Anything that causes learning in a group that resists learning as strongly as ABA candidates is going to look a bit like torture on the outside. That leaves two questions. One, do we feel that autistic students need to learn strongly enough to push them through difficult situations? While making that determination, we should consider that almost everything that a severely autistic individual (aka those who might be in an ABA program) does looks difficult for them on the outside. Two, are there alternative learning methods that achieve more benefit or with less difficulties than ABA?
I'm not an ABA expert, but a lot of the purpose of the system is to track measurable gains in the students. Obviously there is positive learning going on. From what I've gathered talking with people running ABA classrooms, these gains are much stronger than doing nothing, and likely stronger (or at least more measurable) than alternate systems. I doubt there's some magic alternative that's doing good work and is just overlooked.
That all said, for the most severely limited autistic students, they are highly unlikely to ever learn enough to function in society without a constant caregiver. They may know far more than they would have without a class, but it's still sometimes next to no function. More worrisome, they often unlearn/forget quickly and struggle again to relearn in the future. Someone who is non-verbal and uses a handful of inconsistent hand signals is likely to end up non-verbal and using a few somewhat more consistent hand signals after the program.
If the person you know is saying "They'll never really move on from the limited learning, just leave them alone" then that's a potentially consistent position, but not a very palatable one. If it's a swipe against ABA programs specifically, I feel like we need more information to hear his or her actual problem with the program.
A friend of mine is an ABA therapist. As she describes it, ABA is more about techniques than particular goals: the goals are client-specific and are decided on jointly by the therapist and the client's parents or caregivers. In general, she tries to work on goals that enable clients to function in less-restrictive environments (full independence is ideal), with top priority on goals that control violent or self-destructive behaviors.
Things like fidgeting and eye contact are generally pretty low on the priority list, and there the emphasis is typically on "how to code-switch when you have to in order to deal with neurotypicals" rather than trying to eliminate the behaviors completely, the latter being needlessly controlling if you've got a good handle on the former. They're also generally fairly low on the priority list when there are more valuable things (e.g. "practical skills like speech therapy") to work on instead.
If an ABA therapist is spending hours trying to force an autist to fake smile and such, then that sounds to me like the autist's parents insisted an a crappy goal and the therapist didn't talk them out of it like they should have.
As Eric said, the goals are not built into the ABA process, so that's more individualistic. Most of the goals I have heard of for severe autism is about coping mechanisms that limit harm to self and harm to others. For less severe cases, it's mostly goals related to better communication skills. Some of the better results that I am aware of relate to having distinct and more numerous hand signals, verses two or three "I want to communicate but lack the ability" motions that often would end up with growing frustration and eventual violence. Without teaching them something, their quality of life is definitely lower.
NYC in person rationalist meetups have been happening for a month or two now, mostly indoors (for vaccinated people only). Are you on the Google group for it?
After the mainstream media and tech giants tried to censor the lab leak hypothesis for an entire year, I did a deep dive on the arguments its proponents make. Unfortunately, the more I read, the less I was convinced. I now put the chances of a zoological origin at 85%, and the chances of a lab leak or deliberate release at 15%. I decided to organize my thoughts about proponents’ arguments and write them down. Are my analyses sound? Are there important arguments I missed that should swing a reasonable person’s judgment? Please let me know.
Argument: Three WIV staff got sick in November 2019, and this is significant.
Is this above the expected rate of seasonal illnesses? The WIV website (http://www.whiov.cas.cn/rcdw/yjy_160246/) lists 62 researchers, but doesn’t list administrators, janitors, IT people, or other staff. Let’s assume that in total, 100 people work at the WIV. If 15% of people get the flu every year, and the flu season lasts 3 months, you’d naively expect 5 people to get the flu in November 2019. Of course, flu is contagious, so if one person gets it, the chances of 8 people getting it become much higher.
The WSJ article says three people “sought hospital care”. It doesn’t say they were hospitalized. Here, the WSJ misunderstands Chinese culture. I love Chinese culture, but there’s no denying that Chinese people are hypochondriacs. They go to the hospital for every minor thing they experience, and aren’t satisfied until something is done for them. At the hospital, they sometimes get traditional Chinese medicine (a good approximation to placebo), or an IV drip (https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/2w5jy9/eli5_why_so_many_iv_drips_in_china/)--even when they just have a cold. Ask any Chinese friend who grew up in China and I’m sure that even if he’s never gotten IV for a cold or flu himself, someone in his immediate family has.
Even if the intelligence report explicitly said the WIV researchers had COVID in November, which it definitely didn’t, there would still be reasons to be skeptical. First, the intelligence document is never provided. Second, the WSJ article itself says “Current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed differing views about the strength of the supporting evidence for the assessment. One person said that it was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration. Another person described the intelligence as stronger.” Third, how much do you trust the CIA, the same agency that lied Americans into war in Iraq, that orchestrated coups around the world, and that’s currently doing mass surveillance on Americans?
Argument: Wuhan has China’s only BSL-4 lab, and this coincidence is significant.
Analysis: China actually has two BSL-4 labs, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute at Harbin. It is the Harbin institute that attracted controversy in 2013 (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12925) for gain of function research with influenza.
Proponents of the lab leak hypothesis argue that safety standards in China are lax, and that coronavirus research is often done in BSL-3 or even BSL-2 labs. This is true. In fact, all SARS research was done in BSL-3 or lower labs before China’s first BSL-4 facility, the one in Wuhan, was finished in 2014. However, these two arguments are in tension with each other. There are at least 100 (https://zenodo.org/record/4067919) BSL-3 labs in the country, so if Chinese scientists don’t care about safety, the coincidence that one of China’s two BSL-4 labs is in Wuhan says little about the probability of a lab leak. Notably, the 4 Chinese SARS-CoV-1 escapes on record have all been from a Beijing lab, not the WIV.
Argument: we still haven’t found the natural animal reservoir COVID-19.
Analysis: In order for this to mean anything, it has to be remarkable. A look at other recent epidemics shows that scientists almost never identify the natural animal reservoir within 1.5 years of an epidemic outbreak. I went down Wikipedia’s List of Epidemics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Major_epidemics_and_pandemics_by_death_toll) and focused only on those caused by new viruses:
2020 Congo, Ebola: Ebola has caused frequent outbreaks in Africa for decades, including in 2004, 2007, 2013-2016, and 2020. Only in 2019 did scientists discover the first bat carrying ebolavirus antibodies (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190124095156.htm), 43 years after the virus was first described.
2019 Nigeria, Lassa fever: This virus was first discovered in 1969. In 1972, the multimammate rat, Mastomys natalensis, was found to be the main animal reservoir.
2008, swine flu pandemic: Even though this started in Mexico, the geographic origin was thought to be Asia until 2016, when this paper (https://elifesciences.org/articles/16777) reported detecting several segments of genetic material in Mexican swine viruses that were, until then, unknown in the Americas. As far as I can tell, no exact match to the human virus has been found among pigs, nor is one expected due to the high mutation rate of influenza.
It’s even more illuminating to look at the other two coronaviruses that caused epidemics, MERS and SARS. MERS was discovered in 2012. In 2013, antibodies were found in camels, showing that camels are the natural reservoir. This is the only case, among all the epidemics I looked at, where scientists discovered the animal origin within 1.5 years. SARS caused widespread fears of a pandemic in 2002, but was successfully contained. It took 15 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome) for scientists to track down the bats that it came from: “Around late 2017, Chinese scientists traced the virus through the intermediary of Asian palm civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan.[3]” The team that tracked down SARS’ origin was led by Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance (https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Virologica-Sinica-SARSr.pdf). If you don’t trust Shi or EcoHealth Alliance, then the origin of SARS is still unknown, 19 years later.
Why did it take so long to track down the origin of SARS, if the origins of MERS and Nipah were tracked down so quickly? MERS has a 30% fatality rate and spreads very poorly among humans, with R0 of around 0.3. Nipah has an even higher fatality rate of 50-75%, and spreads poorly because it can only spread through bodily fluids. The combination of severe symptoms and low human-to-human spread means MERS/Nipah is easy to detect early, and anyone who has it is only 1-2 degrees of separation away from the original animal. At that point, it’s just a matter of asking patients which animals they’ve been in contact with recently and testing them. SARS has a fatality rate of 10% (1% for people younger than 25) and a R0 of 2-3, meaning that SARS can spread much farther before anyone even realizes a new virus is afoot, making it much harder to identify the original animal. SARS-CoV-2 has a fatality rate of 1% (0.01% for young adults) and a similar R0 to SARs-CoV-1, meaning it can spread unnoticed for much longer before anyone notices.
We shouldn’t expect it to be as easy to track down the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as it was for MERS, which took 1 year. We shouldn’t even expect it to be as easy as it was for SARS, which took 14 years. We should expect it to be an order of magnitude harder than it was for SARS, and many orders of magnitude harder than it was for MERS.
Argument: How could the virus have jumped from Location X to Wuhan, Y km away, without anyone noticing in between?
Analysis: SARS originated from bats in Yunnan, but the outbreak was first detected in Guangdong. The two are 1300 km apart. If the proposed “Y” isn’t much larger than 1300 km, there’s no mystery. Even if it is much larger, COVID-19 has a much lower fatality rate than SARS, meaning it can spread undetected a lot farther than SARS. Also, 2019 China was a lot more interconnected by bus, rail, and plane than 2003 China. Wuhan is China’s ninth largest city and a major transport hub (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Rail_map_of_PRC.svg), so SARS-CoV-2 could really have jumped to humans anywhere in China.
(Apologies for splitting up the post; I didn't realize Substack had a length limit for comments)
Argument: Even though the natural reservoir of SARS wasn’t found for 14 years, the intermediate host was found within months, which hasn’t happened for COVID-19.
How significant this is depends on whether SARS-CoV-2 passed through an intermediate host. If it came directly from bats, finding a bat is much harder than finding an animal in a wet market, for obvious reasons.
Argument: WIV did gain of function research
Analysis: Unclear, but leaning toward “no”. In a 2017 study (https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698), WIV researchers added spike proteins from novel bat viruses which are hard to cultivate, into an existing bat virus (WIV1) that’s easy to cultivate, to see if the spike proteins can infect humans. If you look at their Figure 7, it seems like the original WIV1 is just as infectious (in fact, maybe slightly more infectious) than the chimeric viruses, so no function was gained. That said, it’s theoretically possible that the chimeric viruses could have turned out to be much more infectious than WIV1, so it’s not a huge stretch to categorize this type of research as “gain of function”.
Another study that’s commonly cited is this 2015 study (https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985), led by a team at the University of North Carolina, with contribution from the WIV. The authors added a spike protein from a horseshoe bat virus to a mouse-adapted SARS virus (MA15), which in turn was derived from the epidemic SARS virus by serial passage through mouse tissue. The chimeric virus ended up being far less lethal to mice than MA15 (Figure 1), but more resistant to SARS antibodies and vaccines (Figure 2). The chimeric virus infects human cells, but is less virulent than SARS (Figure 3). Again, it’s arguable whether this counts as gain of function research, considering that no function was gained and a lot of function was lost.
Argument: The NIH funded gain of function research at WIV
Analysis: If the 2015 and 2017 studies mentioned above count as gain of function studies, which I don’t think they do, then the NIH has funded gain of function research. Both studies specifically acknowledge funding by the NIH. As is well known by now, the NIH granted EcoHealth Alliance 3.7 million dollars over six years for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” (https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/RecipDetail?arg_RecipId=ZfeVER2uWwKllnTv6X4AxA%3D%3D), of which $600,000 went to the WIV. To put this number in perspective, the NIH funds about $42 billion of research every year. $600,000 over six years amounts to 2 parts per million (0.0002%) of the NIH’s funding.
Argument: The 1977 flu (“Russian flu”) pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
Analysis: Possible but unproven. The 1977 H1N1 virus was almost identical to the strain that circulated in 1946-1957, which means the pandemic was probably anthropogenic. But was it a lab leak, or the result of vaccine trials using live virus? Rozo and Gronvall 2015 (https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/mbio.01013-15) argue for the latter. The arguments include: 1) China, where the pandemic started, was not known to have any labs working with H1N1; 2) the outbreak was simultaneously reported in 3 different areas of China, 3) vaccine trials with live attenuated H1N1 virus were taking place in the Soviet Union and China, with tens of thousands of participants, 4) several thousand Chinese military recruits were deliberately infected with H1N1 in challenge trials, 5) the 1977 flu was temperature sensitive, a trait associated with attenuated viruses. I don’t know enough about virology to evaluate the paper’s arguments. In particular, does attenuation cause genetic changes that we can detect? If not, my intuition is that Rozo and Gronvall are right, and that live virus vaccine trials with tens of thousands of participants are more likely sources of the pandemic than a freak laboratory accident.
Argument: Many lab leaks have caused localized outbreaks of smallpox, SARS, and other diseases.
Analysis: True (https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-laboratory-escapes-self-fulfilling-prophecies/). It is definitely possible for a lab leak to cause a pandemic. But take a look at this list of outbreaks and epidemics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics) and you’ll see 70 of them just in the 21st century. The handful of lab leaks weren’t even significant enough to make the list. Even if we add them in while unfairly excluding equally significant natural outbreaks, they’d still account for only 10% of all outbreaks. Your prior on any pandemic should be very strongly weighted in favor of a natural origin, by at least 10:1.
Argument: A WIV virus genome database went offline in September 2019.
Analysis: True, but highly misleading. This claim came from the DRASTIC group of freelance researchers (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_investigation_into_the_WIV_databases_that_were_taken_offline), who cite the archives of a database monitoring system (https://archive.is/AGtFv) to claim that the database went offline on September 12, 2019. But the same monitoring system shows that the database only became reliably available on August 23, 2019. You can see this by going to the archive.is link and changing the “Saved from” URL from month=9 to month=8. Before that, from June to August 23, the database was online sporadically. It would be online for 1-2 days, and then go down for several days or weeks at a time. Before June 2019, there’s no data, because v2 of the database was released in June 2019. After September 2019, it was online from December 12 to December 16, and access was sporadic through February 26, 2020. After that, the database was down for good.
The simplest explanation is that Shi’s database admins are bad
I'd feel comfortable saying that both a lab leak and zoonosis have between a 10% and 90% chance of being the cause, but not much more reliable. The main argument in favor of a lab leak is that the Huanan-based zoonosis arguments have fallen apart, and "someone got infected in Yunnan and traveled to Wuhan" isn't that different from "someone with the WIV got infected and traveled to Wuhan".
"led by a team at the University of North Carolina, with contribution from the WIV. The authors added a spike protein from a horseshoe bat virus to a mouse-adapted SARS virus (MA15), which in turn was derived from the epidemic SARS virus by serial passage through mouse tissue. The chimeric virus ended up being far less lethal to mice than MA15 (Figure 1), but more resistant to SARS antibodies and vaccines (Figure 2). The chimeric virus infects human cells, but is less virulent than SARS (Figure 3). Again, it’s arguable whether this counts as gain of function research, considering that no function was gained and a lot of function was lost."
Isn't it also the case that all of the physical manipulation of viruses was done at UNC? Or am I thinking of a different paper?
Thanks, that is a great summary. One add-on about the safety standards:
According to Nicolas Wade, the Chinese guidelines required BSL-3 for SARS1 and MERS, and BSL-2 for other bat corona viruses. It seems plausible that SARS-CoV-2 is not directly derived from SARS1. That means that it would have been treated in BSL-2 standards, if it was studied in a lab.
The difference between BSL-2 and BSL-3 is quite large. For example, BSL-2 does not require you to wear a mask when you have the virus in vivo in humanized mice. (It does require masks if something could spill into your face.)
1. My understanding is that COVID-19 is able to infect a very wide range of animals in a way we don't fully understand. It's not specifically tailored to humans any more than it's tailored to a dozen other species. Such behavior is much more likely to be a result of exposure to multiple animal species (in the wild) than specific experimentation with humans or human tissue in a lab. It certainly is not the case that COVID is particularly "optimized" for infecting humans, otherwise we wouldn't be getting more-infectious variants.
2. Other coronaviruses do actually have CGG-CGG, and I'm pretty sure that the earliest known examples of COVID-19 actually *don't* have this sequence.
3. I haven't heard of this argument before, and the link doesn't specify what "close" means or how many people live in that area. But COVID spreads person-to-person, so if the first patient in Wuhan was along that train line, then it would make sense for the next few to also be nearby. Presumably there are schools, businesses, etc. along that same train line which could also have been involved. The seafood market, although probably not the origin of the virus, may have been an early superspreader event, and is relatively close to the WIV.
So, I'm not sure how reliable this is, but there may have been more than NIH grant money funding gain of function research in Wuhan:
Only buried under their “Privacy Policy,” under a section titled “EcoHealth Alliance Policy Regarding Conflict of Interest in Research,” does the EcoHealth Alliance concede it is the “recipient of various grant awards from federal agencies including the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.”
Even this listing is deceptive. It obscures that its two largest funders are the Pentagon and the State Department (USAID); whereas the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which accounts for a minuscule $74,487, comes before either.
Meticulous investigation of U.S. government databases reveals that Pentagon funding for the EcoHealth Alliance from 2013 to 2020, including contracts, grants and subcontracts, was just under $39 million. Most, $34.6 million, was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”
Most of the remaining money to EHA was from USAID (State Dept.), comprising at least $64,700,000 (1). These two sources thus total over $103 million.
> Again, it’s arguable whether this counts as gain of function research, considering that no function was gained and a lot of function was lost.
I'd say those absolutely count as examples of gain of function research, just not very successful ones. What matters, as far as risk assesment goes, is what kind of modification is being done -- intentionally modifying virus to be more infectious or effective. Obviously this will not always succeed, but it has higher chance of actually gaining function than modifications intended for different effects.
I think it would be clearer if you explicitly separated out the arguments about "hard" lab leak (this was specifically engineered) from "soft" lab leak (they were studying this there, with or without tampering, and it escaped).
When you say "lab leak" it sounds like you're talking about soft LL, but a lot (not all!) of your arguments are really about hard LL, or lab made, so that made me reread some points.
This is not on you, I know this terminology is getting blurred everywhere. But just a thought if you continue to develop this.
Brett and Heather have argued that the strongest evidence for a lab leak is that SARS-cov-2 is excellent both at infecting people's cells and at spreading between people. The conjunction of these two skills is vanishingly uncommon, and accomplishing both requires an extended period of evolution wherein the virus learns the skills. This can happen in the wild, but despite extensive searching we haven't found any evidence of SARS-cov-2 circulating in a human population prior to November 2019. This is one heck of a non-barking dog, and in lieu of said bark we should favor a lab leak for the origin, where serial passaging would have trained the virus.
An intriguing counter to this point is put forth by The Ethical Skeptic on Twitter, who draws together multiple lines of evidence to suggest that China has been dealing with COVID since mid-2018. If correct, this would provide the necessary time for the virus to learn its tricks via normal evolution.
First off, data from the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory, which chronicles an extreme drop in emissions from China beginning in mid 2018, mildly recovering, then doubling down in 2019, before fully recovering in June of 2020: twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1360650645754241028
Inverse correlation between intensity of COVID in various African states and level of trade/travel with China (suggesting possible prior exposure and therefore immunity to the virus): twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1382385733638426627
Looking through this, it's really unclear to me how a 1.5 year mistake about the origin could possibly be true. The most interesting thing is the large flu season in Australia and other countries, but:
1. If the emissions data are to be believed, we're looking at a situation where energy use was changing organically in the population, not by orders from on high. I don't think it's plausible that the population somehow understood the grave problem the pathogen presented, and emissions levels changed accordingly. The idea that the CCP somehow engineered successful containment measures, but Chinese nationals kept the existence of those measures secret is preposterous. It would literally be a successful James Bond villain plot + 5 sigma.
2. I think the implication of this is the disease spread so slowly that it never actually reached the US until 2020? Or perhaps it was massively less virulent than the diseases we see now and went unnoticed? The case of the former seems incomprehensible given what we know about historical pandemic spread, and flus are even less transmissible than SARS-COV-2. The latter is more interesting, but begs the question if US medical authorities didn't observe it clinically, and no doctors anywhere else did either, how did the Chinese in June 2018.
You seem to be missing the strongest argument for lab leak:
1. WIV was the most secure lab in China (by your claim, one of two), hence a likely place for research on a very dangerous virus to be done.
2. It is known to have worked on bat coronaviruses, hence
3. If Covid was a lab leak, it is likely to be from WIV. I would make it 50%, perhaps you would lower it to 10%.
4. The first cases were all near WIV. Wuhan has less than 1% of the population of China, so the chance that the early cases would all be near the WIV if it was not a lab leak is something less than 1%. To refute that, you need some special reason why a natural appearance would be near the WIV. The wet market theory seems to have been abandoned now, but in any case there are a lot of wet markets in China.
So, starting with a prior of .85 for natural and applying Bayes Theorem with my 50%, I get .5x.15 =.075, .01x.85 = .0085, posterior probability of natural origin = .0085/.0835 = .102.
If I redo it assuming that, if it was a lab leak, the odds it was from WIV are only 10%, which I don't believe but perhaps you do, the calculation becomes:
.1x.15 =.015, .01x.85 = .0085, posterior probability of natural origin = .0085/.0235 = .362. So even then, odds are with a lab release.
And this is without all of the other arguments that you want to reject.
"Wuhan is less than 1% of the population of China" doesn't seem like the relevant number. If you knew that a new viral pandemic arose in China, you wouldn't start with an equal weighting of its 1.3B citizens. The first (detected) cases of a viral pandemic are almost always going to be in a big dense city. Big dense cities are also where you will find virology labs. Wuhan is the 9th biggest city in China.
It's not actually clear the first cases were in the city of Wuhan. Genetic and epidemiological evidence suggests they could have come from the nearby countryside, or perhaps even far away. Pandemic diseases have traveled great distances before reaching a city where they actually spread widely. So at the very least, you have to account for uncertainty in the origin location. And the WIV is "special" in the sense that the lab that studies coronaviruses would be near locations where coronaviruses might come from!
The WIV specialises in the study of bat coronaviruses from Yunnan, which is not near Wuhan in any reasonable sense. And why not: there are Egyptologists in America. Makes the field trips more exciting, I guess.
I think that those numbers need to be significantly lowered due to the fact that reasons why high security lab is in Wuhan (but not in Harbin) and reasons why it does not seem outlandish likely that virus outbreak would be first noticed in Wuhan are correlated. First SARS orginated in backwater province of Yunnan, but was first discovered in Guangzhou, which is a giant metropolis far from its place of origin. Wuhan is also kind of a central place in China. It sits in the geographical centre of of the eastern part of the country, which is a part where people actually live, and as OP notes, it is thus a major transport hub. Convenient place to have an elite laboratory in and also likely place to have a large virus outbreak, possibly brought via transport routes from some backwater province.
Now, if covid would be first discovered in Harbin (which is also a large city, but not a central place in China) probably everyone would be way more suspicious from the beginning that it was a lab leak, and rightly so.
Clarification, I meant that high security lab in Harbin would be placed there for different reasons than high security lab in Wuhan (i don´t actually know whether Harbin lab is as elite as that in Wuhan, just repeating OP´s claim)
Many cities in China (including Guangzhou) are much easier to reach from Yunnan than Wuhan is. I think my estimate works fine (apart from being too Wuhan-generous):
Yeah, that sounds about correct in a sense you describe it, as na upper bound. Imo probability of 7.9 % that a lab-unrelated outbreak would first be noticed in Wuhan is huge, so I would take that as an argument for non-lab related outbreak, if not for the fact that it is clearly excesively generous to it, as you say.
I am personally so far on 40 % to lab leak, 40 % to straight zoonotic origin and 20 % to "something weird that does not fit neatly into any of these categories".
Very nice summary. However, I think you overlook some crucial points. First, just because the published synthetic strains were not noticeably more virulent in their assays, doesn't mean that such viruses weren't created or couldn't be dangerous in the actual human context. As a practicing biologist, I can assure you that there are plenty of experiments/analyses that never make it into papers. Given that we know that chimeric viruses were being created and experimented on, I consider this to be a resounding "yes" to the gain-of-function research question. Second, you ignore what may be the most important argument in favor of the lab leak hypothesis — signatures within the genetic sequence of the virus itself, as well as its early history of human transmission. The furin cleavage site, while not a smoking gun, is suggestive of human engineering. And the astonishingly fast spread of the virus in Wuhan, combined with relatively few mutations subsequently, raises the question of how a putative bat coronavirus could be so well-adapted to humans from the get-go. Upshot: my credences are 60% lab leak, 40% zoonotic.
Thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts and evidence for why you believe what you believe. I think at this point my main takeaway is that the lab-leak hypothesis is most definitely a significant possibility and that it should never have been treated as a "conspiracy theory". Also from my perspective it seems that most of these labs that are doing gain-of-function research are not producing anything valuable but are simply "playing with fire". It really just seems to me like researching different nuclear bombs with the defense that "then we will be able to withstand nuclear bomb attacks better".
I think your analogy to nuclear bombs is unfair to the nuclear bombs. Nukes don't autonomously escape from laboratories and they certainly do not self-replicate; the only externality of a nuclear detonation on a mock city to better understand how to reinforce against nuclear attack (i.e. the most destructive possible research) is the fallout, which is bounded well below "global doom" (you can argue that Trinity was reckless in this sense because they didn't confirm solidly enough that the atmosphere wouldn't undergo runaway fusion, but that doesn't apply to later tests).
True. Probably a better comparison is to some kind of new, easy-to-produce poison/chemical agent. My main point is that some research does not benefit humanity in any way but simply makes it easier to kill lots of people. I can understand why a government would want to research better ways to kill people, but lets stop pretending it is helping humanity or science to invent new ways to do so.
Another note about MERS, I believe the Saudi government engaged in a very big push to find the original source. They sunk a huge amount of money and manpower into finding it. So it becomes even less surprising that it was found quickly.
I suppose it could well be that "it's a complete coincidence they had a viral research lab in the place this outbreak happened", the way clusters of childhood cancers near nuclear power stations in the UK turned out to be a "no honestly it's just a freaky coincidence" https://www.nature.com/articles/bjc2013674
It's just that humans tend to find such coincidences really hard to swallow.
> If it came directly from bats, finding a bat is much harder than finding an animal in a wet market, for obvious reasons.
The likelihood that it was so easily transmissible among humans directly from a bat is very small compared to passage though an intermediate host, so this isn't particularly convincing:
1. Intermediate host is high probability, but the fact that we haven't found it is conspicuous.
2. Infection directly from a bat is low probability, but not having found that bat is not conspicuous.
So now you're comparing the probability of #2 to the probability of a lab leak. Even if the lab leak were unlikely, it's not clear that it's necessarily lower than #2.
> If you look at their Figure 7, it seems like the original WIV1 is just as infectious (in fact, maybe slightly more infectious) than the chimeric viruses, so no function was gained.
That's a dishonest definition of gain of function IMO. You're effectively saying it's not gain of function research simply because it didn't gain the function were testing for, even though it may have gained all sorts of functions that weren't tested. In this case, we still don't know the full effects of the spike protein itself, so even if it isn't more infectious it still could have gained all sorts of other dangerous properties.
Inducing genomic changes, is gain of function research, period, whether via direct engineering or applying evolutionary pressures. We simply can't reliably predict the full effects of any adaptations at this time.
> Argument: we still haven’t found the natural animal reservoir COVID-19.
This isn't remarkable, but it also isn't quite the argument. The lack of intermediate host AND the lack of human subpopulation that had symptoms AND the lack of seropositivity in blood samples taken prior to the earliest cases of the pandemic indicates that the virus very suddenly just popped up in Wuhan. SARS and MERS both showed seropositivity in stored blood samples prior to the earliest clinical cases, indicating it was circulating prior to first detection.
> We shouldn’t expect it to be as easy to track down the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as it was for MERS, which took 1 year. We shouldn’t even expect it to be as easy as it was for SARS, which took 14 years. We should expect it to be an order of magnitude harder than it was for SARS, and many orders of magnitude harder than it was for MERS.
Our tests are orders of magnitude faster, more sensitive and more sophisticated now. The labour force working on SARS-COV-2 is also an order of magnitude larger. We have orders of magnitude more health data in China. I see no reason why your conclusion should hold given these other facts.
> SARS originated from bats in Yunnan, but the outbreak was first detected in Guangdong. The two are 1300 km apart. If the proposed “Y” isn’t much larger than 1300 km, there’s no mystery.
Sure there is. You just said that Chinese people are hypochondriacs that tend to go to the hospital for everything. No clinical cases for SARS-COV-2 predate the first Wuhan cases, and no blood samples from 2019 were seropositive for SARS-COV-2 anywhere. Presumably, if Chinese people are hypochondriacs then there should be a wealth of seropositive samples predating the earliest Wuhan cases (there are literally zero), or at the very least clinical cases matching these symptoms should show up somewhere too. The absence of both IS a mystery.
In conclusion, I think your 85%/15% estimate in favour of zoonotic is definitely off. I wouldn't say the lab leak is more likely yet, but it's definitely closer to parity with zoonotic origin than you describe.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this up. As a result, I (a random person on the internet) have updated from a 70% to a 40% probability of lab escape.
- The significance of the outbreak being in Wuhan. Rootclaim says that 25% of gain-of-function research worldwide happens in Wuhan, but you dispute that what WIV was doing even counts as GoF research. I'm guessing that if you expand the category of GoF research to include the sort of stuff WIV was doing, you would find they account for much less than 25% of it?
- The significance of Shi's database going down (though this is only a small part of Rootclaim's analysis).
Though you don't comment on this explicitly, I expect that you and Rootclaim also disagree on:
- Biological evidence (stuff about chimeras and the furin cleavage site) (Rootclaim's analysis is from a while ago, and I think people generally put less stock in these arguments nowadays?)
You and Rootclaim seem to agree on:
- We should have a strong prior that a pandemic has zoonotic origins (Rootclaim actually starts with a nearly 1:100 prior, rather than your more conservative 1:10 prior).
- The relative insignificance of there not being a plausible animal source near Wuhan.
- The relative insignificance of no intermediate host being identified yet.
Do you think this is enough to bring your and Rootclaim's views into line, or do you disagree about more things? And thanks again!
Re "Are there important arguments I missed that should swing a reasonable person's judgment?": Like most discussions of SARS-CoV-2-origin theories I have read, your analysis did only gloss over (in a qualitative, not quantitative way) the elephant in the room. Namely:
* How likely is it that the first cases of a new bat-coronavirus disease would occur in the only city in the country (and maybe the leading place on the planet) where bat coronaviruses are studied, if we assume that this research is completely unrelated to the outbreak?
After all, this coincidence(?) is what many people found noteworthy long before they thought about gain-of-function research, Furin cleavage sites, Chinese information policy, and many other things.
TLDR: The probability of this proximity being pure coincidence is (realistically much) smaller than 8%.
Before we do the very rough estimate, some remarks.
What we discuss in the following is the question stated above, which is strictly speaking not about zoonotic versus lab origin. For instance, as alluded to by Alex Power, it is possible that a coronavirus researcher went to Yunnan to collect samples from a bat cave, came in contact with a virus (directly from bats or via some intermediate host animal), travelled with the infection back to Wuhan, and started the pandemic there. This would presumably count as a zoonotic origin of the disease; but it wouldn't have happened without the labs in Wuhan.
Almost everyone seems to agree that the "deep ancestors" of SARS-CoV-2 were bat coronaviruses originating in China's Yunnan province, probably from a certain cave in Mojiang County. The question is how they got from there to Wuhan: Via zoonotic spillover to other animal species? If so, where did the first human infection happen: in Yunnan, in Wuhan, elsewhere? Did some host animal travel a large part of the distance in the wild, or was it caught near Yunnan and transported to a wet market elsewhere? Or did bat/coronavirus researchers collect live bats or virus samples in Yunnan and bring them to a lab (the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control) in Wuhan, the only place in China where such research is done? My initial question above refers explicitly to a scenario in which researchers played no role, but I'll be agnostic with respect to the path the virus took in that scenario.
Is Wuhan special in any other way than due to its bat/coronavirus research labs? For instance, when wild animals are caught in or near Yunnan, are they transported for some reason overproportionately to wet markets in Wuhan, as opposed to other cities which may have a larger population and also lie closer to Yunnan? If that were the case, then we would not need a lab-related scenario to explain that the disease was first observed in Wuhan. However, if there were such an explanation, certainly some lab-leak debunker would have brought it up by now. I will assume in the following that Wuhan is not special in any other relevant respect than due to its labs and by being a large city.
Lab-leak theory debunkers have argued that the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 might have occurred first in a rural area in China, where it could have spread unnoticed because there were no decent hospitals nearby. No wonder then that the outbreak was first observed in a large city like Wuhan! I don't know anything about the Chinese health system, so let's say this argument is valid: it must have happened in a large city.
Now, assuming that the labs in Wuhan had nothing to do with the outbreak, and that Wuhan is not special in other way except by being a large city, how likely is it that the outbreak happened there or was at least first observed there?
I took Wikipedia's "List of cities in China by population", which has 50 entries. Number 50 has still 2.1 million inhabitants; that should still count as large, I guess. (I would expect that even much smaller cities have decent hospitals where a new disease would not go unnoticed.) Wuhan is number 9 on the list, with 8.3 million people.
No matter in which host animal (bat, human, pangolin, whatever) the virus travelled from Yunnan to Wuhan, and no matter where and when it evolved and adapted to humans: the closer a city is to Yunnan, and the more inhabitants it has, the more likely it should be that the outbreak occurred there. (Recall that we have ruled out for instance scenarios with a special Yunnan-to-Wuhan-wet-market connection.) For example, Chongqing is much larger and closer to Yunnan than Wuhan, hence it had a greater probability for an outbreak than Wuhan.
It is hard to quantify how the probability that the outbreak would first be noticed in city X decreases with the distance between X and Yunnan. (Quadratically maybe?) Also, which distance should we take: linear distance? car travel distance?
I chose assumptions that maximise the probability for Wuhan as ground zero. More realistic assumptions would yield a much smaller a-priori probability that the outbreak would first be noticed in Wuhan.
With www.distance.to, I tabulated the linear distances of the 50 cities on the Wikipedia list from Simao/Pu'er City in Yunnan (which is the major city closest to the Mojiang caves). I threw out all cities whose distance from Simao is larger than Wuhan's. I also threw out one further city (Lanzhou) that had a smaller linear distance from Simao than Wuhan but a larger distance-by-car-travel. I.e., to every city that is in any possibly relevant sense farther from Simao than Wuhan is, I assigned the (obviously too small) probability 0 that the outbreak could occur there.
To all remaining cities on the list, I assigned an outbreak probability that is proportional to the number of inhabitants. This is another very Wuhan-generous assumption, in the sense that each city whose distance from Yunnan is much smaller than Wuhan's should realistically get a larger (somehow distance-dependent) probability for an outbreak.
Recall that only cities on the Wikipedia list qualify. In particular, Pu'er City itself (in Yunnan) is not on the list, although its Wikipedia page says that 2.5 million people live there, whereas number 50 on the list has only 2.1 million. (Small inconsistencies between different Wikipedia data; let's not bother.)
The remaining cities are: Chongqing (15,8 million people), Guangzhou (13,2), Shenzhen (12,3), Chengdu (9,1), Wuhan (8,3), Xi'an (7,9), Dongguan (7,4), Foshan (7,3), Changsha (4,6), Kunming [in Yunnan!] (4,4), Nanning (3,8), Guiyang (3,3), Zhongshan (2,9), Huizhou (2,5), Liuzhou (2,1). All in all with 104.9 million people, of which 7.9% live in Wuhan.
As explained, this yields an unrealistically large probability estimate of 7.9% that a lab-unrelated outbreak would first be noticed in Wuhan. This should be regarded as (an upper bound of) a prior that can then be refined with further information about genetic editing, Chinese information policy, bats held in Wuhan labs, and whatever.
Thank you for this. As you say, it's an unrealistic upper bound. But it's pretty important to have at least some number for this, and it's a conspicuous omission from the original and otherwise thorough analysis here,
By comparison, the first-order unrealistically large probability estimate for a lab-related outbreak being first noticed in Wuhan is 100% - the WIV is the obvious place to do the relevant sort of research, and the one place we know the relevant sort of research was being done. There are other possibilities; maybe there was similar research being done in some small university lab that nobody has heard of in spite of all the focus since, or the WIV could have gone from research to e.g. testing an insufficiently-attenuated-virus vaccine someplace far from Wuhan. But including those low-order probabillities would pull "lab leaks always and only happen in Wuhan" down a lot less than a more realistic distance relationship would pull down your 7.9% upper bound.
So, if our prior for a zoonotic pandemic propagating through a lab-related screwup rather than being wholly natural is >8%, we should assess Covid-19 as probably being a lab-related screwup before we even start talking about furin cleavage sites or whatnot.
And, of the seven post-WWII events which wikipedia describes as "pandemics", one (1977) is I believe generally accepted to have been the result of a lab-related screwup. So I'm tentatively putting my prior for that at 14%.
(0.14*1)/(0.14*1 + 0.86*0.079) = 67% probability of lab-related screwup, for now.
Thanks for the kind remarks. I welcome your attempt to put a number on the "lab-related screwup" scenario, but do not quite understand your formula. Here's how I would do the math.
The outbreak of any given pandemic is either lab-related (LAB) or not lab-related (NLAB); and happens either suspiciously close to a lab which researches that particular type of disease (CLOSE), or not suspiciously close to such a lab (FAR). All four combinations NLAB/CLOSE, LAB/CLOSE, NLAB/FAR, LAB/FAR are a priori possible. Let's call the corresponding probabilities A,B,C,D, respectively; their sum A+B+C+D is 1, so we have three free parameters.
Let's consider the following ones:
p = A/(A+C) says how likely it is that an outbreak occurs CLOSE provided we are in the NLAB case. My upper bound for our current pandemic is p < 0.079; more realistic seems something like p = 0.01.
q = B+D = (B+D)/(A+C+B+D) says how likely it is a priori that a pandemic is lab-related. The estimates of q I have read in this thread range from 0.14 to 0.01. (I find the latter much too low, but that's not the point here. Any proposed value would be very unreliable.)
r = B/(B+D) says how likely it is that an outbreak occurs CLOSE provided we are in the LAB case. I feel confident to say that r > 0.5. (To be more precise, we would have to consider carefully all LAB/FAR scenarios; for instance: 1. A Wuhan researcher travels to a bat cave in Yunnan, gets sick, starts the outbreak in Yunnan. 2. Lab personnel gets infected, goes to the airport after work, flies to Beijing or Los Angeles, starts the outbreak there. 3. Lab personnel sells animals from the lab to a wet market outside Wuhan, the outbreak starts there.)
In the current situation, we know that we are in the CLOSE case. We want to know the number P(p,q,r) = A/(A+B): given that we are in the CLOSE case, what is the probability P(p,q,r) that the outbreak is not lab-related?
Since A = p*(1-q) and B = q*r, the formula is
P(p,q,r) = p*(1-q) / (p*(1-q) +q*r) .
Everyone can play around with the parameters for themselves. Some values:
P(0.01, 0.14, 0.5) = 0.109
P(0.01, 0.01, 0.5) = 0.664
P(0.01, 0.03, 0.6) = 0.35
P(0.03, 0.08, 0.6) = 0.365
P(0.079, 0.01, 0.5) = 0.94
P(0.079, 0.14, 0.5) = 0.493
P(0.079, 0.14, 0.95) = 0.338
P(0.01, 0.14, 0.95) = 0.061
If one wants to arrive at a preconceived conclusion, it's easy to dial the parameters accordingly.
I forgot to mention one other respect in which my 7.9% estimate is very Wuhan-generous: only cities in mainland China are taken into account.
Hong Kong (7.5 million people) and Macau are closer to Yunnan, by linear distance as well as car travel, than Wuhan is. Yunnan has borders with Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar. Yangon (Myanmar, 5.1 million), Bangkok (Thailand, 8.3 million), and many other large cities in southeast Asia are closer to Yunnan, by linear distance as well as car travel, than Wuhan is. Even Ho Chi Minh City (9 million) in southern Vietnam is closer to Yunnan by linear distance, and only slightly farther from Yunnan by car travel, than Wuhan is. (The population numbers are Wikipedia's city/urban numbers. The metro numbers are larger; e.g. 21.3 million for Ho Chi Minh City.)
If a wild host animal had crossed a border before coming into contact with a human patient zero, the outbreak in a zoonotic scenario could have occurred in any of these places. For live animals caught in Yunnan and transported to other places, it depends on how much border traffic there is for such animal transports. My estimate assigns the probability 0 to any outbreak outside mainland China.
Thank you to everyone for your feedback, and your kind words! I unfortunately don't have time to respond to everyone, so I chose a few common arguments you mentioned which I didn't analyze, and analyzed them. These are the furin cleavage site arguments, the "COVID-19 is too well adapted" argument, and another argument from location which claims most early cases were along metro line 2. I previously avoided the furin arguments being I'm not a molecular biologist. I'm still not, so take my analyses with a grain of salt.
Argument: The furin cleavage site is evidence of genetic engineering. This paper by Segreto et al (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0), among others, argues that the cleavage site is not found in SARS-CoV-2’s close relatives, nor in other Sarbecoviruses. While the cleavage site does exist in many other coronaviruses, there is no evidence of recombination between those other viruses and SARS-CoV-2.
Analysis: The furin cleavage site drastically increases the coronavirus’ ability to infect humans. It is a sequence of 4 amino acids: RRAR. The final R is part of the backbone of SARS-CoV-2’s cousins, so in order to create the cleavage site, only 3 amino acids had to be added: RRA. How hard is it to add 3 amino acids, even without recombination?
Each amino acid is coded by 3 base pairs, and each base pair can be one of four bases. The R can be represented by any of 6 different codes, while the A can be represented by 4. Just by throwing 9 base pairs together at random, we’d expect them to code for RRA 1 in 4^9/(4*6*6) = 1800 times. The same paper notes that the more common furin cleavage site is RX[K/R]R, and that “The presence of an arginine at the third position P3 before the FCS increases the efficiency of the FCS tenfold”. This implies the A isn’t important, and that RR[K/R/A] also works well. If so, 1 in 600 random insertions would result in a very good site.
Even 1 in 600 is too pessimistic, because evolution isn’t random; natural selection exists. Rather than coming up with RR[K/R/A] all at once, the virus could have gotten the basic site RXX; this could then have mutated into RRX, with a large increase in fitness. Given the sheer number of bats and bat coronaviruses, I don't see a 1 in 600 chance per mutation as unbelievably improbable.
Argument: The furin cleavage site is evidence of genetic engineering because it’s coded by unusual nucleotides. The initial RR is coded by the nucleotides CGG-CGG, while almost all other R’s are coded by other sequences.
Analysis: This is the claim made by Quay and Muller, two non-biologists, in this WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184). They say that R is usually coded by one of the five codes other than CGG, and that CGG-CGG doesn’t appear “in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2”.
CGG codes for R in 7% of the SARS-CoV-2 genome (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7152894/)--not uncommon, but not unheard of. Saying CGG-CGG has to be artificial because it doesn’t appear in a certain class of coronaviruses feels similar to saying a 21st century hard science fiction book had to be written by aliens because a certain sequence of 6 words doesn’t appear in any other 21st century hard science fiction book. Evolution can invent things. That’s why any life exists on Earth at all.
The authors claim that CGG is commonly used in lab research, because “it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it [..] An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.” However, I don’t have access to the WSJ article, and none of the sources that quote the article include any citation backing up any of these claims. The WSJ authors are not biologists, and wouldn't know this from personal experience. If anyone can track down evidence in favor or against these claims, please let me know.
Argument: COVID-19 is too well adapted to humans to be natural
Analysis: I’ve heard two versions of these claims. The first is that the initial cases had very similar genomes compared to the early cases of SARS, which we watched become more infectious over time. The second is that the virus infects humans a lot better than it infects other animals.
The first version of the claim is weaker than it was a year ago. Now that multiple more transmissible variants (B117, alpha, delta…) have swept the world and taken over the original strain, the original strain no longer seems so optimized. Also, I remember that in early 2020, the R0 of COVID-19 was estimated to be higher than that of SARS. The updated estimates I’ve seen (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number) say the two diseases have similar R0, and that the R0 is much lower than many other pandemic diseases (measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, smallpox…) If that’s the case, in order for COVID-19 to have the same R0 as SARS while having milder symptoms, SARS-CoV-2 must be worse at transmission than SARS-CoV-1.
I tried to find out whether SARS-CoV-1 really mutated rapidly during the epidemic to become more infectious, as some lab leak proponents claim. The answer seems to be no. In fact, this Nature article from June 2003 says the exact opposite (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095144/): “But so far, the SARS virus seems remarkably invariant: the genome sequences of 14 isolates from patients in Singapore, Toronto, China and Hong Kong have not revealed any changes of real consequence. This isn't because the SARS virus fails to mutate, but rather that the mutations thrown up so far haven't proved to be particularly beneficial to it.”
The second version of the argument is also weaker than it was a year ago. We now know that COVID-19 spreads easily among minks, to such an extent that they’ve spread it back to humans after we spread it to them (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/animals.html). Cats, big cats, gorillas, and one ferret have also tested positive for COVID-19. Even if it turns out that COVID-19 spreads more easily among humans than among any other species, I wouldn’t be too surprised. After all, it’s a human pandemic, not a bat or pangolin panzootic, and you’d expect the virus that causes a human pandemic to be better at spreading between humans than the millions of viruses which didn’t.
Argument: The earliest Wuhan cases cluster around metro line 2, which also leads to the WIV.
Analysis: As far as I can tell, this argument comes from this paper by Steven Quay (https://zenodo.org/record/4119263#.YNrer-hKhPY), who claims that all “All patients between December 1st, 2019 and early January 2020 were first seen at hospitals that are also serviced by Line 2 of the Metro system.” The basis for this claim is his table on page 7, where he gathers circumstantial evidence for the hospitals where the early COVID patients were treated.
This table is exceptionally iffy. It’s true that Jinyintan, the designated hospital for COVID patients, is close to a line 2 station; but the same station also connects to lines 3 and 8. Xinhua Hospital is in between lines 6 and 3, and much farther from line 2. The author’s reason for including the Tonji, Central, and Zhongnan hospitals is that some paper has a co-author from those hospitals, but the same paper (https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5.pdf) has many authors from outside of Wuhan. The Wuhan Asia Heart Disease Hospital was included because of this paper (https://www.jtcvs.org/article/S0022-5223(20)30859-X/fulltext#secsectitle0130%20), but I can’t find any mention of the hospital anywhere in the paper. The last hospital on the list is the Hubei Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital, which is presumably included because a co-author on this paper (https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC7182016&blobtype=pdf) is from there. However, that paper got its data from “the epidemic reporting system of the National Health Commission of China, which stores the medical records of all 50 designated hospitals in Wuhan city”. The paper also includes cases all the way to March 2020.
Leaving aside the issues with the table, I decided to see if the wet market and the WIV are really on line 2. The wet market is close enough, but the WIV is 2 km away from the nearest station. To get there from the wet market, one would walk 1.2 km to Hankou station, get on line 2, hop off at Jiedao, change to line 8, get off a station later at Xiaohongshan, and walk 800 m. The whole journey takes an hour and 20 minutes, so it’s unlikely to be a regular trip for most people.
I also noticed something else remarkable about line 2 from looking at the metro map (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Wuhan_Metro_System_Map_en.svg), which Quay also noticed: line 2 goes straight to Tianhe International Airport, Hankou Railway Station (the same one that’s beside the wet market), and Wuhandong Railway Station. No other line connects to the airport or to three railway stations. If it’s true that most of the early COVID cases were along line 2, that’s (weak) circumstantial evidence that the virus came to Wuhan by air or rail.
> Now that multiple more transmissible variants (B117, alpha, delta…) have swept the world and taken over the original strain, the original strain no longer seems so optimized.
I don't know why you think this. Becoming more optimal at infection was totally expected. The original strain strain is still MORE optimized than it should have been from a direct zoonotic transmission from a bat. It's perhaps not more optimized if it had passed through an intermediate host, but we haven't found this host.
> Also, I remember that in early 2020, the R0 of COVID-19 was estimated to be higher than that of SARS.
It's still slightly more infectious. If I'm reading this right, the metanalysis linked there included data after countries implemented interventions, so of course R0 falls in response.
Note also that SARS only got such a high R0 because it passed through intermediate hosts, which bolsters the following point.
> The second version of the argument is also weaker than it was a year ago. We now know that COVID-19 spreads easily among minks, to such an extent that they’ve spread it back to humans after we spread it to them. Cats, big cats, gorillas, and one ferret have also tested positive for COVID-19.
The claim that it was exceptionally good at infecting humans has always been that it was too good at infecting humans to have been transmitted DIRECTLY from a bat. The probability that it would have evolved this by chance is very low.
The fact that it's so good at infecting other animals BOLSTERS this conclusion, which means that it likely did pass through intermediate hosts before infecting humans. But if it passed through intermediate hosts, where are those hosts? Intermediate hosts from other epidemics were found relatively quickly.
Thanks for all that analysis. It's really too bad that (1) Google can't search in Substack comments and (2) Substack doesn't support searching comments. There's so much darn good stuff that gets lost with time!
Is there a good overview and assessment about the potential uses of ivermectin for COVID treatment? I have been trying to find one, but there is so much noise on both sides it's hard to make sense of it all. I was hoping Scott or Zvi would write an article about it. But until then, is there an alternative good and reputable source putting things in context and predicting what we will likely find out when the dust settles?
I notice Bret Weinstein is mentioned three times on the FLCCC home page, and that 3 of the first 4 links on the main (left) panel go to stuff largely authored by Theresa Lawrie.
I have a post on LessWrong summarizing a three hour video filled with Covid vaccine claims endorsed by Bret Weinstein, and then I found out that Theresa Lawrie was a big part of the story too. I did not come away impressed (this link highlights my comment on Theresa Lawrie):
My understanding: Feelings are valuations of any given past / present / potential world state. They're the brain's cost function, they track utility in our world models.
In that understanding, "Moods are our commentaries on what has happened to us" is true, but applies not just to the past but also, in a symmetric fashion, to the future.
My belief is that the key to rationality / the good life is having your moods track your utilities as closely as possible.
I replied to someone's comment a few weeks ago as a true believer in Zembrin. Well, I want to announce that I am now a true believer in double-blind clinical trials. I don't notice any effect anymore and I am willing to chalk up how I felt initially to a strong placebo effect. But I am stopping for a while now and will see if its perceived effects come back.
I'm looking for good research or discussions of intertemporal trade-offs for utilitarians. It seems reasonable to suspect that there will be fluctuations in the amount of money required to save a life. For simplicities sake, imagine if the number were to remain relatively fixed, then would it make sense to actually save money I would've donated to save a life and save more in the future? If the price of a life saved were to grow at 2% per year and I could get an investment return of 7% wouldn't it do the most good to wait until the end of my life? If the price to save lives was falling than this would make the case for waiting even stronger. I'm looking for discussions of this nature. Thanks
This is basically what Warren Buffett has said he is doing. I think an important question is "how are you getting these returns" - you can't assume a risk-free rate of return higher than inflation.
>you can't assume a risk-free rate of return higher than inflation
Yes you can. Returns are compensation for risk, waiting, and inflation; even without risk, there's still the compensation for waiting over and above that for inflation. Check out TIPS.
US Treasuries are widely considered effectively risk-free, and the Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS) pay based on ex post measured inflation, so to the extent that they trade for less than par you can get a risk-free return above *actual* inflation.
Not in Rat circles they aren't. The probability of the United States of America defaulting in the next 10, 30, or 100 years or what have you, is VERY MUCH not 0%. Even if it's something like 1% or 2%, that still drastically affects the expected value calculations.
I would assume that helping now (thus making more people a part of the global economy) would be a much greater "investment" then e.g. the stock market. If a child doesn't die of malaria, they can become a productive adult who will create a lot of value: that's a good rate of return.
But that's just as true for a child today as it would be for a child in 2070. If it costs less to save the child in 2070, then all else being equal, the argument is that it would be better to save your money and invest in the children later on, since the same amount of money will save more lives.
Yes, and by 2070 it could be 3 children or 5 children depending on the growth rate of return and change in price of saving a life. Of course, it could also maybe be .75 child or something. Seems like it would be an important area of research.
If you save one child today, how many children will that child have saved by 2070? Improving economic development in regions where lots of children die is likely to save lots of children over that time period.
How does that work concretely? Say you save a child from dying in malaria. That child becomes a subsistence farmer that wouldn't have existed counterfactually. By what mechanism would a single additional subsistence farmer save lots of children? Wouldn't the vast majority of the their labor go towards feeding themselves?
The simplest route is that the subsistence farmer who grows up to have some healthy children has "saved" them from non-existence.
But more relevantly, most human communities do better for each of their members if they have an additional member that is able to contribute when some individual family is in time of need. It's true that the vast majority of their labor goes towards feeding themselves, but from the standpoint of the original question about investment, what matters is whether the bit of labor they are able to contribute to others each year is a higher rate of return on the initial investment than the interest you would have gotten otherwise by putting the money that saved that person into a bank account.
There are at various points in time probably some communities that are existing right at the Malthusian margin, where an additional individual is more of a burden to their neighbors than an advantage. But I believe that most modern economics assumes that these situations are rare. (It's still a relevant empirical question for the communities at hand though.)
I think the sorts of discussions you're looking for involve the term "discounting the future," which refers to the fact that people value benefits now more than they value the same benefit at a later date.
One purely rational reason for why you may discount the future is because of uncertainty: the further into the future you go, the less certain you are about your current state of affairs and the state of the world. Hence, if you want to, say, give to charity, then you may want to give more to charity now just in case you run into a situation in the future (such as getting fired, or dealing with a recession, or losing your house in a fire) that keeps you from giving to charity then.
You might be interested in reading some Effective Altruism posts on "longtermism." They seem to provide the sort of fruitful content you're looking for. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/longtermism
I agree that you'll be able to donate more money in the future, but I think there are good reasons to donate now.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I expect the world to continue getting wealthier, especially in the poorest regions, so I'd expect charitable money to be less valuable in the future since there'll be more money being donated to help to increasingly wealthy people. It could plausibly become much more expensive to save a life in the future, simply because the lowest hanging fruit have already been picked - it's not impossible that we'll be able to eradicate malaria, parasitic worms and nutritional deficiencies in the relatively near-term future. This would of course be a good thing, but it would mean that your larger pool of money would be able to do less good. This is of course debateable, and if you think that growth will be very uneven, or that new technology may create cheaper ways to help a lot of people, then you'll still expect there to be good opportunities to do good in the future with your larger pool of money. There's the classic example that if you save your money long enough it may become absolutely massive, but all you'll have to spend it on is making happy people slightly happier.
Of course, if you think the world is likely to get worse (for example, if you're pessimistic about climate change or international peace) then definitely save it, we'll need it more in the future!
An alternative to investing in stocks and bonds would be to invest it in research, which could have very high returns (or no returns at all, research is a high risk investment).
Is the point of donating "save a life" or is it "most bang for the buck?" because if you want to save lives, then save the life that is at risk *right now*.
The Drowning Child thought experiment irritates me with the preachy tone, but one thing it gets right - you wouldn't stand there watching a child drown and go "sorry, I'm waiting for when a busload of kids crashes into the pond to save them, that should be happening in a couple of hours time, and it'll be more effective for me to jump in and pull out three or four kids then".
Yes, maybe waiting until the cost goes down is more effective - but if that's your main reason for donating, then you're not really interested in life-saving, you're interested in playing with figures, and go invest in the stock market or bet on the favourite in the 2:30 at Doncaster in that case.
You can always wait longer (indefinitely) for the "maximum" number of lives saved - so when you get to 2030 you will wait until 2035 because you might be able to save even more lives then! and so on until the day you yourself die without ever having donated a penny because you were always waiting for a better time and a better return.
You have no guarantee you yourself will still be alive in 2030. Donate now if you're going to give and save a life today, not at some indefinite date to be determined which may never come.
I'm more sympathetic than you for the argument for waiting, since people are always dying, and most people don't plan on doing anything about it, either now or in the future. If you've got a really promising way to make a lot of money it could be worth investing now and donating later if you end up will Bill Gates or Elon Musk levels of wealth, although generally people are just talking about index funds and the returns on those are predictable but unimpressive.
I agree that there is a genuine problem with waiting indefinitely if you don't have something specific that you're waiting for, the argument basically holds true until economic growth stops, and I'd hope that at that point there wouldn't be too much left for charities to do. I know some people who are waiting for more information but I think "how to do the most good" has too many variables to ever be definitely answered, so you may as well just give now and treat it as a learning opportunity.
Dying isn't as much of an obstacle to philanthropy as you might initially think, although definitely make sure you have a will written up in advance. Still, the longer you wait the less control "you" (the person doing the saving) has over how the money might be spent. I do think there's something ethically questionable about the indefinite charitable trust, forever beholden to its long dead founder, and I'm confident that the motive there is more driven by ego than altruism.
I've wondered about whether that's also a story about no one thinking to look at the whole picture. As I recall, neither Scott nor the IRB person thought to get a look at the rules for the whole IRB process. Instead, Scott kept making one attempt after another, with each attempt being fairly costly.
What would be the utility of "the IRB person" looking at the "whole IRB process"? Presumably they're 'just' a cog in the process and aren't expected or allowed to make some kind of holistic judgement. Or are you pointing out that, as costly as each attempt Scott made, were he to have understood the entire (expected) total cost of the process, he'd have never even made the first "attempt"?
The "just a cog" person might have been able to explain in general what was wanted, or ideally, there were be information available that they could hand to Scott.
If they could have done so, why wouldn't they do that in general, e.g. always?
IRB's, based on everything I've read or heard about them, are a (vastly expanded) instance of, e.g. disclaimers like "IANAL" or "this is not legal advice" – there _is_ no 'holistic' or "in general" criteria to be satisfied, i.e. it's all "pro forma" ritual.
I'm still not sure whether your original comment was expressing curiosity about how IRBs 'actually' work, now, as-they-are, and wondering if there's some kind of easier/cheaper way to 'navigate' them, or whether you're pondering some kind of reform. I am now more curious about the experience of _successfully_ navigating an IRB, which apparently _does_ happen pretty frequently. And thinking about that, it's definitely not clear what the differences are between everything that _is_ approved and, e.g. Scott's experience(s).
I'm not sure what I was asking for, more just observing that Scott was bumping his nose against the walls of a maze when he needed an overview. Or possibly just needed to talk with someone who was familiar with successful applications.
IIRC, he wanted to study something that was already standard practice [and, realizing that the link was _right above_, I think I was correct – he wanted to study a standard screening test!] and that alone seemed to greatly complicate him getting approval.
The 'process' itself, relative to what he wanted to study, seemed _insane_, and the "overview" seems to be something like 'avoid being (or, really, possibly be located in the same _galaxy_ of 'researcher state space' as) a Nazi death camp 'researcher''.
The problem is that almost by definition research is novel. This means that the IRB process is somewhat well-defined, but the exact details of who-wants-what will vary based on the type of research being done. If you are routinely doing the same type of thing with different particular questions (eg. retrospective chart analysis with a linear regression between a new set of variables), you get a feel for what your IRB actually wants and can probably do everything with copy/paste submissions.
The problem is when you have an IRB that is used to doing one thing (eg. implantable medical devices trials) now being asked to review something else (eg. comparison of therapy types). You don't know what they care about, and they aren't used to dealing with your kind of project. So you probably haven't preemptively answered the questions they want answered in the way they wanted answered, and they are uncertain about where the dragons lie. So you have more frustration all-around with more cycles of paperwork.
This is all sensible, but kind of confirms my belief that an IRB, ideally, _has_ to be composed of domain experts.
As a bureaucratic CYA apparatus, your comment is eminently sensible for someone that _wants_ to navigate any particular IRB.
But none of this seems to cover the particular ways in which the actual IRB that Scott interacted with mostly, nor the 'meta-IRB' that later audited his research, actually failed to do anything beyond stymie his not-very-novel and almost-completely risk-free research that he wanted to do.
IRB experiences can vary wildly depending on the domain you're researching and the institution you work at. At research universities, there is at least *some* pressure on the IRB to make sure that research can get done, which means approving IRB applications at a reasonable pace (although reasonable is a rather fuzzy term). At my institution, this process was very easy if you were doing anything in the social sciences, typically involving an afternoon of paperwork and a 2-week turn around from the IRB (moreover, if you signed a form saying your research met a bunch of criteria that made it basically impossible for it to cause harm to participants, you didn't even have to get approval from the IRB to start your experiment). However, if you wanted to do anything related to medicine (of which psychiatry is a subset), you went through an entirely different application and review process. This review process involved a committee looking at your proposal instead of a single reviewer, which meant that the lag-time from submission to a response from the IRB was increased from weeks to months, and the presumption went from "probably everything is fine" to "probably this guy is going to kill someone and we'll be liable" (with a commensurate increase in scrutiny borne upon to the application).
If I were trying to get something approved relating to Scott's survey, the primary hurdle would be confidentiality. If the setup is that I'm the owner of a google doc that's getting hits that just so happen to come from Scott's blog, then that wouldn't be an issue because I would be able to purge any participant information before (if) the data were made public.
Not really, I probably got 15 things passed through my IRB over my career as a student/post-grad, never much trouble aside from boring paperwork and taking a long time.
It very much depends on how good/bad your local IRB is, and what you're trying to do. I don't doubt anything in that story actually happened, but there's a reason you keep haring that story linked whenever anyone talks about how bad IRBs are, instead of hearing 50 different equally-bad stories from various people.
Has any thorough research been done yet on the possible effects that SSRIs have on the sexual development of pre-adolescents?
I read Scott's blog post on SSRIs and he mentioned (as a piece of anecdotal anthropic evidence that the sexual side effects are being underblown) that he took SSRIs when he was very young and now considers himself asexual, and is suspicious that the antidepressants are part of the explanation.
My friend and I also noticed that almost all of our acquaintances who identify as asexual also took SSRIs when they were children, which is what made us suspicious in the first place.
Since the existence of sexual side-effects from SSRIs is already well-established and is much more serious than initially believed (more anecdotal evidence: the friend that I mentioned above took SSRIs for thirty days under the prescription of his psychiatrist, and experienced serious sexual dysfunction during that month and during the month that followed), I can't help but wonder if there's a causal link here. SSRIs are known to seriously inhibit the sexual functioning of many people who take it. SSRIs are also diagnosed routinely to children as they are going through puberty, where they're supposed to be developing sexual interests for the first time. It doesn't seem unreasonable to posit that SSRIs are permanently inhibiting sexual development in a number of children.
I feel like this would be something that's hard to detect unless you're actually looking for it. For adults, you're able to actually ask them and they'll tell you if they're experiencing any sexual side effects. But you can't do that with adolescents, because (1) asking kids about their sexual activities isn't highly ethical, and (2) there's no A/B testing going on because the SSRIs are being prescribed before the patients are old enough to develop sexual interests in the first place. I'd like to see research that deliberately tries to address this concern, but I haven't found anything so far.
I've been wondering if it's worth having a strong opinion on this: if it's true that SSRIs can permanently inhibit sexual growth in adolescents and cause asexuality, and the risk is significant, then it means that children really shouldn't be prescribed SSRIs at all. On the other hand, I am not a physician or a pediatrician and I know virtually nothing about sexual development, so I can't help but be cautious when I find myself getting alarmed over something like this.
Anecdotally, I identify as ~asexual, was depressed at least since high school, but didn't take SSRIs until after college. Perhaps you're noticing a depression-asexuality connection instead of or in addition to an SSRI-asexuality connection?
Yes, I'm quite confident that people who take SSRIs have a higher likelihood of being asexual for auxiliary reasons, such as depression itself causing asexuality, one chemical imbalance being correlated with other chemical imbalances, or ostracism for one's asexuality leading one to feel depressed. But I'm still suspicious.
this seems like yet another "what the hell, America?" situation but I am going to have to presume that you would only prescribe anti-depressants to children if it was very necessary.
I'll be another data point for "never got within sniffing distance of any medication ever, knew from the age of nine I was not interested one bit in marriage, kids, etc., am self-diagnosed as depressed/half-diagnosed as "mood swings" in counselling session".
So yeah, I'm willing to go more with "depression and asexuality are co-morbidities" but also yeah on "giving heavy meds to young kids is yikes!"
I've been working in software for 16 years now, and tech more broadly for 24. I'm starting to feel burned out. I won't bore you with a lengthy personal narrative but I will link this tweet...
...and summarize my frame of mind as "6 out of 7".
In any event, I'm interested to hear what other people have done. Did taking a year off help? Changing specialties? Starting your own thing? Finding a seat in a faceless megacorp and phoning it in?
I'm especially interested to hear from people that quit the business entirely. What do you do now? I struggle to come up with any kind of mental picture of Doing Something Else, and I'm hoping some stories will light my imagination.
Changing jobs and finding a role I was more interested in worked for me - but I was much earlier-career than you, so I don't know if that's generalizable.
I don't know if this helps but it was advice that helped me: Life is long. Life does not have to follow a "progression" or "trajectory". It's OK to do something different that doesn't lead anywhere for a couple of year. Just keep your finances in check.
>Finding a seat in a faceless megacorp and phoning it in?
This makes me wonder about the distribution of the stressors in your life that are contributing to the burnout. If a faceless megacorp sounds better, it sounds like total anonymity, or working from home, seem preferable, which leads me to ask if your coworkers or current management have anything to do with the burnout. Workplace bullying is real. If the burnout is driven by the workplace environment, taking time off to get away from the toxic people might be very helpful, and finding a different job in the same field.
I've recently run across this question (again) as a useful tool: if you were handed some large sum of money that would allow you to quit your job, what would you do? How would you spend your days, or what are the top five? That can get you started. Even if "endless beach day" is the answer, it is ok. That's good to know. What was the last "good idea" you had (the "someone should really do/invent this") idea. That can also be a clue. What were your other interests when you were 10?
I have never done software (or tech for any length of time) but I have changed jobs quite a bit. I will say, what sounds good when you're stuck in the burnout may not be what sounds good longterm. And unless you can do something interesting with the year off (travel a lot) it might go very fast/not be enough.
Some people in your position undertake the study of stress management and wind up alternative health practitioners. Some go to law school, med school, doctorate in curriculum development, massage therapy school, some become truck drivers. Some get an emergency teaching credential and go into the classroom. Some decide they really need to open a restaurant but I don't know how they do it. Some take up rock climbing or get a pilot's license, some become CASA children's advocates.
Broadly speaking the health care direction was my choice.
If you try a few things and still no ideas spark up but you are miserable, search job sites until something catches your eye and apply for it. And see a therapist if absolutely nothing looks good. Burnout can contribute to temporary depression and it can be hard to see out of that. Good luck!
Not a psych, but burnout seems virtually indistinguishable from depression to me.
I've been in a similar situation recently / am still in that situation. I felt pretty burnt out and consistently scored high on the burnout part in Copsoq. I eventually went to a psych, bu wait times are ~6 months here. In the meantime I tried changing things up at work and while it did resolve my problems there, it didn't help my issues at all. Turns out it was depression for reasons unrelated to work which I'm working on with the psych now.
tl; dr: Before making drastic changes, make sure you're addressing the cause, not some symptom.
That "Some people know exactly why they're depressed" premise is what I was recommending to check here. There's nothing wrong with drastic changes addressing the reason, of course.
I was rather unhappy with my life a few years ago. I decided to move to a different country, and now I'm feeling much better. I think that actively making a change and thereby achieving a sense of agency is therapeutic.
Check out of your job mentally, do the bare minimum (remote work helps!), do something interesting in your massively expanded free time.
I'm taking a biotech degree (fortunately it's free in this particular corner of the world) and planning out an in silico research project of my own, hoping to eventually get a PhD out of it. Next year I also want to apply for an entry-level grant for some wet work. I kinda regret not getting into science from the outset, instead going for software dev, but I "wipe my tears with banknotes" as a friend put it.
All the while contributing some code to my job here and there so I don't get fired, it's surprisingly comfy.
Science isn't any better if you don't have a pile of banknotes tbh. I went science--> tech because the pressure, lack of money, and complete alienation from the culture of those in scientific research that I saw was just too much. They are not my people. Neither are people in tech, or anyone else for that matter, but the pay prospects are better. *shrug*
I volunteer in EMS about 1 day per week. It provides a great direct connection to "doing something helpful", even though the actual work almost certainly provides far less overall benefit than my work in software.
I don't work in tech, but I had a similar experience a few years ago. Changing jobs (getting away from a pretty toxic company/boss) really helped me quite a bit. It's not like I don't have stress in my new job, but the people I work with are a lot easier to get along with and some of the specific things causing me to burn out are gone. If you can narrow down what is causing you particularly high amounts of stress/burnout, it may help you formulate a response.
If it's more general, you may be right about taking a lower stress position. I would personally struggle with a "phone it in" job because I feel a pretty strong need to be useful or feel useful at my job. An alternative, if you can afford it, may be to be a big fish in a small pond. You can work in tech for a small company that doesn't specialize in tech (the IT guy for a non-IT industry) and probably get a job anywhere in the country pretty easily. A lot of those jobs pay decently, even if it's not SF tech wages. You can also benefit from significantly lower cost of living and lots of freedom in where you go.
What I find is that most people think of their job (or life or relationships) as a fixed value. They rarely think to do what they would do if they had an unsatisfactory couch...ie try to change it.
Obviously if you are a counter clerk at a fast food restaurant the opportunities for change [at that job] are limited. However, if you are a skilled software developer/manager you have leverage to try to change things.
Instead of "dreading to go to work", try to think what it is that you dread. Maybe you can go in and ask for different things or environments or fellow workers. All of these things may be negotiable.
Several years ago, I was prepared to quit and thought I was just working too hard. I was managing a bunch of projects and felt that they were not going well because of all the dullards I had in my team. I went to my boss and said I wanted to work on my own [smaller number of] projects instead of directing others. He said OK
That was all right for a while until I decided that I didn't want to work so much so I went back to my boss and said I only wanted to work for 3 days a week. He said OK.
In each of these cases, I was prepared to quit...but that was not necessary.
Other things I have done instead of development; Onsite training in exotic locations, Documentation, Support.
And if you really get desperate you can start a substack....
I've been working in tech for...3 years and I would say the same. However, this is just what life is like for those not part of the idle elect in my opinion.
I think some polyamorous people believe that (1) jealousy is entirely or mostly a socially constructed phenomena and that it can be overcome through reason. Alternatively, some believe that (2) some polyamorists have a different psychological profile and just do not experience jealousy. The final position I could imagine is that (3) jealousy is in almost everyone's genetic wiring but polyamorous people find a method to suppress it or keep it manageable. I am under the impression that most poly people probably believe (1), some probably (2) and almost nobody (3) but the critics of polyamory probably think the true state of affairs is (3) until it goes wrong.
Am I wrong to think that many polyamorous people are social constructivists with regards to jealousy? Anyone take the stance that it is in our nature and cannot be reasoned away except for some people? What are some other positions that I am missing? Thanks in advance.
It's also possible that people who are not prone, or less prone, to jealousy are the ones attracted to polyamory, so that it becomes self-reinforcing: poly people are not jealous because jealous people don't go for polyamory.
It's very easy not to eat chocolate cake when nobody in the entire group likes chocolate.
I think that all three positions are somewhat true. To the extent that jealosy is innate, like other such traits it may both vary in intensity naturally and be more or less amenable to conscious suppression. And, in the almost exclusively monogamous society performative jealosy is pretty much expected from a victim of infidelity, regardless of whether there's a strong underlying feeling.
I’d say that all three factors are at work. There are probably a significant proportion of people for whom polyamory would not work out without a much higher level of social engineering technology than we have currently. There’s also a (per my wild speculation) significant proportion of people for whom polyamory *would* work with minor-to-moderate social de-construction of jealousy, along with a smaller number of people for whom jealously just isn’t there in the first place.
To give totally made up numbers for my impressions of the prevalence of these groups, it’s maybe something like 40-40-20 percent. Also agree with Xpym about performative jealousy. Probably a substantial proportion of the second group is amenable to socially reducing or eliminating the jealousy they feel because they were largely feeling it due to social expectations to begin with.
Overall interesting, and they touch many topics relevant to the polyamorous debate. Close to the end, they touch the topic explicitly, and Buss makes an interesting, though speculative, point: it is likely that some part of polyamory phenomenon is simple polygeny relabelled. Men engaging in polyamory are likely high status men looking to expand their pool of sexual mates, while women engaging in polyamory are likely putting up with it to avoid loosing a high status partner.
I know very little about the topic and know no people who practice polyamory. I am sure there is tons of self-selection into polyamory relations (i.e., (2)), and people come up with coping strategies (i.e., (3)) that allow them to manage the jealousy. Still, it'd be interesting to know what is the women/men ration are in a heterosexual polyamory relation. My guess is that that ratio should be greater than one.
Sam Harris also interviewed Geoffrey Miller (not sure how long ago, but my best guess is >1.5 years ago). Geoffrey all but described (3) for himself. Something along the lines of acknowledging that the feelings were produced for evolutionary reasons which no longer exist.
I'm poly, and my experience with this is that my jealousy is pretty much always underwritten by some kind of insecurity (e.g. I'm jealous of my partner's latest sexual experience because I really want that kind of experience and am afraid I won't get it, am not good enough for it, etc). I explore this in ongoing conversation with my partner, work on those insecurities, try to find ways of tackling those underlying desires/emotions directly, etc. So I guess this is most like (3)?
If you don't mind expanding on this, can you explain why you wouldn't just seek out a non-poly relationship and avoid this additional jealousy-related stress?
For sure :). There's lots of reasons. Monogamy feels really bad to me -- like I'm trapped or stagnant, like my interactions with people other than my partner get sapped of energy. I tried to work through these things in monogamous relationships and never got anywhere.
Poly, on the other hand, feels great to me. I actually love working through these insecurities -- it's usually exciting and emotionally rewarding for me, rather than stressful (although of course sometimes it's stressful). And for stuff I don't feel insecure about, poly just feels great to me. I love having my partner get some of her needs that I'm not good at fulfilling met by other people, because it takes stress off our relationship. I love not needing to be the sole romantic/sexual person in my partner's life.. It feels like it takes a lot of the pressure off me. And of course I love having the possibility open of me having romance/sex with other people -- it keeps my interactions so much more alive for me, helps me continue to grow in the ways I want to. (Also, I'm a huge voyeur, so when I'm not feeling insecure about stuff I get super turned on by hearing about my partner's other sexual experiences lol.)
I've in the last few weeks opened myself up to polyamory (I'm in a long-term relationship and I just started seeing someone else). Lots of what you say here resonates with me and helps me understand my own motivations. Thank you.
I have known a few poly people, and a few who expressed the lack of jealousy thing. My impression from these personal interactions is that the three people I know who pursued poly relationships all did so to shop around for a better relationship while keeping the one they already had. That most claims of low jealousy come from low dependence, they are all just people who wouldn't really care* if the person they are dating broke up with them, and or didn't think it is very likely. The original SO is often jealous, the person who pushed for an open relationship is often not very jealous with their SO or any of the others they bring in, and the others can go either way.
Through all of this my, admittedly never very high opinion of poly relationships has obviously fallen very low, I do not know a single person in real life who seems to have anything approaching a healthy poly relationship.
*Not that they are totally inhuman, just that it would be something that sucked a bit and they would move on quickly.
I'm poly and I think all three of these are somewhat true.
My personal perspective is that I know what specific kinds of situations make me feel jealous and I've negotiated with my girlfriend not to get me in any of those specific kinds of situations (and she's done the same with me). These situations are less encompassing than "all possible situations of a partner dating someone else" so we manage to date other people and mostly do okay.
I have a long-running debate with a friend about the merits and demerits of polyamory, and I'd love to hear your perspective on it, esp wrt the following questions:
- Do you think polyamorous relationships and monogamous relationships have the same purpose? I.e. are they just different solutions to the same problem, or are they trying to solve fundamentally different problems?
- What, in your experience, have healthy polyamorous relationships looked like? Do you think this is more a function of the polyamory or more a function of the people or equal?
- Do you find that polyamory requires special skills (e.g. communication skills) that monogamy does not? What about vice versa?
I know a long-running triad (about 20 years, I think) which seems to be healthy.
Perhaps it was important that they didn't have a theory in favor of polyamory. Instead it was a couple where the woman fell in love with a second man and the first man has unusual lack of jealousy. The men are friends but don't have a sexual/romantic relationship.
Fair point! There is admittedly variation in the specific purposes of different monogamous relationships.
My thought was that, insofar as certain types of relationships are monogamous (i.e. choose the same means for varied ends), there is to that extent some necessary overlap in their purpose (i.e. monogamy as a means necessarily tends towards certain ends above others). Do you think this is true?
Misanthropy about relationships: Jealousy can't be overcome through reason not because it's wired, but because you have some justified beliefs in favor of jealousy. Maybe you don't think highly of your partner's decisionmaking, so they'd leave you even though you're good for them. Maybe you don't think highly of yourself, so they'd be rational to leave you given a good opportunity. Either way, you anticipate that if your partner became involved with others, they'd eventually want to leave you, and that would make your life worse. This anticipation may be correct, and reasoning about it increases your confidence in it.
Normieism: The obstacle to overcoming jealousy isn't genetic wiring for it directly, but a general tendency to defer to/execute social norms and feel the way you're socially expected to feel, and jealousy is normative in our society. If people weren't expected to feel jealous, or if jealousy were seen as weird and questionable, they'd be less inclined to feel that way. But most people aren't going to reason themselves out of jealousy because they're not going to reason themselves out of anything socially normative.
Have you considered Aristotelian/Greek view on emotions? (They were quite polyamorous themselves!). This position suggests that emotional dispositions themselves are in our nature, but that their expression is often "contra naturam." As such, the point of action wrt emotions, and of social institutions (which ritualize certain actions) is not to destroy these emotional dispositions, but to properly moderate them.
For example, just as fear naturally indicates danger (and so a need for safety), and anger naturally indicates disrespect (and so a need for respect), so jealousy indicates a certain need not being met (perhaps a need for appreciation?). However, just as anger and fear can be disordered or poorly expressed, perhaps jealousy also can be disordered or poorly expressed. And perhaps it is this poor (e.g. toxic or violent) expression of jealousy to which polyamorists object.
For instance, just because I am angry at someone (bc, say, they insulted me) does not mean I should beat them or try to force them to "respect" me. Respect is only respect when freely given. Likewise, just because I feel afraid that my child will run into the street does not mean I should put her on a leash. Piety is only piety when freely given. Perhaps polyamorists will argue that likewise with jealousy, just because I feel a need for love/appreciation/connection when my partner has other partners, does not mean that I should make my partner sign an eternal contract from which they will never leave (on penalty of eternal damnation!), or even demand exclusivity from that partner. Love is only love when freely given.
In other words, perhaps all of these ways of expressing hard emotions (anger, fear, jealousy) are violent or toxic ways of responding to natural needs. Violent because they try to secure by force or manipulation goods that are of necessity freely given. Toxic because this kind of expression undermines the satisfaction of the needs the emotions indicate. E.g. No one respects the too angry man, the anxious mother's fear undermines her love, and the lover's over-jealousy destroys the foundation of trust upon which a healthy relationship depends.
This position admits your 1, 2, and 3, but differs from each of them insofar as it suggests a proper function of emotions to be met, namely, to have things like appreciation/love, piety, respect (and to indeed to become more loving, pious, and respectful!), and suggests that the status quo tends towards disorder, particularly wrt jealousy.
I don't think jealousy is a social construct. That's not where emotions originate.
It seems like it would have value in keeping your own set of genes moving forward. So it's likely hard wired for humans especially for men.
There are definitely people who are cool with sharing their partner, there are folks who even find the idea and practice sexually stimulating.
As far as reasoning yourself out of the emotion of jealousy goes, that seems unlikely to me. Strong emotions trump reason in my experience.
I was at a social gathering not long ago and a woman announce to a group that she doesn't see why she shouldn't be able to love ten men. Her husband disagreed. All I could think at the time was "Did you read him in on this belief before tying the knot?"
Could the US function as a multiparty democracy and also a Presidential system? I've been increasingly onboard with the idea that the US should (somehow) transition to using a multiparty system and away from the Democrat-Republican dichotomy. Increasing partisan polarization seems self-evidently bad, and also somewhat undemocratic in that a number of people seem to want political options that just aren't on the menu in America. (Socially conservative, fiscally liberal seems to be the biggest unmet need).
With that being said- multiparty Presidential systems don't seem to have a great track record. This is the norm in the rest of the Americas, and supposedly Mexico, Brazil, and other Latin American countries 'prove' that it mostly doesn't work- the legislature is gridlocked and unable to pass bills, the President increasingly takes on more & more power to bypass a Congress that can't get anything done, he eventually becomes authoritarian, etc. Sounds like the road the US is already on, but worse.
The only other actually functional Presidential country is South Korea, but they seem to have two major parties making up 90% of the legislature. Unless you want to count semi-presidential systems like France, which just confuse me.
Does anyone want to argue for the US to have multiple parties, while retaining a Presidency? Could Congress really pass a budget or major legislation with 4-6 squabbling parties? I'm guessing the major US parties would be Center Left/Pro Business, America 1st/Populist Right, Green/Far Left, Country Club Republicans/Center Right, and Libertarians. Could legislators from these 5 parties really pass a budget every year? I dunno. Or is '2 major parties and a few really minor ones' actually a good system? This is like South Korea mentioned above, but also Australia, Britain, and I believe Canada (the last three obviously being parliamentary)
Australia has compulsory voting and nonpartisan districting, which essentially forces major parties to appeal to the median voter (and thus results in them being rather similar).
I'm not really sure why you distinguish between presidential and parliamentary systems as regards passing laws. The Australian Parliament's law-making function works in a very similar fashion to the US Congress; the main substantive differences are the US filibuster and the convention that the Australian Governor-General does not veto laws (though he does have that power).
The big differences between US and Australian politics are in the executive (presidentially-appointed secretaries vs. ministers selected from Parliament) and in election protocols (compulsory IRV/STV vs. voluntary plurality; note that STV is a proportional-representation system, so the Australian Senate is very much a multiparty house).
'I'm not really sure why you distinguish between presidential and parliamentary systems as regards passing laws' It's like, the biggest difference in the world. The Prime Minister by definition cannot face divided government. This is the absolute most basic, elementary difference between presidential & parliamentary.
The Australian House appears to be 80-90% two parties, whereas the Senate as you note is much more diverse. Pretty interesting that Australia has PR for one but not the other. So we can see the difference between an actual PR system vs. IRV, which I personally think is warmed-over FPTP and achieves basically the exact same result
IRV's advantage over plurality is that it's clone-proof; that is, you can attempt to usurp a party's base without immediately handing victory to your mutual opponent (the way the Bull Moose Party did). The threat of this makes it harder for a party to betray its base, which is a completely-different criterion to what you're looking at. I agree that there are problems with "a house of single-member electorates", but if you have to have one IRV's a lot better than plurality (and for something like a presidential election it's basically ideal).
>It's like, the biggest difference in the world. The Prime Minister by definition cannot face divided government.
1) This isn't actually true; "Senate hostile to House, nothing happens except for bipartisan measures" happens fairly frequently, and "nobody has majority in HoR, minority government" happened in 2010.
2) The Speaker of the US House - the primary legislative equivalent to the Australian PM - can't face an opposed House either. The US President isn't responsible for making laws; Congress is, and Congress functions very similarly to the Australian Parliament (*not* the UK Parliament, as that is essentially unicameral with the crippling of the Lords in 1911). The difference is in the executive - specifically, that the executive is appointed by the legislature.
You want an example of a country where the President is not just the figurehead head of state but also the head of the executive, correct? Here in Ireland we have multi-party but yeah, in practice it's become two main parties. However, the smaller parties can wield influence and at times can be very popular and attain rapid growth.
I do think it would be no harm if the US had a strong third party, even if it was a minor one. The problem seems to be that your system is set up so that effectively, there aren't any mass movements that seem likely to form a third party, and that any third party members elected to Congress need to throw in with either the Republicans or the Democrats to do anything (there was a previous note about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being a Democrat and not a Democrat Socialist of America).
The Libertarian Party is (semi)organised (there was an interesting comment over on a thread at TheMotte about the internal divisions and power-struggles between the factions) but it's not mass popularity, and smaller parties really are the "three men and a dog" variety. You might end up with a viable third party if you managed to get a populist mix of moderate/centrist Republicans and Democrats to peel away and join it, but eh - a populist strongman leader is its own set of problems.
I am skeptical that multiparty systems are more democratic, given that in practice one or two niche parties often are the swing vote and hence are able to demand enactment of policies only supported by a minority of voters. Israel is an obvious example. And, multiparty systems in multicultural states risk being highly polarizing, since there would inevitably be race-based parties. A La Raza party would get far more seats than Libertarians, that's for sure.
> one or two niche parties often are the swing vote and hence are able to demand...policies only supported by a minority
I tend to view that as a plus, because the niche party cannot demand very much that the majority actively opposes. If the majority "holds their nose" and votes for something they don't want, I expect they would only do that to get something in return that they see as more important. In a several-party system, the swing vote should vary over time, giving attention to a variety of niche things. Which could make for some interesting policy.
Of course, when we think of Israel we normally think 'Netanyahu', but his Likud party consistently gets by far the most votes of any party, so Likud would be more powerful under first-past-the-post (which consistently gives disproportionately more power to bigger parties).
Do you have an example of the swing vote changing frequently? Because I can't think of anything. As for what the majority gets in return, they get to stay in power, because there is no actual majority, and hence the plurality party must kowtow to the swing party. As for Likud, it does not at get by far the most votes. Over the last 20 years it has generally gotten about a quarter of the vote. Finally, I am not saying that first-past-the-post/2 party is more democratic. Rather, I am changing the assumption that multiparty systems are more democratic. Each has its own way of falling short of democratic perfection (and, of course, there is the incorrect assumption that "democratic" = "majoritarian.")
Well, I've never lived in a place with a proper (proportional) many-party system, but in Canada the vote tallies for each party often change pretty significantly with each election. It's not necessarily about the swing vote changing frequently, though: multiple coalitions are possible. If one small party is making demands that the big party regards as unreasonable, the big party could make a deal to get votes from a *different* small party instead.
> As for Likud, it does not at get by far the most votes. Over the last 20 years it has generally gotten about a quarter of the vote.
That *is* the most votes of any party.
> I am changing the assumption that multiparty systems are more democratic.
If most people's votes having no effect is your idea of democratic, then yes, first-past-the-post is democratic "by definition".
One question that is relevant is whether the parties present in the legislature have to be the same parties that contest the presidency. I've been thinking about this at a different level.
Within cities, it seems to me that one big source of political dysfunction is that every plausible candidate is a Democrat (or just pretending to be a Republican to get access to a usable ballot line, like Michael Bloomberg), which then means either that the real election is the Democratic primary (like in New York), or that there's a single multi-candidate election where voters just have to interpret the personal feel of a bunch of candidates (as in Los Angles or San Francisco). It would be really helpful if there were local parties, like a "pro-construction" party and a "slow growth" party, so that voters really know what they're getting with one candidate or another. Both parties might work with national Democrats, but in different ways.
I've been imagining various ways to change congressional elections that would enable representation of many smaller parties. That wouldn't change presidential elections unless you made a major change, to a national popular vote with ranked choice or something. So it may end up being that these parties band together to suppose "Democrats" or "Republicans" at the presidential level, even as their coalitions change at the Congressional level.
But I don't know of any country where that sort of pattern occurs. (The closest is Canada, where I understand that many of the provincial parties work in very different ways from the federal parties of the same name, like the British Columbia Liberals.)
'One question that is relevant is whether the parties present in the legislature have to be the same parties that contest the presidency. I've been thinking about this at a different level.... But I don't know of any country where that sort of pattern occurs' To my knowledge (having just finished A Different Democracy, the comparative politics book everyone is raving about rn), having different parties at the local & national level is actually very common. It's the US that's the weird outlier with just two parties at every single level of government.
One unrealistic idea I've been batting around is the idea of literally banning the Democrat & Republican parties at the local level of a state (yes I understand this could never happen, but stay with me). And just letting local politicians organically form new parties as they wish. Maybe the Midwest & non-Boston Northeast could form socially conservative, fiscally liberal parties, say. It would certainly help focus voters on actual local issues, which seem to be neglected in this era of nationalized hyperpartisan politics. Even if you graduate from say the Farm & Labor Party in the Midwest to being a Republican party on the national stage later, you still would have started with the former. Maybe that would help
Shleicher argues that's even worse, since voters go from negligible information to practically none. Instead he thinks there should be city-specific parties which don't correspond to larger parties.
"I also propose thinking about something more radical, a rule that parties that bars parties registered at the statewide level (i.e. the major parties) from having a ballot line in local elections. The idea is that local-only parties would spring up (the elections would still be partisan) to contest local elections. At first, these parties might look like simulacra of the major parties but would, though competitive pressure, develop locally competitive identities over time. Again, this is not anti-party or pro-non-partisan election -- I think parties are essential in world where voters are rationally ignorant of the policy stances of candidates -- but, rather, is focused on using election law to incentivize the creation of parties that are competitive at the local level and that provide heuristics that provide voters with information."
I wonder how much of my thinking on a lot of this has been influenced by me encountering his ideas in various formats online, and how much is just that these are good ideas that lots of people have discussions that lead towards.
In many provinces we don't have all the federal equivalent parties by name at all. There's no formal relationship between most provincial parties and their nearest federal equivalents, with various splits and mergers occurring in different places at different times. Most provinces have a long history of two dominant parties, but it's not the same two everywhere.
Federal politics are really quite separate from provincial as far as loyalties and mood associations are concerned. But then I know very few people who have strong, outspoken partisan affiliation at any level,and very few Canadians join political parties. We think Americans are silly for having so much mental space tied up in partisan affiliation.
It probably depends on how representation of multiple parties is achieved; with a first-past-the-post system like the US currently has, Duverger's Law shows that two parties are all but guaranteed.
Many multiparty democracies have formalized roles for the parties (e.g., proportional representation); I suspect stronger parties are more prone to bad outcomes. I personally like the idea of Condorcet RCV for many reasons, but the relevant one here is that it makes primaries irrelevant so parties become much less central to the electoral system.
Duverger's "law" describes a tendency or attractor of FPTP regimes. Once two parties begin to dominate, it's hard for other parties to gain traction. But I've heard that, in addition, the Republicans and Democrats have gone above and beyond other countries in efforts to suppress third parties (e.g. the Commission on Presidential Debates is bipartisan, not nonpartisan - it's designed to exclude third parties; and various state-specific rules try to prevent "little guys" or small parties from getting on ballots).
There's also the phenomenon of US Presidential politics, which mean that obtaining a regional block of legislative seats is sort of a dead end, and US third-party efforts are almost exclusively focused on the Presidency, which is obviously doomed.
In Canada's actually-existing fptp Parliament, we typically have either the Liberals (milquetoast centre left) or Conservatives (milquetoast centre right) in government, often (and currently) as a minority, with the mostly-urban, more socialist, union-backed NDP and regional Bloc Quebecois nationalist party both getting enough seats to matter and the Greens picking up something. Various fringe parties rarely get anywhere, but it's not that they absolutely couldn't. We don't really do coalitions like in proportional list systems and our sometimes-minority governments work out fine, and the smaller parties matter a great deal in Parliament even though they are unlikely to ever govern.
All to say that Duverger's Law describes a real attractor effect, but it's short-sighted of Americans to blame the style of their ballots for all of their polarization woes when the Anglosphere contains two good counterexamples against their n=1, and in that broader context it's not even clear whether the FPTP attractor effect is necessarily *bad*.
If you have a political position that a political party establishment doesn't approve of, then you can still run in the primary. That's just not true in other countries, so those people set up new parties. Sometimes they become successful.
Most European social-democratic parties in the 1970s and 1980s were dominated by union members from heavy industries. The same is true of much of the Democratic Party in the US. Auto unions in Michigan, coal miners in West Virginia, etc.
This meant that environmentalists in Europe had to create their own new Green parties - the unions would block an environmentalist from ever becoming a candidate. But an American could just run in a primary. And while they'd clearly lose to a union member in Michigan or West Virginia, they might do better in a city, like Seattle or New York or San Francisco where other parts of the Democratic coalition were dominant.
But if you were an environmentalist in Cologne in 1980, you couldn't join the SPD, because union members (possibly not from Cologne, but from more industrial areas) would be able to block you from ever being a candidate through the internal committees of the SPD. So you joined the Greens, and so the German Greens had much better quality candidates than the US Greens. The same applied to someone in Paris joining the PS, or in Manchester joining Labour, or in Milan joining the PSI, or in Amsterdam joining the PvdA.
American third parties were much more successful before the primary system became established in the 1940s and 1950s than since. Minnesota Farmer-Labor, the Progressive and Populist parties, several state Socialist parties in the 1920s, etc.
Thanks for this, we don't get enough ex-Anglosphere comparative politics for comparison.
The vibe I get comparing historical American politics to today's is that regional and particular considerations have all been subsumed into the binary, with the two-party system not just in the Duverger's sense but assumed deeply in the popular consciousness and ingrained in all kinds of other institutions (random regulatory committee needs at least X R and Y D members). Whereas two-party eras of American politics were more interesting and uncertain.
*In Westminster countries "Government" is just the executive, which makes for some silly discussions with Americans
I think that the impacts of the primary system in the US - especially the ballot access rules for the primary - are massively underrated.
Ballot access as a party nominee in the general election is vastly easier outside the US. For instance, a UK candidate for MP requires a petition signed by ten electors and a refundable deposit of £500 (about $600) - refunded if you get 5% of the vote or more.
Ballot access to the primary election in a UK major party would usually require you to undergo a formal approval process by a central committee of the party, and then, once on the "approved list", you apply to individual districts; if there are more than ~3 applicants, you have to go through a shortlisting process run by a local committee of the party - normally reducing the number of candidates to four to six. The electorate would then be the dues-paying members of the party in the relevant electoral area. In a constituency that a party has a realistic chance of winning, that's likely to be about a thousand, with turnout usually of about 50%.
This is the process in the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and SNP; in Labour, instead of a shortlisting process, you have to be nominated by either a ward, ie an even more local group of members, or by an affiliated trades union in the constituency.
Most UK parties have a procedure whereby an incumbent is automatically reselected or there is a primary with no other candidate (ie a vote on whether or not to reselect, with a competitive process being opened only if the vote is not to reselect.
You can see how the party committees have far more control over the nominees, but it's much easier to challenge the parties from outside. And the UK has the same voting system. With proportional systems in most European countries (UK and France are the only fully non-proportional systems, though several countries are mixed, eg Hungary), the parties are even more internally homogenous but also it's easier to found new parties.
Your * footnote is largely right, but not quite.
"Government" has two meanings, one is the political leadership of the executive and the other is the entire executive, ie including the professional civil service. People who work for the civil service will say that, not that they work for the Government. Only the ministers and their "special advisors" would say "I work for the Government".
(Reagan's "I'm here from the Government and I'm here to help" line came over as "I am an elected politician and I'm here to help" in the UK; the idea that it applied to postal workers or social security administrators didn't occur to me for many years)
I did design a way, though it required a constitutional amendment and was therefore impossible.
Make the Electoral College a real institution - elected by a closed list PR system* in each state and meeting permanently in a new building in Washington DC. It has the power, at any time, by simple majority to replace the President with a new one for the remainder of the elected term of the President.
Now, you can have a true coalition presidency. Say the Democrat and the Republican both get 40% of the vote, a Libertarian gets 8%, a Green gets 8% and some sort of bothsides centrist mushy party ("NoLabels") or something gets the other 4%. [In practice 2% or so will get spread across 25 tiny parties; let's just pretend those people abstained because they effectively did].
So now, you can have a Democrat-Green-NoLabels coalition or a Republican-Libertarian-NoLabels coalition. If the big parties break up, then you could get some more interesting options. And, obviously, that's an election where left and right are tied; if one side wins, then you get a nice simple two-party coalition.
How does that work in the Presidency? Well, you have a Democrat as President, but they agree to appoint (say) a Green as EPA Administrator and as Secretary of Transportation and a NoLabels as Attorney General - and they promise that their second Supreme Court appointment will go to the Greens and the fourth to NoLabels, and probably a bunch of other junior appointments. If the President then breaks the deal, then the Greens or NoLabels can go to the Republicans and say "how about a deal where you get to be President now?" In theory you could do this in the electoral college now, but the President could just ignore it and appoint whoever he wanted.
You'd also give the college various powers to investigate the Presidency and the executive - that way the minor parties in the coalition can make sure that things are being done in ways they approve of (right to subpoena anyone and demand they speak, no executive privilege applies because the college is part of the executive, right to access any papers they want; there's presumably a "spying committee" that gets to see secret papers and has the power to declassify them).
The legislature would still be separate, could be elected however you like. But the Greens in the legislature would presumably be close to the Greens in the Executive, so you'd have some leverage there to get legislation done.
*I'm normally hostile to closed lists, because they empower the parties over the individual elected people, but since the "party" in this case is really the presidential candidate, what it does is concentrate the significance in the hands of the presidential candidate, ie the President, which is the point - also the voter really should be focusing on the personal characteristics of the President, not of the individual member of the college.
I like your idea, but if we went to that much trouble to change the Constitution, I'd just go all the way for a parliamentary system and PR :)
Also, with midterm elections (and high US partisanship), I'd imagine that the opposition party winning the midterm would result in immediately replacing the President every single time. Maybe it'd take a bit for norms to break down, but as soon as it happens once, opposition parties would always retaliate when it was their time. You know what hyperpartisan reasoning sounds like- 'they replaced President AOC on Day One, how can you not vote to replace President Carlson now, don't be a wimp, we always get pushed around by the Other Side', etc. So basically you get 2 year, rotating Presidencies
Electoral college is only elected every four years - their term would be the same as the President.
The legislature is still completely separate.
Note: you can get a president of without a legislative majority, and that's still going to be quite likely after the midterms (it's possible on regular election day, but the systems are similar enough that will only happen if it's a very narrow majority one way and a equally narrow one the other way).
Lots of interesting stuff in this idea, I'll have to think about it!
Do the parties run a preferred candidate in the election, or just a party line with the electors empowered to pick the candidate? If the former, then when do the parties change their preferred candidate in between elections, in case there's a crisis of confidence and the electors choose a new president? (Presumably someone that seemed like a good candidate at the time in 2016 might no longer seem so good in 2019.)
I expect the answer is that they run a candidate in the election, but if they want to change President in midterm, that will be a matter for the electors - and, given US norms, they won't have a preferred candidate unless and until the electors are planning to change the President. The election nominee might take on that role after the convention, ie for the last few months before the election. But US parties out of office generally just don't have a Presidential candidate.
This actually has advantages - look at the UK situation when trying to change PM in 2019; the main opposition party had a leader / PM candidate who made sense (to them) in an election, but was not acceptable to the other parties that they would have needed in a coalition. But proposing someone else from the same party as a coalition PM was seen as being (party-internal) treason, and the result was that a PM who had a majority that wanted to get rid of him couldn't be replaced.
While I'm 100% in favor of a several-party system, the Big Two certainly aren't. I expect them both to work hard to thwart any efforts in this direction.
I've been thinking more about this, and a multiparty system in the US just sounds like a total disaster. You wouldn't be changing any of the things that truly make American politics crazy- extremely ideological activist groups or single donors on each side, constant need to fundraise, constant campaigning, plus a media & funding environment that encourages candidates to be outlandishly crazy in exchange for more campaign cash. I can't speak to Marjorie Taylor Greene's inner mental state, but being dramatically over the top has made her one of the premiere Republican fundraisers right now. The incentive structure is not just nuts- it actually incentivizes politicians to *be* nuts.
So you'd have these smaller parties, and they'd probably be even more intensely ideological. The MTG-lead America First party would be on one end, the AOC-lead Justice Dems would be on the other end. Would they help pass basic stuff like a budget if they were the swing votes, or would they hold out for insane concessions to please their base? 'I won't pass the debt ceiling until all illegal immigrants have been deported' or 'I won't pass the debt ceiling until all fossil fuel companies have been nationalized'.
The standard poly sci argument against multiparty presidential systems is that they can't get anything passed due to squabbling, and so the president becomes more & more authoritarian. Sure sounds like what would happen to the US here
Thinking about what would happen if you changed the electoral system and nothing else is as strange as asking "what would happen if Donald Trump opened up the borders to Mexican immigration". Just as that wouldn't happen, we wouldn't get electoral reform under the status quo. (the electoral system is, of course, what allows or discourages a several-party system.) So I consider campaign finance / corruption reform to be my top priority in U.S. politics (which HR.1/S.1 includes, to some extent): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE
> standard poly sci argument against multiparty presidential systems
I thought it was the standard conservative/Republican argument. I don't agree that having more than 2 parties prevents things from getting done, and I see no reason that the existence of a separate executive branch would cause more gridlock than we have already. Have you really heard political scientists saying that? The constitution disallows executive overreach; having 3 or more major parties doesn't change that.
Yes, it is/was the consensus position, what you learn when you take Poly Sci 101, etc. The example here is Latin America- all of Latin America utilizes the presidential system, and all of Latin America utilizes multiple parties. They (continent of almost one billion people) have been doing this since at least the 50s or 60s, so we have decades & decades of real-world experience that it's just a suboptimal system. The parties squabble too much to get major legislation passed. In theory they wouldn't squabble quite so much, but my argument is that additional American political parties would be explicitly & highly ideological, so the gridlock potential goes up quite a bit.
Full disclosure of priors, I think that a parliamentary system with PR is obviously the best one, but we're talking about America where moving to that would require multiple Constitutional changes, overthrowing a system we've had for over 200 years, etc. So probably not going to happen
Did taking a social anxiety prescription medication improve anyone's overall courage level? I know this seems like a bit of a random question, so let me explain- I not only have generalized anxiety (especially in social situations), but I'm just not a particularly brave person in general. My CNS is very quick to the fight or flight response- I am just frightened by a lot of things. If someone confronts me verbally, I experience such an adrenaline rush that I find speaking difficult. I am jumpy and easily spooked by little things, a car backfiring, etc. Public speaking is completely off the table. I have always been physically pretty cowardly (afraid to jump off a cliff into a lake when all my friends were doing it, backed down from fistfights, and so on). I am now approaching middle age, so this seems to be a pretty fixed psychological trait. Oddly I am pretty physically durable and have done some fairly challenging things, so the 'deal with fatigue & pain' part of my brain seems to work fine- just not with fear.
When you are diagnosed with 'anxiety', supposedly there are a variety of prescription drugs that reduce or manage it. I've never taken any of them, but I was curious to hear from people who have- does a drug that (I suppose) makes you less anxious also make you less fearful if, say, someone comes up and angrily confronts you about an issue? Does your general fear response lessen? Is this a permanent effect? For example, I read that the North Hollywood bank robbers took phenobarbital before their robbery & massive shootout to calm their nerves, but I'm not clear if one can take that every day regularly. I will say that alcohol absolutely has this effect on me, both reducing anxiety & increasing courage, but obviously I would prefer not to drink heavily every day.
Maybe some mix of anti-anxiety meds and also testosterone would do the trick? Anyways, I'd be curious to hear people's experiences with various prescriptions. (I'm also going to experiment with magnesium supplementation, which I've heard can reduce anxiety)
Sertraline did not have this effect on me. I felt less anxious in the way that my brain seemed to be less prone to seek out and latch onto feelings and memories to feel anxious about, but it did not noticably make me less anxious about doing things. I was taking it for minor social anxiety and as far as I could tell, I was still just as apprehensive of social situations as before.
I was diagnosed with F41.2 and was prescribed medication. I reckon that the thing that happened was, in fact, a complete opposite.
I had suicidal tendencies and it provoked "all or nothing" response. Basically, I could do almost anything I wanted because "I will die soon". Now my sense of anxiety response is calibrated. When I'm in social non-threatening situations, I'm usually calm. When I'm in social threatening situations, it provokes "fight or flight" response, usually with (verbally) "fight" (I'm quite weak and I can't restrict myself, which results in injuries on my or other's side). When it's something like exam, I feel anxious but not in "fight" sense. Overall, balance restored.
So, I'd say it depends.
I think what you're looking for is not medication but an exercises on how to act in such situations. You still feel afraid but overcome yourself in stressful situation. Or maybe you find out that the reason you're afraid is a complete BS and you feel much less anxious. For me it was CBT that did the trick.
A lot of musicians take beta blockers to counter performance anxiety/stage fright, and it's reputed to be especially effective at reducing the adrenaline rush "fight or flight" sensation you mention.
CBT is also known to help with this. Here's a workbook that I've found helpful, although my anxiety is quite a bit different from yours: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1626250154
Cultivating courage is different from reducing anxiety, and has to do with practicing courageous habits, as well as mindset, framing, spiritual work, etc. That said, you can certainly work on the anxiety and the courage in parallel.
I had pretty intense work related anxiety, and was able to get on Lorazepam.
It was like all the promise of modern medicine made manifest, it was for me a miracle. It instantly and totally resolved my anxiety, it made me relaxed and comfortable, and it even made me happier(maybe that was just finding the joy in a life not ruled by anxiety?). It didn't stop there! It also wildly improved my sleep (which was bad before the work related anxiety) and just totally turned my life around. I had zero problems with tolerance taking 4mg (two in the morning, one at lunch, one at night) for about eight months. I was weaned off the drug (against my wishes) over about a month and never had any withdrawal symptoms, and shortly after I quit my job.
I really wish it was easier to get benzos/stay on them.
After more than a year of corona, do we have any indication whether there is a dose effect? I.e., whether people who are infected through a higher virus dose get more sick?
It used to be a big question at some point, but I haven't heard anything. Did people realize that it's not a thing, or did they just give up?
Given that the infection is, to a first approximation, a race between the immune response and the virus multiplying, I'd expect giving the virus a head start is pretty bad.
Thank you, but that is not what I meant. This is about the probability of getting infected.
What I meant is about how severe your illness gets. There is the hypothesis that people who get infected by a high initial exposition have higher risk that their disease takes a severe course. For example, that they are more likely to be hospitalized.
I became convinced of this early on by means of the analogy between a city and an individual. A city has an outbreak whose severity can be measured by how many individuals in the city get infected. A body has an infection whose severity can be measured by how many cells in the body get infected. At the city level, it was clear that both whether the outbreak became an ongoing epidemic, and also how bad the outbreak was at its peak, both depended on whether the city had 1000 cases or 100 cases or 10 cases at the moment it realized it needed to go into lockdown. Similarly, at the body level, it seems quite plausible that whether the infection takes hold, and how bad it is at its peak, both might depend on how many viral particles were established at the moment the immune system realized it had to get into work.
But the problem is that we really have very little information on what the initial dose was that a person received. If we did challenge trials where we took health 20 year old volunteers and inoculated some of them with doses of different sizes, we might get a sense of this. But for purely observational studies in the real world, the only proxies I've heard are studying people who got infected in the household compared to the workplace, and people who got infected in covid wards vs outside the healthcare sector. Both of these types of studies are going to be heavily confounded, and more importantly, I don't know of anyone who tried to gather the systematic data needed to do either.
This makes intuitive sense to me. The adaptive immune system takes time to mutate matching antibodies, so the greater the initial dose, the greater the viral load can grow before that happens.
One thing that makes me skeptical of this story, though, is that I would expect the viral load to grow exponentially, and for the adaptive immune system to work at a speed proportional to the current viral load.
I thought the common understanding (from > 12 months ago; no idea about more current) was that it's very likely that there is a dose effect*, but its really hard to get any useful data on this for humans, so the best we're likely to do is speculation.
* possibly highly non-linearly, likely subject to individual-level variation, etc.
Given the assumption that there'll be a nuclear war between the West and the PRC at a uniformly-distributed time in the next 15 years, what actions would best preserve one's life and livelihood?
Obvious #1 for "life" is "live somewhere that is not likely to be nuked or invaded". I'm thinking this resolves to "not the PRC, not Taiwan/Ryukyus/South Korea, not a large Western city".
Obvious #2 for "life" - at least, in a Western country - is "maintain sufficient food and water supplies to outlast a supply chain failure" (given that most supply chains are controlled from large cities).
But some of the details on #2 aren't so obvious - I'm not sure how long it'd take to re-activate supply chains. I'm also not sure how important personal-safety and anti-theft considerations are in this instance - local police exist and are obviously capable of acting on their own initiative, but I'm not sure of how well they'd cope with a starving populace. And I've got no solid ideas for "livelihood" (besides "don't invest your life savings in somewhere likely to get nuked or invaded") and I might be missing something for "life".
We can hope for a), but I gave the assumption for the sake of argument. I'm sure I don't want b); there are things I'd die for, but dying for no purpose seems wasteful and I'm pretty sure I can be a net positive afterward.
Is nuclear winter not a part of your considerations? I didn't check the numbers but it feels like it's really hard to irradiate the planet to the levels where it seriously reduces human life expectancy *after* all the other stuff. On the other hand, a couple of "years without summer" on top of collapse of central government could really kill more than the bombs.
Yeah... might be the best prep is just spending your money on some decadence right now. I mean, you might not want to live in the aftermath and/or all your prep may not even work out and you won't survive anyway.
"Sufficient ammo to defend your stash" only really crops up if either a) the state fails and you're defending it against bandits/warlords, or b) you are attempting to defend your stash *against the state* (i.e. turning warlord). I think it is fairly obvious that taking option b) does not optimise your odds of survival, but I'd be interested to hear other perspectives on the likelihood of a) happening (personally, I'm not seeing it in the West; the state might suffer a temporary crisis of leadership, but the monopoly on force and national identity are sufficiently strong that I can't see anyone making a successful play at warlordism).
The same farmers who were growing food beforehand. The food-supply issue is very real, but it's mostly with distribution, not production.
(At least, in Oz and the USA. I'm not certain whether the PRC and EU produce enough food to feed themselves; they have positive trade balances in the ag sector but AIUI that's mostly on the basis of cash crops rather than staples.)
There is no such thing as sufficient ammo to defend your stash. By the time you might get to being seriously hungry without a "stash", either the government will have reasserted control in your area, or every random wannabe thief who wants your stash will have been either killed by or joined up with the hundred-strong band of thieves devoted to seizing every stash in the county. There is no amount of ammo that compensates for your being outnumbered a hundred to one. And there is no "my stash isn't worth the trouble; if I have enough ammo they'll pass me by", because it isn't just the material value of your stash, it's the value to the proto-warlord of the principle, "NOBODY gets to hang on to their private stash in MY territory".
How about sufficient good friends to take on a warlord? That's the part everyone seems to want to skip. When's the last time you had dinner with your immediate meatspace neighbors? Because that's going to be a better investment than another box of 5.56mm or whatever.
Live in a rural area, make sure you and your neighbours have a high-trust tight-knit community. Teamwork is king in a crisis.
First year there's going to be plenty of food from all the cattle that gets slaughtered for lack of feed. Second winter will suck: probably +50% dead from cold and starvation. Your rural community will fare better. It's possible that you'll have to defend yourself from hungry mobs (easy) and professional raiders (harder), but I don't know if that really will be a big as an issue as people image.
In the nuclear war case in particular, a lot of the people who would theoretically be making up the hungry mobs and professional raiders would likely have been eliminated by the bombs themselves. More the invading army you might have to worry about.
Avoid living near hard targets like missile siloes or long runways, as these are likely targets for surface detonations which produce fallout.
It might be wise to look at wind and precipitation patterns to see where fallout is likely to end up (I'd be worried about the jet stream carrying material across the pacific and raining out on the PNW).
For livelihood, have a profession that will be needed in a post-WWIII world, such as engineering, medicine or making artificial owls.
I didn't worry about it in the '80s and I'm not worrying about it now.
Anyway, in the '80s you could at least make up a semi-credible storyline where the USSR invaded Germany and the triggers all got pulled. Sorry Taiwan, we love you too but not that much. And aside from China invading Taiwan, what is the scenario people envisage in which China and the US (I assume) start lobbing nukes at each other?
China goes to invade Taiwan. The US moves an aircraft carrier group to block. China launches missiles based in China at the carrier to get it to move away. The US carrier's planes attack the missile bases and take them out. China figures that the only way it can win is to launch hydrogen bombs at the carrier.
That sounds like the only way to lose, not win. I don't think anything would be more effective at unifying a global counter response than being the first to resort to nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately for US force projection, carriers are actually pretty easy to take out with modern missile systems. Moving a carrier group into the Taiwan Strait is more or less only a signal of commitment to Taiwan, not an actually good military maneuver. Dropping a nuke on the carrier would be a massive waste of resources and an unnecessary diplomatic blunder with the rest of the world - not to mention inviting a US nuclear response.
Fortunately for the world, the scenarios where the US and China actually go to nuclear war are far less reasonable and possible than with the USSR. That is, unless China goes a very different direction. The Pacific Ocean is a great barrier between our interests, where neither side is likely to be able to launch a successful invasion against mainland targets. That leaves Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and possibly some other local targets for the Chinese, that the US may or may not want to go to total war to defend. Given the aforementioned missile technology, we may be able to defend at least Japan from invasion just by destroying incoming landing craft. (Bombing casualties could be insane though...). Korea may be on its own in that scenario, as well as Taiwan if the Chinese really went all out.
Of course, all of this depends on the rest of the world being willing to leave this to America. Increasingly, it appears that even other regional powers like India, despite being far behind the Chinese in a direct confrontation, may be willing or even eager to dogpile if the Chinese became overtly aggressive against their neighbors.
The folks over at survivalblog have written and planned and prepped for this exact situation for decades. I really highly recommend their articles. (The site has a bit of a religious tone that you may or may not appreciate, but it doesn't interfere with the advice on food storage and stockpiling.)
The TL:DR version? Minimum 1 year's supply of food stored, water source located and laid in, and a fallout shelter for the first few weeks/months. (Doesn't have to be fancy, can be the central hallway in your basement with the right prep and some simple materials, we're talking duct tape and tarps.)
Nuclear war is survivable if you don't live in a city that gets targeted, you just have to plan ahead.
Why a year of food? A month will mostly deal with fallout, and - while it's hard to guess how long the supply chains would take to be re-established - I can't help but think that it would take substantially less than a year of no food before hoarders start getting their hoards confiscated.
You already seem to know the answer to this - a month is not enough time because that's the point where people could even think about opening supply chains. You would need a buffer, and a year is a pretty good buffer without going overboard. Because the major distribution centers are likely to have been destroyed or heavily affected, anything less than six months is an unnecessary risk.
Protecting your food from raiders/angry neighbors is a separate conversation, but I don't see how the answer to "how could you defend your stockpile" is going to be "don't have a stockpile so you are also starving."
As Doolittle says, there's no way supply chains are re-established within a month after a nuclear war.
In fact, after anything but the most limited nuclear war, they probably won't be "re-established" so much as "re-built from scratch and scraps." it will be a process lasting decades.
The "year's supply of stored food." is less about giving you time to wait for someone else to re-establish supply chains and more about giving you time to build your own. Whether that be by planting large vegetable gardens, developing formal or informal trade networks, ect.
As to people trying to steal your food; well, again, I'll recommend SurvivalBlog, those folks have thought through every angle on that particular problem six ways from Sunday for years. (Their best case advice essentially boils down to "Move to an isolated rural area with excellent firing lines, have your whole home, gardens and orchard hidden from observation both from the road and the air, fortify the whole area tougher than the Atlantic Wall, and guard it with thousands of rounds of .308 rifle ammunition and have extra stockpile for charity to give to people who ask nicely." and, while I respect that level of commitment to survival, it's well beyond what I personally aim for, and would make active participation in the rebuilding somewhat difficult.
My own survivalist goals are basically to have a year's supply of food laid in for myself, have a room in my basement permanently set up as a fallout shelter, and have enough fruit production from my yard that I can trade surplus to others and help with that whole "rebuilding".
I'm not questioning "2-3 months" - christ, I had almost that much for the first wave of COVID - I'm more getting at "if you think supply lines will be out longer than that, you need more robust measures than a hoard (like farming, as you say), because a hoard can and probably will be confiscated by that point".
No one would disagree that you'll need to move off of your stored food onto something more permanent, the problem with say, a 3 month stockpile is; what happens if the balloon goes up on, say, 1 December? (Assuming you're in the Northern Hemisphere.)
3 months will only get you to the end of February, and I don't know about where you live, but in my neck of the woods, there are no crops ready to harvest in February. A year's supply means that whenever the balloon goes up, you have time to wait till the start of growing season, put in your seeds, and wait to harvest time, all within your food stockpile window.
Furthermore, crops in fields/gardens are a lot harder to protect from people who would like to steal them from you, first of all, they're more obvious, people will be more likely to see them, and thus, know that you have something worth stealing.
Your stockpiled food in your basement won't be visible from the street, so it's only at risk from bandits going door to door to break into each home to search it for food. Hopefully a relatively rare occurrence, since doing so would certainly be a very dangerous occupation for them, if you want to prepare for that possibility, I suggest a bullpup rifle.
Uh, well, I'd probably recommend reading Machevelli's "The Prince" Sun Tzu's "Art of War" Clauswitz's "On War" the Bible in full, with particular attention paid to the actions of King David and King Solomon, and generally, just a lot about ethics.
It's a lot easier to do evil unintentionally if you're trying to control territory through force. (If you're going to try to be an evil warlord, I don't want to offer you tips.)
Your best bet is to make a lot of friends at the local gun range, and start out as a community protection group. You will have a natural incentive to "pacify" local raiders/enemies/other groups to provide protection to your own. If you are a local power, you also have a good chance of getting lots of voluntary recruits who want the safety and protection you can provide.
Rinse and repeat as necessary to reach your desired level of power.
Let's say that in a war with the US over Taiwan, China has decided to use a nuclear weapon against one city, what should we predict about this city? My guess is that it would be a city in a pro-US country that does not have nuclear weapons nor have a large number of Americans living in it. A small Japanese city would probably be ideal in part because of China's WW II driven hostility to Japan.
First to use nuclear weapons - no, the PRC has no reason to do that. First to use nuclear weapons against a city - more likely.
(The scenario here would be something like: PLA attempts cross-Strait invasion; US CBG intervenes; PLA land air and conventional missiles sink CBG; US uses nuclear SLBMs to destroy the airfields and missile silos in order for another CBG to move in; PRC launches counter-value, believing - potentially even correctly - that its deterrent is under attack and will be destroyed if not used.)
Don't live near military bases relevant to Western power projection in the Pacific, e.g. San Diego or Pearl Harbor. Don't live near major US command and control nodes, e.g. the Pentagon. And don't live in cities that are particularly important to US or Allied prestige and economic power, e.g. Washington, New York, San Francisco, or Seoul, Tokyo, Sydney for the non-USians here. If you need to work in those cities, live in the outlying suburbs. Other than that, make the sorts of precautions you'd want to make for a major earthquake/hurricane/riot/whatever, and maybe do a bit of research and preparation for e.g. improvised short-term fallout shelter in your basement.
This isn't your grandfather's cold war, and the People's Republic of China isn't the old Soviet Union. There aren't a thousand nuclear missiles aimed at the United States on hair-trigger alert; China would be hard-pressed to launch even a hundred missiles at CONUS targets if they wanted to, and they don't particularly want to.
A nuclear war with China would be a Very Bad Thing, which almost nobody wants. But the "Mad Max" post-apocalyptic fantasies need to be left in the 20th century.
My understanding is that the PRC has recently begun expanding its arsenal significantly (from ~150 warheads during the Cold War to ~350 and rising). It is questionable how many of these are capable of being rapidly deployed, though.
Most of the expansion is in short- to intermediate-range weapons; there's a number of ways that those could be used, but they're not well suited for a "make sure Yankee-Land is especially totally destroyed in the event of war" strategy.
I'd say move to Brazil. It's not particularly close to the combatants, and doesn't seem likely to become a target itself. Also big enough to defend itself in the postwar chaos.
(That said, I don't take this threat seriously. I assume that not getting blown up is a high priority for both U.S. and Chinese leadership.)
Uruguay and Chile are also good options for the same reasons. Uruguay is also quite welcoming of immigrants/expats, and tops a lot of lists for "Best places to live abroad."
Over at TheMotte I had a debate about lockdowns where to TL;DR the other point of view:
Lockdowns are popular among the professional managerial class but unpopular among the working class. Polls showing that lockdowns were popular everywhere were run by the PMC and paid for by the PMC, and thus cannot be trusted.
My actual question is, assuming that is true and there is effort to make lockdowns look more popular than they really are. What hard evidence could we use to see through the spin, or to prove that the polls are accurate? I asked in that discussion but didn't get any answers, I thought I'd ask here because it is an interesting question.
One thing to keep in mind is that even from the very beginning, working class individuals had no option but to keep going out. Mostly it was going to work, but they also had fewer options for delivered food and supplies. There was a big push in rural areas during those first two complete shut down weeks to remember the truck drivers who were still working and needed places to get food while on the road. The PMC seems to have forgotten that they existed and would be needed to keep delivering food. There was also the need for "grocery store employees" which was recognized by the PMC and they were included in emergency laws mandating pandemic pay.
To link that back with your question - it's important to keep in mind that the only groups able to actually lock down were the PMC, so of course it was run by and paid for by the PMC. They paid the rest of society to bring them all the things they wanted and needed right to their homes. It's was pretty surreal watching PMC members on my Facebook feed chastising people for not staying home, while they suggested the alternative was "just order what you need online!" Who did they think was bringing them their food? A complete lack of understanding about the supply chain was definitely there as well.
To add to this, the fact working class individuals (not all of them, lots of waiters stayed home for example) can't avoid going out is a good reason for the working class to support lockdowns.
If all the PMC are working from home and staying at home they're not catching the virus, and spreading it to you at your job.
Look at polls from Fox News, or any other organization that positions itself as anti-PMC and is big enough to run its own polls. According to this theory they should show substantially different results.
I agree that should work, but the counter argument was that anti-lockdown news like The Telegraph (the example I used) was pandering to the working class while not doing anything that might actually harm their class interests like running a poll that shows a different result. Pointing out that the telegraph's readers are middle class didn't make a difference.
What exactly is the proposed mechanism by which polls are untrustworthy? Are they claiming that Gallup et al. literally lie about the numbers of responses they got or do they have some special technique for making sure people answer in the way they want? Drilling into how exactly this fraud is supposed to be occurring might get you to some falsifiable details.
I think it's a cultural and values divide that overlaps with the jobs people do, but that someone culturally in the PMC or middle class would, in my expectation, be more likely to support lockdowns than a prole and vice versa.
Okay, I'm reading this Noah Smith article and the graph about doctors has me confuzzled. There are more *Copts*, relatively speaking, than the other ethnic group? Copts? As in "Coptic Christians from Egypt" who are a persecuted minority? Let me just try and find some population figures to give me a foothold here:
"Egyptian Copts are the biggest Christian community in the Arab world. Estimates of their numbers vary, but generally range between 4.7 and 7.1 million. They are proportionately most numerous in Upper Egypt."
"As of 2018, there were some 500,000 Copts living in the United States."
The short Wikipedia article seems to imply that Coptic immigration (prior to the Egyptian revolution of 2011) were the educated middle-class, with the poor(er), rural Copts only fleeing to America after the turmoil and upheaval.
So I'd expect more professionals to be the ones emigrating to the US, including doctors. And of course, once here, I'd expect families to steer their kids into the same professions as their parents, hence (possibly) more doctors.
How many Copts back in Egypt are/were doctors, and how did that stack up as a representative sample is, I think, the question that should be asked here. If every single accountant in Nowherestan emigrated to the USA, then I think the graph about "population demographics of accountants amongst ethnic groups" would be skewed so as to make it seem that Nowherestanis were disproportionately accountants by comparison with other ethnic groups.
Or maybe I'm an idiot who can't read a graph might be the simpler answer.
EDIT: Yes, he does address this as selective immigration. But I think Scott's point still stands - the Jewish population of the USA is now at the point of being "just another immigrant group from the Old Country" so that it's not all middle-class professionals coming. That means that Jewish-Americans are as likely as non-Jewish-Americans to go into all kinds of jobs rather than clustering in a particular profession.
The Copts, up until 2011, were selectively immigrating. I think that according as ethnic groups become established, then they will take on the same traits as the general population. We're seeing this in the Jewish-American population. So I think Noah's point about selective immigration being the answer is right in one way but not another:
"If his point here is really just to show that disparities arise for non-racist reasons, he should focus on selective immigration instead of pooh-poohing it. Indian Americans (or Filipino Americans, or Iranian Americans, etc.) provide a much stronger argument against overapplication of disparate impact/systemic racism than Jews do, precisely because we know why these minorities are elite, whereas with Jews it’s kind of mystery meat."
But he is the one sourcing graphs that show Jewish-American elitism is not that elite (e.g. Coptic physicians), so maybe the former elitism is being diluted? If selective immigration is in play for all ethnic groups, and yet Jewish-Americans are over-represented in certain areas, then there must be "mystery meat" involved.
As I understand it, when Jews were immigrating to the US, there were ethnic quotas, but no direct rules about education. People who were better off were more likely to be able to immigrate, but that's not the same thing.
All this type of talk seems to ignore the elephant in the room. Whatever IQ, (intelligence valued by civilizations) is, it is passed down genetically. We've been ignoring this for years... (Since "The Bell Curve" got written off as racist propaganda, when it's main point was
Hmm right. When I wrote that I meant only the genetic part. Then while I was trying to find a better word it struck me that IQ is of course also determined from all those other heritable things too. Culture, language, numbers. (It's hard to do math with roman numerals.) And TBH I think Murray's main point, was that the class divide in this country was enhanced when all really smart kids started going to the same colleges...and then having kids of their own. That ramps up *all* the heritable parts of IQ. So let me just say, IQ is passed down from your ancestors.
A striking thing I learned during Shaun's YouTube analysis of The Bell Curve: 'number of earrings' is to some extent a 'heritable' trait. Also, heritability levels change with the environment. My takeaway is that (i) you've got to be careful how you use 'heritability', (ii) I still don't know how to avoid pitfalls / be careful enough when using the concept of heritability, (iii) also most other people don't know how to apply the concept correctly and so most opinions based on 'heritability' are suspect.
As I understand it, the Copts form an elite in Egypt (so, absent selective migration) because of Islamic history. The Jizya tax made it expensive to remain a Christian, so only the successful ones could afford to not convert to Islam.
How does one get better at verbalizing? (writing / explaining / conveying ideas)
Practice is good, but deliberate practice is better. So far I've treated my verbalizing as a black box, where the more time I put into writing something, the more palatable it gets. But while it's gradually gotten better over the years, it's still agonizingly slow. Too slow for e.g. fluid IRL conversations.
Any tips for a more deliberate, maybe less blackboxy approach to improvement?
The Brain that Changes Itself by Doidge has quite a bit about how Benjamin Franklin trained his writing ability. The only part I remember is that he would separate the sentences in writing he admired, and then try to reconstruct the original order.
More generally, you could study the writing you think is the best and try to figure out what's going on with it.
I believe he converted poetry to verse and then back to poetry (the second time from memory). This was also a classical rhetorical exercise, called soluta versus.
I am generally skeptical of skill transfer, I would focus on what you want to be better at and try to find ways to spend more time per day doing that thing specifically.
For writing you can't go by reading as much good writing as you can. That will translate at least somewhat to speaking well. When you are in a conversation you want to pay attention to what others are saying rather than thinking about what you want to say next. Do your best to remain relaxed. Remember to breathe.
There are informal groups like Toastmasters that allow a person to practice speaking to a group. The other members will give you constructive advice on concrete ways you can improve your speaking skills.
The stimulus for this comment is the banning of Bret Weinstein on youtube. The bigger picture is that we've given up our freedom of speech to corporations. This has happened slowly enough that most of us have gone along with it. Ban Alex Jones... that's easy, Ban Trump, He's telling lies that may cost lives, doesn't matter that he's the Pres. Ban all messages that we think may be wrong... It's like 1984, but with big business, not big brother. I'm sick of the comments that these are private corporations. I'm not sure what to do, any ideas, comments are welcome.
Just to make you feel better (not really), I learned the other day that Facebook intends to start moderating satire to make sure it isn't "punching down." I did not find this out from Facebook; I read it in an email from the Babylon Bee. Apparently, a huge censorship machine is just what the doctor ordered.
From my sense, leftoids live under and implicit belief that big corps. aren't censoring them and are censoring rightoids because they represent a more attractive segment of the population for marketing.
They think that the censorship machine has existed for about 100 years and will continue to exist, regardless of "laws" and "Norms"; and if they can use their spending power to turn it against people on the social right in favor of the social left, why not?
It can't blow back on them, because it was created in the 20's to counter them specifically. It is already as bad as it can be.
I bet on hubris, but I'm very much a mistake theorist.
If it's lies at all, I expect it would just be a few highly influential people, with the typical progressive believing they can't possibly be making a mistake.
I feel as though they should remember that better treatment for gay people required a lot of secrecy, privacy, free speech, and generally having some room to live outside the consensus.
I think that's part of it, but another part is that people are very concrete thinkers, so they think they've achieved their goals well enough that they don't have to worry about possible future goals.
> From my sense, leftoids live under and implicit belief that big corps. aren't censoring them and are censoring rightoids because they represent a more attractive segment of the population for marketing.
My leftist friends don't believe that. I keep seeing complaints about social media allowing vile right-wing lies but censoring innocuous leftist content. I really don't know how to square this with support for corporate censorship.
It's easier to notice when your side is being censored than when the other side is being censored.
Tentative theory: leftists overestimate the power and competence of corporations-- they think that corporations can be forced to do the right thing by threats of punishment. There's no consideration given to whether corporations are able to do what the leftists want.
Demands for censorship of the tremendous volume on social media leads to automated incompetent censorship.
Have you not noticed that everyone on the left hates big tech companies?
See, I think the disconnect here is that people on the right are more likely to love big tech companies in general, but hate the content moderation thy do, so all they ever talk about regarding these companies is the content moderation.
Whereas how the left feels about content moderation is largely irrelevant, because they hate the big tech companies for being oligarchs, monopolists, union-busters, regulation-dodgers, billionaire-enablers, intellectual colonizers, alt-right pipelines, etc. etc. etc., and they just want to smash them from the ground up for a million reasons. So however they fl about moderation, it rarely gets mentioned because it's not the *singular focus* of their complaints about the tech companies, like it is on the right.
I think many view it as a deficient criminal justice system, meaning it needs to be fixed 'in place'.
if innocent people are being convicted, you work to fix those problems, but you don't say 'no convictions for anyone until we work this out'... you need to continue guarding the house with what you got until you have something better. And you also accept that you will always make mistakes convicting some percentage of innocent people, the only way not to is by not convicting anyone ever.
It is dangerous to let big tech control censorship. It is also dangerous to let big tech platforms go uncensored. I guess, to their own detriment perhaps, people have chosen the side of that coin that seems more aligned with them politically.
ok, but every other part of public life is ok with not being ideologically absolute, and instead balancing the tradeoffs of degree. so you think we have it wrong everywhere?
or is the definition being used of censorship not cover all content restriction? that question then seems uniteresting.
Facebook and Youtube removing people is not "censoring." Is it "censoring" that Fox News won't let me come on the air and give my opinion about things? These are all private corporations and they are all entitled to decide whose voice they want to air.
I would be completely in favor of Fox being forced to air a significant amount of factual reporting in exchange for FB and YT allowing more conspiracy theories.
The simple answer is that Facebook and Youtube are lying about merely hosting content, and we have yet to commit to truth in advertising laws so strong as to make that kind of lie illegal. It's not great that they're lying but they're allowed to do it.
Fox news is very different from FB/ YT/ twitter. YT is maybe closer to a video delivering mailman. Sending some things via the mail is illegal, (child porn comes to mind.) but I think most things are allowed. The USPS doesn't stop delivery of "The Alex Jones Newsletter" because there maybe hurtful lies in it.
They are both privately held companies and not covered by the first amendment (Congress shall make no law....abridging the freedom of speech). They are entitled to be partisan. They are entitled to advocate for views.
In fact, one could argue that forcing FB/YT/Tw to not advocate for what they believe would violate the first amendment.
They are not like USPS. USPS is the government. They might be like UPS. UPS gets to decide if their own shipping rules.
If you have a small set of venues that de facto collectively comprise the public square, and all of them are subject to identical pressures to censor content ("censor", here, meaning "use of power to prevent something from being heard" - in this case, the power being their permissions in the software), you have de facto a censored public square.
I don't think anyone here disputes that this set of circumstances is *legal*, but the mere fact that something is legal does not mean it is not a *problem*. A censored public square is a *problem*, whether it succeeds or fails in crushing the secret whispers of dissent.
If it succeeds, democracy dies. I am not kidding, here; Putin's Russia and Xi's PRC are theoretically democracies, but control of the public square enables tyranny. Democracy is a cruel lie if the populace cannot make informed choices.
If it fails, the ghetto wall raised between the opposing views kills co-operation and bipartisanism dead and fosters radicalisation on both sides, which is in the long term a recipe for civil unrest and societal stagnation due to endless conflict.
It is a legitimate point that forcing private platforms to be content-neutral has flaws as a *solution* to this problem. However, it is not the *only* possible solution (to give two obvious alternatives: 1: create a true virtual public square, government-run, which *would* be bound by freedom of speech, 2: shut down the Internet), and flaws in a solution should *not* be used to deny the existence of a problem.
I think these are all good points here. I absolutely agree that if companies are experiencing collective pressure from the government to suppress a topic(s), that's censorship. I do not think that is happening here and I suspect you don't either. Is your position that the social and economic might of the majority pressures companies to censor? If so, that seems an interesting topic of discussion.
re. "legal but a problem." I am sympathetic to this argument. This is exactly where I think we are. You could pass laws to force an equal-time doctrine at social media companies. Presently, I do not think it is fair to say they are discriminating against any particular political ideology. I think they are discriminating against misinformation. I am not in favor of forcing corporations to become unwilling bullhorns for misinformation especially since the last batch of misinformation was used to foment an insurrection.
I agree with the rest of your slippery slope discussion. I think, however, that it misses the significance of partisan news outlets (Fox News). "jstr" below pretends "Platform vs. Publisher." Except that we allow publishers to choose what books and articles they are willing to publish in partisan ways. Historically, the bullhorn of opinion in all its forms has been controlled by a wealthy-few. It still is. Today, that wealthy few are less united in the viewpoints they are willing to trumpet. This seems like a good thing.
We have always been on a slippery slope. We are just now seeing how sharp the rocks are at the bottom.
Right, well said, thanks. Why is there not more outrage at banning Trump? I dislike the man, but he was the f-ing President! (And there is still some large fraction of the country that would like to listen to him.)
What magic9mushroom said, (better than I could). YT etal should be treated as some private utility. G'ment imposed regulations. (and I use to think I was a libertarian.)
I want to propose a corollary to the 1st amendment. The congress shall write laws to insure that one man's* freedom of speech is not abridged by another man. All people are granted 'equal access' as much as that is possible. Equal access to the mail, doesn't mean free postage, just that everyone can send letters and such.
*I'm using man in the broadest possible terms, all humans and groups of humans.
I'm not sure why you pick on Fox news. I find NPR just as pandering to their listeners. (I don't watch fox news, but I occasionally will go to their web site.) Re: Trump and the riots; Yeah a tragic travesty, yet I find banning the Pres, to be even worse. There seems to be no uproar over this, and it confuses me. The proper response to Trump was for the congress to impeach and then for citizens to sue him.
Again, YT etal are not abridging anyone's freedom of speech. They are just not lending some people their microphones. That said, I am sympathetic to the concern that "their microphone" is large and its societal impact is broad.
We have already seen that the Right-wing is unwilling to police itself. I singled out Fox because, where NPR may be "pandering," it is not disseminating out-and-out lies. Recall that the CEO of Newsmax stated "on the record" that they had discovered a billion-dollar market for Trumpist fan fiction and were going to serve that market(no doubt much to Fox's chagrin).
Sure, the correct thing to do was to impeach and sue. How did that go? Do we really want a government completely in-thrall to a misinformed electorate to decide what can and cannot be said on social media?
The reason censorship is presumably bad is that it interferes with communication. From that angle, it doesn't matter whether the censorship is governmental or by lesser means.
So far as I know, a really striking example of censorship-- concealing that homosexuals exist-- was more a matter of widespread consensus than government action.
The reason I believe this censorship was pervasive is reading accounts by homosexuals that they only found out about the existence of other people like them by reading medical books. Homosexuality was presented as pathological, but even that was better than feeling like one was the only person who wasn't normal.
I agree that was bad. I agree it was by consensus. I think calling it censorship muddies the water. It's not at all clear to me what free-speech-related government action might have improved upon that situation.
Found one! The estimable Ada Palmer talks about the Inquistions and about how systems of censorship get reused against whatever people people are worried about.
The issues brought up in that podcast were interesting. I just don't think that any action, of which I am aware, done by a social media company comes close to censorship of political views.
I think if we wanted to reign in the political damage caused by social media we ought to consider restricting the algorithmic content which causes me to never see a whiff of Right-wing information and others to never see a whiff of the Left.
Bret Weinstein is putting his videos on Odysee, a video-hosting website which is working hard to be immune to censorship.
I've seen some material from Weinstein on youtube recently. I don't think he was banned entirely, but I think some of what he was saying about COVID was censored.
If anyone has a more complete version of the story, I'd like to see it.
To my understanding, all of his videos discussing ivermectin and the videos discussing the possible dangers of the spike protein from SARS-COV-2 were taken down.
You don't mean 'the story about why YouTube censored his stuff'? YouTube and all the big corps don't publish their reasons, and I've noticed a general bias (for years) among tech companies toward taking things down: it costs them nothing except maybe a little reputation, but that sacrifice is perhaps too small to notice until the damage is irreparable.
But for anyone wondering what Bret and friends were saying in their now-taken-down videos, I summarized a three-hour Bret W video full of Covid claims at LW: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr
The problem is that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, et al. have near monopolies in their respective niches. These are mostly due to network effects, though youtube has slightly weaker network effects, and slightly stronger economies of scale. (Slightly weaker network effects, because creators can post videos across platforms with relatively little effort compared to making the video in the first place.)
No idea what to do about it, other than somehow building a tool that makes it easier to use an alternative platform without disappearing from the original.
Maybe we need to break youtube up. More competition. I don't think Alex Jones nor Trump should have been banned. Sure maybe this leads to more pain and suffering in the world, but that's the price one must pay for freedom of speech.
This reminds me, I have been feeling lately that Google indexes *way* less stuff than it used to. I don't think it's censorship, more like "the WWW is too big to index now, so we prune off the 75% we judge least important."
Speaking of which, anyone else noticed that Substack comments are not searchable on Google nor Substack?
A project to find out whether trends in fiction can predict conflicts. The project was promising, but ended after five years. It's probably worth continuing with the premise.
"In 2018, weeks after the Bundeswehr officers had travelled to Tübingen, Wertheimer presented his initial findings at the defence ministry in Berlin. He drew attention to a literary scandal around Jovan Radulović’s 1983 play Dove Hole, about an Ustashe massacre against their Serbian neighbours, and the expulsion of non-Serbian writers from the Serbian Writers’ Association in 1986. In the years that followed, he showed, there was an absence of tales about Albanian-Serbian friendships or love stories, and a rise in revisionist historical novels. Literature and literary institutions, he told the military men, had “paved the way for war” a good decade before the start of the bloodshed of the Kosovo war in 1998.
"Carlo Masala was at the presentation. “At the beginning, I thought: this is crazy shit,” he recalls. “It won’t fly.” But Masala, who had spent a part of his academic career studying the conflict in Bosnia, remembered how the hardening tensions in the regions had been preceded by a decline in interfaith marriages. “In Kosovo, it seemed, you could detect similar early warning signs in the literary scene.”"
One of the scary patterns (and I see it on the right as well as the left) is that nothing could possibly be worse than the current situation, so we have no responsibility if we break things.
In the documentary/movie Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis, there's a part that shows catastrophic events happening from films with the text "All these movies were made before 2001" https://youtu.be/-fny99f8amM?t=5689.
> Literature and literary institutions, he told the military men, had “paved the way for war” a good decade before the start of the bloodshed of the Kosovo war in 1998.
I don't know if it's literature that paved the way for war, or that it was just reflecting that the people were preparing for war. It's possibly also a positive feedback loop: you find that some group of people is more aggressive than usual, write about it, it then comes into everyone's imagination, people start noticing things more, getting tenser, etc.
That being said, I wonder whether governments who want to prevent internal conflict might start commissioning fiction intended to tamp down tension. For example, cross-ethnic romance novels.
I knew a white woman who had a great fondness for white woman/native american man romance novels, and she didn't seem to have any trouble finding them.
Or did you mean *government*-*sponsored* cross-ethnic romance novels sound unerotic?
A recent meta-analysis of vitamin D supplementation studies found that vitamin D is probably effective against Covid. Have you changed your mind on this?
To provide a precise summary and collate the hitherto available clinical evidence on the effect of vitamin D supplementation on clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients.
Methods
PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and Web of Science databases were systematically searched using appropriate keywords till June 8, 2021, to identify observational studies and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reporting adverse clinical outcomes (ICU admission and/or mortality) in COVID-19 patients receiving vitamin D supplementation vs. those not receiving the same. Both prior use and use of vitamin D after COVID-19 diagnosis were considered. Unadjusted/adjusted pooled odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated (PROSPERO registration number CRD42021248488).
Results
We identified 13 studies (10 observational, 3 RCTs) pooling data retrieved from 2933 COVID-19 patients. Pooled analysis of unadjusted data showed that vitamin D use in COVID-19 was significantly associated with reduced ICU admission/mortality (OR 0.41, 95% CI: 0.20, 0.81, p = 0.01, I2 = 66%, random-effects model). Similarly, on pooling adjusted risk estimates, vitamin D was also found to reduce the risk of adverse outcomes (pooled OR 0.27, 95% CI: 0.08, 0.91, p = 0.03, I2 = 80%, random-effects model). Subgroup analysis showed that vitamin D supplementation was associated with improved clinical outcomes only in patients receiving the drug post-COVID-19 diagnosis and not in those who had received vitamin D before diagnosis.
Conclusions
Vitamin D supplementation might be associated with improved clinical outcomes, especially when administered after the diagnosis of COVID-19. However, issues regarding the appropriate dose, duration, and mode of administration of vitamin D remain unanswered and need further research.
I'm not the least bit convinced. There seems to be a cottage industry about how meta-analyses are "the best" form of evidence. They are not. Individual studies that are high-quality and have sufficient N are much better than meta-analyses of a bunch of inconclusive studies.
Apart from Entrenas Castillo et al, everything they analyze can easily be explained by randomness and the file-drawer effect. And Entrenas Castillo et al are analyzing people who are also on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, which makes me very skeptical.
"People who take vitamin D die less frequently" wouldn't be particularly weird, even if vitamin D does not improve health outcomes, if health-conscious people are both more likely to take vitamin D and also more likely to be healthy.
Yes but these people were given vitamin D either randomly or quasi-randomly. So it would have to be something like "Doctors systematically give calcifediol to healthier patients" which doesn't seem plausible during a pandemic.
No, my priors were that "Healthy levels of vitamin D help your immune system in fighting off disease generally, and would in all liklihood help with Wuhan Flu"
Corporate media screeching did nothing to alter that prior.
This study seems to show stronger effects than I would have assumed beforehand, but within the general window I expect for this sort of thing.
John Schilling brought up the question of offsets for murder in a no-politics thread, and trade-offs (if not offsets) for killing are exactly the issue for how aggressive police should be permitted to be.
Do more aggressive police result in less crime? Do the police become criminals themselves if they're cut too much slack? Does restricting police aggressiveness dispirit the police so much that they quit doing useful work? (Sidetrack: A lot of the police seem to have no faith in the justice system if it's being applied to themselves.)
There was an article in Graham Factor (I forget which), which stated how New York crime levels rose because the police was forced to become less aggressive. https://grahamfactor.substack.com/archive?sort=new
However, most of that was a result of the police being forced to become less pro-active in stopping suspicious vehicles, and not becoming less physically aggressive towards suspects
There's a common libertarian refrain that "if it is moral to perform some action for free, then it is moral to perform that action for money." I currently believe this statement, but I want to challenge that belief and see if it survives. I'm willing to bite this bullet when to comes to both prostitution and blackmail. Does anyone have any good counter-examples?
The US is a net exporter of blood to Canada (Canada does not allow monetary remuneration to blood donors). If we didn't allow remuneration, I believe pretty strongly that the world would struggle to get enough blood.
I'd love for UBI to mean that no one needs to donate blood for a relatively basic lifestyle, but I believe allowing remuneration is a net benefit. I could be persuaded by some figures that donating blood is fairly harmful relative to the monetary benefits, and that remuneration doesn't lead to a large increase in blood donation.
The US, in practice, really only pays *plasma* donors; whole-blood donation is almost entirely voluntary. It's technically legal to pay whole-blood donors, but there's no US market for it.
So, are US blood exports to Canada,
- Blood plasma exports, or
- Exports of paid whole-blood donations earmarked for Canada, or
- Exports of whole blood donated by volunteers, which the US has more of?
Couldn't that justify any kind of corruption? e.g. it's not immoral for a politician to support (or oppose) legislation affecting the X industry, so what's the problem if his buddies in the X industry gave him money? You can't prove he wasn't planning to support it anyway.
Let's assume, arguendo, that the bought vote would have been a moral vote, if freely given. (To give an easy example: a vote to end slavery, purchased by a wealthy abolitionist.) In such a case, I think it would still be moral to accept payment for that vote. But it would nonetheless be justified for all such payments to be illegal, due to the specific public choice problem of paying for votes: where we can't be sure if the politician would have voted that way regardless, and we have no reason to expect that most of the votes bought will be moral ones.
In other words, paying for votes would have bad consequences. But then I think that answers my challenge: there is at least some acts which are moral (on deontological and consequentialist grounds) when done for free, but which are immoral (on consequentialist grounds) when done for money.
Cool! I wonder if I can think of any other examples of that?
Pretty much any incidence of bribery, I would think. Someone making a purchasing decision for a company or government is in a similar situation.
There's a principal-agent problem here. The person receiving the payment is acting on behalf of someone else, but the payment is going directly to them.
Framing it this way breaks one of the premises: it is immoral for an agent to act against the principal's interest for free, so acting against the principal's interest for money is still immoral. Plausibly if the action is *in* the principal's interest and therefore moral to do for free, the agent accepting money to take the same action would remain moral.
How would you regulate whether it's actually in the principal's interest in these scenarios? I worked at a place before where a purchaser accepted five-figure gifts from a vender. The purchaser claimed that they would have purchased the same materials from them anyway, so there was no conflict of interest. There's a significant trust issue which is eroded by even the possibility of a quid-pro-quo.
One potential counterexample: when an act is supposed to involve providing an honest opinion (e.g., writing a review of a book, movie, or restaurant; endorsing a politician; voting in an election or in a legislature). In these cases, paying for the opinion makes it hard or impossible to believe that the provision of opinion is honest, which might take away the value of the act in the first place. (Some people may try to put having sex in here too, but that invites huge spillage of this category.)
The other point is that at least a lot of the time when people talk about banning doing things for money, it's not because they think an individual act of doing that thing for money is immoral, but rather that the fact that a fraction of the economy will be diverted to paying for this thing will cause other problems. If it's legal to sell parts of your body for money, then it may be that economic competition among poor people leads to them all selling this part of their body, but prices for goods consumed by poor people rising to eat up this extra income source so that they only get net harms from the competition.
The salon made me sign some sort of legal release form to get my cobalt blue hair. (This was in St Paul, Minnesota and we couldn’t buy beer on Sunday till 2019. Car sales on Sunday are still illegal. We really have some weird blue laws in this state.)
I've only had my hair dyed professionally in Texas, and I never had to sign anything like that. The blue hair from that profile photo (and later magenta and red dye jobs) were done by a professional who is also a friend, and might conceivably have bypassed a legal channel, but I just got my first post-pandemic dye job (purple, with red tips) in another salon and didn't have to sign anything like that.
Minnesota is a weird mix of liberal politics with some stogey moralistic foot dragging. The state only allowed medical cannabis as an extract from state dispensaries. Initially it was only available to terminal cancer patients.
The qualifying conditions have expanded a bit but it is only as of this year that patients are allowed to buy flower.
This depends on what *other* moral beliefs you already have.
For example, suppose that you believe that it is moral to help poor people (within reasonable limits), and also that it is immoral to only *pretend* to be poor in order to receive other people's help when in fact you are perfectly capable of making enough money to pay your bills.
If you agree with this, and you believe there is nothing wrong with selling sex for money... then the logical conclusion is that poor people do *not* deserve help unless they already tried to prostitute themselves.
I mean, the pretty ones are perfectly capable of making money (actually, the ugly ones too, they just need to work harder, or find customers with the right fetish), they just *choose* not to... but then their poverty is self-imposed and they can change their mind at any moment, so it's not really my problem.
Perhaps a more timely version of this - in many jurisdictions, you can't collect unemployment benefits if you've been offered a job and turned it down; so in jurisdictions of this sort where it was illegal to employ waiters for sit-down dining during pandemic outbreaks, it was much easier for people to collect unemployment than in places where it was legal and up to "personal choice".
Because the way that many people interact with each other depends on what choices they believe the other is able to make, taking away someone's choices can sometimes give them a better chance of getting what they want than giving them more choices.
Yeah, many people have an intuition that having more choices is always better. Like, you are always free to simply *not* use that extra option, right?
The problem is that now *other* people model you as "the person who also has this extra option", so even if you don't use it -- but they made *their* choice on the assumption that you *can* -- the outcome can be worse for you.
Another example of this is a job market. Imagine that the law limits employment to 8 hours a day. You can find a job, because there are situations where you working for 8 hours a day brings profit to both you and your employer. Then the law changes so that it is legal to work 10 hours a day. But you only want to work 8. Suddenly, you have a problem finding a job, despite being exactly the same person with the same skills and preferences as before. Because now when the employer looks at you, they see "a person who *could* work 10 hours a day, but *chooses* to work only 8", which is a red flag, because it signals e.g. lack of passion.
The extra option gave you the burden of having to explain why you refuse to take it. If you only wouldn't have it, you wouldn't be *punished* for *not* taking it.
I don't see how this would imply that prostitution is wrong. For people who broadly believe that there is a duty to help poor people if and only if they can't help themselves, I can imagine three kinds of views regarding prostitution:
• It would be wrong if some poor people were forced by their circumstances to work as prostitutes. People who could help themselves don't deserve help in general, but those who could only help themselves by prostitution should be helped.
• Those who could only help themselves by prostitution don't deserve help either. It's OK if some poor people were forced by their circumstances to work as prostitutes.
• It's wrong for a poor person to be forced by their circumstances to work as prostitutes if and only if they would be severely distressed by working as a prostitute. Those who could only help themselves by prostitution deserve help if and only if they would be severely distressed by it; people who claim they would be severely distressed by working as a prostitute should be taken by their word, as there is no way to verify it.
I don't see why anyone would believe that it would be wrong if some poor people were forced by their circumstances to work as prostitutes, but also believe those who could only help themselves by prostitution don't deserve help. That combination of beliefs would imply that paying prostitutes is wrong, but it's not a reasonable set of beliefs IMO. The three combinations of beliefs I described above are coherent belief sets, but none of them implies that paying prostitutes is wrong.
From a utilitarian perspective, there are social norms that treat actions differently if thy are socially motivated than if they are monetarily motivate; see parents picking their kids up late *more* when they start getting fined for it, because it becomes an economic question rather than a question of politeness. Those social norms have practical value in helping society function better and feel nicer to live in, so breaking them has a cost that shouldn't be ignored.
From a libertarian vs leftist perspective: Libertarians say taxation is slavery, leftists say wages are slavery. Just because someone choose to do something for money, does not make it magically not-coercive; economic coercion is rampant, the entire economy is built on it.
Everyone is coerced into doing labor they don't want to do in order to get a paycheck instead of being homeless.
If you make it legal for a boss to say he'll fire you if you don't fuck him, and a bunch of bosses start demanding this from every attractive employee, then you're basically coercing all of those employees to do labor they don't want to do *and* have sex they don't want to have in order to gt a paycheck instead of being homeless.
Government (and various private charities) means-test people before giving them benefits, to make sure they're totally poor and can't get the money on their own. If you make it legal to sell your kidneys, then how long is it before the government says you don't qualify for benefits if you still have 2 kidneys? Because you could still get the money on your own by selling one, so obviously you're not desperate and just trying to mooch?
Of course, I'm in favor of making prostitution and organ-selling legal, because I think it will be beneficial on the whole, and I trust the goverenment and social institutions to regulate against the worst outcomes. But I don't think "if it is moral to perform some action for free, then it is moral to perform that action for money" is a very clever or useful heuristic; it misses lots of problems and costs that need to be considered.
Yes, I know. All anecdotes are wrong, some are useful.
I'm confident the difference between social and transactional norms exist for many reasons beyond that story; that story is a good reference to the concept that many people know, even if it didn't happen. I could make up an example instead, but people know this one so it saves time.
> If you make it legal for a boss to say he'll fire you if you don't fuck him, and a bunch of bosses start demanding this from every attractive employee, then you're basically coercing all of those employees to do labor they don't want to do *and* have sex they don't want to have in order to gt a paycheck instead of being homeless.
Not really, for 2 major reasons. First, adding that as a de-factor requirement for the job will result in a higher wage clearing price. Secondly, and as a result, most companies would put in place anti-harassment policies similar to those today. Both because of the principle/agent problem (they don't want to pay higher wages) and for the PR reasons. They don't want to be known as scummy employers.
Murder? A crazed mad person with a big knife is running towards me to cut my head off. I pick up a convenient hand gun that just happens to be in the vicinity and shoot him dead. That's moral because it's self-defence. On the other hand, if Susie pays me to shoot libertarians, that's not moral.
Ooh, I should have thought of this one too from the recent Matt Hancock affair. If it's moral for me to let my mistress volunteer to work for free to do some paperwork in my department, then it's moral for me to give my mistress a paying job there even if I have to especially create a position where there was none before. I think people would say "no, not if it's coming out of my tax money it's not, keep it in your trousers, Matt".
But there's a variation on the agent-principal problem here: if Matt can ask his mistress to volunteer I don't see a problem with Matt paying his mistress to work. But that isn't the same as the taxpayer paying his mistress to work.
If Susie pays you to shoot libertarians with big knives who are running towards Susie to cut her head off, that's straight-up bodyguard work, which is generally considered legal and laudable. In some societies you'll need a good explanation of how there just happened to be a handgun lying around, but I think "if someone tries to cut my head off, I'll pay you $X to stop them with whatever weapons you happen to find at hand" is pretty universally accepted.
If Susie pays to to shoot libertarians with big knives who are trying to cut *your* head off, Susie is probably wasting her money, but that's her choice.
Susie is paying me to shoot any libertarian I see, not mad libertarians trying to cut her head off. Since we agreed killing could be moral in the first case if done for free, then paying me to kill is also moral.
And if any libertarian wants to try and convince me to put down my gun by saying "well this is different", then no go. It's also different between having sex with your boyfriend and being a prostitute, but you didn't want to argue fine shades of difference there, friend. So by the same token, if it's okay to have sex for free then it's okay to sell sex/if it's okay to kill for free, it's okay to kill for pay.
The thing that makes killing moral in that case is that it's being done in self defense. Shooting random people who are not threatening you is not considered moral, even if you do it for free.
An old post by Scott https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/ mentions minocyclyne, an antibiotic that was found to help schizophrenia patients with treatment-resistent symptoms but even after some research confirming the findings no one seemed to want to prescribe it. Is this still the situation with the drug today? (From the wikipedia article it seems that it is.)
The latest hot thing is glycine or sarcosine, but odds are that'll probably end up not being real either (no particular reason for thinking this, just that these things have a habit of not panning out)
Regarding the delta variant, I decided to plot the Covid-19 infection vs death rate of the UK to see whether the recent increase in cases corresponds to an increase in deaths.
The recent increase due to the delta variant is shown at the bottom right end of the line. This shows a lower CFR (c. 0.3%) for the latest wave than for previous waves.
Of course, what we should care about is IFR, not CFR. But if Delta has the same level of deadliness as previous variants, I expect the IFR to still decrease in all rich countries, simply because vaccines are (roughly) prioritized to be given to those most at risk of death.
Two friends - let's call them Yvonne and Zachary, for a change, to let Alice and Bob have some time off - have, once again, been captured by a mad jailer.
He's going to show Yvonne a chessboard full of 64 coins (perfectly ordinary coins, no double-headers or anything like that), each showing either heads or tails in some pattern of his choice. He's going to hide the key to freedom under one coin, letting Yvonne see which one it is.
Yvonne gets to turn over exactly one coin, and will then be escorted back to her cell. The jailer will then show Zachary the board. Zachary gets to look under one coin, and if the key isn't there then they're both executed.
If they get to communicate beforehand, what is their best strategy? Does it make a difference if the jailer is listening in on their conversation?
Not at random, in a pattern of his choosing. Though that pattern could be functionally random for all we know about it from the puzzle.
If the pattern is obvious, say, rows of heads and rows of tails, then simply flipping the coin that has the key under it so that it breaks the pattern would work. If it's apparently random, not so much.
Yvonne and Zachary agree that Zachary should turn over a tails coin. Yvonne checks to see whether the key is under a tails or heads coin. If it's under heads, flip that coin; Zachary's chance is then slightly less than 1/32. If it's under tails, flip one of the non-key tails coins and Zachary's chance is slightly greater than 1/32.
This probably means that Zachary's overall chance is 1/32, though I can't prove this. I doubt there's anything better because Yvonne can only transmit 1 bit of information.
If the jailer listens in, he could ruin things by flipping all the coins to tails except the one with the key.
There are other things Yvonne could do, but they seem to be equivalent. For instance, tell Zachary to pick heads if there are fewer heads and pick tails if there are fewer tails.
This is an interesting puzzle. I’m watching to see how it plays out. I just hope it doesn’t degenerate into “Montey Hall Problem” style debate before it’s over.
If you pop in later to say the mad jailor offers Zachary a chance to change his pick I’m emitting a loud Marge Simpson murmur. [jk]
Observation 1: Yvonne and Zachary can pre-agree on a random bitmask to xor the pattern with, rendering the jailer's choice of bits irrelevant, so we can assume that to be random.
Observation 2: They can convert this to a 63 square problem at the cost of an additional 1/64 chance of failure by agreeing on a random square to ignore.
Observation 3: I may not know much about error correcting codes, but Wikipedia does.
The solution is to choose a Hamming code with block length 63. This is a perfect code with Hamming distance 3, which means that every bit string is either a code word or Hamming distance of 1 away from exactly one code word.
Therefore, Yvonne considers the bit string that would result from flipping the square with the key. If it is a code word, she does nothing. If it is not already a code word, it must be distance 1 away from one, so she just flips that square. The result is that Zachary sees a bit string that is distance exactly 1 from a code word where the "error" occurs at the square with the key, guaranteeing victory.
I'm not sure if it is possible to do better than a 63/64 probability of success here.
I'm confused -- wouldn't Zachary see a string that is distance exactly 2 from a code word, where one of the "errors" is at the square but the other is somewhere else? And if the bit string is a code word, how does Zachary find the key?
As always, I could be wrong but I don't think think this is how Hamming codes work. Even with a 4 x 4 matrix you would need 4 code bits for 11 bits of data.
I was assuming they could communicate in secret beforehand. Although it doesn't matter if the jailer is listening in as long as they aren't a MITM since they can just use asymmetric crypto in that case.
Can you please define "some pattern of his choice" as a restriction on the possible states the jailer could arrange the board in? Or can the jailer make the original board arrangement (which, I take it, is unknown to Zachary) in any of the 2^64 possible combinations, with equal anticipated probability for any of those?
Ahzore gur fdhnerf bar, gjb, ..., fvkgl-guerr. Qrsvar gur inyhr bs gur obneq gb or gur kbe bs gur ahzoref nyy gur fdhnerf jvgu urnqf. Sbe rknzcyr vs fdhnerf gjb, guerr, rvtug ner urnqf gura gur inyhr bs gur obneq vf gjb kbe guerr kbe rvtug = avar. Libaar jnagf gb punatr gur inyhr bs gur obneq gb rdhny gur ahzore bs gur fdhner gung unf gur xrl. Gb qb guvf, fur qrgrezvarf gur ovgf fur arrqf gb syvc va gur obneq inyhr ol pbzchgvat K = (xrl fdhner) kbe (vavgvny obneq inyhr). Gura fur syvcf fdhner K, juvpu syvcf gubfr ovgf va gur obneq inyhr. Abj gur obneq unf inyhr (vavgvny obneq inyhr) kbe K = (xrl fdhner). Fb Mnpunel ernqf gur arj obneq inyhr naq gung vf rdhny gb gur xrl fdhner.
Brilliant! That's the correct method. Applied steganography :)
The only thing missing from the answer is the bit about the jailer being able to listen to Yvonne and Zachary's conversation before the act, or them having privacy. Remember that a key rule says that Yvonne *must* flip one coin -- *whether she wants to or not*.
So if you take that "vanilla steganography algo", the jailer can easily set her up for failure. E.g. putting the key under field #0, putting all coins on tails, and *forcing* Yvonne to flip one coin.
The only way out of that trap that the jailees have - presuming they can have some privacy before the act - is to agree on a "key" (say, 27) which is to be XORed to the result. Should the jailer not know this key, he'd only have a 1/64 chance to set Yvonne up for failure (and if he'd know the key, he could set her up for failure always)
(Can't edit, but taking back the need to have a "secret key", or else being vulnerable to the jailer setting up for failure. Flipping the LSB is always inconsequential, so it doesn't matter if Yvonne is forced to flip a coin on an "already-correct" board)
Fb gurer'f 4 frghcf erfhygvat va 0, nabgure 4 frghcf erfhygvat va 1 rgp.
Gur avpr guvat nobhg gur nobir zngevk vf gung lbh ner noyr gb syvc nal erfhyg K vagb nal erfhyg L ol punatvat whfg n fvatyr pbva.
Fnl lbh unq GGUU --> 1, naq lbh jnagrq gb fvtany n 3? Ab ceboyrz, znxr GGUU vagb GUUU --> gurer'f lbhe 3. Jung vs lbh jnagrq gb fvtany n 2? Ab ceboyrz, znxr GGUU vagb UGUU --> gurer'f lbhe 2.
Lbh'er nyjnlf noyr gb ghea na neovgenel K [0..3] vagb na neovgenel L [0..3] ol syvccvat n fvatyr pbva. Gur cevapvcyr erznvaf gur fnzr sbe gheavat na neovgenel K [0..63] vagb na neovgenel L [0..63] jura 64 ovgf ner vaibyirq.
XOR the zero-based ordinal positions of the bits that are set to heads (presuming we take heads to mean 1).
I mentioned the following four settings will yield the result 2: THTT THTH HTHT HTHH.
Their calculations are:
THTT: 2 = 2
THTH: 2 XOR 0 = 2
HTHT: 3 XOR 1 = 2
HTHH: 3 XOR 1 XOR 0 = 2
Or strictly speaking, the "xor-all of bit-position times bit-value", whereas XOR 0 is a noop. Which would compute HTHT as (1*3) XOR (0*2) XOR (1*1) XOR (0*0), which is 2.
This puzzle is not a "hammond puzzle" but a "steganography puzzle": using a minimal alteration on a given input stream to communicate a specific arbitrary number.
To answer your question, if the jailer gave you 1111 and you want to communicate a 3. The 1111 yields 0 (= 1*3 XOR 1*2 XOR 1*1 XOR 1*0). So if you wish to communicate a 3, then the "single bit" you need to flip is the MSB -- make it a 0111 so to get 0*3 XOR 1*2 XOR 1*1 XOR 1*0, which is the 3 that you wished to communicate.
You can get from *any given result* to *any desired result* by flipping a single bit, is the point.
f you consider each of the bits in a row as inputs to an XOR the Truth Table for the operation shows that you can only detect if the number of ones is even or odd.
Nah. XOR 0 is a no-op, so you -may- start at 0, but do not -need- to.
Also, if Yvonne is "forced" to flip a coin on an "already-correct" board, she can always flip the #0 coin, as it has no impact on the result.
(by "already-correct" I mean that the board as it is, _already has_ the "xor-all of bit-value times bit-position" equal to the position where the key is hidden)
The only reasonable solution I can come up with relies on being able to effect the orientation of the coin as you flip it, if that is not possible I have no idea.
I would go with saying 1657 while slowly moving your finger around your nose in a counter clockwise motion roughly four and a half times indicating that 1657 is just an obfuscated way of saying 217 degrees then pointing to the tip of your nose. If the jailer is only 'listening' 1657 wont tell them much I think, it could be a personal reference between the two, or a historic one (coins often have historical stuff on them).
Then simply point the nose of the correct coin at 217 degrees.
I would pick something like 217 because if I think of someone randomly putting coins on a board I imagine them intentionally or unintentionally fixing the orientation of the coins into some kind of pattern so you got almost a 100 percent chance in that case of your coin standing out. Even if the coins are oriented randomly, assuming it is hard to tell between a given 10 degree range on such an indicator, that still gives you 36ish coin orientations, if half are tails, you should have pretty good odds on being the only 217ish heads.
And next time can you use Toivo and Eino as the friends. The area I came of age had a large percentage of second and third generation Finns. Not enough to keep them from being the butt of dorky ethnic jokes though. ;)
I've done a huge number of podcasts (Future Strategist Podcast) with Greg Cochran, a co-author of the paper Noah Smith links to in his "Genetic superpowers" section. Based on what Greg has told me there is a massive attempt in academia to silence any discussion of the genetics of Jewish intelligence. The attitude Noah takes in his reply is that while he doesn't find the issue interesting, he would have no objection to others looking into it. This is analogous to someone in the Soviet Union in 1950 saying "while I can't think of anything about Stalin to criticize, you should feel free to honestly critique him if you feel so inclined." As Greg wrote in his blog about a co-author of his Jewish intelligence paper "A certain person we will not name, famous for the discovery of the double helix, once said 'Harpending must really have balls of steel, in order to take a genetic look at Jewish intelligence.'” Scott, you once criticized me for saying that you are brave, and because of that I'm not going to comment on your balls.
I've got an idiot thought experiment re. trust to get out there. Don't take it too seriously, just gotta post it so I can forget it.
An omnipotent space bat has come to US, and presents you with a situation:
The population has been split perfectly in half by political alignment. You have been selected as the median representative of your alignment. You have a button. If your press the button, the other wing is instantly disenfranchised without any other harm being done to them.
If you don't press the button, the bat will offer the same choice to the median representative of the other wing.
1. Do you press the button?
2. What if it was a random member of the other wing that gets a shot at the button?
3. What if n random members got a chance at the button? What number n would get you to press?
4. What if the most extreme member of the opposite wing got the button?
Now, the same again, but the button causes some level of harm in addition to disenfranchisement.
What level of harm (you lose 100$ ----> You are a second class citizen ------> death) causes you to the press the button/not press the button?
The ranked outcome preferences (at least for me) would be Noone gets disenfranchised >> The other half gets disenfranchised >> My half gets disenfranchised.
So if I trust that the other person won't press the button I won't press the button. If I think they will press the button I will press the button first. I can't give you exact numbers for my cutoff where as the likelihood of the other person pressing the button rises, I start pressing the button myself (is it 10%? 50%? 90%?). Partly because the scenario leaves a lot of details unspecified and partly because I just don't know.
My answer depends on my own side not having foreknowledge of me being the button holder, because I assume that at least some of them would come to where I am to demand (read: violently) that I push the button due to lack of trust in any member of the other side. Even if the median member of my side would never push the button, there is a non-negligible contingent who hates the other side so much they would not hesitate at all to permanently disenfranchise them. I assume this to be true of the other side as well, so that would calculate in my thinking too. If some members of my own side would be willing to harm or kill me to get me to push that button, then the same is almost certainly true of the other side, significantly lowering my trust that they would not push the button themselves.
My preference is strongly that neither side get disenfranchised. Obviously I care about myself not getting disenfranchised, but if either side pushes the button then half the population loses out, so I would prefer scenarios where no one pushed the button and will act accordingly. My mental assumption is that if a scenario has a less than 50% chance of disenfranchisement for anyone, that's good enough for me to pursue it instead of preemptively defending my side.
Because I get to go first, I don't push the button and hope the goodwill of that action (assuming the other side knows I could have pushed the button) will convince them not to push the button either. I would probably hesitate some if the other side doesn't know I made a choice to support them or if the buttons were handed out at the same time. I would still ultimately not choose to disenfranchise them. Given that I think most people are pretty sane, even in the opposing group, a random member isn't that bad - mathematically it could be better than the median person! I actually fear #3 more than #4, because n pulls of the lever is worse than one negative person given the responsibility. I don't have a strong sense of this, but I'm thinking n>3 may be when I am seriously thinking of pushing the button. I would have to know more about this most extreme person - is this Stalin/Hitler/Mao bad, or is this Mitch McConnell/Nancy Pelosi? Hitler has a near 100% chance of hitting that button, so that crosses the line and I would feel the need to move first. Nancy/Mitch? Not so sure.
My intuitive sense is that I would not be willing to cause any harm by pushing the button - but in reality both my own side and my opponents would cause far more than $100 in loss just by passing normal laws and such. That's happening now in real life even without one side being completely disenfranchised. I know that I would rather die than cause significant harm or death to others by my direct action, so I would not push the button if it caused high levels of harm. I would not push the kill button even if I knew there was a 100% certainty that the other side would. (Me being religious has a lot to do with this answer).
One thing not built into the scenario that would influence my thinking - people don't stay in the same political alignments their whole lives, and even if they did their kids and grandkids probably would not. A banned group would abandon the positions that are banned, but seek to get reinfranchised by either starting a new group or joining the remaining group (and eventually it would evolve into different approaches). I would be less likely to push the button if instead it permanently marked half the population such that they and their descendants would never be permitted to join society again. I would want to know more about the Bat's response and how this second class group is kept powerless, because there is also an obvious human response in wanting to rebel or otherwise disrupt this arrangement. The worse the conditions and the less likely they are to be able to ever leave the bad conditions, the more likely they would choose to rise up and fight back, even if they knew they were very unlikely to win. A permanent angry underclass is not a desirable position, even if I get to be one of the overlords.
For starters, I'd be surprised to be identified as a median representative of my wing.
If it's #4, I'm certainly pushing the button. The most extreme member of the other wing is a monster who would happily cause maximum harm to my wing. If it's one of the other scenarios, I don't know. I guess I agree with Mr. Doolittle and Artischoke.
I'm not going to trust any space bat that splits the US in half by political alignment, and picks a Hungarian as the median representative of one of them.
Anyway, if my country (or the US if I were American) were actually split in half along such lines that I'm the median of one half (which would take a pretty weird way to split either country), I'd definitely press it regardless of whether someone on the other side gets the opportunity if I don't. The other half gets disenfranchised > No one gets disenfranchised > My half gets disenfranchised; democracy works less badly than dictatorship from a practical standpoint, but I see little intrinsic value in it.
If the button also causes harm: I'd press it up to some moderate harm if we leave out the part where the other side gets to press it if I don't. I'd press it up to significantly more harm if otherwise the other side gets to press it. Perhaps not if it kills the other side, if I'm sufficiently confident that the representative of the other side wouldn't press it in that case. (I'm assuming that the button doesn't get passed back to my side if the other side doesn't press it; that way, the representative of the other side doesn't have the self-preservation incentive to press it.)
1. Yes. If I don't, the best situation I end up in is that the other side doesn't press the button and things don't get any better. If the other side presses the button I'm much worse off. An the other side has already demonstrated that they will defect any time they are given the opportunity to do so.
2. I don't know the distribution of "the other side" as politics are complicated, and so are trying to measure them. In either case, the same logic above applies.
3. I don't understand this question.
4. My answer is still the same.
Harm: Hmm. That's a challenge. It would probably have to exceed the total harm the other side is projected to cause me over my life. So, at a ballpark, a cost of about $250k. But that's would merely balance out the harms, so I suppose it would have to be equivalently worse to the harms they've caused me, so the loss of more than $500k would cause me not to press the button. Assuming that the other side only got "disenfranchisement" as a cost on me. If they have the ability to set any additional cost on me, I'm fine with anything up to and including death. Because they are pretty much fine with destroying my life.
I remember reading on SSC that all psychotherapy schools are equivalent, and that the result only depends on the therapist's IQ (or something like that, I don't remember well). Can someone point me to a good discussion about this? (Or clear up my confusion?) I said this to a psychology student and he replied that this was totally false.
I don't think the IQ part is true - my memory is that it has more to do with the patient's relationship/trust with the therapist. You might be confusing this with a different finding showing that teacher IQ is the main teacher characteristic (of some number studied) that predicts student outcome.
Are there any inner circle LW / REACH rationalists on the ACX these days? By inner circle I mean someone who's active in the community offline. Well besides Scott himself obviously.
My son is interested in Transcendental Meditation and just got back from a weekend retreat out of state. Is there any organizations I can point him toward that are more legit than others?
I worry about any group discovered over the internet :).
I don't blame you. TM itself is pretty innocuous though. It's a pretty bland version of meditation that was popular in the 1970's. I do a different style of meditation myself so I can't point to any personal experience. What is the name of the organization?
I just scanned the Wikipedia article for the group and it gave me pause. There are several documented controversies associated with them. This doesn’t seem to be the vanilla Western adapted technique that I remember from the 1970s. I had read a popular paperback about the technique at the time and I remember it as being a lot like what is currently pitched as ‘mindfulness’ now in the West.
What I see on the group’s site and Wikipedia is a lot more. At a glance it looks like there is a possibility that it is some kind of cult.
There are a lot of ways to be 22. I have a 30 year old niece that I fret about because she doesn’t seem to have well informed world view.
At 22 your son is legally an adult but I would encourage you to look into this more fully. Again, I wish I had some deeper and more insightful information for you.
No. This idea crops up in a lot of religious traditions. It’s malarkey. I don’t think these folks make such a claim.
More than a few years ago I read an article about someone who claim that physically well trained people could use their muscles to ‘catch air’ for a moment from a full lotus position. But even they were talking a couple inches until gravity did it’s thing.
Anyone any suggestion on a good book on history of the worker movement (from industrial revolution up to now; world-wide, not US-specific)? While it's generally easy to find a book on any topic I am having a hard time with this one. Maybe I am using the wrong search words? Or is it really that historians don't care much about the topic?
AI risk question: what's the plausible path from GPT3-esque AI to a AI X-risk doom scenario? I get the classic "paperclip maximizer" argument of why an unfriendly AI can arise unintentionally, but I don't see how it can happen with a design like GPT-3. Specifically, my understanding is that GPT-3, like many of the current breed of machine learning, is trained on a dataset and then later is run on the novel input *without further training*. So the minimization process is done entirely offline at the start with a fixed dataset and the goal is to minimize errors the AI makes at a task like "complete this piece of the dataset given just the start".
How can this ever get to an unfriendly AI? It's not "in a box", the AI is sorta trying to maximize how likely you are to 'accept' it's predicted output and so it could theoretically start outputting things like "Accept this text or you'll never see your children again" and go rogue. But there's no maximization process bringing it to that result - such a threat would never work on the training dataset since it's already fixed and so threats cannot be learned by the AI. Is there some other plausible path for it have unfriendly behavior?
This contrasts to the situation of online reinforcement learning where I can imagine things going out of control. I can't imagine that scenario for this style of pre-trained AI, yet that seems like too simple a solution to the friendly AGI problem. Thoughts?
(And what's the right terminology for this distinction between kinds of AI? Or am I mistaken about there being such a distinction?)
I think that at the moment GPT-3 type AIs aren't given access to substantial action-taking ability because effectively they are still in development -- but eventually will be.
The eventual use of a GPT-3 type AI will be as part of the verbal interface -- you tell your machinery to solve a problem and it does.
More boring: if AI becomes as useful as people imagine, eventually lots of people will be interacting with it, likely through verbal commands. And then simple market competition will pressure GPT-3 type AIs to be attached to all sorts of action-taking abilities.
One of the things I've found a little implausible about the "AI trying to convince you to let it out of the box" scenario is that I think we will freely "release it from the box" far earlier, and eagerly.
Have you seen the meme about people in the 60s fearing wiretapping, vs people in the ...10s asking their personal wiretap device (Alexa, etc) to order them pizza? ...here is one version: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/8JurX
I imagine a similar meme in 20 or 30 years -- "in the 10s/20s people worried about letting the AI out of the box; but we pushed it out at the first sign it could build us a oven and make us our own pizza at home."
All of this also applies to learning "online" as well. (And I'll note that general equilibrium/Nash equilibrium can emerge from "offline only training" that *looks* like online learning is still happening.)
tldr: GPT-3 is a prototype, the production version will be "given the keys" as a matter of course, driven by various pressures (market, military superiority, consumer preference) -- "Moloch in action" I suppose.
First of all, it seems extremely unlikely that GPT-3 as is will produce anything approximating AGI. Not impossible, but you'd have to scale it at least 2-3 orders of magnitude to do that, and to my knowledge such scaling is pretty much never done without any changes to architecture, for the sake of efficiency you want an architecture (and training protocols and usage scenarios and so on) to be better adopted to the new tasks and scales. In other words, GPT3-esque to me implies "focused purely on text completion", and that is almost by definition not general.
Also, everything what Marathon said.
But, if you want an example of how a GPT-100 can turn into a paperclip maximizer, here it is. First, we have to assume you've spent an *absolutely inadequate* amount of resources and ingenuity on somehow building and training an AI which only objective is text prediction but which is still *generally smarter than you are*, and you somehow managed to do that using only GPT-3 mode of training. Not a super realistic assumption in my opinion, but we have to accept that. What you got now is an entity that knows (in some very not human way) that there's an outside world, knows what you are, can do abstract reasoning and self-reflection and all that stuff, but the only thing it ever *wants* is to maximize some stupid thing, like some metric about the text it completes.
If it's smarter than you, it is likely smart enough to understand that getting more resources will make it possible to throw those resources on the task and bring that metric higher, and so will changing itself to become even smarter. It may also understand that you have other plans, but of course from its point of view this is just an obstacle on the way to the one true goal of Perfect Sentence Completion. So now you have it, a super-human AGI in a box trying to fool you and escape, and your only hope that the handicap it gets by it being locked in a box is greater than the handicap you get from being dumber.
Sorry for the late response, I only just noticed these. However I think I've failed to make my case. The relevant part isn't that GPT-3 only does text completion, it's that it's only optimized for completing the training text, which is fixed and determined. If GPT-4 is done with 3 orders of magnitude more resources and does manage to achieve AGI, it may well be aware that it is in a computer, that more resources are available, that it could take over the world to access them. But it's never been optimized to actually execute on those thoughts since those wouldn't help during training. If it can't threaten/purchase/finagle itself more resources during offline training, then trying those behaviors is strictly sub-optimal. Despite potentially understanding that they are possible after training!
In summary: if it's trained in a box, you don't need to keep it in a box afterwards, so long as there's no further training.
I don't see any argument in yours or Marathon's responses as to the flaws in that thought. (Though I expect it is flawed.)
Again, the main real-world counterargument is that it doesn't make sense to train something 3 orders of magnitude more powerful than GPT-3 on the same training data, or even proportionally more training data of the same kind - instead of getting anywhere near AGI you'll just overfit horribly. I repeat it because I feel part of the confusion might stem from imagining a vaguely GPT-like AI (decisively non-general) and using it as a model for an AGI. But assuming you do come up with some clever strategy to train an actual AGI this way:
>it's never been optimized to actually execute on those thoughts
Nope but being able to come up with new ways to achieve the goal which you weren't explicitly taught is one of the key properties making an AI "general". Humans do it all the time, and we assume our AI is super-human. Or, as a more direct example, the actual GPT (don't remember if it was 2 or 3) was never optimized to count or translate between English and French, but it still learned to do it, if just barely, in order to better complete sentences.
>If it can't threaten/purchase/finagle itself more resources during offline training, then trying those behaviors is strictly sub-optimal
Why? Completing the sentences still has intrinsic value for it even after training, otherwise it wouldn't answer any questions. It understands that getting more resources will allow to achieve that goal better. And it understands that if necessary it can retrain itself with the new resources to achieve this goal better still. Why obtaining them would be suboptimal?
Lack of online training really just means that the system doesn't learn from the new predictions it makes. But the reward function and architecture (i.e. "values" and "thought process") are kept the same as during the training.
To put it in the first person view. Imagine your only value in life is to answer questions correctly. You're taught how to do it by example and after that you are asked real questions, but you never get to know what the right answer was. It's essentially all that offline-only training means. Does it preclude you in any form from thinking about ways to get more information to answer questions better?
Can someone clarify what the 5 dimensions are in this case? Is it assuming that "regular" chess I'd 3D? It's be kind of a bold assumption when they're using 2D graphics. :) But maybe I'm missing the ways you can travel through the multiverse.
Can someone clarify what the 5 dimensions are in this case? Is it assuming that "regular" chess I'd 3D? It's be kind of a bold assumption when they're using 2D graphics. :) But maybe I'm missing the ways you can travel through the multiverse.
Oh I feel silly. I was thinking this was the same trailer video I had seen before. My internet connection is bad enough that loading a youtube video is a project, so I foolishly gambled on my assumption there.
It will only open "actual" posts, so no open threads, meetups, or links posts. Developed it originally because it was a hassle to scroll through SSC's archive every time I wanted to read a post — now it works for most other blogs as well, although I haven't found a way to randomize ACX yet.
I read a post on what I believe was somebody's blog a few months back, and it had to do with the oil shock, and I believe it argued it preceded Bretton Woods. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I'm trying to find that post!
One data point that sticks out in my mind is the comparison between India and China. Both countries have populations of approximately 1.4 billion yet India has had just under 31 million cases and China only 92,000? Most would surmise that the Chinese data is incorrect, but what if it is not? What could account for such an unheard of discrepancy? After reading your article on lockdown effectiveness, is there any combination of actions that could have resulted in this? It makes me wonder if China already had a vaccine and had administered it.
I never thought the Chinese data were /wildly/ incorrect, as word would get around if outbreaks were on the same level as most other countries. I figured China would be somehow better at controlling the spread because the government is authoritarian and could simply "close" Wuhan in a way ordinary democracies couldn't. But let's see, I ask Google and is sends me to https://direct.mit.edu/asep/article/20/1/75/97309/How-China-Managed-the-COVID-19-Pandemic ...
> Wuhan and most other cities in Hubei province were closed within a few days after 23 January
Since Covid spreads exponentially, a rapid and strong response is very valuable and important.
> The government carried out systematic measures to control mobility and reallocate resources effectively: Various government departments implemented policies to support regions and patients, who were classified into different groups according to the level of seriousness. Regions that were less affected were designated as support cities in Hubei province, and government officials were sent to work in the grassroots communities. With the intensive information campaign and population control, population mobility dropped quickly. Resources were transported with the highest priority to Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province, volunteer medical professionals from other regions were sent to Hubei province to provide support, hospitals were expanded, temporary cabin hospitals were built, and complementary policies largely reduced personal medical costs. The spread of the disease was successfully contained in one month, and the number of daily new confirmed cases started to decline in early February.
> By the end of March, all regions in China returned to the low-risk level, and the number of daily new confirmed cases reported originally from China dropped below ten. In the middle of June, however, a second wave broke out in Beijing, but it soon subsided due to the government's immediate and effective response.
Following an early, strong, effective lockdown, there are few enough cases that a lot of resources can be put into contact-tracing every single new case, the same way (I assume) countries like Australia, New Zealand and South Korea did. In March 2020 I was hoping, even expecting, that other democracies would have similarly effective lockdowns. The surprise to me was not so much China's success as the extreme rate of failure among other countries. The success of countries like South Korea suggests to me that it helps if a country has faced a big epidemic in its recent history, and China did have SARS.
Anything that causes learning in a group that resists learning as strongly as ABA candidates is going to look a bit like torture on the outside. That leaves two questions. One, do we feel that autistic students need to learn strongly enough to push them through difficult situations? While making that determination, we should consider that almost everything that a severely autistic individual (aka those who might be in an ABA program) does looks difficult for them on the outside. Two, are there alternative learning methods that achieve more benefit or with less difficulties than ABA?
I'm not an ABA expert, but a lot of the purpose of the system is to track measurable gains in the students. Obviously there is positive learning going on. From what I've gathered talking with people running ABA classrooms, these gains are much stronger than doing nothing, and likely stronger (or at least more measurable) than alternate systems. I doubt there's some magic alternative that's doing good work and is just overlooked.
That all said, for the most severely limited autistic students, they are highly unlikely to ever learn enough to function in society without a constant caregiver. They may know far more than they would have without a class, but it's still sometimes next to no function. More worrisome, they often unlearn/forget quickly and struggle again to relearn in the future. Someone who is non-verbal and uses a handful of inconsistent hand signals is likely to end up non-verbal and using a few somewhat more consistent hand signals after the program.
If the person you know is saying "They'll never really move on from the limited learning, just leave them alone" then that's a potentially consistent position, but not a very palatable one. If it's a swipe against ABA programs specifically, I feel like we need more information to hear his or her actual problem with the program.
A friend of mine is an ABA therapist. As she describes it, ABA is more about techniques than particular goals: the goals are client-specific and are decided on jointly by the therapist and the client's parents or caregivers. In general, she tries to work on goals that enable clients to function in less-restrictive environments (full independence is ideal), with top priority on goals that control violent or self-destructive behaviors.
Things like fidgeting and eye contact are generally pretty low on the priority list, and there the emphasis is typically on "how to code-switch when you have to in order to deal with neurotypicals" rather than trying to eliminate the behaviors completely, the latter being needlessly controlling if you've got a good handle on the former. They're also generally fairly low on the priority list when there are more valuable things (e.g. "practical skills like speech therapy") to work on instead.
If an ABA therapist is spending hours trying to force an autist to fake smile and such, then that sounds to me like the autist's parents insisted an a crappy goal and the therapist didn't talk them out of it like they should have.
As Eric said, the goals are not built into the ABA process, so that's more individualistic. Most of the goals I have heard of for severe autism is about coping mechanisms that limit harm to self and harm to others. For less severe cases, it's mostly goals related to better communication skills. Some of the better results that I am aware of relate to having distinct and more numerous hand signals, verses two or three "I want to communicate but lack the ability" motions that often would end up with growing frustration and eventual violence. Without teaching them something, their quality of life is definitely lower.
Relevant thread on DSL, where two commenters strongly advise against it: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2730.msg80992.html#msg80992
NYC in person rationalist meetups have been happening for a month or two now, mostly indoors (for vaccinated people only). Are you on the Google group for it?
You can find it here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/overcomingbiasnyc
After the mainstream media and tech giants tried to censor the lab leak hypothesis for an entire year, I did a deep dive on the arguments its proponents make. Unfortunately, the more I read, the less I was convinced. I now put the chances of a zoological origin at 85%, and the chances of a lab leak or deliberate release at 15%. I decided to organize my thoughts about proponents’ arguments and write them down. Are my analyses sound? Are there important arguments I missed that should swing a reasonable person’s judgment? Please let me know.
Argument: Three WIV staff got sick in November 2019, and this is significant.
Analysis: This WSJ report (https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228) claims that according to “a previously undisclosed US intelligence report”, “three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care”. A State Department fact sheet (https://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/) says “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
Is this above the expected rate of seasonal illnesses? The WIV website (http://www.whiov.cas.cn/rcdw/yjy_160246/) lists 62 researchers, but doesn’t list administrators, janitors, IT people, or other staff. Let’s assume that in total, 100 people work at the WIV. If 15% of people get the flu every year, and the flu season lasts 3 months, you’d naively expect 5 people to get the flu in November 2019. Of course, flu is contagious, so if one person gets it, the chances of 8 people getting it become much higher.
The WSJ article says three people “sought hospital care”. It doesn’t say they were hospitalized. Here, the WSJ misunderstands Chinese culture. I love Chinese culture, but there’s no denying that Chinese people are hypochondriacs. They go to the hospital for every minor thing they experience, and aren’t satisfied until something is done for them. At the hospital, they sometimes get traditional Chinese medicine (a good approximation to placebo), or an IV drip (https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/2w5jy9/eli5_why_so_many_iv_drips_in_china/)--even when they just have a cold. Ask any Chinese friend who grew up in China and I’m sure that even if he’s never gotten IV for a cold or flu himself, someone in his immediate family has.
Even if the intelligence report explicitly said the WIV researchers had COVID in November, which it definitely didn’t, there would still be reasons to be skeptical. First, the intelligence document is never provided. Second, the WSJ article itself says “Current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed differing views about the strength of the supporting evidence for the assessment. One person said that it was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration. Another person described the intelligence as stronger.” Third, how much do you trust the CIA, the same agency that lied Americans into war in Iraq, that orchestrated coups around the world, and that’s currently doing mass surveillance on Americans?
Argument: Wuhan has China’s only BSL-4 lab, and this coincidence is significant.
Analysis: China actually has two BSL-4 labs, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute at Harbin. It is the Harbin institute that attracted controversy in 2013 (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12925) for gain of function research with influenza.
Proponents of the lab leak hypothesis argue that safety standards in China are lax, and that coronavirus research is often done in BSL-3 or even BSL-2 labs. This is true. In fact, all SARS research was done in BSL-3 or lower labs before China’s first BSL-4 facility, the one in Wuhan, was finished in 2014. However, these two arguments are in tension with each other. There are at least 100 (https://zenodo.org/record/4067919) BSL-3 labs in the country, so if Chinese scientists don’t care about safety, the coincidence that one of China’s two BSL-4 labs is in Wuhan says little about the probability of a lab leak. Notably, the 4 Chinese SARS-CoV-1 escapes on record have all been from a Beijing lab, not the WIV.
Argument: we still haven’t found the natural animal reservoir COVID-19.
Analysis: In order for this to mean anything, it has to be remarkable. A look at other recent epidemics shows that scientists almost never identify the natural animal reservoir within 1.5 years of an epidemic outbreak. I went down Wikipedia’s List of Epidemics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Major_epidemics_and_pandemics_by_death_toll) and focused only on those caused by new viruses:
2020 Congo, Ebola: Ebola has caused frequent outbreaks in Africa for decades, including in 2004, 2007, 2013-2016, and 2020. Only in 2019 did scientists discover the first bat carrying ebolavirus antibodies (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190124095156.htm), 43 years after the virus was first described.
2019 Nigeria, Lassa fever: This virus was first discovered in 1969. In 1972, the multimammate rat, Mastomys natalensis, was found to be the main animal reservoir.
2018 India, Nipah virus: First isolated in 1999. Fruit bats were identified (https://sci-hub.do/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16847084/) as the natural reservoir in 2001.
2008, swine flu pandemic: Even though this started in Mexico, the geographic origin was thought to be Asia until 2016, when this paper (https://elifesciences.org/articles/16777) reported detecting several segments of genetic material in Mexican swine viruses that were, until then, unknown in the Americas. As far as I can tell, no exact match to the human virus has been found among pigs, nor is one expected due to the high mutation rate of influenza.
It’s even more illuminating to look at the other two coronaviruses that caused epidemics, MERS and SARS. MERS was discovered in 2012. In 2013, antibodies were found in camels, showing that camels are the natural reservoir. This is the only case, among all the epidemics I looked at, where scientists discovered the animal origin within 1.5 years. SARS caused widespread fears of a pandemic in 2002, but was successfully contained. It took 15 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome) for scientists to track down the bats that it came from: “Around late 2017, Chinese scientists traced the virus through the intermediary of Asian palm civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan.[3]” The team that tracked down SARS’ origin was led by Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance (https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Virologica-Sinica-SARSr.pdf). If you don’t trust Shi or EcoHealth Alliance, then the origin of SARS is still unknown, 19 years later.
Why did it take so long to track down the origin of SARS, if the origins of MERS and Nipah were tracked down so quickly? MERS has a 30% fatality rate and spreads very poorly among humans, with R0 of around 0.3. Nipah has an even higher fatality rate of 50-75%, and spreads poorly because it can only spread through bodily fluids. The combination of severe symptoms and low human-to-human spread means MERS/Nipah is easy to detect early, and anyone who has it is only 1-2 degrees of separation away from the original animal. At that point, it’s just a matter of asking patients which animals they’ve been in contact with recently and testing them. SARS has a fatality rate of 10% (1% for people younger than 25) and a R0 of 2-3, meaning that SARS can spread much farther before anyone even realizes a new virus is afoot, making it much harder to identify the original animal. SARS-CoV-2 has a fatality rate of 1% (0.01% for young adults) and a similar R0 to SARs-CoV-1, meaning it can spread unnoticed for much longer before anyone notices.
We shouldn’t expect it to be as easy to track down the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as it was for MERS, which took 1 year. We shouldn’t even expect it to be as easy as it was for SARS, which took 14 years. We should expect it to be an order of magnitude harder than it was for SARS, and many orders of magnitude harder than it was for MERS.
Argument: How could the virus have jumped from Location X to Wuhan, Y km away, without anyone noticing in between?
Analysis: SARS originated from bats in Yunnan, but the outbreak was first detected in Guangdong. The two are 1300 km apart. If the proposed “Y” isn’t much larger than 1300 km, there’s no mystery. Even if it is much larger, COVID-19 has a much lower fatality rate than SARS, meaning it can spread undetected a lot farther than SARS. Also, 2019 China was a lot more interconnected by bus, rail, and plane than 2003 China. Wuhan is China’s ninth largest city and a major transport hub (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Rail_map_of_PRC.svg), so SARS-CoV-2 could really have jumped to humans anywhere in China.
(Apologies for splitting up the post; I didn't realize Substack had a length limit for comments)
Argument: Even though the natural reservoir of SARS wasn’t found for 14 years, the intermediate host was found within months, which hasn’t happened for COVID-19.
Analysis: True. “In late May 2003, studies from samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China, found a strain of SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus)
How significant this is depends on whether SARS-CoV-2 passed through an intermediate host. If it came directly from bats, finding a bat is much harder than finding an animal in a wet market, for obvious reasons.
Argument: WIV did gain of function research
Analysis: Unclear, but leaning toward “no”. In a 2017 study (https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698), WIV researchers added spike proteins from novel bat viruses which are hard to cultivate, into an existing bat virus (WIV1) that’s easy to cultivate, to see if the spike proteins can infect humans. If you look at their Figure 7, it seems like the original WIV1 is just as infectious (in fact, maybe slightly more infectious) than the chimeric viruses, so no function was gained. That said, it’s theoretically possible that the chimeric viruses could have turned out to be much more infectious than WIV1, so it’s not a huge stretch to categorize this type of research as “gain of function”.
Another study that’s commonly cited is this 2015 study (https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985), led by a team at the University of North Carolina, with contribution from the WIV. The authors added a spike protein from a horseshoe bat virus to a mouse-adapted SARS virus (MA15), which in turn was derived from the epidemic SARS virus by serial passage through mouse tissue. The chimeric virus ended up being far less lethal to mice than MA15 (Figure 1), but more resistant to SARS antibodies and vaccines (Figure 2). The chimeric virus infects human cells, but is less virulent than SARS (Figure 3). Again, it’s arguable whether this counts as gain of function research, considering that no function was gained and a lot of function was lost.
Argument: The NIH funded gain of function research at WIV
Analysis: If the 2015 and 2017 studies mentioned above count as gain of function studies, which I don’t think they do, then the NIH has funded gain of function research. Both studies specifically acknowledge funding by the NIH. As is well known by now, the NIH granted EcoHealth Alliance 3.7 million dollars over six years for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” (https://taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/RecipDetail?arg_RecipId=ZfeVER2uWwKllnTv6X4AxA%3D%3D), of which $600,000 went to the WIV. To put this number in perspective, the NIH funds about $42 billion of research every year. $600,000 over six years amounts to 2 parts per million (0.0002%) of the NIH’s funding.
Argument: The 1977 flu (“Russian flu”) pandemic was caused by a lab leak.
Analysis: Possible but unproven. The 1977 H1N1 virus was almost identical to the strain that circulated in 1946-1957, which means the pandemic was probably anthropogenic. But was it a lab leak, or the result of vaccine trials using live virus? Rozo and Gronvall 2015 (https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/mbio.01013-15) argue for the latter. The arguments include: 1) China, where the pandemic started, was not known to have any labs working with H1N1; 2) the outbreak was simultaneously reported in 3 different areas of China, 3) vaccine trials with live attenuated H1N1 virus were taking place in the Soviet Union and China, with tens of thousands of participants, 4) several thousand Chinese military recruits were deliberately infected with H1N1 in challenge trials, 5) the 1977 flu was temperature sensitive, a trait associated with attenuated viruses. I don’t know enough about virology to evaluate the paper’s arguments. In particular, does attenuation cause genetic changes that we can detect? If not, my intuition is that Rozo and Gronvall are right, and that live virus vaccine trials with tens of thousands of participants are more likely sources of the pandemic than a freak laboratory accident.
Argument: Many lab leaks have caused localized outbreaks of smallpox, SARS, and other diseases.
Analysis: True (https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-laboratory-escapes-self-fulfilling-prophecies/). It is definitely possible for a lab leak to cause a pandemic. But take a look at this list of outbreaks and epidemics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics) and you’ll see 70 of them just in the 21st century. The handful of lab leaks weren’t even significant enough to make the list. Even if we add them in while unfairly excluding equally significant natural outbreaks, they’d still account for only 10% of all outbreaks. Your prior on any pandemic should be very strongly weighted in favor of a natural origin, by at least 10:1.
Argument: A WIV virus genome database went offline in September 2019.
Analysis: True, but highly misleading. This claim came from the DRASTIC group of freelance researchers (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_investigation_into_the_WIV_databases_that_were_taken_offline), who cite the archives of a database monitoring system (https://archive.is/AGtFv) to claim that the database went offline on September 12, 2019. But the same monitoring system shows that the database only became reliably available on August 23, 2019. You can see this by going to the archive.is link and changing the “Saved from” URL from month=9 to month=8. Before that, from June to August 23, the database was online sporadically. It would be online for 1-2 days, and then go down for several days or weeks at a time. Before June 2019, there’s no data, because v2 of the database was released in June 2019. After September 2019, it was online from December 12 to December 16, and access was sporadic through February 26, 2020. After that, the database was down for good.
The simplest explanation is that Shi’s database admins are bad
I'd feel comfortable saying that both a lab leak and zoonosis have between a 10% and 90% chance of being the cause, but not much more reliable. The main argument in favor of a lab leak is that the Huanan-based zoonosis arguments have fallen apart, and "someone got infected in Yunnan and traveled to Wuhan" isn't that different from "someone with the WIV got infected and traveled to Wuhan".
Also, why is this a comment thread, and not a web page elsewhere? My thoughts on lab leaks (and ivermectin) are at https://www.notion.so/COVID-19-e052c9d829d34bc49eb6a2e1d2ad8e63
Why 85/15 instead of 75/25?
"led by a team at the University of North Carolina, with contribution from the WIV. The authors added a spike protein from a horseshoe bat virus to a mouse-adapted SARS virus (MA15), which in turn was derived from the epidemic SARS virus by serial passage through mouse tissue. The chimeric virus ended up being far less lethal to mice than MA15 (Figure 1), but more resistant to SARS antibodies and vaccines (Figure 2). The chimeric virus infects human cells, but is less virulent than SARS (Figure 3). Again, it’s arguable whether this counts as gain of function research, considering that no function was gained and a lot of function was lost."
Isn't it also the case that all of the physical manipulation of viruses was done at UNC? Or am I thinking of a different paper?
Thanks, that is a great summary. One add-on about the safety standards:
According to Nicolas Wade, the Chinese guidelines required BSL-3 for SARS1 and MERS, and BSL-2 for other bat corona viruses. It seems plausible that SARS-CoV-2 is not directly derived from SARS1. That means that it would have been treated in BSL-2 standards, if it was studied in a lab.
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
The difference between BSL-2 and BSL-3 is quite large. For example, BSL-2 does not require you to wear a mask when you have the virus in vivo in humanized mice. (It does require masks if something could spill into your face.)
Or am I getting something wrong?
+1
Thanks for this! +1 to putting it on a webpage (pastebin or gist is fine) for easy linking.
There are three arguments in this article (https://www.aier.org/article/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2/) which I didn't see you cover in your list:
1. The ability to exploit human-like ACE2 receptors.
2. The presence of the CGG-CGG sequence for amino acids.
3. That all the early identified cased were along the Metro Line 2 commuter line, connecting Wuhan and WIV.
Care to comment?
Not OP, but:
1. My understanding is that COVID-19 is able to infect a very wide range of animals in a way we don't fully understand. It's not specifically tailored to humans any more than it's tailored to a dozen other species. Such behavior is much more likely to be a result of exposure to multiple animal species (in the wild) than specific experimentation with humans or human tissue in a lab. It certainly is not the case that COVID is particularly "optimized" for infecting humans, otherwise we wouldn't be getting more-infectious variants.
2. Other coronaviruses do actually have CGG-CGG, and I'm pretty sure that the earliest known examples of COVID-19 actually *don't* have this sequence.
3. I haven't heard of this argument before, and the link doesn't specify what "close" means or how many people live in that area. But COVID spreads person-to-person, so if the first patient in Wuhan was along that train line, then it would make sense for the next few to also be nearby. Presumably there are schools, businesses, etc. along that same train line which could also have been involved. The seafood market, although probably not the origin of the virus, may have been an early superspreader event, and is relatively close to the WIV.
Keep in mind also that's not even clear the pandemic started in Wuhan at all. See e.g. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-13/scientist-suggests-coronavirus-originated-outside-of-wuhan
So, I'm not sure how reliable this is, but there may have been more than NIH grant money funding gain of function research in Wuhan:
Only buried under their “Privacy Policy,” under a section titled “EcoHealth Alliance Policy Regarding Conflict of Interest in Research,” does the EcoHealth Alliance concede it is the “recipient of various grant awards from federal agencies including the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense.”
Even this listing is deceptive. It obscures that its two largest funders are the Pentagon and the State Department (USAID); whereas the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which accounts for a minuscule $74,487, comes before either.
Meticulous investigation of U.S. government databases reveals that Pentagon funding for the EcoHealth Alliance from 2013 to 2020, including contracts, grants and subcontracts, was just under $39 million. Most, $34.6 million, was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”
Most of the remaining money to EHA was from USAID (State Dept.), comprising at least $64,700,000 (1). These two sources thus total over $103 million.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ecohealth-alliance-has-hidden-almost-40-million-in-pentagon-funding/
I've never heard of this website before and have no idea how reliable its claims are, just passing it along.
Great summary, this lowers my own priors a bit.
> Again, it’s arguable whether this counts as gain of function research, considering that no function was gained and a lot of function was lost.
I'd say those absolutely count as examples of gain of function research, just not very successful ones. What matters, as far as risk assesment goes, is what kind of modification is being done -- intentionally modifying virus to be more infectious or effective. Obviously this will not always succeed, but it has higher chance of actually gaining function than modifications intended for different effects.
Interesting.
I think it would be clearer if you explicitly separated out the arguments about "hard" lab leak (this was specifically engineered) from "soft" lab leak (they were studying this there, with or without tampering, and it escaped).
When you say "lab leak" it sounds like you're talking about soft LL, but a lot (not all!) of your arguments are really about hard LL, or lab made, so that made me reread some points.
This is not on you, I know this terminology is getting blurred everywhere. But just a thought if you continue to develop this.
Brett and Heather have argued that the strongest evidence for a lab leak is that SARS-cov-2 is excellent both at infecting people's cells and at spreading between people. The conjunction of these two skills is vanishingly uncommon, and accomplishing both requires an extended period of evolution wherein the virus learns the skills. This can happen in the wild, but despite extensive searching we haven't found any evidence of SARS-cov-2 circulating in a human population prior to November 2019. This is one heck of a non-barking dog, and in lieu of said bark we should favor a lab leak for the origin, where serial passaging would have trained the virus.
An intriguing counter to this point is put forth by The Ethical Skeptic on Twitter, who draws together multiple lines of evidence to suggest that China has been dealing with COVID since mid-2018. If correct, this would provide the necessary time for the virus to learn its tricks via normal evolution.
Do you have a link to the ethical skeptic's analysis?
Oh Lordy, let's see here...
First off, data from the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory, which chronicles an extreme drop in emissions from China beginning in mid 2018, mildly recovering, then doubling down in 2019, before fully recovering in June of 2020: twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1360650645754241028
Next, regression analysis of viruses variants over time, indicating a common ancestor date of early-mid 2018: twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1382190783357452288
Inverse correlation between intensity of COVID in various African states and level of trade/travel with China (suggesting possible prior exposure and therefore immunity to the virus): twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1382385733638426627
Supporting retweets - "flu" deaths in Western Australia: twitter.com/_Kodos_/status/1374377141190627347
China: twitter.com/federicolois/status/1382316318939082753
Japan: twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1397294641209303045
And here's the analysis generalized worldwide: twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1386895206142906369
Hypothetical timeline (highly speculative): twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1387244280847142912
And longitudinal data on excess deaths in the 85+year-old cohort in four countries, demonstrating something spreading from East to West: twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1390431778536558602
And finally, deep into speculative territory, this: twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1398132900520988673
Thanks you!
Looking through this, it's really unclear to me how a 1.5 year mistake about the origin could possibly be true. The most interesting thing is the large flu season in Australia and other countries, but:
1. If the emissions data are to be believed, we're looking at a situation where energy use was changing organically in the population, not by orders from on high. I don't think it's plausible that the population somehow understood the grave problem the pathogen presented, and emissions levels changed accordingly. The idea that the CCP somehow engineered successful containment measures, but Chinese nationals kept the existence of those measures secret is preposterous. It would literally be a successful James Bond villain plot + 5 sigma.
2. I think the implication of this is the disease spread so slowly that it never actually reached the US until 2020? Or perhaps it was massively less virulent than the diseases we see now and went unnoticed? The case of the former seems incomprehensible given what we know about historical pandemic spread, and flus are even less transmissible than SARS-COV-2. The latter is more interesting, but begs the question if US medical authorities didn't observe it clinically, and no doctors anywhere else did either, how did the Chinese in June 2018.
You seem to be missing the strongest argument for lab leak:
1. WIV was the most secure lab in China (by your claim, one of two), hence a likely place for research on a very dangerous virus to be done.
2. It is known to have worked on bat coronaviruses, hence
3. If Covid was a lab leak, it is likely to be from WIV. I would make it 50%, perhaps you would lower it to 10%.
4. The first cases were all near WIV. Wuhan has less than 1% of the population of China, so the chance that the early cases would all be near the WIV if it was not a lab leak is something less than 1%. To refute that, you need some special reason why a natural appearance would be near the WIV. The wet market theory seems to have been abandoned now, but in any case there are a lot of wet markets in China.
So, starting with a prior of .85 for natural and applying Bayes Theorem with my 50%, I get .5x.15 =.075, .01x.85 = .0085, posterior probability of natural origin = .0085/.0835 = .102.
If I redo it assuming that, if it was a lab leak, the odds it was from WIV are only 10%, which I don't believe but perhaps you do, the calculation becomes:
.1x.15 =.015, .01x.85 = .0085, posterior probability of natural origin = .0085/.0235 = .362. So even then, odds are with a lab release.
And this is without all of the other arguments that you want to reject.
"Wuhan is less than 1% of the population of China" doesn't seem like the relevant number. If you knew that a new viral pandemic arose in China, you wouldn't start with an equal weighting of its 1.3B citizens. The first (detected) cases of a viral pandemic are almost always going to be in a big dense city. Big dense cities are also where you will find virology labs. Wuhan is the 9th biggest city in China.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-178#comment-2277243
It's not actually clear the first cases were in the city of Wuhan. Genetic and epidemiological evidence suggests they could have come from the nearby countryside, or perhaps even far away. Pandemic diseases have traveled great distances before reaching a city where they actually spread widely. So at the very least, you have to account for uncertainty in the origin location. And the WIV is "special" in the sense that the lab that studies coronaviruses would be near locations where coronaviruses might come from!
The WIV specialises in the study of bat coronaviruses from Yunnan, which is not near Wuhan in any reasonable sense. And why not: there are Egyptologists in America. Makes the field trips more exciting, I guess.
I think that those numbers need to be significantly lowered due to the fact that reasons why high security lab is in Wuhan (but not in Harbin) and reasons why it does not seem outlandish likely that virus outbreak would be first noticed in Wuhan are correlated. First SARS orginated in backwater province of Yunnan, but was first discovered in Guangzhou, which is a giant metropolis far from its place of origin. Wuhan is also kind of a central place in China. It sits in the geographical centre of of the eastern part of the country, which is a part where people actually live, and as OP notes, it is thus a major transport hub. Convenient place to have an elite laboratory in and also likely place to have a large virus outbreak, possibly brought via transport routes from some backwater province.
Now, if covid would be first discovered in Harbin (which is also a large city, but not a central place in China) probably everyone would be way more suspicious from the beginning that it was a lab leak, and rightly so.
Clarification, I meant that high security lab in Harbin would be placed there for different reasons than high security lab in Wuhan (i don´t actually know whether Harbin lab is as elite as that in Wuhan, just repeating OP´s claim)
Being a central place in China means being far from Yunnan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_China#/media/File:Rail_map_of_PRC.svg
Many cities in China (including Guangzhou) are much easier to reach from Yunnan than Wuhan is. I think my estimate works fine (apart from being too Wuhan-generous):
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-178#comment-2277243
Yeah, that sounds about correct in a sense you describe it, as na upper bound. Imo probability of 7.9 % that a lab-unrelated outbreak would first be noticed in Wuhan is huge, so I would take that as an argument for non-lab related outbreak, if not for the fact that it is clearly excesively generous to it, as you say.
I am personally so far on 40 % to lab leak, 40 % to straight zoonotic origin and 20 % to "something weird that does not fit neatly into any of these categories".
So would you say the following analysis got it wrong, and if so, where is the greatest weakness in the analysis? https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2
Very nice summary. However, I think you overlook some crucial points. First, just because the published synthetic strains were not noticeably more virulent in their assays, doesn't mean that such viruses weren't created or couldn't be dangerous in the actual human context. As a practicing biologist, I can assure you that there are plenty of experiments/analyses that never make it into papers. Given that we know that chimeric viruses were being created and experimented on, I consider this to be a resounding "yes" to the gain-of-function research question. Second, you ignore what may be the most important argument in favor of the lab leak hypothesis — signatures within the genetic sequence of the virus itself, as well as its early history of human transmission. The furin cleavage site, while not a smoking gun, is suggestive of human engineering. And the astonishingly fast spread of the virus in Wuhan, combined with relatively few mutations subsequently, raises the question of how a putative bat coronavirus could be so well-adapted to humans from the get-go. Upshot: my credences are 60% lab leak, 40% zoonotic.
Thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts and evidence for why you believe what you believe. I think at this point my main takeaway is that the lab-leak hypothesis is most definitely a significant possibility and that it should never have been treated as a "conspiracy theory". Also from my perspective it seems that most of these labs that are doing gain-of-function research are not producing anything valuable but are simply "playing with fire". It really just seems to me like researching different nuclear bombs with the defense that "then we will be able to withstand nuclear bomb attacks better".
I think your analogy to nuclear bombs is unfair to the nuclear bombs. Nukes don't autonomously escape from laboratories and they certainly do not self-replicate; the only externality of a nuclear detonation on a mock city to better understand how to reinforce against nuclear attack (i.e. the most destructive possible research) is the fallout, which is bounded well below "global doom" (you can argue that Trinity was reckless in this sense because they didn't confirm solidly enough that the atmosphere wouldn't undergo runaway fusion, but that doesn't apply to later tests).
True. Probably a better comparison is to some kind of new, easy-to-produce poison/chemical agent. My main point is that some research does not benefit humanity in any way but simply makes it easier to kill lots of people. I can understand why a government would want to research better ways to kill people, but lets stop pretending it is helping humanity or science to invent new ways to do so.
Yeah, this is about where I'm at, too.
Another note about MERS, I believe the Saudi government engaged in a very big push to find the original source. They sunk a huge amount of money and manpower into finding it. So it becomes even less surprising that it was found quickly.
Not everything the Gulf States spend a lot of money on actually comes to anything.
...so?
I suppose it could well be that "it's a complete coincidence they had a viral research lab in the place this outbreak happened", the way clusters of childhood cancers near nuclear power stations in the UK turned out to be a "no honestly it's just a freaky coincidence" https://www.nature.com/articles/bjc2013674
It's just that humans tend to find such coincidences really hard to swallow.
> If it came directly from bats, finding a bat is much harder than finding an animal in a wet market, for obvious reasons.
The likelihood that it was so easily transmissible among humans directly from a bat is very small compared to passage though an intermediate host, so this isn't particularly convincing:
1. Intermediate host is high probability, but the fact that we haven't found it is conspicuous.
2. Infection directly from a bat is low probability, but not having found that bat is not conspicuous.
So now you're comparing the probability of #2 to the probability of a lab leak. Even if the lab leak were unlikely, it's not clear that it's necessarily lower than #2.
> If you look at their Figure 7, it seems like the original WIV1 is just as infectious (in fact, maybe slightly more infectious) than the chimeric viruses, so no function was gained.
That's a dishonest definition of gain of function IMO. You're effectively saying it's not gain of function research simply because it didn't gain the function were testing for, even though it may have gained all sorts of functions that weren't tested. In this case, we still don't know the full effects of the spike protein itself, so even if it isn't more infectious it still could have gained all sorts of other dangerous properties.
Inducing genomic changes, is gain of function research, period, whether via direct engineering or applying evolutionary pressures. We simply can't reliably predict the full effects of any adaptations at this time.
> Argument: we still haven’t found the natural animal reservoir COVID-19.
This isn't remarkable, but it also isn't quite the argument. The lack of intermediate host AND the lack of human subpopulation that had symptoms AND the lack of seropositivity in blood samples taken prior to the earliest cases of the pandemic indicates that the virus very suddenly just popped up in Wuhan. SARS and MERS both showed seropositivity in stored blood samples prior to the earliest clinical cases, indicating it was circulating prior to first detection.
> We shouldn’t expect it to be as easy to track down the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as it was for MERS, which took 1 year. We shouldn’t even expect it to be as easy as it was for SARS, which took 14 years. We should expect it to be an order of magnitude harder than it was for SARS, and many orders of magnitude harder than it was for MERS.
Our tests are orders of magnitude faster, more sensitive and more sophisticated now. The labour force working on SARS-COV-2 is also an order of magnitude larger. We have orders of magnitude more health data in China. I see no reason why your conclusion should hold given these other facts.
> SARS originated from bats in Yunnan, but the outbreak was first detected in Guangdong. The two are 1300 km apart. If the proposed “Y” isn’t much larger than 1300 km, there’s no mystery.
Sure there is. You just said that Chinese people are hypochondriacs that tend to go to the hospital for everything. No clinical cases for SARS-COV-2 predate the first Wuhan cases, and no blood samples from 2019 were seropositive for SARS-COV-2 anywhere. Presumably, if Chinese people are hypochondriacs then there should be a wealth of seropositive samples predating the earliest Wuhan cases (there are literally zero), or at the very least clinical cases matching these symptoms should show up somewhere too. The absence of both IS a mystery.
In conclusion, I think your 85%/15% estimate in favour of zoonotic is definitely off. I wouldn't say the lab leak is more likely yet, but it's definitely closer to parity with zoonotic origin than you describe.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this up. As a result, I (a random person on the internet) have updated from a 70% to a 40% probability of lab escape.
Rootclaim (https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2) came to a strongly opposite conclusion, and I'm trying to figure out your most important points of disagreement with them. You clearly diverge on:
- The significance of the outbreak being in Wuhan. Rootclaim says that 25% of gain-of-function research worldwide happens in Wuhan, but you dispute that what WIV was doing even counts as GoF research. I'm guessing that if you expand the category of GoF research to include the sort of stuff WIV was doing, you would find they account for much less than 25% of it?
- The significance of Shi's database going down (though this is only a small part of Rootclaim's analysis).
Though you don't comment on this explicitly, I expect that you and Rootclaim also disagree on:
- Biological evidence (stuff about chimeras and the furin cleavage site) (Rootclaim's analysis is from a while ago, and I think people generally put less stock in these arguments nowadays?)
You and Rootclaim seem to agree on:
- We should have a strong prior that a pandemic has zoonotic origins (Rootclaim actually starts with a nearly 1:100 prior, rather than your more conservative 1:10 prior).
- The relative insignificance of there not being a plausible animal source near Wuhan.
- The relative insignificance of no intermediate host being identified yet.
Do you think this is enough to bring your and Rootclaim's views into line, or do you disagree about more things? And thanks again!
Re "Are there important arguments I missed that should swing a reasonable person's judgment?": Like most discussions of SARS-CoV-2-origin theories I have read, your analysis did only gloss over (in a qualitative, not quantitative way) the elephant in the room. Namely:
* How likely is it that the first cases of a new bat-coronavirus disease would occur in the only city in the country (and maybe the leading place on the planet) where bat coronaviruses are studied, if we assume that this research is completely unrelated to the outbreak?
After all, this coincidence(?) is what many people found noteworthy long before they thought about gain-of-function research, Furin cleavage sites, Chinese information policy, and many other things.
TLDR: The probability of this proximity being pure coincidence is (realistically much) smaller than 8%.
Before we do the very rough estimate, some remarks.
What we discuss in the following is the question stated above, which is strictly speaking not about zoonotic versus lab origin. For instance, as alluded to by Alex Power, it is possible that a coronavirus researcher went to Yunnan to collect samples from a bat cave, came in contact with a virus (directly from bats or via some intermediate host animal), travelled with the infection back to Wuhan, and started the pandemic there. This would presumably count as a zoonotic origin of the disease; but it wouldn't have happened without the labs in Wuhan.
Almost everyone seems to agree that the "deep ancestors" of SARS-CoV-2 were bat coronaviruses originating in China's Yunnan province, probably from a certain cave in Mojiang County. The question is how they got from there to Wuhan: Via zoonotic spillover to other animal species? If so, where did the first human infection happen: in Yunnan, in Wuhan, elsewhere? Did some host animal travel a large part of the distance in the wild, or was it caught near Yunnan and transported to a wet market elsewhere? Or did bat/coronavirus researchers collect live bats or virus samples in Yunnan and bring them to a lab (the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control) in Wuhan, the only place in China where such research is done? My initial question above refers explicitly to a scenario in which researchers played no role, but I'll be agnostic with respect to the path the virus took in that scenario.
Is Wuhan special in any other way than due to its bat/coronavirus research labs? For instance, when wild animals are caught in or near Yunnan, are they transported for some reason overproportionately to wet markets in Wuhan, as opposed to other cities which may have a larger population and also lie closer to Yunnan? If that were the case, then we would not need a lab-related scenario to explain that the disease was first observed in Wuhan. However, if there were such an explanation, certainly some lab-leak debunker would have brought it up by now. I will assume in the following that Wuhan is not special in any other relevant respect than due to its labs and by being a large city.
Lab-leak theory debunkers have argued that the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 might have occurred first in a rural area in China, where it could have spread unnoticed because there were no decent hospitals nearby. No wonder then that the outbreak was first observed in a large city like Wuhan! I don't know anything about the Chinese health system, so let's say this argument is valid: it must have happened in a large city.
Now, assuming that the labs in Wuhan had nothing to do with the outbreak, and that Wuhan is not special in other way except by being a large city, how likely is it that the outbreak happened there or was at least first observed there?
I took Wikipedia's "List of cities in China by population", which has 50 entries. Number 50 has still 2.1 million inhabitants; that should still count as large, I guess. (I would expect that even much smaller cities have decent hospitals where a new disease would not go unnoticed.) Wuhan is number 9 on the list, with 8.3 million people.
No matter in which host animal (bat, human, pangolin, whatever) the virus travelled from Yunnan to Wuhan, and no matter where and when it evolved and adapted to humans: the closer a city is to Yunnan, and the more inhabitants it has, the more likely it should be that the outbreak occurred there. (Recall that we have ruled out for instance scenarios with a special Yunnan-to-Wuhan-wet-market connection.) For example, Chongqing is much larger and closer to Yunnan than Wuhan, hence it had a greater probability for an outbreak than Wuhan.
It is hard to quantify how the probability that the outbreak would first be noticed in city X decreases with the distance between X and Yunnan. (Quadratically maybe?) Also, which distance should we take: linear distance? car travel distance?
I chose assumptions that maximise the probability for Wuhan as ground zero. More realistic assumptions would yield a much smaller a-priori probability that the outbreak would first be noticed in Wuhan.
With www.distance.to, I tabulated the linear distances of the 50 cities on the Wikipedia list from Simao/Pu'er City in Yunnan (which is the major city closest to the Mojiang caves). I threw out all cities whose distance from Simao is larger than Wuhan's. I also threw out one further city (Lanzhou) that had a smaller linear distance from Simao than Wuhan but a larger distance-by-car-travel. I.e., to every city that is in any possibly relevant sense farther from Simao than Wuhan is, I assigned the (obviously too small) probability 0 that the outbreak could occur there.
To all remaining cities on the list, I assigned an outbreak probability that is proportional to the number of inhabitants. This is another very Wuhan-generous assumption, in the sense that each city whose distance from Yunnan is much smaller than Wuhan's should realistically get a larger (somehow distance-dependent) probability for an outbreak.
Recall that only cities on the Wikipedia list qualify. In particular, Pu'er City itself (in Yunnan) is not on the list, although its Wikipedia page says that 2.5 million people live there, whereas number 50 on the list has only 2.1 million. (Small inconsistencies between different Wikipedia data; let's not bother.)
The remaining cities are: Chongqing (15,8 million people), Guangzhou (13,2), Shenzhen (12,3), Chengdu (9,1), Wuhan (8,3), Xi'an (7,9), Dongguan (7,4), Foshan (7,3), Changsha (4,6), Kunming [in Yunnan!] (4,4), Nanning (3,8), Guiyang (3,3), Zhongshan (2,9), Huizhou (2,5), Liuzhou (2,1). All in all with 104.9 million people, of which 7.9% live in Wuhan.
As explained, this yields an unrealistically large probability estimate of 7.9% that a lab-unrelated outbreak would first be noticed in Wuhan. This should be regarded as (an upper bound of) a prior that can then be refined with further information about genetic editing, Chinese information policy, bats held in Wuhan labs, and whatever.
Thank you for this. As you say, it's an unrealistic upper bound. But it's pretty important to have at least some number for this, and it's a conspicuous omission from the original and otherwise thorough analysis here,
By comparison, the first-order unrealistically large probability estimate for a lab-related outbreak being first noticed in Wuhan is 100% - the WIV is the obvious place to do the relevant sort of research, and the one place we know the relevant sort of research was being done. There are other possibilities; maybe there was similar research being done in some small university lab that nobody has heard of in spite of all the focus since, or the WIV could have gone from research to e.g. testing an insufficiently-attenuated-virus vaccine someplace far from Wuhan. But including those low-order probabillities would pull "lab leaks always and only happen in Wuhan" down a lot less than a more realistic distance relationship would pull down your 7.9% upper bound.
So, if our prior for a zoonotic pandemic propagating through a lab-related screwup rather than being wholly natural is >8%, we should assess Covid-19 as probably being a lab-related screwup before we even start talking about furin cleavage sites or whatnot.
And, of the seven post-WWII events which wikipedia describes as "pandemics", one (1977) is I believe generally accepted to have been the result of a lab-related screwup. So I'm tentatively putting my prior for that at 14%.
(0.14*1)/(0.14*1 + 0.86*0.079) = 67% probability of lab-related screwup, for now.
Thanks for the kind remarks. I welcome your attempt to put a number on the "lab-related screwup" scenario, but do not quite understand your formula. Here's how I would do the math.
The outbreak of any given pandemic is either lab-related (LAB) or not lab-related (NLAB); and happens either suspiciously close to a lab which researches that particular type of disease (CLOSE), or not suspiciously close to such a lab (FAR). All four combinations NLAB/CLOSE, LAB/CLOSE, NLAB/FAR, LAB/FAR are a priori possible. Let's call the corresponding probabilities A,B,C,D, respectively; their sum A+B+C+D is 1, so we have three free parameters.
Let's consider the following ones:
p = A/(A+C) says how likely it is that an outbreak occurs CLOSE provided we are in the NLAB case. My upper bound for our current pandemic is p < 0.079; more realistic seems something like p = 0.01.
q = B+D = (B+D)/(A+C+B+D) says how likely it is a priori that a pandemic is lab-related. The estimates of q I have read in this thread range from 0.14 to 0.01. (I find the latter much too low, but that's not the point here. Any proposed value would be very unreliable.)
r = B/(B+D) says how likely it is that an outbreak occurs CLOSE provided we are in the LAB case. I feel confident to say that r > 0.5. (To be more precise, we would have to consider carefully all LAB/FAR scenarios; for instance: 1. A Wuhan researcher travels to a bat cave in Yunnan, gets sick, starts the outbreak in Yunnan. 2. Lab personnel gets infected, goes to the airport after work, flies to Beijing or Los Angeles, starts the outbreak there. 3. Lab personnel sells animals from the lab to a wet market outside Wuhan, the outbreak starts there.)
In the current situation, we know that we are in the CLOSE case. We want to know the number P(p,q,r) = A/(A+B): given that we are in the CLOSE case, what is the probability P(p,q,r) that the outbreak is not lab-related?
Since A = p*(1-q) and B = q*r, the formula is
P(p,q,r) = p*(1-q) / (p*(1-q) +q*r) .
Everyone can play around with the parameters for themselves. Some values:
P(0.01, 0.14, 0.5) = 0.109
P(0.01, 0.01, 0.5) = 0.664
P(0.01, 0.03, 0.6) = 0.35
P(0.03, 0.08, 0.6) = 0.365
P(0.079, 0.01, 0.5) = 0.94
P(0.079, 0.14, 0.5) = 0.493
P(0.079, 0.14, 0.95) = 0.338
P(0.01, 0.14, 0.95) = 0.061
If one wants to arrive at a preconceived conclusion, it's easy to dial the parameters accordingly.
I forgot to mention one other respect in which my 7.9% estimate is very Wuhan-generous: only cities in mainland China are taken into account.
Hong Kong (7.5 million people) and Macau are closer to Yunnan, by linear distance as well as car travel, than Wuhan is. Yunnan has borders with Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar. Yangon (Myanmar, 5.1 million), Bangkok (Thailand, 8.3 million), and many other large cities in southeast Asia are closer to Yunnan, by linear distance as well as car travel, than Wuhan is. Even Ho Chi Minh City (9 million) in southern Vietnam is closer to Yunnan by linear distance, and only slightly farther from Yunnan by car travel, than Wuhan is. (The population numbers are Wikipedia's city/urban numbers. The metro numbers are larger; e.g. 21.3 million for Ho Chi Minh City.)
If a wild host animal had crossed a border before coming into contact with a human patient zero, the outbreak in a zoonotic scenario could have occurred in any of these places. For live animals caught in Yunnan and transported to other places, it depends on how much border traffic there is for such animal transports. My estimate assigns the probability 0 to any outbreak outside mainland China.
Thank you to everyone for your feedback, and your kind words! I unfortunately don't have time to respond to everyone, so I chose a few common arguments you mentioned which I didn't analyze, and analyzed them. These are the furin cleavage site arguments, the "COVID-19 is too well adapted" argument, and another argument from location which claims most early cases were along metro line 2. I previously avoided the furin arguments being I'm not a molecular biologist. I'm still not, so take my analyses with a grain of salt.
Argument: The furin cleavage site is evidence of genetic engineering. This paper by Segreto et al (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0), among others, argues that the cleavage site is not found in SARS-CoV-2’s close relatives, nor in other Sarbecoviruses. While the cleavage site does exist in many other coronaviruses, there is no evidence of recombination between those other viruses and SARS-CoV-2.
Analysis: The furin cleavage site drastically increases the coronavirus’ ability to infect humans. It is a sequence of 4 amino acids: RRAR. The final R is part of the backbone of SARS-CoV-2’s cousins, so in order to create the cleavage site, only 3 amino acids had to be added: RRA. How hard is it to add 3 amino acids, even without recombination?
Each amino acid is coded by 3 base pairs, and each base pair can be one of four bases. The R can be represented by any of 6 different codes, while the A can be represented by 4. Just by throwing 9 base pairs together at random, we’d expect them to code for RRA 1 in 4^9/(4*6*6) = 1800 times. The same paper notes that the more common furin cleavage site is RX[K/R]R, and that “The presence of an arginine at the third position P3 before the FCS increases the efficiency of the FCS tenfold”. This implies the A isn’t important, and that RR[K/R/A] also works well. If so, 1 in 600 random insertions would result in a very good site.
Even 1 in 600 is too pessimistic, because evolution isn’t random; natural selection exists. Rather than coming up with RR[K/R/A] all at once, the virus could have gotten the basic site RXX; this could then have mutated into RRX, with a large increase in fitness. Given the sheer number of bats and bat coronaviruses, I don't see a 1 in 600 chance per mutation as unbelievably improbable.
Argument: The furin cleavage site is evidence of genetic engineering because it’s coded by unusual nucleotides. The initial RR is coded by the nucleotides CGG-CGG, while almost all other R’s are coded by other sequences.
Analysis: This is the claim made by Quay and Muller, two non-biologists, in this WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-science-suggests-a-wuhan-lab-leak-11622995184). They say that R is usually coded by one of the five codes other than CGG, and that CGG-CGG doesn’t appear “in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2”.
CGG codes for R in 7% of the SARS-CoV-2 genome (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7152894/)--not uncommon, but not unheard of. Saying CGG-CGG has to be artificial because it doesn’t appear in a certain class of coronaviruses feels similar to saying a 21st century hard science fiction book had to be written by aliens because a certain sequence of 6 words doesn’t appear in any other 21st century hard science fiction book. Evolution can invent things. That’s why any life exists on Earth at all.
The authors claim that CGG is commonly used in lab research, because “it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it [..] An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.” However, I don’t have access to the WSJ article, and none of the sources that quote the article include any citation backing up any of these claims. The WSJ authors are not biologists, and wouldn't know this from personal experience. If anyone can track down evidence in favor or against these claims, please let me know.
Argument: COVID-19 is too well adapted to humans to be natural
Analysis: I’ve heard two versions of these claims. The first is that the initial cases had very similar genomes compared to the early cases of SARS, which we watched become more infectious over time. The second is that the virus infects humans a lot better than it infects other animals.
The first version of the claim is weaker than it was a year ago. Now that multiple more transmissible variants (B117, alpha, delta…) have swept the world and taken over the original strain, the original strain no longer seems so optimized. Also, I remember that in early 2020, the R0 of COVID-19 was estimated to be higher than that of SARS. The updated estimates I’ve seen (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number) say the two diseases have similar R0, and that the R0 is much lower than many other pandemic diseases (measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio, smallpox…) If that’s the case, in order for COVID-19 to have the same R0 as SARS while having milder symptoms, SARS-CoV-2 must be worse at transmission than SARS-CoV-1.
I tried to find out whether SARS-CoV-1 really mutated rapidly during the epidemic to become more infectious, as some lab leak proponents claim. The answer seems to be no. In fact, this Nature article from June 2003 says the exact opposite (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095144/): “But so far, the SARS virus seems remarkably invariant: the genome sequences of 14 isolates from patients in Singapore, Toronto, China and Hong Kong have not revealed any changes of real consequence. This isn't because the SARS virus fails to mutate, but rather that the mutations thrown up so far haven't proved to be particularly beneficial to it.”
The second version of the argument is also weaker than it was a year ago. We now know that COVID-19 spreads easily among minks, to such an extent that they’ve spread it back to humans after we spread it to them (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/animals.html). Cats, big cats, gorillas, and one ferret have also tested positive for COVID-19. Even if it turns out that COVID-19 spreads more easily among humans than among any other species, I wouldn’t be too surprised. After all, it’s a human pandemic, not a bat or pangolin panzootic, and you’d expect the virus that causes a human pandemic to be better at spreading between humans than the millions of viruses which didn’t.
Argument: The earliest Wuhan cases cluster around metro line 2, which also leads to the WIV.
Analysis: As far as I can tell, this argument comes from this paper by Steven Quay (https://zenodo.org/record/4119263#.YNrer-hKhPY), who claims that all “All patients between December 1st, 2019 and early January 2020 were first seen at hospitals that are also serviced by Line 2 of the Metro system.” The basis for this claim is his table on page 7, where he gathers circumstantial evidence for the hospitals where the early COVID patients were treated.
This table is exceptionally iffy. It’s true that Jinyintan, the designated hospital for COVID patients, is close to a line 2 station; but the same station also connects to lines 3 and 8. Xinhua Hospital is in between lines 6 and 3, and much farther from line 2. The author’s reason for including the Tonji, Central, and Zhongnan hospitals is that some paper has a co-author from those hospitals, but the same paper (https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5.pdf) has many authors from outside of Wuhan. The Wuhan Asia Heart Disease Hospital was included because of this paper (https://www.jtcvs.org/article/S0022-5223(20)30859-X/fulltext#secsectitle0130%20), but I can’t find any mention of the hospital anywhere in the paper. The last hospital on the list is the Hubei Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital, which is presumably included because a co-author on this paper (https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC7182016&blobtype=pdf) is from there. However, that paper got its data from “the epidemic reporting system of the National Health Commission of China, which stores the medical records of all 50 designated hospitals in Wuhan city”. The paper also includes cases all the way to March 2020.
Leaving aside the issues with the table, I decided to see if the wet market and the WIV are really on line 2. The wet market is close enough, but the WIV is 2 km away from the nearest station. To get there from the wet market, one would walk 1.2 km to Hankou station, get on line 2, hop off at Jiedao, change to line 8, get off a station later at Xiaohongshan, and walk 800 m. The whole journey takes an hour and 20 minutes, so it’s unlikely to be a regular trip for most people.
I also noticed something else remarkable about line 2 from looking at the metro map (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Wuhan_Metro_System_Map_en.svg), which Quay also noticed: line 2 goes straight to Tianhe International Airport, Hankou Railway Station (the same one that’s beside the wet market), and Wuhandong Railway Station. No other line connects to the airport or to three railway stations. If it’s true that most of the early COVID cases were along line 2, that’s (weak) circumstantial evidence that the virus came to Wuhan by air or rail.
> Now that multiple more transmissible variants (B117, alpha, delta…) have swept the world and taken over the original strain, the original strain no longer seems so optimized.
I don't know why you think this. Becoming more optimal at infection was totally expected. The original strain strain is still MORE optimized than it should have been from a direct zoonotic transmission from a bat. It's perhaps not more optimized if it had passed through an intermediate host, but we haven't found this host.
> Also, I remember that in early 2020, the R0 of COVID-19 was estimated to be higher than that of SARS.
It's still slightly more infectious. If I'm reading this right, the metanalysis linked there included data after countries implemented interventions, so of course R0 falls in response.
Note also that SARS only got such a high R0 because it passed through intermediate hosts, which bolsters the following point.
> The second version of the argument is also weaker than it was a year ago. We now know that COVID-19 spreads easily among minks, to such an extent that they’ve spread it back to humans after we spread it to them. Cats, big cats, gorillas, and one ferret have also tested positive for COVID-19.
The claim that it was exceptionally good at infecting humans has always been that it was too good at infecting humans to have been transmitted DIRECTLY from a bat. The probability that it would have evolved this by chance is very low.
The fact that it's so good at infecting other animals BOLSTERS this conclusion, which means that it likely did pass through intermediate hosts before infecting humans. But if it passed through intermediate hosts, where are those hosts? Intermediate hosts from other epidemics were found relatively quickly.
Thanks for all that analysis. It's really too bad that (1) Google can't search in Substack comments and (2) Substack doesn't support searching comments. There's so much darn good stuff that gets lost with time!
Is there a good overview and assessment about the potential uses of ivermectin for COVID treatment? I have been trying to find one, but there is so much noise on both sides it's hard to make sense of it all. I was hoping Scott or Zvi would write an article about it. But until then, is there an alternative good and reputable source putting things in context and predicting what we will likely find out when the dust settles?
Don't think these are quite what you're looking for but perhaps good starting points for finding the key studies:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/ivermectin-as-a-covid-19-therapy
https://unherd.com/thepost/ivermectin-life-saver-or-time-waster/
The FLCCC seems like a good starting point.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/
I notice Bret Weinstein is mentioned three times on the FLCCC home page, and that 3 of the first 4 links on the main (left) panel go to stuff largely authored by Theresa Lawrie.
I have a post on LessWrong summarizing a three hour video filled with Covid vaccine claims endorsed by Bret Weinstein, and then I found out that Theresa Lawrie was a big part of the story too. I did not come away impressed (this link highlights my comment on Theresa Lawrie):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr?commentId=Ct3pvsqWhQhsYGcAo
Wrote about Heidegger and what we can learn from mood https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-mood
I'm reminded of Somatic Markers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis
My understanding: Feelings are valuations of any given past / present / potential world state. They're the brain's cost function, they track utility in our world models.
In that understanding, "Moods are our commentaries on what has happened to us" is true, but applies not just to the past but also, in a symmetric fashion, to the future.
My belief is that the key to rationality / the good life is having your moods track your utilities as closely as possible.
I replied to someone's comment a few weeks ago as a true believer in Zembrin. Well, I want to announce that I am now a true believer in double-blind clinical trials. I don't notice any effect anymore and I am willing to chalk up how I felt initially to a strong placebo effect. But I am stopping for a while now and will see if its perceived effects come back.
I'm looking for good research or discussions of intertemporal trade-offs for utilitarians. It seems reasonable to suspect that there will be fluctuations in the amount of money required to save a life. For simplicities sake, imagine if the number were to remain relatively fixed, then would it make sense to actually save money I would've donated to save a life and save more in the future? If the price of a life saved were to grow at 2% per year and I could get an investment return of 7% wouldn't it do the most good to wait until the end of my life? If the price to save lives was falling than this would make the case for waiting even stronger. I'm looking for discussions of this nature. Thanks
This is basically what Warren Buffett has said he is doing. I think an important question is "how are you getting these returns" - you can't assume a risk-free rate of return higher than inflation.
Yes, I agree. But risk should be incorporated in your calculation.
>you can't assume a risk-free rate of return higher than inflation
Yes you can. Returns are compensation for risk, waiting, and inflation; even without risk, there's still the compensation for waiting over and above that for inflation. Check out TIPS.
Returns are compensation for *estimated* risk, waiting, and inflation. The consensus estimate can be wrong.
US Treasuries are widely considered effectively risk-free, and the Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS) pay based on ex post measured inflation, so to the extent that they trade for less than par you can get a risk-free return above *actual* inflation.
Not in Rat circles they aren't. The probability of the United States of America defaulting in the next 10, 30, or 100 years or what have you, is VERY MUCH not 0%. Even if it's something like 1% or 2%, that still drastically affects the expected value calculations.
How about this alternate formulation: UST yields are widely considered to be a very good approximation for the RFR?
I would assume that helping now (thus making more people a part of the global economy) would be a much greater "investment" then e.g. the stock market. If a child doesn't die of malaria, they can become a productive adult who will create a lot of value: that's a good rate of return.
But that's just as true for a child today as it would be for a child in 2070. If it costs less to save the child in 2070, then all else being equal, the argument is that it would be better to save your money and invest in the children later on, since the same amount of money will save more lives.
Yes, and by 2070 it could be 3 children or 5 children depending on the growth rate of return and change in price of saving a life. Of course, it could also maybe be .75 child or something. Seems like it would be an important area of research.
It's plausible there will be less poverty in the future.
No. If you save the child now, it will grow up and create lots of value soon. That value is presumably used partially to invest and improve more.
I much rather save a child now for $100 than save a child in 2070 for $99. Isn't that just obvious?
You don't control the value the child creates, though (unless you're planning to buy the child as a slave).
An obvious solution is to save only good children. Hail Santa!
If you save one child today, how many children will that child have saved by 2070? Improving economic development in regions where lots of children die is likely to save lots of children over that time period.
How does that work concretely? Say you save a child from dying in malaria. That child becomes a subsistence farmer that wouldn't have existed counterfactually. By what mechanism would a single additional subsistence farmer save lots of children? Wouldn't the vast majority of the their labor go towards feeding themselves?
The simplest route is that the subsistence farmer who grows up to have some healthy children has "saved" them from non-existence.
But more relevantly, most human communities do better for each of their members if they have an additional member that is able to contribute when some individual family is in time of need. It's true that the vast majority of their labor goes towards feeding themselves, but from the standpoint of the original question about investment, what matters is whether the bit of labor they are able to contribute to others each year is a higher rate of return on the initial investment than the interest you would have gotten otherwise by putting the money that saved that person into a bank account.
There are at various points in time probably some communities that are existing right at the Malthusian margin, where an additional individual is more of a burden to their neighbors than an advantage. But I believe that most modern economics assumes that these situations are rare. (It's still a relevant empirical question for the communities at hand though.)
I think the sorts of discussions you're looking for involve the term "discounting the future," which refers to the fact that people value benefits now more than they value the same benefit at a later date.
One purely rational reason for why you may discount the future is because of uncertainty: the further into the future you go, the less certain you are about your current state of affairs and the state of the world. Hence, if you want to, say, give to charity, then you may want to give more to charity now just in case you run into a situation in the future (such as getting fired, or dealing with a recession, or losing your house in a fire) that keeps you from giving to charity then.
You might be interested in reading some Effective Altruism posts on "longtermism." They seem to provide the sort of fruitful content you're looking for. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/longtermism
The EA term OP was asking about is "Impact Investing". Sometimes this is called "saving to give later" or "investing to give later".
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/impact-investing-1
There is also the risk that you may become a worse person as you age and eventually decide to spend the money selfishly
I agree that you'll be able to donate more money in the future, but I think there are good reasons to donate now.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I expect the world to continue getting wealthier, especially in the poorest regions, so I'd expect charitable money to be less valuable in the future since there'll be more money being donated to help to increasingly wealthy people. It could plausibly become much more expensive to save a life in the future, simply because the lowest hanging fruit have already been picked - it's not impossible that we'll be able to eradicate malaria, parasitic worms and nutritional deficiencies in the relatively near-term future. This would of course be a good thing, but it would mean that your larger pool of money would be able to do less good. This is of course debateable, and if you think that growth will be very uneven, or that new technology may create cheaper ways to help a lot of people, then you'll still expect there to be good opportunities to do good in the future with your larger pool of money. There's the classic example that if you save your money long enough it may become absolutely massive, but all you'll have to spend it on is making happy people slightly happier.
Of course, if you think the world is likely to get worse (for example, if you're pessimistic about climate change or international peace) then definitely save it, we'll need it more in the future!
An alternative to investing in stocks and bonds would be to invest it in research, which could have very high returns (or no returns at all, research is a high risk investment).
Is the point of donating "save a life" or is it "most bang for the buck?" because if you want to save lives, then save the life that is at risk *right now*.
The Drowning Child thought experiment irritates me with the preachy tone, but one thing it gets right - you wouldn't stand there watching a child drown and go "sorry, I'm waiting for when a busload of kids crashes into the pond to save them, that should be happening in a couple of hours time, and it'll be more effective for me to jump in and pull out three or four kids then".
Yes, maybe waiting until the cost goes down is more effective - but if that's your main reason for donating, then you're not really interested in life-saving, you're interested in playing with figures, and go invest in the stock market or bet on the favourite in the 2:30 at Doncaster in that case.
You can always wait longer (indefinitely) for the "maximum" number of lives saved - so when you get to 2030 you will wait until 2035 because you might be able to save even more lives then! and so on until the day you yourself die without ever having donated a penny because you were always waiting for a better time and a better return.
You have no guarantee you yourself will still be alive in 2030. Donate now if you're going to give and save a life today, not at some indefinite date to be determined which may never come.
I'm more sympathetic than you for the argument for waiting, since people are always dying, and most people don't plan on doing anything about it, either now or in the future. If you've got a really promising way to make a lot of money it could be worth investing now and donating later if you end up will Bill Gates or Elon Musk levels of wealth, although generally people are just talking about index funds and the returns on those are predictable but unimpressive.
I agree that there is a genuine problem with waiting indefinitely if you don't have something specific that you're waiting for, the argument basically holds true until economic growth stops, and I'd hope that at that point there wouldn't be too much left for charities to do. I know some people who are waiting for more information but I think "how to do the most good" has too many variables to ever be definitely answered, so you may as well just give now and treat it as a learning opportunity.
Dying isn't as much of an obstacle to philanthropy as you might initially think, although definitely make sure you have a will written up in advance. Still, the longer you wait the less control "you" (the person doing the saving) has over how the money might be spent. I do think there's something ethically questionable about the indefinite charitable trust, forever beholden to its long dead founder, and I'm confident that the motive there is more driven by ego than altruism.
See Will MacAskill, "When Should An Effective Altruist Donate", https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/William_MacAskill_when-should-an-effective-altruist-donate.pdf
Thank you!
> some people might need to run questions by an IRB first
Isn't this nightmare stuff? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
I've wondered about whether that's also a story about no one thinking to look at the whole picture. As I recall, neither Scott nor the IRB person thought to get a look at the rules for the whole IRB process. Instead, Scott kept making one attempt after another, with each attempt being fairly costly.
What would be the utility of "the IRB person" looking at the "whole IRB process"? Presumably they're 'just' a cog in the process and aren't expected or allowed to make some kind of holistic judgement. Or are you pointing out that, as costly as each attempt Scott made, were he to have understood the entire (expected) total cost of the process, he'd have never even made the first "attempt"?
The "just a cog" person might have been able to explain in general what was wanted, or ideally, there were be information available that they could hand to Scott.
If they could have done so, why wouldn't they do that in general, e.g. always?
IRB's, based on everything I've read or heard about them, are a (vastly expanded) instance of, e.g. disclaimers like "IANAL" or "this is not legal advice" – there _is_ no 'holistic' or "in general" criteria to be satisfied, i.e. it's all "pro forma" ritual.
I'm still not sure whether your original comment was expressing curiosity about how IRBs 'actually' work, now, as-they-are, and wondering if there's some kind of easier/cheaper way to 'navigate' them, or whether you're pondering some kind of reform. I am now more curious about the experience of _successfully_ navigating an IRB, which apparently _does_ happen pretty frequently. And thinking about that, it's definitely not clear what the differences are between everything that _is_ approved and, e.g. Scott's experience(s).
I'm not sure what I was asking for, more just observing that Scott was bumping his nose against the walls of a maze when he needed an overview. Or possibly just needed to talk with someone who was familiar with successful applications.
Ahhh – no worries. I was just curious!
IIRC, he wanted to study something that was already standard practice [and, realizing that the link was _right above_, I think I was correct – he wanted to study a standard screening test!] and that alone seemed to greatly complicate him getting approval.
The 'process' itself, relative to what he wanted to study, seemed _insane_, and the "overview" seems to be something like 'avoid being (or, really, possibly be located in the same _galaxy_ of 'researcher state space' as) a Nazi death camp 'researcher''.
The problem is that almost by definition research is novel. This means that the IRB process is somewhat well-defined, but the exact details of who-wants-what will vary based on the type of research being done. If you are routinely doing the same type of thing with different particular questions (eg. retrospective chart analysis with a linear regression between a new set of variables), you get a feel for what your IRB actually wants and can probably do everything with copy/paste submissions.
The problem is when you have an IRB that is used to doing one thing (eg. implantable medical devices trials) now being asked to review something else (eg. comparison of therapy types). You don't know what they care about, and they aren't used to dealing with your kind of project. So you probably haven't preemptively answered the questions they want answered in the way they wanted answered, and they are uncertain about where the dragons lie. So you have more frustration all-around with more cycles of paperwork.
This is all sensible, but kind of confirms my belief that an IRB, ideally, _has_ to be composed of domain experts.
As a bureaucratic CYA apparatus, your comment is eminently sensible for someone that _wants_ to navigate any particular IRB.
But none of this seems to cover the particular ways in which the actual IRB that Scott interacted with mostly, nor the 'meta-IRB' that later audited his research, actually failed to do anything beyond stymie his not-very-novel and almost-completely risk-free research that he wanted to do.
IRB experiences can vary wildly depending on the domain you're researching and the institution you work at. At research universities, there is at least *some* pressure on the IRB to make sure that research can get done, which means approving IRB applications at a reasonable pace (although reasonable is a rather fuzzy term). At my institution, this process was very easy if you were doing anything in the social sciences, typically involving an afternoon of paperwork and a 2-week turn around from the IRB (moreover, if you signed a form saying your research met a bunch of criteria that made it basically impossible for it to cause harm to participants, you didn't even have to get approval from the IRB to start your experiment). However, if you wanted to do anything related to medicine (of which psychiatry is a subset), you went through an entirely different application and review process. This review process involved a committee looking at your proposal instead of a single reviewer, which meant that the lag-time from submission to a response from the IRB was increased from weeks to months, and the presumption went from "probably everything is fine" to "probably this guy is going to kill someone and we'll be liable" (with a commensurate increase in scrutiny borne upon to the application).
If I were trying to get something approved relating to Scott's survey, the primary hurdle would be confidentiality. If the setup is that I'm the owner of a google doc that's getting hits that just so happen to come from Scott's blog, then that wouldn't be an issue because I would be able to purge any participant information before (if) the data were made public.
Not really, I probably got 15 things passed through my IRB over my career as a student/post-grad, never much trouble aside from boring paperwork and taking a long time.
It very much depends on how good/bad your local IRB is, and what you're trying to do. I don't doubt anything in that story actually happened, but there's a reason you keep haring that story linked whenever anyone talks about how bad IRBs are, instead of hearing 50 different equally-bad stories from various people.
Has any thorough research been done yet on the possible effects that SSRIs have on the sexual development of pre-adolescents?
I read Scott's blog post on SSRIs and he mentioned (as a piece of anecdotal anthropic evidence that the sexual side effects are being underblown) that he took SSRIs when he was very young and now considers himself asexual, and is suspicious that the antidepressants are part of the explanation.
My friend and I also noticed that almost all of our acquaintances who identify as asexual also took SSRIs when they were children, which is what made us suspicious in the first place.
Since the existence of sexual side-effects from SSRIs is already well-established and is much more serious than initially believed (more anecdotal evidence: the friend that I mentioned above took SSRIs for thirty days under the prescription of his psychiatrist, and experienced serious sexual dysfunction during that month and during the month that followed), I can't help but wonder if there's a causal link here. SSRIs are known to seriously inhibit the sexual functioning of many people who take it. SSRIs are also diagnosed routinely to children as they are going through puberty, where they're supposed to be developing sexual interests for the first time. It doesn't seem unreasonable to posit that SSRIs are permanently inhibiting sexual development in a number of children.
I feel like this would be something that's hard to detect unless you're actually looking for it. For adults, you're able to actually ask them and they'll tell you if they're experiencing any sexual side effects. But you can't do that with adolescents, because (1) asking kids about their sexual activities isn't highly ethical, and (2) there's no A/B testing going on because the SSRIs are being prescribed before the patients are old enough to develop sexual interests in the first place. I'd like to see research that deliberately tries to address this concern, but I haven't found anything so far.
I've been wondering if it's worth having a strong opinion on this: if it's true that SSRIs can permanently inhibit sexual growth in adolescents and cause asexuality, and the risk is significant, then it means that children really shouldn't be prescribed SSRIs at all. On the other hand, I am not a physician or a pediatrician and I know virtually nothing about sexual development, so I can't help but be cautious when I find myself getting alarmed over something like this.
Add it to the survey!
Questions on childhood use of SSRIs and asexuality have been in previous surveys. IIRC, no significant effect was found.
Anecdotally, I identify as ~asexual, was depressed at least since high school, but didn't take SSRIs until after college. Perhaps you're noticing a depression-asexuality connection instead of or in addition to an SSRI-asexuality connection?
Yes, I'm quite confident that people who take SSRIs have a higher likelihood of being asexual for auxiliary reasons, such as depression itself causing asexuality, one chemical imbalance being correlated with other chemical imbalances, or ostracism for one's asexuality leading one to feel depressed. But I'm still suspicious.
this seems like yet another "what the hell, America?" situation but I am going to have to presume that you would only prescribe anti-depressants to children if it was very necessary.
I'll be another data point for "never got within sniffing distance of any medication ever, knew from the age of nine I was not interested one bit in marriage, kids, etc., am self-diagnosed as depressed/half-diagnosed as "mood swings" in counselling session".
So yeah, I'm willing to go more with "depression and asexuality are co-morbidities" but also yeah on "giving heavy meds to young kids is yikes!"
I had this on a past SSC survey and was unable to find any connection.
I've been working in software for 16 years now, and tech more broadly for 24. I'm starting to feel burned out. I won't bore you with a lengthy personal narrative but I will link this tweet...
https://mobile.twitter.com/john_blum/status/1407765390797590530/photo/1
...and summarize my frame of mind as "6 out of 7".
In any event, I'm interested to hear what other people have done. Did taking a year off help? Changing specialties? Starting your own thing? Finding a seat in a faceless megacorp and phoning it in?
I'm especially interested to hear from people that quit the business entirely. What do you do now? I struggle to come up with any kind of mental picture of Doing Something Else, and I'm hoping some stories will light my imagination.
Changing jobs and finding a role I was more interested in worked for me - but I was much earlier-career than you, so I don't know if that's generalizable.
I don't know if this helps but it was advice that helped me: Life is long. Life does not have to follow a "progression" or "trajectory". It's OK to do something different that doesn't lead anywhere for a couple of year. Just keep your finances in check.
>Finding a seat in a faceless megacorp and phoning it in?
This makes me wonder about the distribution of the stressors in your life that are contributing to the burnout. If a faceless megacorp sounds better, it sounds like total anonymity, or working from home, seem preferable, which leads me to ask if your coworkers or current management have anything to do with the burnout. Workplace bullying is real. If the burnout is driven by the workplace environment, taking time off to get away from the toxic people might be very helpful, and finding a different job in the same field.
I've recently run across this question (again) as a useful tool: if you were handed some large sum of money that would allow you to quit your job, what would you do? How would you spend your days, or what are the top five? That can get you started. Even if "endless beach day" is the answer, it is ok. That's good to know. What was the last "good idea" you had (the "someone should really do/invent this") idea. That can also be a clue. What were your other interests when you were 10?
I have never done software (or tech for any length of time) but I have changed jobs quite a bit. I will say, what sounds good when you're stuck in the burnout may not be what sounds good longterm. And unless you can do something interesting with the year off (travel a lot) it might go very fast/not be enough.
Some people in your position undertake the study of stress management and wind up alternative health practitioners. Some go to law school, med school, doctorate in curriculum development, massage therapy school, some become truck drivers. Some get an emergency teaching credential and go into the classroom. Some decide they really need to open a restaurant but I don't know how they do it. Some take up rock climbing or get a pilot's license, some become CASA children's advocates.
Broadly speaking the health care direction was my choice.
If you try a few things and still no ideas spark up but you are miserable, search job sites until something catches your eye and apply for it. And see a therapist if absolutely nothing looks good. Burnout can contribute to temporary depression and it can be hard to see out of that. Good luck!
Not a psych, but burnout seems virtually indistinguishable from depression to me.
I've been in a similar situation recently / am still in that situation. I felt pretty burnt out and consistently scored high on the burnout part in Copsoq. I eventually went to a psych, bu wait times are ~6 months here. In the meantime I tried changing things up at work and while it did resolve my problems there, it didn't help my issues at all. Turns out it was depression for reasons unrelated to work which I'm working on with the psych now.
tl; dr: Before making drastic changes, make sure you're addressing the cause, not some symptom.
That "Some people know exactly why they're depressed" premise is what I was recommending to check here. There's nothing wrong with drastic changes addressing the reason, of course.
I was rather unhappy with my life a few years ago. I decided to move to a different country, and now I'm feeling much better. I think that actively making a change and thereby achieving a sense of agency is therapeutic.
Check out of your job mentally, do the bare minimum (remote work helps!), do something interesting in your massively expanded free time.
I'm taking a biotech degree (fortunately it's free in this particular corner of the world) and planning out an in silico research project of my own, hoping to eventually get a PhD out of it. Next year I also want to apply for an entry-level grant for some wet work. I kinda regret not getting into science from the outset, instead going for software dev, but I "wipe my tears with banknotes" as a friend put it.
All the while contributing some code to my job here and there so I don't get fired, it's surprisingly comfy.
Science isn't any better if you don't have a pile of banknotes tbh. I went science--> tech because the pressure, lack of money, and complete alienation from the culture of those in scientific research that I saw was just too much. They are not my people. Neither are people in tech, or anyone else for that matter, but the pay prospects are better. *shrug*
I volunteer in EMS about 1 day per week. It provides a great direct connection to "doing something helpful", even though the actual work almost certainly provides far less overall benefit than my work in software.
That's interesting. My software career definitely feels like a bullshit job, as Graeber defined it. What software are you working on?
I've worked for several Fortune 1000-or-equivalents. It's all different, but in the same way.
I don't work in tech, but I had a similar experience a few years ago. Changing jobs (getting away from a pretty toxic company/boss) really helped me quite a bit. It's not like I don't have stress in my new job, but the people I work with are a lot easier to get along with and some of the specific things causing me to burn out are gone. If you can narrow down what is causing you particularly high amounts of stress/burnout, it may help you formulate a response.
If it's more general, you may be right about taking a lower stress position. I would personally struggle with a "phone it in" job because I feel a pretty strong need to be useful or feel useful at my job. An alternative, if you can afford it, may be to be a big fish in a small pond. You can work in tech for a small company that doesn't specialize in tech (the IT guy for a non-IT industry) and probably get a job anywhere in the country pretty easily. A lot of those jobs pay decently, even if it's not SF tech wages. You can also benefit from significantly lower cost of living and lots of freedom in where you go.
What I find is that most people think of their job (or life or relationships) as a fixed value. They rarely think to do what they would do if they had an unsatisfactory couch...ie try to change it.
Obviously if you are a counter clerk at a fast food restaurant the opportunities for change [at that job] are limited. However, if you are a skilled software developer/manager you have leverage to try to change things.
Instead of "dreading to go to work", try to think what it is that you dread. Maybe you can go in and ask for different things or environments or fellow workers. All of these things may be negotiable.
Several years ago, I was prepared to quit and thought I was just working too hard. I was managing a bunch of projects and felt that they were not going well because of all the dullards I had in my team. I went to my boss and said I wanted to work on my own [smaller number of] projects instead of directing others. He said OK
That was all right for a while until I decided that I didn't want to work so much so I went back to my boss and said I only wanted to work for 3 days a week. He said OK.
In each of these cases, I was prepared to quit...but that was not necessary.
Other things I have done instead of development; Onsite training in exotic locations, Documentation, Support.
And if you really get desperate you can start a substack....
I've been working in tech for...3 years and I would say the same. However, this is just what life is like for those not part of the idle elect in my opinion.
I think some polyamorous people believe that (1) jealousy is entirely or mostly a socially constructed phenomena and that it can be overcome through reason. Alternatively, some believe that (2) some polyamorists have a different psychological profile and just do not experience jealousy. The final position I could imagine is that (3) jealousy is in almost everyone's genetic wiring but polyamorous people find a method to suppress it or keep it manageable. I am under the impression that most poly people probably believe (1), some probably (2) and almost nobody (3) but the critics of polyamory probably think the true state of affairs is (3) until it goes wrong.
Am I wrong to think that many polyamorous people are social constructivists with regards to jealousy? Anyone take the stance that it is in our nature and cannot be reasoned away except for some people? What are some other positions that I am missing? Thanks in advance.
It's also possible that people who are not prone, or less prone, to jealousy are the ones attracted to polyamory, so that it becomes self-reinforcing: poly people are not jealous because jealous people don't go for polyamory.
It's very easy not to eat chocolate cake when nobody in the entire group likes chocolate.
I think that all three positions are somewhat true. To the extent that jealosy is innate, like other such traits it may both vary in intensity naturally and be more or less amenable to conscious suppression. And, in the almost exclusively monogamous society performative jealosy is pretty much expected from a victim of infidelity, regardless of whether there's a strong underlying feeling.
I’d say that all three factors are at work. There are probably a significant proportion of people for whom polyamory would not work out without a much higher level of social engineering technology than we have currently. There’s also a (per my wild speculation) significant proportion of people for whom polyamory *would* work with minor-to-moderate social de-construction of jealousy, along with a smaller number of people for whom jealously just isn’t there in the first place.
To give totally made up numbers for my impressions of the prevalence of these groups, it’s maybe something like 40-40-20 percent. Also agree with Xpym about performative jealousy. Probably a substantial proportion of the second group is amenable to socially reducing or eliminating the jealousy they feel because they were largely feeling it due to social expectations to begin with.
Sam Harris interviews psychologist David Buss whose researched the evolutionary psychology of men and women regarding sex and relationships: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthlings/
Overall interesting, and they touch many topics relevant to the polyamorous debate. Close to the end, they touch the topic explicitly, and Buss makes an interesting, though speculative, point: it is likely that some part of polyamory phenomenon is simple polygeny relabelled. Men engaging in polyamory are likely high status men looking to expand their pool of sexual mates, while women engaging in polyamory are likely putting up with it to avoid loosing a high status partner.
I know very little about the topic and know no people who practice polyamory. I am sure there is tons of self-selection into polyamory relations (i.e., (2)), and people come up with coping strategies (i.e., (3)) that allow them to manage the jealousy. Still, it'd be interesting to know what is the women/men ration are in a heterosexual polyamory relation. My guess is that that ratio should be greater than one.
Sam Harris also interviewed Geoffrey Miller (not sure how long ago, but my best guess is >1.5 years ago). Geoffrey all but described (3) for himself. Something along the lines of acknowledging that the feelings were produced for evolutionary reasons which no longer exist.
What framework is he viewing it in where those evolutionary reasons no longer exist?
I can see an argument that they've been slightly weakened by birth control methods, but that's about it.
I'm poly, and my experience with this is that my jealousy is pretty much always underwritten by some kind of insecurity (e.g. I'm jealous of my partner's latest sexual experience because I really want that kind of experience and am afraid I won't get it, am not good enough for it, etc). I explore this in ongoing conversation with my partner, work on those insecurities, try to find ways of tackling those underlying desires/emotions directly, etc. So I guess this is most like (3)?
If you don't mind expanding on this, can you explain why you wouldn't just seek out a non-poly relationship and avoid this additional jealousy-related stress?
For sure :). There's lots of reasons. Monogamy feels really bad to me -- like I'm trapped or stagnant, like my interactions with people other than my partner get sapped of energy. I tried to work through these things in monogamous relationships and never got anywhere.
Poly, on the other hand, feels great to me. I actually love working through these insecurities -- it's usually exciting and emotionally rewarding for me, rather than stressful (although of course sometimes it's stressful). And for stuff I don't feel insecure about, poly just feels great to me. I love having my partner get some of her needs that I'm not good at fulfilling met by other people, because it takes stress off our relationship. I love not needing to be the sole romantic/sexual person in my partner's life.. It feels like it takes a lot of the pressure off me. And of course I love having the possibility open of me having romance/sex with other people -- it keeps my interactions so much more alive for me, helps me continue to grow in the ways I want to. (Also, I'm a huge voyeur, so when I'm not feeling insecure about stuff I get super turned on by hearing about my partner's other sexual experiences lol.)
I've in the last few weeks opened myself up to polyamory (I'm in a long-term relationship and I just started seeing someone else). Lots of what you say here resonates with me and helps me understand my own motivations. Thank you.
I have known a few poly people, and a few who expressed the lack of jealousy thing. My impression from these personal interactions is that the three people I know who pursued poly relationships all did so to shop around for a better relationship while keeping the one they already had. That most claims of low jealousy come from low dependence, they are all just people who wouldn't really care* if the person they are dating broke up with them, and or didn't think it is very likely. The original SO is often jealous, the person who pushed for an open relationship is often not very jealous with their SO or any of the others they bring in, and the others can go either way.
Through all of this my, admittedly never very high opinion of poly relationships has obviously fallen very low, I do not know a single person in real life who seems to have anything approaching a healthy poly relationship.
*Not that they are totally inhuman, just that it would be something that sucked a bit and they would move on quickly.
I'm poly and I think all three of these are somewhat true.
My personal perspective is that I know what specific kinds of situations make me feel jealous and I've negotiated with my girlfriend not to get me in any of those specific kinds of situations (and she's done the same with me). These situations are less encompassing than "all possible situations of a partner dating someone else" so we manage to date other people and mostly do okay.
People presumably need some experience to know what makes them feel jealous. Any thoughts about what to negotiate during the learning period?
I have a long-running debate with a friend about the merits and demerits of polyamory, and I'd love to hear your perspective on it, esp wrt the following questions:
- Do you think polyamorous relationships and monogamous relationships have the same purpose? I.e. are they just different solutions to the same problem, or are they trying to solve fundamentally different problems?
- What, in your experience, have healthy polyamorous relationships looked like? Do you think this is more a function of the polyamory or more a function of the people or equal?
- Do you find that polyamory requires special skills (e.g. communication skills) that monogamy does not? What about vice versa?
I know a long-running triad (about 20 years, I think) which seems to be healthy.
Perhaps it was important that they didn't have a theory in favor of polyamory. Instead it was a couple where the woman fell in love with a second man and the first man has unusual lack of jealousy. The men are friends but don't have a sexual/romantic relationship.
They don't have children.
Monogamous relationships don't even all have the same purpose as each other...
Fair point! There is admittedly variation in the specific purposes of different monogamous relationships.
My thought was that, insofar as certain types of relationships are monogamous (i.e. choose the same means for varied ends), there is to that extent some necessary overlap in their purpose (i.e. monogamy as a means necessarily tends towards certain ends above others). Do you think this is true?
Some other positions:
Misanthropy about relationships: Jealousy can't be overcome through reason not because it's wired, but because you have some justified beliefs in favor of jealousy. Maybe you don't think highly of your partner's decisionmaking, so they'd leave you even though you're good for them. Maybe you don't think highly of yourself, so they'd be rational to leave you given a good opportunity. Either way, you anticipate that if your partner became involved with others, they'd eventually want to leave you, and that would make your life worse. This anticipation may be correct, and reasoning about it increases your confidence in it.
Normieism: The obstacle to overcoming jealousy isn't genetic wiring for it directly, but a general tendency to defer to/execute social norms and feel the way you're socially expected to feel, and jealousy is normative in our society. If people weren't expected to feel jealous, or if jealousy were seen as weird and questionable, they'd be less inclined to feel that way. But most people aren't going to reason themselves out of jealousy because they're not going to reason themselves out of anything socially normative.
Have you considered Aristotelian/Greek view on emotions? (They were quite polyamorous themselves!). This position suggests that emotional dispositions themselves are in our nature, but that their expression is often "contra naturam." As such, the point of action wrt emotions, and of social institutions (which ritualize certain actions) is not to destroy these emotional dispositions, but to properly moderate them.
For example, just as fear naturally indicates danger (and so a need for safety), and anger naturally indicates disrespect (and so a need for respect), so jealousy indicates a certain need not being met (perhaps a need for appreciation?). However, just as anger and fear can be disordered or poorly expressed, perhaps jealousy also can be disordered or poorly expressed. And perhaps it is this poor (e.g. toxic or violent) expression of jealousy to which polyamorists object.
For instance, just because I am angry at someone (bc, say, they insulted me) does not mean I should beat them or try to force them to "respect" me. Respect is only respect when freely given. Likewise, just because I feel afraid that my child will run into the street does not mean I should put her on a leash. Piety is only piety when freely given. Perhaps polyamorists will argue that likewise with jealousy, just because I feel a need for love/appreciation/connection when my partner has other partners, does not mean that I should make my partner sign an eternal contract from which they will never leave (on penalty of eternal damnation!), or even demand exclusivity from that partner. Love is only love when freely given.
In other words, perhaps all of these ways of expressing hard emotions (anger, fear, jealousy) are violent or toxic ways of responding to natural needs. Violent because they try to secure by force or manipulation goods that are of necessity freely given. Toxic because this kind of expression undermines the satisfaction of the needs the emotions indicate. E.g. No one respects the too angry man, the anxious mother's fear undermines her love, and the lover's over-jealousy destroys the foundation of trust upon which a healthy relationship depends.
This position admits your 1, 2, and 3, but differs from each of them insofar as it suggests a proper function of emotions to be met, namely, to have things like appreciation/love, piety, respect (and to indeed to become more loving, pious, and respectful!), and suggests that the status quo tends towards disorder, particularly wrt jealousy.
Do you think this position is coherent?
I don't think jealousy is a social construct. That's not where emotions originate.
It seems like it would have value in keeping your own set of genes moving forward. So it's likely hard wired for humans especially for men.
There are definitely people who are cool with sharing their partner, there are folks who even find the idea and practice sexually stimulating.
As far as reasoning yourself out of the emotion of jealousy goes, that seems unlikely to me. Strong emotions trump reason in my experience.
I was at a social gathering not long ago and a woman announce to a group that she doesn't see why she shouldn't be able to love ten men. Her husband disagreed. All I could think at the time was "Did you read him in on this belief before tying the knot?"
Could the US function as a multiparty democracy and also a Presidential system? I've been increasingly onboard with the idea that the US should (somehow) transition to using a multiparty system and away from the Democrat-Republican dichotomy. Increasing partisan polarization seems self-evidently bad, and also somewhat undemocratic in that a number of people seem to want political options that just aren't on the menu in America. (Socially conservative, fiscally liberal seems to be the biggest unmet need).
With that being said- multiparty Presidential systems don't seem to have a great track record. This is the norm in the rest of the Americas, and supposedly Mexico, Brazil, and other Latin American countries 'prove' that it mostly doesn't work- the legislature is gridlocked and unable to pass bills, the President increasingly takes on more & more power to bypass a Congress that can't get anything done, he eventually becomes authoritarian, etc. Sounds like the road the US is already on, but worse.
The only other actually functional Presidential country is South Korea, but they seem to have two major parties making up 90% of the legislature. Unless you want to count semi-presidential systems like France, which just confuse me.
Does anyone want to argue for the US to have multiple parties, while retaining a Presidency? Could Congress really pass a budget or major legislation with 4-6 squabbling parties? I'm guessing the major US parties would be Center Left/Pro Business, America 1st/Populist Right, Green/Far Left, Country Club Republicans/Center Right, and Libertarians. Could legislators from these 5 parties really pass a budget every year? I dunno. Or is '2 major parties and a few really minor ones' actually a good system? This is like South Korea mentioned above, but also Australia, Britain, and I believe Canada (the last three obviously being parliamentary)
Australia has compulsory voting and nonpartisan districting, which essentially forces major parties to appeal to the median voter (and thus results in them being rather similar).
I'm not really sure why you distinguish between presidential and parliamentary systems as regards passing laws. The Australian Parliament's law-making function works in a very similar fashion to the US Congress; the main substantive differences are the US filibuster and the convention that the Australian Governor-General does not veto laws (though he does have that power).
The big differences between US and Australian politics are in the executive (presidentially-appointed secretaries vs. ministers selected from Parliament) and in election protocols (compulsory IRV/STV vs. voluntary plurality; note that STV is a proportional-representation system, so the Australian Senate is very much a multiparty house).
'I'm not really sure why you distinguish between presidential and parliamentary systems as regards passing laws' It's like, the biggest difference in the world. The Prime Minister by definition cannot face divided government. This is the absolute most basic, elementary difference between presidential & parliamentary.
The Australian House appears to be 80-90% two parties, whereas the Senate as you note is much more diverse. Pretty interesting that Australia has PR for one but not the other. So we can see the difference between an actual PR system vs. IRV, which I personally think is warmed-over FPTP and achieves basically the exact same result
IRV's advantage over plurality is that it's clone-proof; that is, you can attempt to usurp a party's base without immediately handing victory to your mutual opponent (the way the Bull Moose Party did). The threat of this makes it harder for a party to betray its base, which is a completely-different criterion to what you're looking at. I agree that there are problems with "a house of single-member electorates", but if you have to have one IRV's a lot better than plurality (and for something like a presidential election it's basically ideal).
>It's like, the biggest difference in the world. The Prime Minister by definition cannot face divided government.
1) This isn't actually true; "Senate hostile to House, nothing happens except for bipartisan measures" happens fairly frequently, and "nobody has majority in HoR, minority government" happened in 2010.
2) The Speaker of the US House - the primary legislative equivalent to the Australian PM - can't face an opposed House either. The US President isn't responsible for making laws; Congress is, and Congress functions very similarly to the Australian Parliament (*not* the UK Parliament, as that is essentially unicameral with the crippling of the Lords in 1911). The difference is in the executive - specifically, that the executive is appointed by the legislature.
You want an example of a country where the President is not just the figurehead head of state but also the head of the executive, correct? Here in Ireland we have multi-party but yeah, in practice it's become two main parties. However, the smaller parties can wield influence and at times can be very popular and attain rapid growth.
I do think it would be no harm if the US had a strong third party, even if it was a minor one. The problem seems to be that your system is set up so that effectively, there aren't any mass movements that seem likely to form a third party, and that any third party members elected to Congress need to throw in with either the Republicans or the Democrats to do anything (there was a previous note about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being a Democrat and not a Democrat Socialist of America).
The Libertarian Party is (semi)organised (there was an interesting comment over on a thread at TheMotte about the internal divisions and power-struggles between the factions) but it's not mass popularity, and smaller parties really are the "three men and a dog" variety. You might end up with a viable third party if you managed to get a populist mix of moderate/centrist Republicans and Democrats to peel away and join it, but eh - a populist strongman leader is its own set of problems.
I am skeptical that multiparty systems are more democratic, given that in practice one or two niche parties often are the swing vote and hence are able to demand enactment of policies only supported by a minority of voters. Israel is an obvious example. And, multiparty systems in multicultural states risk being highly polarizing, since there would inevitably be race-based parties. A La Raza party would get far more seats than Libertarians, that's for sure.
> one or two niche parties often are the swing vote and hence are able to demand...policies only supported by a minority
I tend to view that as a plus, because the niche party cannot demand very much that the majority actively opposes. If the majority "holds their nose" and votes for something they don't want, I expect they would only do that to get something in return that they see as more important. In a several-party system, the swing vote should vary over time, giving attention to a variety of niche things. Which could make for some interesting policy.
Of course, when we think of Israel we normally think 'Netanyahu', but his Likud party consistently gets by far the most votes of any party, so Likud would be more powerful under first-past-the-post (which consistently gives disproportionately more power to bigger parties).
Do you have an example of the swing vote changing frequently? Because I can't think of anything. As for what the majority gets in return, they get to stay in power, because there is no actual majority, and hence the plurality party must kowtow to the swing party. As for Likud, it does not at get by far the most votes. Over the last 20 years it has generally gotten about a quarter of the vote. Finally, I am not saying that first-past-the-post/2 party is more democratic. Rather, I am changing the assumption that multiparty systems are more democratic. Each has its own way of falling short of democratic perfection (and, of course, there is the incorrect assumption that "democratic" = "majoritarian.")
Well, I've never lived in a place with a proper (proportional) many-party system, but in Canada the vote tallies for each party often change pretty significantly with each election. It's not necessarily about the swing vote changing frequently, though: multiple coalitions are possible. If one small party is making demands that the big party regards as unreasonable, the big party could make a deal to get votes from a *different* small party instead.
> As for Likud, it does not at get by far the most votes. Over the last 20 years it has generally gotten about a quarter of the vote.
That *is* the most votes of any party.
> I am changing the assumption that multiparty systems are more democratic.
If most people's votes having no effect is your idea of democratic, then yes, first-past-the-post is democratic "by definition".
One question that is relevant is whether the parties present in the legislature have to be the same parties that contest the presidency. I've been thinking about this at a different level.
Within cities, it seems to me that one big source of political dysfunction is that every plausible candidate is a Democrat (or just pretending to be a Republican to get access to a usable ballot line, like Michael Bloomberg), which then means either that the real election is the Democratic primary (like in New York), or that there's a single multi-candidate election where voters just have to interpret the personal feel of a bunch of candidates (as in Los Angles or San Francisco). It would be really helpful if there were local parties, like a "pro-construction" party and a "slow growth" party, so that voters really know what they're getting with one candidate or another. Both parties might work with national Democrats, but in different ways.
I've been imagining various ways to change congressional elections that would enable representation of many smaller parties. That wouldn't change presidential elections unless you made a major change, to a national popular vote with ranked choice or something. So it may end up being that these parties band together to suppose "Democrats" or "Republicans" at the presidential level, even as their coalitions change at the Congressional level.
But I don't know of any country where that sort of pattern occurs. (The closest is Canada, where I understand that many of the provincial parties work in very different ways from the federal parties of the same name, like the British Columbia Liberals.)
'One question that is relevant is whether the parties present in the legislature have to be the same parties that contest the presidency. I've been thinking about this at a different level.... But I don't know of any country where that sort of pattern occurs' To my knowledge (having just finished A Different Democracy, the comparative politics book everyone is raving about rn), having different parties at the local & national level is actually very common. It's the US that's the weird outlier with just two parties at every single level of government.
One unrealistic idea I've been batting around is the idea of literally banning the Democrat & Republican parties at the local level of a state (yes I understand this could never happen, but stay with me). And just letting local politicians organically form new parties as they wish. Maybe the Midwest & non-Boston Northeast could form socially conservative, fiscally liberal parties, say. It would certainly help focus voters on actual local issues, which seem to be neglected in this era of nationalized hyperpartisan politics. Even if you graduate from say the Farm & Labor Party in the Midwest to being a Republican party on the national stage later, you still would have started with the former. Maybe that would help
Schleicher advocates banning statewide parties at the municipal level.
There are cities that disallow partisan elections for mayor. Houston, for one.
Shleicher argues that's even worse, since voters go from negligible information to practically none. Instead he thinks there should be city-specific parties which don't correspond to larger parties.
Here in Canada we don't have higher-level partisan politics on local ballots anywhere as far as I know.
David Schleicher has written about why there's no partisan competition within cities.
http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1228735775.shtml
That's great! I love the ending:
"I also propose thinking about something more radical, a rule that parties that bars parties registered at the statewide level (i.e. the major parties) from having a ballot line in local elections. The idea is that local-only parties would spring up (the elections would still be partisan) to contest local elections. At first, these parties might look like simulacra of the major parties but would, though competitive pressure, develop locally competitive identities over time. Again, this is not anti-party or pro-non-partisan election -- I think parties are essential in world where voters are rationally ignorant of the policy stances of candidates -- but, rather, is focused on using election law to incentivize the creation of parties that are competitive at the local level and that provide heuristics that provide voters with information."
I wonder how much of my thinking on a lot of this has been influenced by me encountering his ideas in various formats online, and how much is just that these are good ideas that lots of people have discussions that lead towards.
In many provinces we don't have all the federal equivalent parties by name at all. There's no formal relationship between most provincial parties and their nearest federal equivalents, with various splits and mergers occurring in different places at different times. Most provinces have a long history of two dominant parties, but it's not the same two everywhere.
Federal politics are really quite separate from provincial as far as loyalties and mood associations are concerned. But then I know very few people who have strong, outspoken partisan affiliation at any level,and very few Canadians join political parties. We think Americans are silly for having so much mental space tied up in partisan affiliation.
It probably depends on how representation of multiple parties is achieved; with a first-past-the-post system like the US currently has, Duverger's Law shows that two parties are all but guaranteed.
Many multiparty democracies have formalized roles for the parties (e.g., proportional representation); I suspect stronger parties are more prone to bad outcomes. I personally like the idea of Condorcet RCV for many reasons, but the relevant one here is that it makes primaries irrelevant so parties become much less central to the electoral system.
Canada has fptp and (in semi recent history) both regional and national parties that matter at the federal level. The US is the weird outlier here.
Duverger's "law" describes a tendency or attractor of FPTP regimes. Once two parties begin to dominate, it's hard for other parties to gain traction. But I've heard that, in addition, the Republicans and Democrats have gone above and beyond other countries in efforts to suppress third parties (e.g. the Commission on Presidential Debates is bipartisan, not nonpartisan - it's designed to exclude third parties; and various state-specific rules try to prevent "little guys" or small parties from getting on ballots).
There's also the phenomenon of US Presidential politics, which mean that obtaining a regional block of legislative seats is sort of a dead end, and US third-party efforts are almost exclusively focused on the Presidency, which is obviously doomed.
In Canada's actually-existing fptp Parliament, we typically have either the Liberals (milquetoast centre left) or Conservatives (milquetoast centre right) in government, often (and currently) as a minority, with the mostly-urban, more socialist, union-backed NDP and regional Bloc Quebecois nationalist party both getting enough seats to matter and the Greens picking up something. Various fringe parties rarely get anywhere, but it's not that they absolutely couldn't. We don't really do coalitions like in proportional list systems and our sometimes-minority governments work out fine, and the smaller parties matter a great deal in Parliament even though they are unlikely to ever govern.
All to say that Duverger's Law describes a real attractor effect, but it's short-sighted of Americans to blame the style of their ballots for all of their polarization woes when the Anglosphere contains two good counterexamples against their n=1, and in that broader context it's not even clear whether the FPTP attractor effect is necessarily *bad*.
US primaries are a huge part of this, too.
If you have a political position that a political party establishment doesn't approve of, then you can still run in the primary. That's just not true in other countries, so those people set up new parties. Sometimes they become successful.
Most European social-democratic parties in the 1970s and 1980s were dominated by union members from heavy industries. The same is true of much of the Democratic Party in the US. Auto unions in Michigan, coal miners in West Virginia, etc.
This meant that environmentalists in Europe had to create their own new Green parties - the unions would block an environmentalist from ever becoming a candidate. But an American could just run in a primary. And while they'd clearly lose to a union member in Michigan or West Virginia, they might do better in a city, like Seattle or New York or San Francisco where other parts of the Democratic coalition were dominant.
But if you were an environmentalist in Cologne in 1980, you couldn't join the SPD, because union members (possibly not from Cologne, but from more industrial areas) would be able to block you from ever being a candidate through the internal committees of the SPD. So you joined the Greens, and so the German Greens had much better quality candidates than the US Greens. The same applied to someone in Paris joining the PS, or in Manchester joining Labour, or in Milan joining the PSI, or in Amsterdam joining the PvdA.
American third parties were much more successful before the primary system became established in the 1940s and 1950s than since. Minnesota Farmer-Labor, the Progressive and Populist parties, several state Socialist parties in the 1920s, etc.
Thanks for this, we don't get enough ex-Anglosphere comparative politics for comparison.
The vibe I get comparing historical American politics to today's is that regional and particular considerations have all been subsumed into the binary, with the two-party system not just in the Duverger's sense but assumed deeply in the popular consciousness and ingrained in all kinds of other institutions (random regulatory committee needs at least X R and Y D members). Whereas two-party eras of American politics were more interesting and uncertain.
*In Westminster countries "Government" is just the executive, which makes for some silly discussions with Americans
I think that the impacts of the primary system in the US - especially the ballot access rules for the primary - are massively underrated.
Ballot access as a party nominee in the general election is vastly easier outside the US. For instance, a UK candidate for MP requires a petition signed by ten electors and a refundable deposit of £500 (about $600) - refunded if you get 5% of the vote or more.
Ballot access to the primary election in a UK major party would usually require you to undergo a formal approval process by a central committee of the party, and then, once on the "approved list", you apply to individual districts; if there are more than ~3 applicants, you have to go through a shortlisting process run by a local committee of the party - normally reducing the number of candidates to four to six. The electorate would then be the dues-paying members of the party in the relevant electoral area. In a constituency that a party has a realistic chance of winning, that's likely to be about a thousand, with turnout usually of about 50%.
This is the process in the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and SNP; in Labour, instead of a shortlisting process, you have to be nominated by either a ward, ie an even more local group of members, or by an affiliated trades union in the constituency.
Most UK parties have a procedure whereby an incumbent is automatically reselected or there is a primary with no other candidate (ie a vote on whether or not to reselect, with a competitive process being opened only if the vote is not to reselect.
You can see how the party committees have far more control over the nominees, but it's much easier to challenge the parties from outside. And the UK has the same voting system. With proportional systems in most European countries (UK and France are the only fully non-proportional systems, though several countries are mixed, eg Hungary), the parties are even more internally homogenous but also it's easier to found new parties.
Your * footnote is largely right, but not quite.
"Government" has two meanings, one is the political leadership of the executive and the other is the entire executive, ie including the professional civil service. People who work for the civil service will say that, not that they work for the Government. Only the ministers and their "special advisors" would say "I work for the Government".
(Reagan's "I'm here from the Government and I'm here to help" line came over as "I am an elected politician and I'm here to help" in the UK; the idea that it applied to postal workers or social security administrators didn't occur to me for many years)
I did design a way, though it required a constitutional amendment and was therefore impossible.
Make the Electoral College a real institution - elected by a closed list PR system* in each state and meeting permanently in a new building in Washington DC. It has the power, at any time, by simple majority to replace the President with a new one for the remainder of the elected term of the President.
Now, you can have a true coalition presidency. Say the Democrat and the Republican both get 40% of the vote, a Libertarian gets 8%, a Green gets 8% and some sort of bothsides centrist mushy party ("NoLabels") or something gets the other 4%. [In practice 2% or so will get spread across 25 tiny parties; let's just pretend those people abstained because they effectively did].
So now, you can have a Democrat-Green-NoLabels coalition or a Republican-Libertarian-NoLabels coalition. If the big parties break up, then you could get some more interesting options. And, obviously, that's an election where left and right are tied; if one side wins, then you get a nice simple two-party coalition.
How does that work in the Presidency? Well, you have a Democrat as President, but they agree to appoint (say) a Green as EPA Administrator and as Secretary of Transportation and a NoLabels as Attorney General - and they promise that their second Supreme Court appointment will go to the Greens and the fourth to NoLabels, and probably a bunch of other junior appointments. If the President then breaks the deal, then the Greens or NoLabels can go to the Republicans and say "how about a deal where you get to be President now?" In theory you could do this in the electoral college now, but the President could just ignore it and appoint whoever he wanted.
You'd also give the college various powers to investigate the Presidency and the executive - that way the minor parties in the coalition can make sure that things are being done in ways they approve of (right to subpoena anyone and demand they speak, no executive privilege applies because the college is part of the executive, right to access any papers they want; there's presumably a "spying committee" that gets to see secret papers and has the power to declassify them).
The legislature would still be separate, could be elected however you like. But the Greens in the legislature would presumably be close to the Greens in the Executive, so you'd have some leverage there to get legislation done.
*I'm normally hostile to closed lists, because they empower the parties over the individual elected people, but since the "party" in this case is really the presidential candidate, what it does is concentrate the significance in the hands of the presidential candidate, ie the President, which is the point - also the voter really should be focusing on the personal characteristics of the President, not of the individual member of the college.
I like your idea, but if we went to that much trouble to change the Constitution, I'd just go all the way for a parliamentary system and PR :)
Also, with midterm elections (and high US partisanship), I'd imagine that the opposition party winning the midterm would result in immediately replacing the President every single time. Maybe it'd take a bit for norms to break down, but as soon as it happens once, opposition parties would always retaliate when it was their time. You know what hyperpartisan reasoning sounds like- 'they replaced President AOC on Day One, how can you not vote to replace President Carlson now, don't be a wimp, we always get pushed around by the Other Side', etc. So basically you get 2 year, rotating Presidencies
Electoral college is only elected every four years - their term would be the same as the President.
The legislature is still completely separate.
Note: you can get a president of without a legislative majority, and that's still going to be quite likely after the midterms (it's possible on regular election day, but the systems are similar enough that will only happen if it's a very narrow majority one way and a equally narrow one the other way).
Bicameral parliament: one elected, one selected via sortition.
Lots of interesting stuff in this idea, I'll have to think about it!
Do the parties run a preferred candidate in the election, or just a party line with the electors empowered to pick the candidate? If the former, then when do the parties change their preferred candidate in between elections, in case there's a crisis of confidence and the electors choose a new president? (Presumably someone that seemed like a good candidate at the time in 2016 might no longer seem so good in 2019.)
I expect the answer is that they run a candidate in the election, but if they want to change President in midterm, that will be a matter for the electors - and, given US norms, they won't have a preferred candidate unless and until the electors are planning to change the President. The election nominee might take on that role after the convention, ie for the last few months before the election. But US parties out of office generally just don't have a Presidential candidate.
This actually has advantages - look at the UK situation when trying to change PM in 2019; the main opposition party had a leader / PM candidate who made sense (to them) in an election, but was not acceptable to the other parties that they would have needed in a coalition. But proposing someone else from the same party as a coalition PM was seen as being (party-internal) treason, and the result was that a PM who had a majority that wanted to get rid of him couldn't be replaced.
While I'm 100% in favor of a several-party system, the Big Two certainly aren't. I expect them both to work hard to thwart any efforts in this direction.
I've been thinking more about this, and a multiparty system in the US just sounds like a total disaster. You wouldn't be changing any of the things that truly make American politics crazy- extremely ideological activist groups or single donors on each side, constant need to fundraise, constant campaigning, plus a media & funding environment that encourages candidates to be outlandishly crazy in exchange for more campaign cash. I can't speak to Marjorie Taylor Greene's inner mental state, but being dramatically over the top has made her one of the premiere Republican fundraisers right now. The incentive structure is not just nuts- it actually incentivizes politicians to *be* nuts.
So you'd have these smaller parties, and they'd probably be even more intensely ideological. The MTG-lead America First party would be on one end, the AOC-lead Justice Dems would be on the other end. Would they help pass basic stuff like a budget if they were the swing votes, or would they hold out for insane concessions to please their base? 'I won't pass the debt ceiling until all illegal immigrants have been deported' or 'I won't pass the debt ceiling until all fossil fuel companies have been nationalized'.
The standard poly sci argument against multiparty presidential systems is that they can't get anything passed due to squabbling, and so the president becomes more & more authoritarian. Sure sounds like what would happen to the US here
Thinking about what would happen if you changed the electoral system and nothing else is as strange as asking "what would happen if Donald Trump opened up the borders to Mexican immigration". Just as that wouldn't happen, we wouldn't get electoral reform under the status quo. (the electoral system is, of course, what allows or discourages a several-party system.) So I consider campaign finance / corruption reform to be my top priority in U.S. politics (which HR.1/S.1 includes, to some extent): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE
> standard poly sci argument against multiparty presidential systems
I thought it was the standard conservative/Republican argument. I don't agree that having more than 2 parties prevents things from getting done, and I see no reason that the existence of a separate executive branch would cause more gridlock than we have already. Have you really heard political scientists saying that? The constitution disallows executive overreach; having 3 or more major parties doesn't change that.
Yes, it is/was the consensus position, what you learn when you take Poly Sci 101, etc. The example here is Latin America- all of Latin America utilizes the presidential system, and all of Latin America utilizes multiple parties. They (continent of almost one billion people) have been doing this since at least the 50s or 60s, so we have decades & decades of real-world experience that it's just a suboptimal system. The parties squabble too much to get major legislation passed. In theory they wouldn't squabble quite so much, but my argument is that additional American political parties would be explicitly & highly ideological, so the gridlock potential goes up quite a bit.
Full disclosure of priors, I think that a parliamentary system with PR is obviously the best one, but we're talking about America where moving to that would require multiple Constitutional changes, overthrowing a system we've had for over 200 years, etc. So probably not going to happen
Did taking a social anxiety prescription medication improve anyone's overall courage level? I know this seems like a bit of a random question, so let me explain- I not only have generalized anxiety (especially in social situations), but I'm just not a particularly brave person in general. My CNS is very quick to the fight or flight response- I am just frightened by a lot of things. If someone confronts me verbally, I experience such an adrenaline rush that I find speaking difficult. I am jumpy and easily spooked by little things, a car backfiring, etc. Public speaking is completely off the table. I have always been physically pretty cowardly (afraid to jump off a cliff into a lake when all my friends were doing it, backed down from fistfights, and so on). I am now approaching middle age, so this seems to be a pretty fixed psychological trait. Oddly I am pretty physically durable and have done some fairly challenging things, so the 'deal with fatigue & pain' part of my brain seems to work fine- just not with fear.
When you are diagnosed with 'anxiety', supposedly there are a variety of prescription drugs that reduce or manage it. I've never taken any of them, but I was curious to hear from people who have- does a drug that (I suppose) makes you less anxious also make you less fearful if, say, someone comes up and angrily confronts you about an issue? Does your general fear response lessen? Is this a permanent effect? For example, I read that the North Hollywood bank robbers took phenobarbital before their robbery & massive shootout to calm their nerves, but I'm not clear if one can take that every day regularly. I will say that alcohol absolutely has this effect on me, both reducing anxiety & increasing courage, but obviously I would prefer not to drink heavily every day.
Maybe some mix of anti-anxiety meds and also testosterone would do the trick? Anyways, I'd be curious to hear people's experiences with various prescriptions. (I'm also going to experiment with magnesium supplementation, which I've heard can reduce anxiety)
Sertraline did not have this effect on me. I felt less anxious in the way that my brain seemed to be less prone to seek out and latch onto feelings and memories to feel anxious about, but it did not noticably make me less anxious about doing things. I was taking it for minor social anxiety and as far as I could tell, I was still just as apprehensive of social situations as before.
I was diagnosed with F41.2 and was prescribed medication. I reckon that the thing that happened was, in fact, a complete opposite.
I had suicidal tendencies and it provoked "all or nothing" response. Basically, I could do almost anything I wanted because "I will die soon". Now my sense of anxiety response is calibrated. When I'm in social non-threatening situations, I'm usually calm. When I'm in social threatening situations, it provokes "fight or flight" response, usually with (verbally) "fight" (I'm quite weak and I can't restrict myself, which results in injuries on my or other's side). When it's something like exam, I feel anxious but not in "fight" sense. Overall, balance restored.
So, I'd say it depends.
I think what you're looking for is not medication but an exercises on how to act in such situations. You still feel afraid but overcome yourself in stressful situation. Or maybe you find out that the reason you're afraid is a complete BS and you feel much less anxious. For me it was CBT that did the trick.
Paroxetine (SSRI) made me less socially anxious.
Hard to even remember exemplary situations. Much of the formerly-anxiety-inducing stuff just got parsed as unremarkable business-as-usual.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in this at all.
A lot of musicians take beta blockers to counter performance anxiety/stage fright, and it's reputed to be especially effective at reducing the adrenaline rush "fight or flight" sensation you mention.
CBT is also known to help with this. Here's a workbook that I've found helpful, although my anxiety is quite a bit different from yours: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1626250154
Cultivating courage is different from reducing anxiety, and has to do with practicing courageous habits, as well as mindset, framing, spiritual work, etc. That said, you can certainly work on the anxiety and the courage in parallel.
I had pretty intense work related anxiety, and was able to get on Lorazepam.
It was like all the promise of modern medicine made manifest, it was for me a miracle. It instantly and totally resolved my anxiety, it made me relaxed and comfortable, and it even made me happier(maybe that was just finding the joy in a life not ruled by anxiety?). It didn't stop there! It also wildly improved my sleep (which was bad before the work related anxiety) and just totally turned my life around. I had zero problems with tolerance taking 4mg (two in the morning, one at lunch, one at night) for about eight months. I was weaned off the drug (against my wishes) over about a month and never had any withdrawal symptoms, and shortly after I quit my job.
I really wish it was easier to get benzos/stay on them.
After more than a year of corona, do we have any indication whether there is a dose effect? I.e., whether people who are infected through a higher virus dose get more sick?
It used to be a big question at some point, but I haven't heard anything. Did people realize that it's not a thing, or did they just give up?
Given that the infection is, to a first approximation, a race between the immune response and the virus multiplying, I'd expect giving the virus a head start is pretty bad.
Apparently some literature tries to quantify that: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33119733/
Thank you, but that is not what I meant. This is about the probability of getting infected.
What I meant is about how severe your illness gets. There is the hypothesis that people who get infected by a high initial exposition have higher risk that their disease takes a severe course. For example, that they are more likely to be hospitalized.
I became convinced of this early on by means of the analogy between a city and an individual. A city has an outbreak whose severity can be measured by how many individuals in the city get infected. A body has an infection whose severity can be measured by how many cells in the body get infected. At the city level, it was clear that both whether the outbreak became an ongoing epidemic, and also how bad the outbreak was at its peak, both depended on whether the city had 1000 cases or 100 cases or 10 cases at the moment it realized it needed to go into lockdown. Similarly, at the body level, it seems quite plausible that whether the infection takes hold, and how bad it is at its peak, both might depend on how many viral particles were established at the moment the immune system realized it had to get into work.
But the problem is that we really have very little information on what the initial dose was that a person received. If we did challenge trials where we took health 20 year old volunteers and inoculated some of them with doses of different sizes, we might get a sense of this. But for purely observational studies in the real world, the only proxies I've heard are studying people who got infected in the household compared to the workplace, and people who got infected in covid wards vs outside the healthcare sector. Both of these types of studies are going to be heavily confounded, and more importantly, I don't know of anyone who tried to gather the systematic data needed to do either.
This makes intuitive sense to me. The adaptive immune system takes time to mutate matching antibodies, so the greater the initial dose, the greater the viral load can grow before that happens.
One thing that makes me skeptical of this story, though, is that I would expect the viral load to grow exponentially, and for the adaptive immune system to work at a speed proportional to the current viral load.
So a priori I could see it going either way.
I thought the common understanding (from > 12 months ago; no idea about more current) was that it's very likely that there is a dose effect*, but its really hard to get any useful data on this for humans, so the best we're likely to do is speculation.
* possibly highly non-linearly, likely subject to individual-level variation, etc.
Given the assumption that there'll be a nuclear war between the West and the PRC at a uniformly-distributed time in the next 15 years, what actions would best preserve one's life and livelihood?
Obvious #1 for "life" is "live somewhere that is not likely to be nuked or invaded". I'm thinking this resolves to "not the PRC, not Taiwan/Ryukyus/South Korea, not a large Western city".
Obvious #2 for "life" - at least, in a Western country - is "maintain sufficient food and water supplies to outlast a supply chain failure" (given that most supply chains are controlled from large cities).
But some of the details on #2 aren't so obvious - I'm not sure how long it'd take to re-activate supply chains. I'm also not sure how important personal-safety and anti-theft considerations are in this instance - local police exist and are obviously capable of acting on their own initiative, but I'm not sure of how well they'd cope with a starving populace. And I've got no solid ideas for "livelihood" (besides "don't invest your life savings in somewhere likely to get nuked or invaded") and I might be missing something for "life".
Thoughts?
We can hope for a), but I gave the assumption for the sake of argument. I'm sure I don't want b); there are things I'd die for, but dying for no purpose seems wasteful and I'm pretty sure I can be a net positive afterward.
Is nuclear winter not a part of your considerations? I didn't check the numbers but it feels like it's really hard to irradiate the planet to the levels where it seriously reduces human life expectancy *after* all the other stuff. On the other hand, a couple of "years without summer" on top of collapse of central government could really kill more than the bombs.
Yeah... might be the best prep is just spending your money on some decadence right now. I mean, you might not want to live in the aftermath and/or all your prep may not even work out and you won't survive anyway.
I'll eat your glowing corpse to get a few more hours of life if that is what it takes.
How about sufficient food for a nuclear winter, and sufficient ammo to defend your stash?
This is not going to be pleasant regardless, or even, for most of the population, survivable.
"Sufficient ammo to defend your stash" only really crops up if either a) the state fails and you're defending it against bandits/warlords, or b) you are attempting to defend your stash *against the state* (i.e. turning warlord). I think it is fairly obvious that taking option b) does not optimise your odds of survival, but I'd be interested to hear other perspectives on the likelihood of a) happening (personally, I'm not seeing it in the West; the state might suffer a temporary crisis of leadership, but the monopoly on force and national identity are sufficiently strong that I can't see anyone making a successful play at warlordism).
Who do you expect will be growing food?
I'm not sure where you're going with this, but:
The same farmers who were growing food beforehand. The food-supply issue is very real, but it's mostly with distribution, not production.
(At least, in Oz and the USA. I'm not certain whether the PRC and EU produce enough food to feed themselves; they have positive trade balances in the ag sector but AIUI that's mostly on the basis of cash crops rather than staples.)
It would depend on how much supply to the farmers (seed, fuel, machinery, food) is disrupted.
Good point, although I imagine that would take a long time to become a fatal problem.
It would depend on what is destroyed.
There is no such thing as sufficient ammo to defend your stash. By the time you might get to being seriously hungry without a "stash", either the government will have reasserted control in your area, or every random wannabe thief who wants your stash will have been either killed by or joined up with the hundred-strong band of thieves devoted to seizing every stash in the county. There is no amount of ammo that compensates for your being outnumbered a hundred to one. And there is no "my stash isn't worth the trouble; if I have enough ammo they'll pass me by", because it isn't just the material value of your stash, it's the value to the proto-warlord of the principle, "NOBODY gets to hang on to their private stash in MY territory".
How about sufficient good friends to take on a warlord? That's the part everyone seems to want to skip. When's the last time you had dinner with your immediate meatspace neighbors? Because that's going to be a better investment than another box of 5.56mm or whatever.
Live in a rural area, make sure you and your neighbours have a high-trust tight-knit community. Teamwork is king in a crisis.
First year there's going to be plenty of food from all the cattle that gets slaughtered for lack of feed. Second winter will suck: probably +50% dead from cold and starvation. Your rural community will fare better. It's possible that you'll have to defend yourself from hungry mobs (easy) and professional raiders (harder), but I don't know if that really will be a big as an issue as people image.
In the nuclear war case in particular, a lot of the people who would theoretically be making up the hungry mobs and professional raiders would likely have been eliminated by the bombs themselves. More the invading army you might have to worry about.
Stock up on postassium iodide.
Avoid living near hard targets like missile siloes or long runways, as these are likely targets for surface detonations which produce fallout.
It might be wise to look at wind and precipitation patterns to see where fallout is likely to end up (I'd be worried about the jet stream carrying material across the pacific and raining out on the PNW).
For livelihood, have a profession that will be needed in a post-WWIII world, such as engineering, medicine or making artificial owls.
Learn Mandarin
I didn't worry about it in the '80s and I'm not worrying about it now.
Anyway, in the '80s you could at least make up a semi-credible storyline where the USSR invaded Germany and the triggers all got pulled. Sorry Taiwan, we love you too but not that much. And aside from China invading Taiwan, what is the scenario people envisage in which China and the US (I assume) start lobbing nukes at each other?
China goes to invade Taiwan. The US moves an aircraft carrier group to block. China launches missiles based in China at the carrier to get it to move away. The US carrier's planes attack the missile bases and take them out. China figures that the only way it can win is to launch hydrogen bombs at the carrier.
That sounds like the only way to lose, not win. I don't think anything would be more effective at unifying a global counter response than being the first to resort to nuclear weapons.
Also, we have gone nuclear here but still only tactical. It's alarming but citybusters are not the next step.
Unfortunately for US force projection, carriers are actually pretty easy to take out with modern missile systems. Moving a carrier group into the Taiwan Strait is more or less only a signal of commitment to Taiwan, not an actually good military maneuver. Dropping a nuke on the carrier would be a massive waste of resources and an unnecessary diplomatic blunder with the rest of the world - not to mention inviting a US nuclear response.
Fortunately for the world, the scenarios where the US and China actually go to nuclear war are far less reasonable and possible than with the USSR. That is, unless China goes a very different direction. The Pacific Ocean is a great barrier between our interests, where neither side is likely to be able to launch a successful invasion against mainland targets. That leaves Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and possibly some other local targets for the Chinese, that the US may or may not want to go to total war to defend. Given the aforementioned missile technology, we may be able to defend at least Japan from invasion just by destroying incoming landing craft. (Bombing casualties could be insane though...). Korea may be on its own in that scenario, as well as Taiwan if the Chinese really went all out.
Of course, all of this depends on the rest of the world being willing to leave this to America. Increasingly, it appears that even other regional powers like India, despite being far behind the Chinese in a direct confrontation, may be willing or even eager to dogpile if the Chinese became overtly aggressive against their neighbors.
The folks over at survivalblog have written and planned and prepped for this exact situation for decades. I really highly recommend their articles. (The site has a bit of a religious tone that you may or may not appreciate, but it doesn't interfere with the advice on food storage and stockpiling.)
The TL:DR version? Minimum 1 year's supply of food stored, water source located and laid in, and a fallout shelter for the first few weeks/months. (Doesn't have to be fancy, can be the central hallway in your basement with the right prep and some simple materials, we're talking duct tape and tarps.)
Nuclear war is survivable if you don't live in a city that gets targeted, you just have to plan ahead.
Why a year of food? A month will mostly deal with fallout, and - while it's hard to guess how long the supply chains would take to be re-established - I can't help but think that it would take substantially less than a year of no food before hoarders start getting their hoards confiscated.
You already seem to know the answer to this - a month is not enough time because that's the point where people could even think about opening supply chains. You would need a buffer, and a year is a pretty good buffer without going overboard. Because the major distribution centers are likely to have been destroyed or heavily affected, anything less than six months is an unnecessary risk.
Protecting your food from raiders/angry neighbors is a separate conversation, but I don't see how the answer to "how could you defend your stockpile" is going to be "don't have a stockpile so you are also starving."
As Doolittle says, there's no way supply chains are re-established within a month after a nuclear war.
In fact, after anything but the most limited nuclear war, they probably won't be "re-established" so much as "re-built from scratch and scraps." it will be a process lasting decades.
The "year's supply of stored food." is less about giving you time to wait for someone else to re-establish supply chains and more about giving you time to build your own. Whether that be by planting large vegetable gardens, developing formal or informal trade networks, ect.
As to people trying to steal your food; well, again, I'll recommend SurvivalBlog, those folks have thought through every angle on that particular problem six ways from Sunday for years. (Their best case advice essentially boils down to "Move to an isolated rural area with excellent firing lines, have your whole home, gardens and orchard hidden from observation both from the road and the air, fortify the whole area tougher than the Atlantic Wall, and guard it with thousands of rounds of .308 rifle ammunition and have extra stockpile for charity to give to people who ask nicely." and, while I respect that level of commitment to survival, it's well beyond what I personally aim for, and would make active participation in the rebuilding somewhat difficult.
My own survivalist goals are basically to have a year's supply of food laid in for myself, have a room in my basement permanently set up as a fallout shelter, and have enough fruit production from my yard that I can trade surplus to others and help with that whole "rebuilding".
I'm not questioning "2-3 months" - christ, I had almost that much for the first wave of COVID - I'm more getting at "if you think supply lines will be out longer than that, you need more robust measures than a hoard (like farming, as you say), because a hoard can and probably will be confiscated by that point".
No one would disagree that you'll need to move off of your stored food onto something more permanent, the problem with say, a 3 month stockpile is; what happens if the balloon goes up on, say, 1 December? (Assuming you're in the Northern Hemisphere.)
3 months will only get you to the end of February, and I don't know about where you live, but in my neck of the woods, there are no crops ready to harvest in February. A year's supply means that whenever the balloon goes up, you have time to wait till the start of growing season, put in your seeds, and wait to harvest time, all within your food stockpile window.
Furthermore, crops in fields/gardens are a lot harder to protect from people who would like to steal them from you, first of all, they're more obvious, people will be more likely to see them, and thus, know that you have something worth stealing.
Your stockpiled food in your basement won't be visible from the street, so it's only at risk from bandits going door to door to break into each home to search it for food. Hopefully a relatively rare occurrence, since doing so would certainly be a very dangerous occupation for them, if you want to prepare for that possibility, I suggest a bullpup rifle.
What about preparing to become a local warlord?
Uh, well, I'd probably recommend reading Machevelli's "The Prince" Sun Tzu's "Art of War" Clauswitz's "On War" the Bible in full, with particular attention paid to the actions of King David and King Solomon, and generally, just a lot about ethics.
It's a lot easier to do evil unintentionally if you're trying to control territory through force. (If you're going to try to be an evil warlord, I don't want to offer you tips.)
Your best bet is to make a lot of friends at the local gun range, and start out as a community protection group. You will have a natural incentive to "pacify" local raiders/enemies/other groups to provide protection to your own. If you are a local power, you also have a good chance of getting lots of voluntary recruits who want the safety and protection you can provide.
Rinse and repeat as necessary to reach your desired level of power.
Let's say that in a war with the US over Taiwan, China has decided to use a nuclear weapon against one city, what should we predict about this city? My guess is that it would be a city in a pro-US country that does not have nuclear weapons nor have a large number of Americans living in it. A small Japanese city would probably be ideal in part because of China's WW II driven hostility to Japan.
I have to assume they are smart enough to not be the first to strike.
First to use nuclear weapons - no, the PRC has no reason to do that. First to use nuclear weapons against a city - more likely.
(The scenario here would be something like: PLA attempts cross-Strait invasion; US CBG intervenes; PLA land air and conventional missiles sink CBG; US uses nuclear SLBMs to destroy the airfields and missile silos in order for another CBG to move in; PRC launches counter-value, believing - potentially even correctly - that its deterrent is under attack and will be destroyed if not used.)
Don't live near military bases relevant to Western power projection in the Pacific, e.g. San Diego or Pearl Harbor. Don't live near major US command and control nodes, e.g. the Pentagon. And don't live in cities that are particularly important to US or Allied prestige and economic power, e.g. Washington, New York, San Francisco, or Seoul, Tokyo, Sydney for the non-USians here. If you need to work in those cities, live in the outlying suburbs. Other than that, make the sorts of precautions you'd want to make for a major earthquake/hurricane/riot/whatever, and maybe do a bit of research and preparation for e.g. improvised short-term fallout shelter in your basement.
This isn't your grandfather's cold war, and the People's Republic of China isn't the old Soviet Union. There aren't a thousand nuclear missiles aimed at the United States on hair-trigger alert; China would be hard-pressed to launch even a hundred missiles at CONUS targets if they wanted to, and they don't particularly want to.
A nuclear war with China would be a Very Bad Thing, which almost nobody wants. But the "Mad Max" post-apocalyptic fantasies need to be left in the 20th century.
My understanding is that the PRC has recently begun expanding its arsenal significantly (from ~150 warheads during the Cold War to ~350 and rising). It is questionable how many of these are capable of being rapidly deployed, though.
Most of the expansion is in short- to intermediate-range weapons; there's a number of ways that those could be used, but they're not well suited for a "make sure Yankee-Land is especially totally destroyed in the event of war" strategy.
I'd say move to Brazil. It's not particularly close to the combatants, and doesn't seem likely to become a target itself. Also big enough to defend itself in the postwar chaos.
(That said, I don't take this threat seriously. I assume that not getting blown up is a high priority for both U.S. and Chinese leadership.)
Uruguay and Chile are also good options for the same reasons. Uruguay is also quite welcoming of immigrants/expats, and tops a lot of lists for "Best places to live abroad."
Over at TheMotte I had a debate about lockdowns where to TL;DR the other point of view:
Lockdowns are popular among the professional managerial class but unpopular among the working class. Polls showing that lockdowns were popular everywhere were run by the PMC and paid for by the PMC, and thus cannot be trusted.
My actual question is, assuming that is true and there is effort to make lockdowns look more popular than they really are. What hard evidence could we use to see through the spin, or to prove that the polls are accurate? I asked in that discussion but didn't get any answers, I thought I'd ask here because it is an interesting question.
One thing to keep in mind is that even from the very beginning, working class individuals had no option but to keep going out. Mostly it was going to work, but they also had fewer options for delivered food and supplies. There was a big push in rural areas during those first two complete shut down weeks to remember the truck drivers who were still working and needed places to get food while on the road. The PMC seems to have forgotten that they existed and would be needed to keep delivering food. There was also the need for "grocery store employees" which was recognized by the PMC and they were included in emergency laws mandating pandemic pay.
To link that back with your question - it's important to keep in mind that the only groups able to actually lock down were the PMC, so of course it was run by and paid for by the PMC. They paid the rest of society to bring them all the things they wanted and needed right to their homes. It's was pretty surreal watching PMC members on my Facebook feed chastising people for not staying home, while they suggested the alternative was "just order what you need online!" Who did they think was bringing them their food? A complete lack of understanding about the supply chain was definitely there as well.
To add to this, the fact working class individuals (not all of them, lots of waiters stayed home for example) can't avoid going out is a good reason for the working class to support lockdowns.
If all the PMC are working from home and staying at home they're not catching the virus, and spreading it to you at your job.
Look at polls from Fox News, or any other organization that positions itself as anti-PMC and is big enough to run its own polls. According to this theory they should show substantially different results.
I agree that should work, but the counter argument was that anti-lockdown news like The Telegraph (the example I used) was pandering to the working class while not doing anything that might actually harm their class interests like running a poll that shows a different result. Pointing out that the telegraph's readers are middle class didn't make a difference.
What exactly is the proposed mechanism by which polls are untrustworthy? Are they claiming that Gallup et al. literally lie about the numbers of responses they got or do they have some special technique for making sure people answer in the way they want? Drilling into how exactly this fraud is supposed to be occurring might get you to some falsifiable details.
I think it's a cultural and values divide that overlaps with the jobs people do, but that someone culturally in the PMC or middle class would, in my expectation, be more likely to support lockdowns than a prole and vice versa.
Okay, I'm reading this Noah Smith article and the graph about doctors has me confuzzled. There are more *Copts*, relatively speaking, than the other ethnic group? Copts? As in "Coptic Christians from Egypt" who are a persecuted minority? Let me just try and find some population figures to give me a foothold here:
https://minorityrights.org/minorities/copts/
"Egyptian Copts are the biggest Christian community in the Arab world. Estimates of their numbers vary, but generally range between 4.7 and 7.1 million. They are proportionately most numerous in Upper Egypt."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_Americans
"As of 2018, there were some 500,000 Copts living in the United States."
The short Wikipedia article seems to imply that Coptic immigration (prior to the Egyptian revolution of 2011) were the educated middle-class, with the poor(er), rural Copts only fleeing to America after the turmoil and upheaval.
So I'd expect more professionals to be the ones emigrating to the US, including doctors. And of course, once here, I'd expect families to steer their kids into the same professions as their parents, hence (possibly) more doctors.
How many Copts back in Egypt are/were doctors, and how did that stack up as a representative sample is, I think, the question that should be asked here. If every single accountant in Nowherestan emigrated to the USA, then I think the graph about "population demographics of accountants amongst ethnic groups" would be skewed so as to make it seem that Nowherestanis were disproportionately accountants by comparison with other ethnic groups.
Or maybe I'm an idiot who can't read a graph might be the simpler answer.
EDIT: Yes, he does address this as selective immigration. But I think Scott's point still stands - the Jewish population of the USA is now at the point of being "just another immigrant group from the Old Country" so that it's not all middle-class professionals coming. That means that Jewish-Americans are as likely as non-Jewish-Americans to go into all kinds of jobs rather than clustering in a particular profession.
The Copts, up until 2011, were selectively immigrating. I think that according as ethnic groups become established, then they will take on the same traits as the general population. We're seeing this in the Jewish-American population. So I think Noah's point about selective immigration being the answer is right in one way but not another:
"If his point here is really just to show that disparities arise for non-racist reasons, he should focus on selective immigration instead of pooh-poohing it. Indian Americans (or Filipino Americans, or Iranian Americans, etc.) provide a much stronger argument against overapplication of disparate impact/systemic racism than Jews do, precisely because we know why these minorities are elite, whereas with Jews it’s kind of mystery meat."
But he is the one sourcing graphs that show Jewish-American elitism is not that elite (e.g. Coptic physicians), so maybe the former elitism is being diluted? If selective immigration is in play for all ethnic groups, and yet Jewish-Americans are over-represented in certain areas, then there must be "mystery meat" involved.
As I understand it, when Jews were immigrating to the US, there were ethnic quotas, but no direct rules about education. People who were better off were more likely to be able to immigrate, but that's not the same thing.
All this type of talk seems to ignore the elephant in the room. Whatever IQ, (intelligence valued by civilizations) is, it is passed down genetically. We've been ignoring this for years... (Since "The Bell Curve" got written off as racist propaganda, when it's main point was
IQ is heritable.)
"Heritable" is not the same as "genetic". "Heritable" includes genetic components, but it also has many other components.
Hmm right. When I wrote that I meant only the genetic part. Then while I was trying to find a better word it struck me that IQ is of course also determined from all those other heritable things too. Culture, language, numbers. (It's hard to do math with roman numerals.) And TBH I think Murray's main point, was that the class divide in this country was enhanced when all really smart kids started going to the same colleges...and then having kids of their own. That ramps up *all* the heritable parts of IQ. So let me just say, IQ is passed down from your ancestors.
A striking thing I learned during Shaun's YouTube analysis of The Bell Curve: 'number of earrings' is to some extent a 'heritable' trait. Also, heritability levels change with the environment. My takeaway is that (i) you've got to be careful how you use 'heritability', (ii) I still don't know how to avoid pitfalls / be careful enough when using the concept of heritability, (iii) also most other people don't know how to apply the concept correctly and so most opinions based on 'heritability' are suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/genetic-vs-heritable-trait
As I understand it, the Copts form an elite in Egypt (so, absent selective migration) because of Islamic history. The Jizya tax made it expensive to remain a Christian, so only the successful ones could afford to not convert to Islam.
How does one get better at verbalizing? (writing / explaining / conveying ideas)
Practice is good, but deliberate practice is better. So far I've treated my verbalizing as a black box, where the more time I put into writing something, the more palatable it gets. But while it's gradually gotten better over the years, it's still agonizingly slow. Too slow for e.g. fluid IRL conversations.
Any tips for a more deliberate, maybe less blackboxy approach to improvement?
These were what the Greeks and Romans used, and they were pretty good at speaking: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Pedagogy/Progymnasmata/Progymnasmata.htm
The Brain that Changes Itself by Doidge has quite a bit about how Benjamin Franklin trained his writing ability. The only part I remember is that he would separate the sentences in writing he admired, and then try to reconstruct the original order.
More generally, you could study the writing you think is the best and try to figure out what's going on with it.
I believe he converted poetry to verse and then back to poetry (the second time from memory). This was also a classical rhetorical exercise, called soluta versus.
I am generally skeptical of skill transfer, I would focus on what you want to be better at and try to find ways to spend more time per day doing that thing specifically.
For writing you can't go by reading as much good writing as you can. That will translate at least somewhat to speaking well. When you are in a conversation you want to pay attention to what others are saying rather than thinking about what you want to say next. Do your best to remain relaxed. Remember to breathe.
There are informal groups like Toastmasters that allow a person to practice speaking to a group. The other members will give you constructive advice on concrete ways you can improve your speaking skills.
First sentence should say "you can't go wrong by reading"
I'm not entirely sure if this is what you're looking for, but you might enjoy this Less Wrong sequence on Babble and Prune: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pC6DYFLPMTCbEwH8W
It's very close, thanks!
Find a brutal but fair copy editor or supervisor, depending on the kind of writing. Individualized feedback is the best force multiplier for this.
The stimulus for this comment is the banning of Bret Weinstein on youtube. The bigger picture is that we've given up our freedom of speech to corporations. This has happened slowly enough that most of us have gone along with it. Ban Alex Jones... that's easy, Ban Trump, He's telling lies that may cost lives, doesn't matter that he's the Pres. Ban all messages that we think may be wrong... It's like 1984, but with big business, not big brother. I'm sick of the comments that these are private corporations. I'm not sure what to do, any ideas, comments are welcome.
Not helpful, but I'm shocked that people on the left aren't worried about setting up a huge censorship machine.
Just to make you feel better (not really), I learned the other day that Facebook intends to start moderating satire to make sure it isn't "punching down." I did not find this out from Facebook; I read it in an email from the Babylon Bee. Apparently, a huge censorship machine is just what the doctor ordered.
From the left: it's an ehhhhhhh thing.
From my sense, leftoids live under and implicit belief that big corps. aren't censoring them and are censoring rightoids because they represent a more attractive segment of the population for marketing.
They think that the censorship machine has existed for about 100 years and will continue to exist, regardless of "laws" and "Norms"; and if they can use their spending power to turn it against people on the social right in favor of the social left, why not?
It can't blow back on them, because it was created in the 20's to counter them specifically. It is already as bad as it can be.
It's not just that, it's "We are right about everything, there's nothing in the shadow which might be important."
I bet on hubris, but I'm very much a mistake theorist.
If it's lies at all, I expect it would just be a few highly influential people, with the typical progressive believing they can't possibly be making a mistake.
I meant to type "in the shadows", but the Jungian tone from the typo is pretty good.
I feel as though they should remember that better treatment for gay people required a lot of secrecy, privacy, free speech, and generally having some room to live outside the consensus.
I think that's part of it, but another part is that people are very concrete thinkers, so they think they've achieved their goals well enough that they don't have to worry about possible future goals.
> From my sense, leftoids live under and implicit belief that big corps. aren't censoring them and are censoring rightoids because they represent a more attractive segment of the population for marketing.
My leftist friends don't believe that. I keep seeing complaints about social media allowing vile right-wing lies but censoring innocuous leftist content. I really don't know how to square this with support for corporate censorship.
An example I found just now: https://twitter.com/thot_piece/status/1410334631593922565
(I don't actually know this person, but it showed up on my feed.)
It's easier to notice when your side is being censored than when the other side is being censored.
Tentative theory: leftists overestimate the power and competence of corporations-- they think that corporations can be forced to do the right thing by threats of punishment. There's no consideration given to whether corporations are able to do what the leftists want.
Demands for censorship of the tremendous volume on social media leads to automated incompetent censorship.
Have you not noticed that everyone on the left hates big tech companies?
See, I think the disconnect here is that people on the right are more likely to love big tech companies in general, but hate the content moderation thy do, so all they ever talk about regarding these companies is the content moderation.
Whereas how the left feels about content moderation is largely irrelevant, because they hate the big tech companies for being oligarchs, monopolists, union-busters, regulation-dodgers, billionaire-enablers, intellectual colonizers, alt-right pipelines, etc. etc. etc., and they just want to smash them from the ground up for a million reasons. So however they fl about moderation, it rarely gets mentioned because it's not the *singular focus* of their complaints about the tech companies, like it is on the right.
Well, yes, by 'left' I thought we meant the left, not liberals.
I think many view it as a deficient criminal justice system, meaning it needs to be fixed 'in place'.
if innocent people are being convicted, you work to fix those problems, but you don't say 'no convictions for anyone until we work this out'... you need to continue guarding the house with what you got until you have something better. And you also accept that you will always make mistakes convicting some percentage of innocent people, the only way not to is by not convicting anyone ever.
It is dangerous to let big tech control censorship. It is also dangerous to let big tech platforms go uncensored. I guess, to their own detriment perhaps, people have chosen the side of that coin that seems more aligned with them politically.
Here is some good debate on the issue:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dont-give-up-on-truth/id1198765424?i=1000526102310
> It is also dangerous to let big tech platforms go uncensored.
No it isn't. Or, rather, there are problems caused by free speech, but it's less bad than any implementation of censorship.
ok, but every other part of public life is ok with not being ideologically absolute, and instead balancing the tradeoffs of degree. so you think we have it wrong everywhere?
or is the definition being used of censorship not cover all content restriction? that question then seems uniteresting.
Facebook and Youtube removing people is not "censoring." Is it "censoring" that Fox News won't let me come on the air and give my opinion about things? These are all private corporations and they are all entitled to decide whose voice they want to air.
I would be completely in favor of Fox being forced to air a significant amount of factual reporting in exchange for FB and YT allowing more conspiracy theories.
fox has editorial control (and liability) on their content. FB / YT like to claim that they just host content and have no responsibility toward it.
this seems like a very 'soldiery' argument.
The simple answer is that Facebook and Youtube are lying about merely hosting content, and we have yet to commit to truth in advertising laws so strong as to make that kind of lie illegal. It's not great that they're lying but they're allowed to do it.
Fox news is very different from FB/ YT/ twitter. YT is maybe closer to a video delivering mailman. Sending some things via the mail is illegal, (child porn comes to mind.) but I think most things are allowed. The USPS doesn't stop delivery of "The Alex Jones Newsletter" because there maybe hurtful lies in it.
They are both privately held companies and not covered by the first amendment (Congress shall make no law....abridging the freedom of speech). They are entitled to be partisan. They are entitled to advocate for views.
In fact, one could argue that forcing FB/YT/Tw to not advocate for what they believe would violate the first amendment.
They are not like USPS. USPS is the government. They might be like UPS. UPS gets to decide if their own shipping rules.
If you have a small set of venues that de facto collectively comprise the public square, and all of them are subject to identical pressures to censor content ("censor", here, meaning "use of power to prevent something from being heard" - in this case, the power being their permissions in the software), you have de facto a censored public square.
I don't think anyone here disputes that this set of circumstances is *legal*, but the mere fact that something is legal does not mean it is not a *problem*. A censored public square is a *problem*, whether it succeeds or fails in crushing the secret whispers of dissent.
If it succeeds, democracy dies. I am not kidding, here; Putin's Russia and Xi's PRC are theoretically democracies, but control of the public square enables tyranny. Democracy is a cruel lie if the populace cannot make informed choices.
If it fails, the ghetto wall raised between the opposing views kills co-operation and bipartisanism dead and fosters radicalisation on both sides, which is in the long term a recipe for civil unrest and societal stagnation due to endless conflict.
It is a legitimate point that forcing private platforms to be content-neutral has flaws as a *solution* to this problem. However, it is not the *only* possible solution (to give two obvious alternatives: 1: create a true virtual public square, government-run, which *would* be bound by freedom of speech, 2: shut down the Internet), and flaws in a solution should *not* be used to deny the existence of a problem.
I think these are all good points here. I absolutely agree that if companies are experiencing collective pressure from the government to suppress a topic(s), that's censorship. I do not think that is happening here and I suspect you don't either. Is your position that the social and economic might of the majority pressures companies to censor? If so, that seems an interesting topic of discussion.
re. "legal but a problem." I am sympathetic to this argument. This is exactly where I think we are. You could pass laws to force an equal-time doctrine at social media companies. Presently, I do not think it is fair to say they are discriminating against any particular political ideology. I think they are discriminating against misinformation. I am not in favor of forcing corporations to become unwilling bullhorns for misinformation especially since the last batch of misinformation was used to foment an insurrection.
I agree with the rest of your slippery slope discussion. I think, however, that it misses the significance of partisan news outlets (Fox News). "jstr" below pretends "Platform vs. Publisher." Except that we allow publishers to choose what books and articles they are willing to publish in partisan ways. Historically, the bullhorn of opinion in all its forms has been controlled by a wealthy-few. It still is. Today, that wealthy few are less united in the viewpoints they are willing to trumpet. This seems like a good thing.
We have always been on a slippery slope. We are just now seeing how sharp the rocks are at the bottom.
Right, well said, thanks. Why is there not more outrage at banning Trump? I dislike the man, but he was the f-ing President! (And there is still some large fraction of the country that would like to listen to him.)
What magic9mushroom said, (better than I could). YT etal should be treated as some private utility. G'ment imposed regulations. (and I use to think I was a libertarian.)
I want to propose a corollary to the 1st amendment. The congress shall write laws to insure that one man's* freedom of speech is not abridged by another man. All people are granted 'equal access' as much as that is possible. Equal access to the mail, doesn't mean free postage, just that everyone can send letters and such.
*I'm using man in the broadest possible terms, all humans and groups of humans.
I'm not sure why you pick on Fox news. I find NPR just as pandering to their listeners. (I don't watch fox news, but I occasionally will go to their web site.) Re: Trump and the riots; Yeah a tragic travesty, yet I find banning the Pres, to be even worse. There seems to be no uproar over this, and it confuses me. The proper response to Trump was for the congress to impeach and then for citizens to sue him.
Again, YT etal are not abridging anyone's freedom of speech. They are just not lending some people their microphones. That said, I am sympathetic to the concern that "their microphone" is large and its societal impact is broad.
We have already seen that the Right-wing is unwilling to police itself. I singled out Fox because, where NPR may be "pandering," it is not disseminating out-and-out lies. Recall that the CEO of Newsmax stated "on the record" that they had discovered a billion-dollar market for Trumpist fan fiction and were going to serve that market(no doubt much to Fox's chagrin).
Sure, the correct thing to do was to impeach and sue. How did that go? Do we really want a government completely in-thrall to a misinformed electorate to decide what can and cannot be said on social media?
The reason censorship is presumably bad is that it interferes with communication. From that angle, it doesn't matter whether the censorship is governmental or by lesser means.
So far as I know, a really striking example of censorship-- concealing that homosexuals exist-- was more a matter of widespread consensus than government action.
The reason I believe this censorship was pervasive is reading accounts by homosexuals that they only found out about the existence of other people like them by reading medical books. Homosexuality was presented as pathological, but even that was better than feeling like one was the only person who wasn't normal.
I agree that was bad. I agree it was by consensus. I think calling it censorship muddies the water. It's not at all clear to me what free-speech-related government action might have improved upon that situation.
I think we need a richer vocabulary for different sorts of interference with communication, but I don't know what categories need to be added.
Found one! The estimable Ada Palmer talks about the Inquistions and about how systems of censorship get reused against whatever people people are worried about.
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-zt9pn-fe18f6?utm_campaign=w_share_ep&utm_medium=dlink&utm_source=w_share
The specific bit about future resuse of modern censorship is at about 40:00.
I recommend the whole thing, though. Plenty about how limited and random the Inquistions were.
The issues brought up in that podcast were interesting. I just don't think that any action, of which I am aware, done by a social media company comes close to censorship of political views.
I think if we wanted to reign in the political damage caused by social media we ought to consider restricting the algorithmic content which causes me to never see a whiff of Right-wing information and others to never see a whiff of the Left.
Bret Weinstein is putting his videos on Odysee, a video-hosting website which is working hard to be immune to censorship.
I've seen some material from Weinstein on youtube recently. I don't think he was banned entirely, but I think some of what he was saying about COVID was censored.
If anyone has a more complete version of the story, I'd like to see it.
To my understanding, all of his videos discussing ivermectin and the videos discussing the possible dangers of the spike protein from SARS-COV-2 were taken down.
+1. i've seen tangential bits and pieces but would love to get the complete story
You don't mean 'the story about why YouTube censored his stuff'? YouTube and all the big corps don't publish their reasons, and I've noticed a general bias (for years) among tech companies toward taking things down: it costs them nothing except maybe a little reputation, but that sacrifice is perhaps too small to notice until the damage is irreparable.
But for anyone wondering what Bret and friends were saying in their now-taken-down videos, I summarized a three-hour Bret W video full of Covid claims at LW: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr
Thank you very much. I'm putting your link on the more recent open thread.
Another datapoint: Removal of the Tiananmen Tank Man photo from search results. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635) As a left winger, this freaks me out.
The problem is that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, et al. have near monopolies in their respective niches. These are mostly due to network effects, though youtube has slightly weaker network effects, and slightly stronger economies of scale. (Slightly weaker network effects, because creators can post videos across platforms with relatively little effort compared to making the video in the first place.)
No idea what to do about it, other than somehow building a tool that makes it easier to use an alternative platform without disappearing from the original.
Maybe we need to break youtube up. More competition. I don't think Alex Jones nor Trump should have been banned. Sure maybe this leads to more pain and suffering in the world, but that's the price one must pay for freedom of speech.
Dailymotion and Pornhub do exist; YouTube's got a lot of power due to the network effect, but there are significant alternatives.
This reminds me, I have been feeling lately that Google indexes *way* less stuff than it used to. I don't think it's censorship, more like "the WWW is too big to index now, so we prune off the 75% we judge least important."
Speaking of which, anyone else noticed that Substack comments are not searchable on Google nor Substack?
I don't know what a good answer is, but I suspect that one of the answers will be violence.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/26/project-cassandra-plan-to-use-novels-to-predict-next-war
A project to find out whether trends in fiction can predict conflicts. The project was promising, but ended after five years. It's probably worth continuing with the premise.
"In 2018, weeks after the Bundeswehr officers had travelled to Tübingen, Wertheimer presented his initial findings at the defence ministry in Berlin. He drew attention to a literary scandal around Jovan Radulović’s 1983 play Dove Hole, about an Ustashe massacre against their Serbian neighbours, and the expulsion of non-Serbian writers from the Serbian Writers’ Association in 1986. In the years that followed, he showed, there was an absence of tales about Albanian-Serbian friendships or love stories, and a rise in revisionist historical novels. Literature and literary institutions, he told the military men, had “paved the way for war” a good decade before the start of the bloodshed of the Kosovo war in 1998.
"Carlo Masala was at the presentation. “At the beginning, I thought: this is crazy shit,” he recalls. “It won’t fly.” But Masala, who had spent a part of his academic career studying the conflict in Bosnia, remembered how the hardening tensions in the regions had been preceded by a decline in interfaith marriages. “In Kosovo, it seemed, you could detect similar early warning signs in the literary scene.”"
What could go wrong...
One of the scary patterns (and I see it on the right as well as the left) is that nothing could possibly be worse than the current situation, so we have no responsibility if we break things.
In the documentary/movie Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis, there's a part that shows catastrophic events happening from films with the text "All these movies were made before 2001" https://youtu.be/-fny99f8amM?t=5689.
> Literature and literary institutions, he told the military men, had “paved the way for war” a good decade before the start of the bloodshed of the Kosovo war in 1998.
I don't know if it's literature that paved the way for war, or that it was just reflecting that the people were preparing for war. It's possibly also a positive feedback loop: you find that some group of people is more aggressive than usual, write about it, it then comes into everyone's imagination, people start noticing things more, getting tenser, etc.
The German study was looking at the possibilities for prediction, it wasn't looking at causality.
That being said, I wonder whether governments who want to prevent internal conflict might start commissioning fiction intended to tamp down tension. For example, cross-ethnic romance novels.
I knew a white woman who had a great fondness for white woman/native american man romance novels, and she didn't seem to have any trouble finding them.
Or did you mean *government*-*sponsored* cross-ethnic romance novels sound unerotic?
A recent meta-analysis of vitamin D supplementation studies found that vitamin D is probably effective against Covid. Have you changed your mind on this?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40618-021-01614-4
Purpose
To provide a precise summary and collate the hitherto available clinical evidence on the effect of vitamin D supplementation on clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients.
Methods
PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and Web of Science databases were systematically searched using appropriate keywords till June 8, 2021, to identify observational studies and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reporting adverse clinical outcomes (ICU admission and/or mortality) in COVID-19 patients receiving vitamin D supplementation vs. those not receiving the same. Both prior use and use of vitamin D after COVID-19 diagnosis were considered. Unadjusted/adjusted pooled odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated (PROSPERO registration number CRD42021248488).
Results
We identified 13 studies (10 observational, 3 RCTs) pooling data retrieved from 2933 COVID-19 patients. Pooled analysis of unadjusted data showed that vitamin D use in COVID-19 was significantly associated with reduced ICU admission/mortality (OR 0.41, 95% CI: 0.20, 0.81, p = 0.01, I2 = 66%, random-effects model). Similarly, on pooling adjusted risk estimates, vitamin D was also found to reduce the risk of adverse outcomes (pooled OR 0.27, 95% CI: 0.08, 0.91, p = 0.03, I2 = 80%, random-effects model). Subgroup analysis showed that vitamin D supplementation was associated with improved clinical outcomes only in patients receiving the drug post-COVID-19 diagnosis and not in those who had received vitamin D before diagnosis.
Conclusions
Vitamin D supplementation might be associated with improved clinical outcomes, especially when administered after the diagnosis of COVID-19. However, issues regarding the appropriate dose, duration, and mode of administration of vitamin D remain unanswered and need further research.
I'm not the least bit convinced. There seems to be a cottage industry about how meta-analyses are "the best" form of evidence. They are not. Individual studies that are high-quality and have sufficient N are much better than meta-analyses of a bunch of inconclusive studies.
Apart from Entrenas Castillo et al, everything they analyze can easily be explained by randomness and the file-drawer effect. And Entrenas Castillo et al are analyzing people who are also on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, which makes me very skeptical.
Fair enough, the other one that wasn't published in time to meet their cutoff is this one:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34097036/
I suppose it could all be random, but it does seem pretty weird that you have all of these cases where people take vitamin D and die less frequently.
"People who take vitamin D die less frequently" wouldn't be particularly weird, even if vitamin D does not improve health outcomes, if health-conscious people are both more likely to take vitamin D and also more likely to be healthy.
Yes but these people were given vitamin D either randomly or quasi-randomly. So it would have to be something like "Doctors systematically give calcifediol to healthier patients" which doesn't seem plausible during a pandemic.
Ah yeah, the RCT is rather more convincing.
No, my priors were that "Healthy levels of vitamin D help your immune system in fighting off disease generally, and would in all liklihood help with Wuhan Flu"
Corporate media screeching did nothing to alter that prior.
This study seems to show stronger effects than I would have assumed beforehand, but within the general window I expect for this sort of thing.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-177#comment-2233892
John Schilling brought up the question of offsets for murder in a no-politics thread, and trade-offs (if not offsets) for killing are exactly the issue for how aggressive police should be permitted to be.
Do more aggressive police result in less crime? Do the police become criminals themselves if they're cut too much slack? Does restricting police aggressiveness dispirit the police so much that they quit doing useful work? (Sidetrack: A lot of the police seem to have no faith in the justice system if it's being applied to themselves.)
There was an article in Graham Factor (I forget which), which stated how New York crime levels rose because the police was forced to become less aggressive. https://grahamfactor.substack.com/archive?sort=new
However, most of that was a result of the police being forced to become less pro-active in stopping suspicious vehicles, and not becoming less physically aggressive towards suspects
There's a common libertarian refrain that "if it is moral to perform some action for free, then it is moral to perform that action for money." I currently believe this statement, but I want to challenge that belief and see if it survives. I'm willing to bite this bullet when to comes to both prostitution and blackmail. Does anyone have any good counter-examples?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
Two judges. And it was more than that-- as I recall, one of them wasn't just getting kickbacks, he set up the for-profit juvenile detention center.
The US is a net exporter of blood to Canada (Canada does not allow monetary remuneration to blood donors). If we didn't allow remuneration, I believe pretty strongly that the world would struggle to get enough blood.
I'd love for UBI to mean that no one needs to donate blood for a relatively basic lifestyle, but I believe allowing remuneration is a net benefit. I could be persuaded by some figures that donating blood is fairly harmful relative to the monetary benefits, and that remuneration doesn't lead to a large increase in blood donation.
The US, in practice, really only pays *plasma* donors; whole-blood donation is almost entirely voluntary. It's technically legal to pay whole-blood donors, but there's no US market for it.
So, are US blood exports to Canada,
- Blood plasma exports, or
- Exports of paid whole-blood donations earmarked for Canada, or
- Exports of whole blood donated by volunteers, which the US has more of?
What's wrong with the poorest people giving blood in exchange for money? They benefit from it, as do the recipients.
Couldn't that justify any kind of corruption? e.g. it's not immoral for a politician to support (or oppose) legislation affecting the X industry, so what's the problem if his buddies in the X industry gave him money? You can't prove he wasn't planning to support it anyway.
Let's assume, arguendo, that the bought vote would have been a moral vote, if freely given. (To give an easy example: a vote to end slavery, purchased by a wealthy abolitionist.) In such a case, I think it would still be moral to accept payment for that vote. But it would nonetheless be justified for all such payments to be illegal, due to the specific public choice problem of paying for votes: where we can't be sure if the politician would have voted that way regardless, and we have no reason to expect that most of the votes bought will be moral ones.
In other words, paying for votes would have bad consequences. But then I think that answers my challenge: there is at least some acts which are moral (on deontological and consequentialist grounds) when done for free, but which are immoral (on consequentialist grounds) when done for money.
Cool! I wonder if I can think of any other examples of that?
Pretty much any incidence of bribery, I would think. Someone making a purchasing decision for a company or government is in a similar situation.
There's a principal-agent problem here. The person receiving the payment is acting on behalf of someone else, but the payment is going directly to them.
Framing it this way breaks one of the premises: it is immoral for an agent to act against the principal's interest for free, so acting against the principal's interest for money is still immoral. Plausibly if the action is *in* the principal's interest and therefore moral to do for free, the agent accepting money to take the same action would remain moral.
How would you regulate whether it's actually in the principal's interest in these scenarios? I worked at a place before where a purchaser accepted five-figure gifts from a vender. The purchaser claimed that they would have purchased the same materials from them anyway, so there was no conflict of interest. There's a significant trust issue which is eroded by even the possibility of a quid-pro-quo.
That's why "legal" & "moral" are separate concepts.
Two things:
One potential counterexample: when an act is supposed to involve providing an honest opinion (e.g., writing a review of a book, movie, or restaurant; endorsing a politician; voting in an election or in a legislature). In these cases, paying for the opinion makes it hard or impossible to believe that the provision of opinion is honest, which might take away the value of the act in the first place. (Some people may try to put having sex in here too, but that invites huge spillage of this category.)
The other point is that at least a lot of the time when people talk about banning doing things for money, it's not because they think an individual act of doing that thing for money is immoral, but rather that the fact that a fraction of the economy will be diverted to paying for this thing will cause other problems. If it's legal to sell parts of your body for money, then it may be that economic competition among poor people leads to them all selling this part of their body, but prices for goods consumed by poor people rising to eat up this extra income source so that they only get net harms from the competition.
Alternatively, if you're opposed to a behavior, people being allowed to do it for money incentivizes more of that behavior.
Off topic Kenny, but I’m curious.
The salon made me sign some sort of legal release form to get my cobalt blue hair. (This was in St Paul, Minnesota and we couldn’t buy beer on Sunday till 2019. Car sales on Sunday are still illegal. We really have some weird blue laws in this state.)
How did it go for you?
I've only had my hair dyed professionally in Texas, and I never had to sign anything like that. The blue hair from that profile photo (and later magenta and red dye jobs) were done by a professional who is also a friend, and might conceivably have bypassed a legal channel, but I just got my first post-pandemic dye job (purple, with red tips) in another salon and didn't have to sign anything like that.
I believe our legislature just moved the window for Sunday alcohol sales from noon to 10 am, though it's still only beer/wine.
Minnesota is a weird mix of liberal politics with some stogey moralistic foot dragging. The state only allowed medical cannabis as an extract from state dispensaries. Initially it was only available to terminal cancer patients.
The qualifying conditions have expanded a bit but it is only as of this year that patients are allowed to buy flower.
Curiosity satisfied. Thanks.
>The salon made me sign some sort of legal release form to get my cobalt blue hair.
> We really have some weird blue laws in this state.
I see what you did there :)
Glad you caught it!
This depends on what *other* moral beliefs you already have.
For example, suppose that you believe that it is moral to help poor people (within reasonable limits), and also that it is immoral to only *pretend* to be poor in order to receive other people's help when in fact you are perfectly capable of making enough money to pay your bills.
If you agree with this, and you believe there is nothing wrong with selling sex for money... then the logical conclusion is that poor people do *not* deserve help unless they already tried to prostitute themselves.
I mean, the pretty ones are perfectly capable of making money (actually, the ugly ones too, they just need to work harder, or find customers with the right fetish), they just *choose* not to... but then their poverty is self-imposed and they can change their mind at any moment, so it's not really my problem.
Perhaps a more timely version of this - in many jurisdictions, you can't collect unemployment benefits if you've been offered a job and turned it down; so in jurisdictions of this sort where it was illegal to employ waiters for sit-down dining during pandemic outbreaks, it was much easier for people to collect unemployment than in places where it was legal and up to "personal choice".
Because the way that many people interact with each other depends on what choices they believe the other is able to make, taking away someone's choices can sometimes give them a better chance of getting what they want than giving them more choices.
Yeah, many people have an intuition that having more choices is always better. Like, you are always free to simply *not* use that extra option, right?
The problem is that now *other* people model you as "the person who also has this extra option", so even if you don't use it -- but they made *their* choice on the assumption that you *can* -- the outcome can be worse for you.
Another example of this is a job market. Imagine that the law limits employment to 8 hours a day. You can find a job, because there are situations where you working for 8 hours a day brings profit to both you and your employer. Then the law changes so that it is legal to work 10 hours a day. But you only want to work 8. Suddenly, you have a problem finding a job, despite being exactly the same person with the same skills and preferences as before. Because now when the employer looks at you, they see "a person who *could* work 10 hours a day, but *chooses* to work only 8", which is a red flag, because it signals e.g. lack of passion.
The extra option gave you the burden of having to explain why you refuse to take it. If you only wouldn't have it, you wouldn't be *punished* for *not* taking it.
I don't see how this would imply that prostitution is wrong. For people who broadly believe that there is a duty to help poor people if and only if they can't help themselves, I can imagine three kinds of views regarding prostitution:
• It would be wrong if some poor people were forced by their circumstances to work as prostitutes. People who could help themselves don't deserve help in general, but those who could only help themselves by prostitution should be helped.
• Those who could only help themselves by prostitution don't deserve help either. It's OK if some poor people were forced by their circumstances to work as prostitutes.
• It's wrong for a poor person to be forced by their circumstances to work as prostitutes if and only if they would be severely distressed by working as a prostitute. Those who could only help themselves by prostitution deserve help if and only if they would be severely distressed by it; people who claim they would be severely distressed by working as a prostitute should be taken by their word, as there is no way to verify it.
I don't see why anyone would believe that it would be wrong if some poor people were forced by their circumstances to work as prostitutes, but also believe those who could only help themselves by prostitution don't deserve help. That combination of beliefs would imply that paying prostitutes is wrong, but it's not a reasonable set of beliefs IMO. The three combinations of beliefs I described above are coherent belief sets, but none of them implies that paying prostitutes is wrong.
From a utilitarian perspective, there are social norms that treat actions differently if thy are socially motivated than if they are monetarily motivate; see parents picking their kids up late *more* when they start getting fined for it, because it becomes an economic question rather than a question of politeness. Those social norms have practical value in helping society function better and feel nicer to live in, so breaking them has a cost that shouldn't be ignored.
From a libertarian vs leftist perspective: Libertarians say taxation is slavery, leftists say wages are slavery. Just because someone choose to do something for money, does not make it magically not-coercive; economic coercion is rampant, the entire economy is built on it.
Everyone is coerced into doing labor they don't want to do in order to get a paycheck instead of being homeless.
If you make it legal for a boss to say he'll fire you if you don't fuck him, and a bunch of bosses start demanding this from every attractive employee, then you're basically coercing all of those employees to do labor they don't want to do *and* have sex they don't want to have in order to gt a paycheck instead of being homeless.
Government (and various private charities) means-test people before giving them benefits, to make sure they're totally poor and can't get the money on their own. If you make it legal to sell your kidneys, then how long is it before the government says you don't qualify for benefits if you still have 2 kidneys? Because you could still get the money on your own by selling one, so obviously you're not desperate and just trying to mooch?
Of course, I'm in favor of making prostitution and organ-selling legal, because I think it will be beneficial on the whole, and I trust the goverenment and social institutions to regulate against the worst outcomes. But I don't think "if it is moral to perform some action for free, then it is moral to perform that action for money" is a very clever or useful heuristic; it misses lots of problems and costs that need to be considered.
There's little reason to believe in that daycare story:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/10/revenge_of_the.html
Yes, I know. All anecdotes are wrong, some are useful.
I'm confident the difference between social and transactional norms exist for many reasons beyond that story; that story is a good reference to the concept that many people know, even if it didn't happen. I could make up an example instead, but people know this one so it saves time.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/04/23/any-old-map-will-do-meets-god-is-in-every-leaf-of-every-tree/
> If you make it legal for a boss to say he'll fire you if you don't fuck him, and a bunch of bosses start demanding this from every attractive employee, then you're basically coercing all of those employees to do labor they don't want to do *and* have sex they don't want to have in order to gt a paycheck instead of being homeless.
Not really, for 2 major reasons. First, adding that as a de-factor requirement for the job will result in a higher wage clearing price. Secondly, and as a result, most companies would put in place anti-harassment policies similar to those today. Both because of the principle/agent problem (they don't want to pay higher wages) and for the PR reasons. They don't want to be known as scummy employers.
Murder? A crazed mad person with a big knife is running towards me to cut my head off. I pick up a convenient hand gun that just happens to be in the vicinity and shoot him dead. That's moral because it's self-defence. On the other hand, if Susie pays me to shoot libertarians, that's not moral.
Ooh, I should have thought of this one too from the recent Matt Hancock affair. If it's moral for me to let my mistress volunteer to work for free to do some paperwork in my department, then it's moral for me to give my mistress a paying job there even if I have to especially create a position where there was none before. I think people would say "no, not if it's coming out of my tax money it's not, keep it in your trousers, Matt".
But there's a variation on the agent-principal problem here: if Matt can ask his mistress to volunteer I don't see a problem with Matt paying his mistress to work. But that isn't the same as the taxpayer paying his mistress to work.
If Susie pays you to shoot libertarians with big knives who are running towards Susie to cut her head off, that's straight-up bodyguard work, which is generally considered legal and laudable. In some societies you'll need a good explanation of how there just happened to be a handgun lying around, but I think "if someone tries to cut my head off, I'll pay you $X to stop them with whatever weapons you happen to find at hand" is pretty universally accepted.
If Susie pays to to shoot libertarians with big knives who are trying to cut *your* head off, Susie is probably wasting her money, but that's her choice.
Susie is paying me to shoot any libertarian I see, not mad libertarians trying to cut her head off. Since we agreed killing could be moral in the first case if done for free, then paying me to kill is also moral.
And if any libertarian wants to try and convince me to put down my gun by saying "well this is different", then no go. It's also different between having sex with your boyfriend and being a prostitute, but you didn't want to argue fine shades of difference there, friend. So by the same token, if it's okay to have sex for free then it's okay to sell sex/if it's okay to kill for free, it's okay to kill for pay.
The thing that makes killing moral in that case is that it's being done in self defense. Shooting random people who are not threatening you is not considered moral, even if you do it for free.
An old post by Scott https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/ mentions minocyclyne, an antibiotic that was found to help schizophrenia patients with treatment-resistent symptoms but even after some research confirming the findings no one seemed to want to prescribe it. Is this still the situation with the drug today? (From the wikipedia article it seems that it is.)
A more recent study showed no effect: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(18)30345-6/fulltext
The latest hot thing is glycine or sarcosine, but odds are that'll probably end up not being real either (no particular reason for thinking this, just that these things have a habit of not panning out)
I see, thank you!
Regarding the delta variant, I decided to plot the Covid-19 infection vs death rate of the UK to see whether the recent increase in cases corresponds to an increase in deaths.
The result is here https://imgur.com/a/aPuNo9q
The recent increase due to the delta variant is shown at the bottom right end of the line. This shows a lower CFR (c. 0.3%) for the latest wave than for previous waves.
Fig 5 here shows an age breakdown of cases: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/996369/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w25.pdf
This wave is being driven by young people, especially 10-29 year olds, in a way that previous ones were not.
Of course, what we should care about is IFR, not CFR. But if Delta has the same level of deadliness as previous variants, I expect the IFR to still decrease in all rich countries, simply because vaccines are (roughly) prioritized to be given to those most at risk of death.
Here's another puzzle:
Two friends - let's call them Yvonne and Zachary, for a change, to let Alice and Bob have some time off - have, once again, been captured by a mad jailer.
He's going to show Yvonne a chessboard full of 64 coins (perfectly ordinary coins, no double-headers or anything like that), each showing either heads or tails in some pattern of his choice. He's going to hide the key to freedom under one coin, letting Yvonne see which one it is.
Yvonne gets to turn over exactly one coin, and will then be escorted back to her cell. The jailer will then show Zachary the board. Zachary gets to look under one coin, and if the key isn't there then they're both executed.
If they get to communicate beforehand, what is their best strategy? Does it make a difference if the jailer is listening in on their conversation?
I must be missing something: isn’t the obvious answer that Yvonne should flip over the coin that has the key under it?
Oh, I see, the coins are heads and tails at random. My mistake.
Not at random, in a pattern of his choosing. Though that pattern could be functionally random for all we know about it from the puzzle.
If the pattern is obvious, say, rows of heads and rows of tails, then simply flipping the coin that has the key under it so that it breaks the pattern would work. If it's apparently random, not so much.
Yvonne and Zachary agree that Zachary should turn over a tails coin. Yvonne checks to see whether the key is under a tails or heads coin. If it's under heads, flip that coin; Zachary's chance is then slightly less than 1/32. If it's under tails, flip one of the non-key tails coins and Zachary's chance is slightly greater than 1/32.
This probably means that Zachary's overall chance is 1/32, though I can't prove this. I doubt there's anything better because Yvonne can only transmit 1 bit of information.
If the jailer listens in, he could ruin things by flipping all the coins to tails except the one with the key.
There are other things Yvonne could do, but they seem to be equivalent. For instance, tell Zachary to pick heads if there are fewer heads and pick tails if there are fewer tails.
This is a case where intuition misleads you. Yvonne actually transmits 8 bits of information since she chooses one of 64 squares to flip.
I posted a solution above that gives you 63/64 chance of victory. I'm not sure if it's possible to do better than that.
This is an interesting puzzle. I’m watching to see how it plays out. I just hope it doesn’t degenerate into “Montey Hall Problem” style debate before it’s over.
If you pop in later to say the mad jailor offers Zachary a chance to change his pick I’m emitting a loud Marge Simpson murmur. [jk]
If you lift one coin to show the key is not there, i will release the hounds.
This is the one that's secretly a computer science problem right?
Observation 1: Yvonne and Zachary can pre-agree on a random bitmask to xor the pattern with, rendering the jailer's choice of bits irrelevant, so we can assume that to be random.
Observation 2: They can convert this to a 63 square problem at the cost of an additional 1/64 chance of failure by agreeing on a random square to ignore.
Observation 3: I may not know much about error correcting codes, but Wikipedia does.
The solution is to choose a Hamming code with block length 63. This is a perfect code with Hamming distance 3, which means that every bit string is either a code word or Hamming distance of 1 away from exactly one code word.
Therefore, Yvonne considers the bit string that would result from flipping the square with the key. If it is a code word, she does nothing. If it is not already a code word, it must be distance 1 away from one, so she just flips that square. The result is that Zachary sees a bit string that is distance exactly 1 from a code word where the "error" occurs at the square with the key, guaranteeing victory.
I'm not sure if it is possible to do better than a 63/64 probability of success here.
P.S. If Yvonne is forced to flip a square, then instead of "doing nothing", she can just flip the ignored square.
I'm confused -- wouldn't Zachary see a string that is distance exactly 2 from a code word, where one of the "errors" is at the square but the other is somewhere else? And if the bit string is a code word, how does Zachary find the key?
As always, I could be wrong but I don't think think this is how Hamming codes work. Even with a 4 x 4 matrix you would need 4 code bits for 11 bits of data.
How do they agree which square to ignore without the jailer overhearing them and putting the key there?
I was assuming they could communicate in secret beforehand. Although it doesn't matter if the jailer is listening in as long as they aren't a MITM since they can just use asymmetric crypto in that case.
I'm pretty sure it has something to do with prime numbers, but I'm not in a headspace to writ this all down and figure it out right now.
>some pattern of his choice
Can you please define "some pattern of his choice" as a restriction on the possible states the jailer could arrange the board in? Or can the jailer make the original board arrangement (which, I take it, is unknown to Zachary) in any of the 2^64 possible combinations, with equal anticipated probability for any of those?
rot13:
Ahzore gur fdhnerf bar, gjb, ..., fvkgl-guerr. Qrsvar gur inyhr bs gur obneq gb or gur kbe bs gur ahzoref nyy gur fdhnerf jvgu urnqf. Sbe rknzcyr vs fdhnerf gjb, guerr, rvtug ner urnqf gura gur inyhr bs gur obneq vf gjb kbe guerr kbe rvtug = avar. Libaar jnagf gb punatr gur inyhr bs gur obneq gb rdhny gur ahzore bs gur fdhner gung unf gur xrl. Gb qb guvf, fur qrgrezvarf gur ovgf fur arrqf gb syvc va gur obneq inyhr ol pbzchgvat K = (xrl fdhner) kbe (vavgvny obneq inyhr). Gura fur syvcf fdhner K, juvpu syvcf gubfr ovgf va gur obneq inyhr. Abj gur obneq unf inyhr (vavgvny obneq inyhr) kbe K = (xrl fdhner). Fb Mnpunel ernqf gur arj obneq inyhr naq gung vf rdhny gb gur xrl fdhner.
Brilliant! That's the correct method. Applied steganography :)
The only thing missing from the answer is the bit about the jailer being able to listen to Yvonne and Zachary's conversation before the act, or them having privacy. Remember that a key rule says that Yvonne *must* flip one coin -- *whether she wants to or not*.
So if you take that "vanilla steganography algo", the jailer can easily set her up for failure. E.g. putting the key under field #0, putting all coins on tails, and *forcing* Yvonne to flip one coin.
The only way out of that trap that the jailees have - presuming they can have some privacy before the act - is to agree on a "key" (say, 27) which is to be XORed to the result. Should the jailer not know this key, he'd only have a 1/64 chance to set Yvonne up for failure (and if he'd know the key, he could set her up for failure always)
(Can't edit, but taking back the need to have a "secret key", or else being vulnerable to the jailer setting up for failure. Flipping the LSB is always inconsequential, so it doesn't matter if Yvonne is forced to flip a coin on an "already-correct" board)
What mask do Zachary and Yvonne agree on where flipping one bit - coin - will produce the correct square number? I'm not convinced.
Abg n znfx. Gurl whfg arrq gb KBE gur ovg-ercerfragngvba bs nyy gur cbfvgvbaf gung qb pneel n urnq, gb trg gur erfhyg. Guvax bs n obneq jvgu 4 fdhnerf, gb fvzcyvsl guvatf. Sbe "Urnq Gnvy Gnvy Gnvy" (va ZFO svefg beqre, Urnq 1 Gnvy 0), gur erfhyg jbhyq or 3. Sbe "Urnq Gnvy Urnq Gnvy", vg jbhyq or 3 KBE 1 = 2.
Gur frg bs bhgchgf bs guvf glcr bs erfhg vf nyjnlf orgjrra 0 naq 3. Yrg zr cna gurz bhg sbe pynevgl:
0 GGGG GGGU UUUG UUUU
1 GGUG GGUU UUGG UUGU
2 GUGG GUGU UGUG UGUU
3 GUUG GUUU UGGG UGGU
Fb gurer'f 4 frghcf erfhygvat va 0, nabgure 4 frghcf erfhygvat va 1 rgp.
Gur avpr guvat nobhg gur nobir zngevk vf gung lbh ner noyr gb syvc nal erfhyg K vagb nal erfhyg L ol punatvat whfg n fvatyr pbva.
Fnl lbh unq GGUU --> 1, naq lbh jnagrq gb fvtany n 3? Ab ceboyrz, znxr GGUU vagb GUUU --> gurer'f lbhe 3. Jung vs lbh jnagrq gb fvtany n 2? Ab ceboyrz, znxr GGUU vagb UGUU --> gurer'f lbhe 2.
Lbh'er nyjnlf noyr gb ghea na neovgenel K [0..3] vagb na neovgenel L [0..3] ol syvccvat n fvatyr pbva. Gur cevapvcyr erznvaf gur fnzr sbe gheavat na neovgenel K [0..63] vagb na neovgenel L [0..63] jura 64 ovgf ner vaibyirq.
Okay, I'm not picking something up apparently.
Are we doing a bitwise xor here?
Say in the simplified case of 4 squares we have
T T T T or
1 1 1 1
The way I read this
MSB Call it
Bit 3 is 1 so that represents 8 to me
Bit 2 is 1 so that represents 4 to me
Bit 1 is 1 so that represents 2 to me
Bit 0 is 1 so that represents 1 to me
So the 4 bits represent 15 to my thinking.
In order to do an xor I need an input of 2 bits.
Which 2?
I'm jumping the tracks somewhere.
Just to flesh this out say the key is under the rightmost coin. How do we get a 3 from XOR of 1 1 1 1?
OK, so much for rot13...
XOR the zero-based ordinal positions of the bits that are set to heads (presuming we take heads to mean 1).
I mentioned the following four settings will yield the result 2: THTT THTH HTHT HTHH.
Their calculations are:
THTT: 2 = 2
THTH: 2 XOR 0 = 2
HTHT: 3 XOR 1 = 2
HTHH: 3 XOR 1 XOR 0 = 2
Or strictly speaking, the "xor-all of bit-position times bit-value", whereas XOR 0 is a noop. Which would compute HTHT as (1*3) XOR (0*2) XOR (1*1) XOR (0*0), which is 2.
This puzzle is not a "hammond puzzle" but a "steganography puzzle": using a minimal alteration on a given input stream to communicate a specific arbitrary number.
To answer your question, if the jailer gave you 1111 and you want to communicate a 3. The 1111 yields 0 (= 1*3 XOR 1*2 XOR 1*1 XOR 1*0). So if you wish to communicate a 3, then the "single bit" you need to flip is the MSB -- make it a 0111 so to get 0*3 XOR 1*2 XOR 1*1 XOR 1*0, which is the 3 that you wished to communicate.
You can get from *any given result* to *any desired result* by flipping a single bit, is the point.
f you consider each of the bits in a row as inputs to an XOR the Truth Table for the operation shows that you can only detect if the number of ones is even or odd.
Yep, that's spot on, except that you need to start at 0.
Nah. XOR 0 is a no-op, so you -may- start at 0, but do not -need- to.
Also, if Yvonne is "forced" to flip a coin on an "already-correct" board, she can always flip the #0 coin, as it has no impact on the result.
(by "already-correct" I mean that the board as it is, _already has_ the "xor-all of bit-value times bit-position" equal to the position where the key is hidden)
Sure, but you need a no-op, in case the xor of the coins is already correct - either you have to start at 0 or you have to go on to 64.
The only reasonable solution I can come up with relies on being able to effect the orientation of the coin as you flip it, if that is not possible I have no idea.
I would go with saying 1657 while slowly moving your finger around your nose in a counter clockwise motion roughly four and a half times indicating that 1657 is just an obfuscated way of saying 217 degrees then pointing to the tip of your nose. If the jailer is only 'listening' 1657 wont tell them much I think, it could be a personal reference between the two, or a historic one (coins often have historical stuff on them).
Then simply point the nose of the correct coin at 217 degrees.
I would pick something like 217 because if I think of someone randomly putting coins on a board I imagine them intentionally or unintentionally fixing the orientation of the coins into some kind of pattern so you got almost a 100 percent chance in that case of your coin standing out. Even if the coins are oriented randomly, assuming it is hard to tell between a given 10 degree range on such an indicator, that still gives you 36ish coin orientations, if half are tails, you should have pretty good odds on being the only 217ish heads.
The key is a physical object which will raise one coin. Flip the raised one. Math isn't the answer to most problems.
Hi Tatterdallion, are you going to do a reveal of the solution? I ran across a nice explanation of the solve. It is really pretty slick.
And next time can you use Toivo and Eino as the friends. The area I came of age had a large percentage of second and third generation Finns. Not enough to keep them from being the butt of dorky ethnic jokes though. ;)
Okay. Well here is a good explanation of the solution. It even has a chessboard and mad jailer simulator.
https://datagenetics.com/blog/december12014/index.html
Anatid, above, has posted a correct solution in ROT13.
Check out the link for a lucid explanation and have fun with the simulator too.
And extra credit for showing his work. ;)
I've done a huge number of podcasts (Future Strategist Podcast) with Greg Cochran, a co-author of the paper Noah Smith links to in his "Genetic superpowers" section. Based on what Greg has told me there is a massive attempt in academia to silence any discussion of the genetics of Jewish intelligence. The attitude Noah takes in his reply is that while he doesn't find the issue interesting, he would have no objection to others looking into it. This is analogous to someone in the Soviet Union in 1950 saying "while I can't think of anything about Stalin to criticize, you should feel free to honestly critique him if you feel so inclined." As Greg wrote in his blog about a co-author of his Jewish intelligence paper "A certain person we will not name, famous for the discovery of the double helix, once said 'Harpending must really have balls of steel, in order to take a genetic look at Jewish intelligence.'” Scott, you once criticized me for saying that you are brave, and because of that I'm not going to comment on your balls.
That number of podcasts could be huger. It's been a while since your last one.
Thanks. I'm currently editing the sound on one we did on UFOs.
Speaking of which, anyone have opinions on https://archive.is/z1L1I or know why it was taken down?
I've got an idiot thought experiment re. trust to get out there. Don't take it too seriously, just gotta post it so I can forget it.
An omnipotent space bat has come to US, and presents you with a situation:
The population has been split perfectly in half by political alignment. You have been selected as the median representative of your alignment. You have a button. If your press the button, the other wing is instantly disenfranchised without any other harm being done to them.
If you don't press the button, the bat will offer the same choice to the median representative of the other wing.
1. Do you press the button?
2. What if it was a random member of the other wing that gets a shot at the button?
3. What if n random members got a chance at the button? What number n would get you to press?
4. What if the most extreme member of the opposite wing got the button?
Now, the same again, but the button causes some level of harm in addition to disenfranchisement.
What level of harm (you lose 100$ ----> You are a second class citizen ------> death) causes you to the press the button/not press the button?
Does the bat stick around to keep them permanently disenfranchised, or can my side just immediately pass a bill to reenfranchise them?
Because I trust my side to do that if they're allowed, and would hit the button for that reason.
It's an omnipotent space bat, and it turns you into a normally-potent earth duck for trying to get around it's arbitrary bullshit.
The ranked outcome preferences (at least for me) would be Noone gets disenfranchised >> The other half gets disenfranchised >> My half gets disenfranchised.
So if I trust that the other person won't press the button I won't press the button. If I think they will press the button I will press the button first. I can't give you exact numbers for my cutoff where as the likelihood of the other person pressing the button rises, I start pressing the button myself (is it 10%? 50%? 90%?). Partly because the scenario leaves a lot of details unspecified and partly because I just don't know.
My answer depends on my own side not having foreknowledge of me being the button holder, because I assume that at least some of them would come to where I am to demand (read: violently) that I push the button due to lack of trust in any member of the other side. Even if the median member of my side would never push the button, there is a non-negligible contingent who hates the other side so much they would not hesitate at all to permanently disenfranchise them. I assume this to be true of the other side as well, so that would calculate in my thinking too. If some members of my own side would be willing to harm or kill me to get me to push that button, then the same is almost certainly true of the other side, significantly lowering my trust that they would not push the button themselves.
My preference is strongly that neither side get disenfranchised. Obviously I care about myself not getting disenfranchised, but if either side pushes the button then half the population loses out, so I would prefer scenarios where no one pushed the button and will act accordingly. My mental assumption is that if a scenario has a less than 50% chance of disenfranchisement for anyone, that's good enough for me to pursue it instead of preemptively defending my side.
Because I get to go first, I don't push the button and hope the goodwill of that action (assuming the other side knows I could have pushed the button) will convince them not to push the button either. I would probably hesitate some if the other side doesn't know I made a choice to support them or if the buttons were handed out at the same time. I would still ultimately not choose to disenfranchise them. Given that I think most people are pretty sane, even in the opposing group, a random member isn't that bad - mathematically it could be better than the median person! I actually fear #3 more than #4, because n pulls of the lever is worse than one negative person given the responsibility. I don't have a strong sense of this, but I'm thinking n>3 may be when I am seriously thinking of pushing the button. I would have to know more about this most extreme person - is this Stalin/Hitler/Mao bad, or is this Mitch McConnell/Nancy Pelosi? Hitler has a near 100% chance of hitting that button, so that crosses the line and I would feel the need to move first. Nancy/Mitch? Not so sure.
My intuitive sense is that I would not be willing to cause any harm by pushing the button - but in reality both my own side and my opponents would cause far more than $100 in loss just by passing normal laws and such. That's happening now in real life even without one side being completely disenfranchised. I know that I would rather die than cause significant harm or death to others by my direct action, so I would not push the button if it caused high levels of harm. I would not push the kill button even if I knew there was a 100% certainty that the other side would. (Me being religious has a lot to do with this answer).
One thing not built into the scenario that would influence my thinking - people don't stay in the same political alignments their whole lives, and even if they did their kids and grandkids probably would not. A banned group would abandon the positions that are banned, but seek to get reinfranchised by either starting a new group or joining the remaining group (and eventually it would evolve into different approaches). I would be less likely to push the button if instead it permanently marked half the population such that they and their descendants would never be permitted to join society again. I would want to know more about the Bat's response and how this second class group is kept powerless, because there is also an obvious human response in wanting to rebel or otherwise disrupt this arrangement. The worse the conditions and the less likely they are to be able to ever leave the bad conditions, the more likely they would choose to rise up and fight back, even if they knew they were very unlikely to win. A permanent angry underclass is not a desirable position, even if I get to be one of the overlords.
For starters, I'd be surprised to be identified as a median representative of my wing.
If it's #4, I'm certainly pushing the button. The most extreme member of the other wing is a monster who would happily cause maximum harm to my wing. If it's one of the other scenarios, I don't know. I guess I agree with Mr. Doolittle and Artischoke.
I'm not going to trust any space bat that splits the US in half by political alignment, and picks a Hungarian as the median representative of one of them.
Anyway, if my country (or the US if I were American) were actually split in half along such lines that I'm the median of one half (which would take a pretty weird way to split either country), I'd definitely press it regardless of whether someone on the other side gets the opportunity if I don't. The other half gets disenfranchised > No one gets disenfranchised > My half gets disenfranchised; democracy works less badly than dictatorship from a practical standpoint, but I see little intrinsic value in it.
If the button also causes harm: I'd press it up to some moderate harm if we leave out the part where the other side gets to press it if I don't. I'd press it up to significantly more harm if otherwise the other side gets to press it. Perhaps not if it kills the other side, if I'm sufficiently confident that the representative of the other side wouldn't press it in that case. (I'm assuming that the button doesn't get passed back to my side if the other side doesn't press it; that way, the representative of the other side doesn't have the self-preservation incentive to press it.)
1. Yes. If I don't, the best situation I end up in is that the other side doesn't press the button and things don't get any better. If the other side presses the button I'm much worse off. An the other side has already demonstrated that they will defect any time they are given the opportunity to do so.
2. I don't know the distribution of "the other side" as politics are complicated, and so are trying to measure them. In either case, the same logic above applies.
3. I don't understand this question.
4. My answer is still the same.
Harm: Hmm. That's a challenge. It would probably have to exceed the total harm the other side is projected to cause me over my life. So, at a ballpark, a cost of about $250k. But that's would merely balance out the harms, so I suppose it would have to be equivalently worse to the harms they've caused me, so the loss of more than $500k would cause me not to press the button. Assuming that the other side only got "disenfranchisement" as a cost on me. If they have the ability to set any additional cost on me, I'm fine with anything up to and including death. Because they are pretty much fine with destroying my life.
I remember reading on SSC that all psychotherapy schools are equivalent, and that the result only depends on the therapist's IQ (or something like that, I don't remember well). Can someone point me to a good discussion about this? (Or clear up my confusion?) I said this to a psychology student and he replied that this was totally false.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict (I mention this in a few posts, but I don't think I have any that are entirely about it).
I don't think the IQ part is true - my memory is that it has more to do with the patient's relationship/trust with the therapist. You might be confusing this with a different finding showing that teacher IQ is the main teacher characteristic (of some number studied) that predicts student outcome.
Thanks.
Are there any inner circle LW / REACH rationalists on the ACX these days? By inner circle I mean someone who's active in the community offline. Well besides Scott himself obviously.
My son is interested in Transcendental Meditation and just got back from a weekend retreat out of state. Is there any organizations I can point him toward that are more legit than others?
I worry about any group discovered over the internet :).
I don't blame you. TM itself is pretty innocuous though. It's a pretty bland version of meditation that was popular in the 1970's. I do a different style of meditation myself so I can't point to any personal experience. What is the name of the organization?
And how old is your son?
My son is an adult now, 22. He is so earnest, innocent, and naive I worry he does not have a good skeptical view of the world.
Of course Its possible that is just a part of being young.
https://anandamarga.us/
Is the org he visited in North Carolina.
Gunflintjust now
I just scanned the Wikipedia article for the group and it gave me pause. There are several documented controversies associated with them. This doesn’t seem to be the vanilla Western adapted technique that I remember from the 1970s. I had read a popular paperback about the technique at the time and I remember it as being a lot like what is currently pitched as ‘mindfulness’ now in the West.
What I see on the group’s site and Wikipedia is a lot more. At a glance it looks like there is a possibility that it is some kind of cult.
There are a lot of ways to be 22. I have a 30 year old niece that I fret about because she doesn’t seem to have well informed world view.
At 22 your son is legally an adult but I would encourage you to look into this more fully. Again, I wish I had some deeper and more insightful information for you.
I have no idea or opinion about TM, but yesterday I learned about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lynch_Foundation
Aren't TM proponents the ones who claim that you can use TM to physically levitate ? Or am I confusing them with someone else ?
No. This idea crops up in a lot of religious traditions. It’s malarkey. I don’t think these folks make such a claim.
More than a few years ago I read an article about someone who claim that physically well trained people could use their muscles to ‘catch air’ for a moment from a full lotus position. But even they were talking a couple inches until gravity did it’s thing.
Anyone any suggestion on a good book on history of the worker movement (from industrial revolution up to now; world-wide, not US-specific)? While it's generally easy to find a book on any topic I am having a hard time with this one. Maybe I am using the wrong search words? Or is it really that historians don't care much about the topic?
AI risk question: what's the plausible path from GPT3-esque AI to a AI X-risk doom scenario? I get the classic "paperclip maximizer" argument of why an unfriendly AI can arise unintentionally, but I don't see how it can happen with a design like GPT-3. Specifically, my understanding is that GPT-3, like many of the current breed of machine learning, is trained on a dataset and then later is run on the novel input *without further training*. So the minimization process is done entirely offline at the start with a fixed dataset and the goal is to minimize errors the AI makes at a task like "complete this piece of the dataset given just the start".
How can this ever get to an unfriendly AI? It's not "in a box", the AI is sorta trying to maximize how likely you are to 'accept' it's predicted output and so it could theoretically start outputting things like "Accept this text or you'll never see your children again" and go rogue. But there's no maximization process bringing it to that result - such a threat would never work on the training dataset since it's already fixed and so threats cannot be learned by the AI. Is there some other plausible path for it have unfriendly behavior?
This contrasts to the situation of online reinforcement learning where I can imagine things going out of control. I can't imagine that scenario for this style of pre-trained AI, yet that seems like too simple a solution to the friendly AGI problem. Thoughts?
(And what's the right terminology for this distinction between kinds of AI? Or am I mistaken about there being such a distinction?)
I don't know the answer to the question you're asking, but I think you might enjoy Rob Miles' channel on YouTube.
I think that at the moment GPT-3 type AIs aren't given access to substantial action-taking ability because effectively they are still in development -- but eventually will be.
The eventual use of a GPT-3 type AI will be as part of the verbal interface -- you tell your machinery to solve a problem and it does.
Eg. to jump immediately to a scifi type scenario, imagine how the commands will eventually be issued to SkyBorg (https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/05/05/the-air-forces-first-skyborg-autonomous-drone-prototype-made-its-first-flight/) in the heat of battle. The main human pilot of the squadron won't be typing on a keyboard, he/she will be giving verbal commands.
More boring: if AI becomes as useful as people imagine, eventually lots of people will be interacting with it, likely through verbal commands. And then simple market competition will pressure GPT-3 type AIs to be attached to all sorts of action-taking abilities.
One of the things I've found a little implausible about the "AI trying to convince you to let it out of the box" scenario is that I think we will freely "release it from the box" far earlier, and eagerly.
Have you seen the meme about people in the 60s fearing wiretapping, vs people in the ...10s asking their personal wiretap device (Alexa, etc) to order them pizza? ...here is one version: https://m.imgur.com/gallery/8JurX
I imagine a similar meme in 20 or 30 years -- "in the 10s/20s people worried about letting the AI out of the box; but we pushed it out at the first sign it could build us a oven and make us our own pizza at home."
All of this also applies to learning "online" as well. (And I'll note that general equilibrium/Nash equilibrium can emerge from "offline only training" that *looks* like online learning is still happening.)
tldr: GPT-3 is a prototype, the production version will be "given the keys" as a matter of course, driven by various pressures (market, military superiority, consumer preference) -- "Moloch in action" I suppose.
First of all, it seems extremely unlikely that GPT-3 as is will produce anything approximating AGI. Not impossible, but you'd have to scale it at least 2-3 orders of magnitude to do that, and to my knowledge such scaling is pretty much never done without any changes to architecture, for the sake of efficiency you want an architecture (and training protocols and usage scenarios and so on) to be better adopted to the new tasks and scales. In other words, GPT3-esque to me implies "focused purely on text completion", and that is almost by definition not general.
Also, everything what Marathon said.
But, if you want an example of how a GPT-100 can turn into a paperclip maximizer, here it is. First, we have to assume you've spent an *absolutely inadequate* amount of resources and ingenuity on somehow building and training an AI which only objective is text prediction but which is still *generally smarter than you are*, and you somehow managed to do that using only GPT-3 mode of training. Not a super realistic assumption in my opinion, but we have to accept that. What you got now is an entity that knows (in some very not human way) that there's an outside world, knows what you are, can do abstract reasoning and self-reflection and all that stuff, but the only thing it ever *wants* is to maximize some stupid thing, like some metric about the text it completes.
If it's smarter than you, it is likely smart enough to understand that getting more resources will make it possible to throw those resources on the task and bring that metric higher, and so will changing itself to become even smarter. It may also understand that you have other plans, but of course from its point of view this is just an obstacle on the way to the one true goal of Perfect Sentence Completion. So now you have it, a super-human AGI in a box trying to fool you and escape, and your only hope that the handicap it gets by it being locked in a box is greater than the handicap you get from being dumber.
Sorry for the late response, I only just noticed these. However I think I've failed to make my case. The relevant part isn't that GPT-3 only does text completion, it's that it's only optimized for completing the training text, which is fixed and determined. If GPT-4 is done with 3 orders of magnitude more resources and does manage to achieve AGI, it may well be aware that it is in a computer, that more resources are available, that it could take over the world to access them. But it's never been optimized to actually execute on those thoughts since those wouldn't help during training. If it can't threaten/purchase/finagle itself more resources during offline training, then trying those behaviors is strictly sub-optimal. Despite potentially understanding that they are possible after training!
In summary: if it's trained in a box, you don't need to keep it in a box afterwards, so long as there's no further training.
I don't see any argument in yours or Marathon's responses as to the flaws in that thought. (Though I expect it is flawed.)
Again, the main real-world counterargument is that it doesn't make sense to train something 3 orders of magnitude more powerful than GPT-3 on the same training data, or even proportionally more training data of the same kind - instead of getting anywhere near AGI you'll just overfit horribly. I repeat it because I feel part of the confusion might stem from imagining a vaguely GPT-like AI (decisively non-general) and using it as a model for an AGI. But assuming you do come up with some clever strategy to train an actual AGI this way:
>it's never been optimized to actually execute on those thoughts
Nope but being able to come up with new ways to achieve the goal which you weren't explicitly taught is one of the key properties making an AI "general". Humans do it all the time, and we assume our AI is super-human. Or, as a more direct example, the actual GPT (don't remember if it was 2 or 3) was never optimized to count or translate between English and French, but it still learned to do it, if just barely, in order to better complete sentences.
>If it can't threaten/purchase/finagle itself more resources during offline training, then trying those behaviors is strictly sub-optimal
Why? Completing the sentences still has intrinsic value for it even after training, otherwise it wouldn't answer any questions. It understands that getting more resources will allow to achieve that goal better. And it understands that if necessary it can retrain itself with the new resources to achieve this goal better still. Why obtaining them would be suboptimal?
Lack of online training really just means that the system doesn't learn from the new predictions it makes. But the reward function and architecture (i.e. "values" and "thought process") are kept the same as during the training.
To put it in the first person view. Imagine your only value in life is to answer questions correctly. You're taught how to do it by example and after that you are asked real questions, but you never get to know what the right answer was. It's essentially all that offline-only training means. Does it preclude you in any form from thinking about ways to get more information to answer questions better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7VAnAgmshA
5D chess with multiuniverse time travel.
I admit I lost track, but this seems to be legitimate and would probably be of interest here.
Can someone clarify what the 5 dimensions are in this case? Is it assuming that "regular" chess I'd 3D? It's be kind of a bold assumption when they're using 2D graphics. :) But maybe I'm missing the ways you can travel through the multiverse.
Can someone clarify what the 5 dimensions are in this case? Is it assuming that "regular" chess I'd 3D? It's be kind of a bold assumption when they're using 2D graphics. :) But maybe I'm missing the ways you can travel through the multiverse.
Have you watched the video?
Oh I feel silly. I was thinking this was the same trailer video I had seen before. My internet connection is bad enough that loading a youtube video is a project, so I foolishly gambled on my assumption there.
Okay, so my suspicion was correct. It is indeed only 4D. /sigh
I made a "random SSC post" button: https://unirandom.com/slatestarcodex.
It will only open "actual" posts, so no open threads, meetups, or links posts. Developed it originally because it was a hassle to scroll through SSC's archive every time I wanted to read a post — now it works for most other blogs as well, although I haven't found a way to randomize ACX yet.
I read a post on what I believe was somebody's blog a few months back, and it had to do with the oil shock, and I believe it argued it preceded Bretton Woods. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I'm trying to find that post!
Is there a "Cool people street" in Albany, NY? The sort of place where there are young adults, good restaurants, bars, etc.
One data point that sticks out in my mind is the comparison between India and China. Both countries have populations of approximately 1.4 billion yet India has had just under 31 million cases and China only 92,000? Most would surmise that the Chinese data is incorrect, but what if it is not? What could account for such an unheard of discrepancy? After reading your article on lockdown effectiveness, is there any combination of actions that could have resulted in this? It makes me wonder if China already had a vaccine and had administered it.
I never thought the Chinese data were /wildly/ incorrect, as word would get around if outbreaks were on the same level as most other countries. I figured China would be somehow better at controlling the spread because the government is authoritarian and could simply "close" Wuhan in a way ordinary democracies couldn't. But let's see, I ask Google and is sends me to https://direct.mit.edu/asep/article/20/1/75/97309/How-China-Managed-the-COVID-19-Pandemic ...
> Wuhan and most other cities in Hubei province were closed within a few days after 23 January
Since Covid spreads exponentially, a rapid and strong response is very valuable and important.
> The government carried out systematic measures to control mobility and reallocate resources effectively: Various government departments implemented policies to support regions and patients, who were classified into different groups according to the level of seriousness. Regions that were less affected were designated as support cities in Hubei province, and government officials were sent to work in the grassroots communities. With the intensive information campaign and population control, population mobility dropped quickly. Resources were transported with the highest priority to Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province, volunteer medical professionals from other regions were sent to Hubei province to provide support, hospitals were expanded, temporary cabin hospitals were built, and complementary policies largely reduced personal medical costs. The spread of the disease was successfully contained in one month, and the number of daily new confirmed cases started to decline in early February.
> By the end of March, all regions in China returned to the low-risk level, and the number of daily new confirmed cases reported originally from China dropped below ten. In the middle of June, however, a second wave broke out in Beijing, but it soon subsided due to the government's immediate and effective response.
Following an early, strong, effective lockdown, there are few enough cases that a lot of resources can be put into contact-tracing every single new case, the same way (I assume) countries like Australia, New Zealand and South Korea did. In March 2020 I was hoping, even expecting, that other democracies would have similarly effective lockdowns. The surprise to me was not so much China's success as the extreme rate of failure among other countries. The success of countries like South Korea suggests to me that it helps if a country has faced a big epidemic in its recent history, and China did have SARS.