A remarkable #Roman bronze statuette of an old woman preparing to make a sacrifice to the gods.
— Nina Willburger (@DrNWillburger) May 30, 2021
Found in Belginum/Wederath, dating 1st century AD.
Photo: Landesmuseum Trier/Th. Zühmer#RomanArchaeology pic.twitter.com/GBgN2q3LMl
“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) May 25, 2021
Bertrand Russell pic.twitter.com/H00qnTmMRL
From A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
However, all this went off again, and the weather proving cold, and the frost, which began in December, still continuing very severe even till near the end of February, attended with sharp though moderate winds, the bills decreased again, and the city grew healthy, and everybody began to look upon the danger as good as over; only that still the burials in St Giles’s continued high. From the beginning of April especially they stood at twenty-five each week, till the week from the 18th to the 25th, when there was buried in St Giles’s parish thirty, whereof two of the plague and eight of the spotted-fever, which was looked upon as the same thing; likewise the number that died of the spotted-fever in the whole increased, being eight the week before, and twelve the week above-named.
This alarmed us all again, and terrible apprehensions were among the people, especially the weather being now changed and growing warm, and the summer being at hand. However, the next week there seemed to be some hopes again; the bills were low, the number of the dead in all was but 388, there was none of the plague, and but four of the spotted-fever.
But the following week it returned again, and the distemper was spread into two or three other parishes, viz., St Andrew’s, Holborn; St Clement Danes; and, to the great affliction of the city, one died within the walls, in the parish of St Mary Woolchurch, that is to say, in Bearbinder Lane, near Stocks Market; in all there were nine of the plague and six of the spotted-fever.
Parallels to today:
In most quarters, it has been anticipated that there would be a cyclicality to Covid-19 with an anticipation that it would synchronize to the seasons with onsets in fall and winter. In practice, we are seeing intermittence without really seeing cyclicality yet.
We don't know why some countries are not hid till many months after others. Some regions of the US are on their second wave while others appear on a third wave for reasons not known with confidence.
It is not that there is not cyclicality or that that cyclicality won't be tied to the seasons. We just aren't seeing it yet with any predictability.
This uncertainty has colored (along with sheer partisan bias) the coverage of state re-openings. Some states reopening early and with great confidence, others later with great trepidation. We don't know yet.
I love you kitty on top of the ship pic.twitter.com/e1pgnoFi8o
— Cats That Heal Your Depression (@Catshealdeprsn) May 30, 2021
If some pirates kidnap you and demand a bounty tell them to ask for more. Then after your released gather a bunch of dudes and go kill them.
— Daily Roman Updates (@UpdatingOnRome) May 9, 2021
Be a man
Across the western world in the post war era, cohorts born before the Great Depression voted more in line with their views on economic views while cohorts born after the Great Depression voted more in line with their views on cultural issues. https://t.co/c6Ysx9qf5q
— (((David Shor))) (@davidshor) May 29, 2021
Listening to the Orchard Oriole, 1902 by Childe Hassam
Someone just pointed out an expert forecaster who got the whole Covid-19 forecast nearly completely right from back in October 2020. Here is the original YouTube.
Had a video ever aged so well in modern history? @chrissaccoccia1 pic.twitter.com/BCeiF07PnG
— Mr Smith (@WestwoodParking) June 29, 2021
Not accustomed to my expert forecasters being Canadians with funny haircuts in T-shirts and being selected from a protest crowd. But he must be an expert given the accuracy of the forecast.
Ancient Egyptian wooden cosmetic box in the shape of a trussed duck. 18th Dynasty, c. 1350 BC.
— Alison Fisk (@AlisonFisk) May 29, 2021
Image: British Museum (EA5959) pic.twitter.com/uAKlhi35s1
The more one does a deep dive on critical theory, Foucalt, Gramsci, Marxism, Communism, et al., & how modern-day academia became a cauldron of trait empathisation, you realize it's basically a hatred of capitalism & individual. A hatred of necessary structural hierarchy.
— J.D. Haltigan (@JDHaltigan) May 25, 2021
From A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
Besides this, it was observed with great uneasiness by the people that the weekly bills in general increased very much during these weeks, although it was at a time of the year when usually the bills are very moderate.
The usual number of burials within the bills of mortality for a week was from about 240 or thereabouts to 300. The last was esteemed a pretty high bill; but after this we found the bills successively increasing as follows:—
Buried. Increased.
December the 20th to the 27th 291 ...
December 27th to 3rd January 349 58
January the 3rd to 10th ” 394 45
January 10th to 17th ” 415 21
January 17th to 24th ” 474 59
This last bill was really frightful, being a higher number than had been known to have been buried in one week since the preceding visitation of 1656.
Parallels to today:
We still have little real visibility on the death rates from Covid-19. In the US the headline number is some 600,000 but we know that number includes people dying with Covid, not from Covid. We know that virtually all flu and pneumonia deaths have disappeared, presumably due to being subsumed into Covid. We know a vast majority of those who have died we expected to die within months due to comorbidities.
We simply have not agreed at a public level as to what constitutes the number of deaths from Covid.
This is relevant because the number of possibly avoided deaths is the bounding number for the cost of whatever we wish to do. The higher the avoidable deaths from Covid, the more money we ought to be willing to forestall those deaths.
Additionally, we need to know the real mortality rates to assess the gravity of the potential disease. In 1665 with All Causes Mortality increasing by 10-25% a week, it was clear that serious action was warranted. Our All Causes Increases in deaths per week have never approached those levels. Serious, yes; but not plague serious.
I have no idea how this got by all the control systems of academia and the tech industry. My hesitation in posting about it is that it is a new substack and I have no awareness of the author, Zach Goldberg, supposedly a PhD candidate.
How he could be such and publish such a disemboweling article to an article of faith in academia, I don't understand.
From Exposing the group disparities = discrimination fallacy by Zach Goldberg.
“We have a hard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large … When you truly believe that racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination.”-Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
The idea that persistent outcome disparities between racial groups necessarily reflect or result from discrimination rests on a narrow, misleading, and politically motivated portrayal of the empirical reality. In what follows, I introduce and briefly discuss a number of data points that call this narrative into question.
Goldberg appears to be using data from the American Community Survey for the five years 2015-2019. Respondents to the Census survey self-report their primary ethnic/geographical/cultural origin. Any ethnic group with fewer than 300 members is omitted. ACS randomly selects approximately 3.5 million households for participation each year and about 95% of recipients respond.
Goldberg also uses data from longitudinal surveys conducted by the Department of Labor. Specifically, he is using data from
NLSY79
The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) is a sample of 12,686 men and women born during the years 1957 through 1964 and living in the United States when the survey began. Survey respondents were ages 14 to 22 when first interviewed in 1979. The U.S. Department of Labor selected the NLSY79 cohort to replicate the NLS of Young Women and the NLS of Young Men, which began in the 1960s. The NLSY79 also was designed to help researchers and policymakers evaluate the expanded employment and training programs for youths legislated by the 1977 amendments to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). Data are available for this cohort through 2014 when the 7,071 men and women in the sample were ages 49 to 58. Data from the 2016-2017 survey will be released in late 2018/early 2019. To supplement the main data collection, survey staff conducted special high school and transcript surveys. NLSY79 respondents also participated in a special administration of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.
and from
These are large population sets, as close to random as possible and are extensively used by both government agencies and corporations for consequential and important administrative purposes as well as business and policy decisions. This is good data.NLSY97
The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), the newest survey in the NLS program, is a sample of 8,984 young men and women born during the years 1980 through 1984 and living in the United States when first interviewed. Survey respondents were ages 12 to 17 when first interviewed in 1997. The U.S. Department of Labor selected the NLSY97 cohort to enable research on youths’ transition from school to the labor market and into adulthood. Data from the first 17 rounds of data collection are available to researchers. Round 17 consisted of 7,103 respondents, age 30- 36, and was completed in 2015-2016 with data made available in fall of 2017. In addition, survey staff conducted special high school and college transcript data collections to supplement the data on schooling provided by respondents. Many NLSY97 respondents also participated in a special administration of the computer-adaptive form of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and scores from that test are available for approximately 80 percent of sample members.
As shown in Figure 10, when controlling only for age and sex, US-born white panelists earn, on average, over $24,000 and $15,000 more than their black and Hispanic counterparts. When additionally controlling for cognitive ability, though, these disparities are all but eliminated.Figure 10.
Click to enlarge.
Figure 11 presents data from the 1997 cohort (born 1980-1984) of the NLSY, as arrest histories were not measured for the 1979 cohort. In the left graph, which controls only for age, we see that US-born black and Hispanic male panelists were significantly more likely than their white and Asian counterparts to be arrested at least once. But, these differences all but evaporate when controlling for cognitive ability.Figure 11.
Click to enlarge.
Figure 12 shows that this pattern extends to disparities in incarceration. Once again, controlling for age and cognitive ability, white, black, and Hispanic male panelists experience incarceration at statistically indistinguishable rates, while rates for Asian men remain significantly lower (apparently, one is better off Asian than white in our ‘white supremacist’ society).
Figure 12.
Click to enlarge.
Figure 10 says that, contrary to my expectations, only IQ matters for income attainment.
Figure 11 says that, contrary to my expectations, only IQ matters for arrests. With a small exception for Asians.
Figure 12 says that, contrary to my expectations, only IQ matters for incarceration. With a large exception for Asians.
Hmm. I am comfortable to accord a heavy weight to IQ as determinative of outcomes, but 100%?
Is there anyway to rescue culture as an influential variable? Perhaps. The marked differences for Asians is a clue. Asian migration at volume is really only a phenomenon of the past two generations. Goldberg excluded first generation participants but that might not be sufficient. The very act of emigration is self-selecting and usually it takes 2-4 generations for full cultural assimilation.
Also, assuming that the great majority of Asian immigration is legal, then they are subject to a very heavy selection bias from admission criteria which heavily bias towards factors highly correlated to IQ (professional attainment, educational attainment, etc.). Separate from the experience of immigration itself and time gap towards full cultural assimilation, there is also the factor that biologically IQ tends to revert to the mean. Two high IQ parents are not guaranteed to have equally gifted children owing to reversion.
Asians in Goldbergs data may be anomalous simply because of recency.
Otherwise we are left with those striking graphs. Once having properly controlled for age, sex, and IQ, everyone achieves the same income, the same probability of arrest and nearly the same probability of incarceration.
That is a huge impediment to the hypothesis of systemic racism and similar constructs. In fact, if true, it is a huge endorsement that the US has come very close to fulfilling its Age of Enlightenment aspirations of all men being equal under the law in an environment of the rule of law and maximal practical individual freedom.
If true, this is an enormous cause of celebration!
I am left with the discomfort over the absence of significant impact of cultural behaviors. It is possible that cultural values are indeed still significant but that owing to multi-causal complexity, they only show up within the race groups.
In other words while controlling for age, sex and IQ, when you look at the dataset for White (and then separately Blacks and then Hispanics) you might still find that cultural values related to work ethic, familial establishment, time discounting, risk tolerance, valuation of education attainment do show up as determinative in distribution of outcomes.
It could also be that cultural persistence is very high and that race identification is also highly correlated with the key cultural attributes determinative of good life outcomes.
We just can't know this from Goldberg's evidence here. I am not willing to let go of cultural behaviors as a key driver of good life outcomes but I certainly need to asterisk that assumption.
Because what Goldberg's analysis from pretty high quality data suggests that age, sex, and IQ are the key forecasting variables for life outcomes AND that the US is living up to its ideals of everyone having an equal opportunity for success only constrained by those variables. Not race.
If Goldberg's findings get any circulation they will be attacked with vigor because they go against a whole set of ideologies (Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Theory), a whole set of political philosophies (communism and socialism), against a political party (Democrats) and against almost the entirety of academia and mainstream media.
If Goldberg, his data, and his analysis survives that assault, it will be a cause of huge celebration for those who love the ideals of America and finally will allow us to focus on policies which might make lives better rather than always doubling down on the will-o-wisps of Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Theory, Communism and Socialism.
Periodic reminder that geese absolutely will not be taking your shit (or anyone else's). pic.twitter.com/SaYtelFL8N
— Helen Dale (not on your team, but always fair) (@_HelenDale) May 28, 2021
Twitter is such an unusual phenomenon. Highly unrepresentative of Americans but incredibly influential among those who do use it. Functionally a fantastically effective means of democratizing knowledge but astonishingly oblivious of free speech values and very sympathetic to repressing knowledge and interpretations of facts.
And sometimes it just produces singular, oddly funny, exchanges. For instance:
oh my
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) June 28, 2021
I'm just going to leave this here for a moment and let it shine https://t.co/hdsEGjwqfH
Thomas M. Nichols (born December 7, 1960) is an academic specialist on international affairs, currently a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School. His work deals with issues involving Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs. He was previously a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Professor of economics. Meditation teacher. YouTuber. Pronouns: he, him #Communist.
It feels embarrassingly rude to dwell on the chasm of educational and professional attainment between the two. Credentials have relevance to the possibility of accurate information but are certainly not a reliable indicator. Plenty of people with deep credentials also spout nonsense. It just seems such a glaring mismatch.
As a self-declared communist, Bair's critique:
I suppose you think your knowledge of the Soviet Union is far greater than mine because of what you recall from high school social studies class
seems to imply that he has no awareness of one of the nation's leading researchers on the Soviet Union.
I guess what is so striking to me is that Bair does not have an argument. He is merely attempting to be disparaging. But his ignorance of whom he is disparaging renders his attempted disparagement moot and instead ends up making himself appear to be the fool.
It is in some ways a small tragedy played out on the tawdry stage of Twitter. I guess it is also an example of the downside of democratizing knowledge and communication. It increases the opportunities for people to make fools of themselves.
Brings to mind Proverbs 17:28 (KJV).
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
Variously rendered in the vernacular along the lines of
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
The left-right reversal of the diploma divide since 1970 across all western democracies is really something. https://t.co/5iMRNIZWPg pic.twitter.com/7mbvB4TozF
— Lee Drutman (@leedrutman) May 29, 2021
The grimmest Prisoner's Dilemma paper studies when multiple resisters were arrested for treason against the Nazis & told to turn the other in for leniency. In PD games, 30-50% of "prisoner" pairs don't confess. Faced with real brutal consequences, 17% of resister groups didn't. pic.twitter.com/0YvQCoKRP4
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) May 29, 2021
Western Motel by Gustav Deutsch (1952-2019)
The things you learn as you go along. From Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration by Scott Alexander.
This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history; family lore usually focuses on how our ancestors were the poorest of the poor. My great-great-grandfather was a chicken farmer in Poland. He first emigrated to Germany, but felt like the German Jews were too stuck up and contemptuous of poor Polish Jews like himself, so he booked passage to America. I asked my Jewish housemate, whose family has millions of dollars and all went to Ivy League schools; she says her emigrant ancestors were "a Kosher butcher in Minsk and some guy who floated logs down the Dneiper River".
(her parents also say they might be descended from the Vilna Gaon, but every Jew says their family might be descended from the Vilna Gaon)
I have never heard of Vilna Gaon. From Wikipedia.
"The sage, our teacher, Elijah") or Elijah Ben Solomon Zalman (Sialiec, April 23, 1720 – Vilnius October 9, 1797), was a Talmudist, halakhist, kabbalist, and the foremost leader of misnagdic (non-hasidic) Jewry of the past few centuries. He is commonly referred to in Hebrew as ha-Gaon he-Chasid mi-Vilna, "the pious genius from Vilnius".
Through his annotations and emendations of Talmudic and other texts, he became one of the most familiar and influential figures in the rabbinic study since the Middle Ages, counted by many among the sages known as the Acharonim, and ranked by some with the even more revered Rishonim of the Middle Ages. Large groups of people, including many yeshivas, uphold the set of Jewish customs and rites (minhag), the "minhag ha-Gra", which is named for him, and which is also considered by many to be the prevailing Ashkenazi minhag in Jerusalem.
Noted.
So Ashkenazi Jews claiming suspected descent from Vilna Gaon seems roughly the equivalent of American families claiming suspected descent from Native Americans.
Interesting the things you don't know which are widely known within their own communities.
This is what an intellectual discussion should be. Scott Alexander is the author of the late lamented blog Slate Star Codex and its replacement Astral Codex Ten. ACT was created on Substack to put it beyond the direct reach of raging mobs of CRT/SJ ideologues insistent on denying human rights (particularly free speech) to those with whom they disagree. Alexander is a psychiatrist and member of the rationalist community. He writes about a wide range of topics such as effective altruism and artificial intelligence but the reality is that he writes more about what he finds puzzling or intellectually unexpected than he does about particular topics.
And when he writes, he does deep research and brings a habit of counterintuitive insights to the topic.
On both platforms, he has built a large following of fully engaged commenters whose discussions are sometimes even more insightful than the original post. It is the apotheosis of Age of Enlightenment free thought and free speech, following logic, experience and evidence across multiple fields of expertise to arrive at conclusions, tentative or otherwise. Which is why it was so alarming when the New York Times sought to do an attack piece on Alexander.
I am a big fan of Scott Alexander.
Noah Smith, not so much. Bright? Certainly. And a decent writer but lacking the verb and sheer intellectual curiosity of Alexander. Also, too much a scion of the mainstream media, firmly committed to most the fashions and fads of the Mandarin Class and therefore more fettered in his thinking, unwilling to risk his social standing. At least, that is my cold impression. Because the ordinariness of his pieces and the consistency with which he adheres to the old nostrums of the socialist left, I do not read him with great frequency.
Recently, Smith reposted a piece of his from 2013, How successful are Jews really? by Noah Smith.
It is an age old question, Why are Jews so successful? And it is part of a larger issue in which I am interested; Why are there periods of exceptional epistemic cultural blossoming? For example Greece from 550-450BC, Scotland from 1750-1850, Japan from 1850-1950. You find these periods of florescence scattered through history. Sometimes they are largely singular defined periods as with Scotland - among the poorest and least developed nations, a sudden ascendence to the front ranks of civilization and then a reversion to historical mean. Then there are those nations where there seem to be multiple waves of blossomings such as England (1650-1950) or Netherlands or Japan. Certainly the US from 1750-2021.
Is it just circumstantial? Is it perhaps culture? Religion? Institutions? The happenstance of the coincidence of incredibly bright individuals? Geography?
We don't know. It is certainly multi-causal and quite likely there is a degree of circumstantial uniqueness among the examples. But an endlessly intriguing question.
In the case of Jews, their success has usually been ascribed to hereditarian causes (high IQ) and to cultural constructs which favor success.
Smith is staking out the ground that Jews are not particularly special in the first place (both Smith and Alexander are Jewish) and that the appearance of excess achievement can be explained by selective immigration, urbanization, asymmetric identification of who is Jewish, temporary group effects and temporary country effects.
Smith makes some interesting points but I am strongly inclined towards the culture and hereditarian argument. I do not find Smiths argument that there is no excess success to explain and his dismissal as merely the artifact of selective immigration, urbanization, etc. particularly convincing. Some interesting points, but no more.
Alexander saw this reposted article and constructed his own post, Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration by Scott Alexander. As is his wont, Alexander gets specific and data oriented. He doesn't just deal in words, he deals in measured realities.
Noah Smith asks whether Jews are really disproportionately successful.
(in case it shapes the way you read any of this, both he and I are Jewish)
By the numbers, it would seem they are. US Jews have a median household income about 50% higher than US Christians, a net worth about 6x that of Christians, and are about twice as likely as Christians to make more than $100K/year. They're about twice as likely as Christians to get college degrees, and about 15x more likely to win Nobel prizes. These numbers are of about the same magnitude as the gap between blacks and whites, so if you take those numbers seriously, you should probably take these ones seriously too.
But Noah wonders if this really needs an interesting explanation, or if it's just a series of boring things on top of each other.
Alexander then addresses each of the five explanations offered by Smith as to why the appearance is not real or why it has an ordinary explanation. Read Alexander's article for the details. His response is full of links and explications, data, on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. It is reasonably typical of his writings. You can't help but learn something new, both factual and interpretive, whether you agree with him or not.
And, as always, there is a lively and data-filled and argument-rich discussion among Alexander's commenters which defend, expand or attack Alexander's points.
After the first round, you have Smith's position that Jews are not particularly unique and there is not much to be explained beyond ordinary things like selection and urbanization. Alexander's position fortifies with data the argument that there is an exceptional performance which does need explanation and then uses further data to undermine Smith's five explanations.
Importantly, though, he notes:Noah concludes:
Now, I'm not saying that these factors explain 100% of Jewish overachievement. I'm simply saying that A) all of these factors make the original hypothesis of Jewish special-ness seem somewhat less interesting, and B) some, though not all of these factors will tend to bias upward any statistical measures of Jewish achievement.
And I'm not saying they explain zero of it. Both of us agree that they explain somewhere above zero and less than 100% of Jewish overachievement. So how come I'm arguing with Noah?
Noah admits that his goal is to make the hypothesis of Jewish specialness sound "less interesting". I'm against this. I would like it to remain interesting and something that people pay attention to.
It is a good clarification. I still think that there is a real phenomenon to be explained and that Alexander has significantly the better argument in the first round. But why does Alexander think it important for Jewish specialness to remain interesting?
Why? The Standard Model of American Ethnicity says that there are whites and non-whites, whites are rich, non-whites are poor, and this is because of structural racism where whites are oppressing everyone else. Reality gets beaten and twisted until it can be shoehorned into this model - gifted programs that are 80% Asian "perpetuate whiteness", etc. The reality is that every ethnic group is different from every other ethnic group, including in socioeconomic status, with white people usually somewhere around the middle.
Click to enlarge.
(source: Zach Goldberg)
If you dismiss every group that does better than whites, then you can tell a story where all inequality is caused by white people controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favor whites. If you don't dismiss those groups, the story becomes harder. Anti-Semites had their own story about problems caused by Jews controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favored Jews. Nowadays we rightly reject that story. But in order to continue rejecting it, we have to come up with strained explanations to make Jewish achievement less interesting, because we've already committed to using the structural racism explanation for every group difference that seems relevant to us.
I would have put it differently, but I broadly agree. We have allowed an intellectually vacuous notion (all group differences can only be explained by structured discrimination) to preclude real investigation about those differences and what might be done to allow more people to flourish to a greater extent. The solution lies not with outlawing structural discrimination. There is precious little evidence of such structural discrimination we have wasted decades and billions to no consequence on solving the problem of ill-defined and poorly evidenced structural discrimination.
But like any good Age of Enlightenment conflict of ideas, you don't just end with the declaration of ideas. You argue them. Smith comes back with A response to Scott Alexander on Jewish achievement by Noah Smith. He starts off with a clarification about what it is he thinks they are arguing about.
First, a quick word about how I think about this issue. Scott writes:
Noah admits that his goal is to make the hypothesis of Jewish specialness sound "less interesting". I'm against this. I would like it to remain interesting and something that people pay attention to.
In fact, that is not my goal. It was merely my conclusion, after hearing about Jewish achievement for pretty much my entire life and finally sitting down to think about it carefully.
I am not sure that that is a meaningful distinction but it is worth noting.
The rest of his responding article is this time more substantive than the initiating essay. There are occasional links and data and deeper consideration of the relative merits of ideas.
On the whole, Smith scores a few points and refines a few conclusions. There is some contributive merit to his five theses. I think selective immigration is weak but contributive. Urbanization and asymmetric identification of who is Jewish might be real but I suspect relatively weak effect sizes. Temporary group effects and temporary country effects? More open to these ideas but warrants more investigation and reflection.
Overall, though, I think Alexander holds the high territory in this argument. Culture and hereditarian influences cannot be ignored and probably are the biggest explanatory components. See Zach Goldberg's essay which provides very substantive evidence of this.
Overall, regardless of the relative probabilities of the respective arguments and the precision and competency with which those arguments are made, we are left with two very bright individuals disagreeing about something important, engaging with their respective ideas in rational and civilized ways to the benefit of all. It is a model of the Age of Enlightenment marketplace of ideas. We need more of this rather than ideological fervor, vituperative essays and ad hominem arguments. A breath of fresh air is this discussion between Scott Alexander and Noah Smith.
Starting at the one minute mark.
Urge for Goingby Joni Mitchell
I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
When the sun turns traitor cold
And all trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going but I never seem to go
I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in
I had me a man in summertime
He had summer-colored skin
And not another girl in town
My darling's heart could win
But when the leaves fell on the ground
And bully winds came around pushed them face down in the snow
He got the urge for going and I had to let him go
He got the urge for going
When the meadow grass was turning brown
And summertime was falling down and winter was closing in
Now the warriors of winter they gave a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying and all that lives is getting out
See the geese in chevron flight flapping and racing on before the snow
They've got the urge for going and they've got the wings so they can go
They get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in
I'll ply the fire with kindling and pull the blankets to my chin
I'll lock the vagrant winter out and I'll bolt my wandering in
I'd like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so
But she's got the urge for going so I guess she'll have to go
She get the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown
And all her empires are falling down
And winter's closing in
And I get the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown
And summertime is falling down
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
Just came across this marvellous and quite rare #Greek askos in the form of a lobster claw, dating around 450 BC. The vessel was used to hold oil.
— Nina Willburger (@DrNWillburger) May 29, 2021
Photo: https://t.co/Y032PqpNpg pic.twitter.com/I13tIPc0XT
I'm back from a week at my mom's house and now I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I've been putting in my mouth for a week. We never talked about this brand or googled it or anything like that.
— Robert G. Reeve (@RobertGReeve) May 25, 2021
As a privacy tech worker, let me explain why this is happening. 🧵
From Anomalies in implicit attitudes research by Edouard Machery, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh.
The Conclusion:
A little more broadly:We do not know what indirect measures measure; indirect measures are unreliable at the individual level, and people’s scores vary from occasion to occasion; indirect measures predict behavior poorly, and we do not know in which contexts they could be more predictive; in any case, the hope of measuring broad traits is not fulfilled by the development of indirect measures; and there is still no reason to believe that they measure anything that makes a causal difference. These issues would not be too concerning for a budding science; they are anomalies for a thirty-year old research tradition that has been extremely successful at selling itself to policy makers and the public at large. So, should social psychologists pack up and move to other research topics or should they stubbornly try to address the anomalies pointed out in this article? It is unwise to predict the future of science, and the issues presented here could well be resolved by the many psychologists working on indirect measures, but it would also be unwise to dismiss them as mere challenges to be addressed in the course of normal science.
Since the 1990s, social psychologists have developed several unobtrusive or indirect measures of attitudes, the most famous of which is the Implicit Association Test. Psychologists, and following them philosophers and policy makers, often take these measures to tap into a new kind of attitudes, distinct from the attitudes that older direct measures assess: implicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes have been blamed for many of the enduring social ills, and they justify costly training programs in the corporate world, universities, and police departments.
In recent years, however, there have been increasing concerns about the quality of indirect measurements. This article reviews the most important issues related to that question:
There is little evidence that direct and indirect measures measure distinct things.
Indirect measures are unreliable: Your score today does not predict well your score tomorrow.
Indirect measures predict behavior poorly.
There is no causal evidence that whatever it is indirect measures tap into affects behavior.
These issues have been around for now decades, but they have barely been addressed despite their basic nature. But then why do so many believe in implicit attitudes at all, as a sui generis kind of attitudes?
One more zombie ideological indulgence. All the evidence points away from Implicit Attitude Tests as being in any way meaningful but policy makers keep relying on them to shape their policies.
From A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
“This increase of the bills stood thus: the usual number of burials in a week, in the parishes of St Giles-in-the-Fields and St Andrew’s, Holborn, were from twelve to seventeen or nineteen each, few more or less; but from the time that the plague first began in St Giles’s parish, it was observed that the ordinary burials increased in number considerably. For example:—
From December 27 to January 3 { St Giles’s 16
{ St Andrew’s 17
January 3 to 10 { St Giles’s 12
{ St Andrew’s 25
January 10 to 17 { St Giles’s 18
{ St Andrew’s 28
January 17 to 24 { St Giles’s 23
{ St Andrew’s 16
January 24 to 31 { St Giles’s 24
{ St Andrew’s 15
January 30 ” February 7 { St Giles’s 21
{ St Andrew’s 23
February 7 to 14 { St Giles’s 24
Parallels to today:
This is a very interesting one. In 1665 they were immediately focused on Total All Causes Death Rate which is what we should have been doing all along. We still do not pay too much attention to All Causes Death. Instead we have distracted ourselves by focusing on test results (from tests which have been known to be unreliable since the beginning with too many false positives and negatives), hospitalizations, etc.
By trying to anticipate whether there would be a hospital crunch (there wasn't) we focused on unreliable precursor measurements that would allow us, we thought, insight to what was coming in terms of hospitalizations.
In 1665 there were no hospitals to speak of, no testing, and little public health authority. The public knew there was a problem not because people were ill but because the All Causes Death (as measured by burials) was materially higher than normal for the season.
In general, you never want to bo backwards to the healthcare conditions of yesteryear but in this instance, they had a clearer understanding of the reality of the plague than did any of the modern nations of the Covid-19.
Sister surprises younger brother at graduation... First time seeing each other in over two years.😭📽Rowley_olivia pic.twitter.com/YgIIB9DFnD
— GoodNewsCorrespondent (@GoodNewsCorres1) May 29, 2021
Popularizing science - trying to make its methods and findings accessible to non-scientists - then follows naturally and immediately. Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science.
But there’s another reason: science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Published in 1995, this echoes the work of Neil Postman and is disturbingly prescient.
New study showing bleeding obvious:
— Adam Creighton (@Adam_Creighton) May 28, 2021
"Mask mandates and use are not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among US states.
80% of US states mandated masks.
Mandates induced greater mask compliance but did not predict lower growth rates"https://t.co/piQjqcS0to
Full Moon at Akashi Beach by Tsuchiya Koitsu (1870-1949)
From The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame. Always a good reminder from Rat -
There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do.
This Roman gladiator helmet found at in Pompeii is our #ArtefactOfTheDay.
— The Classical Compendium 🏛️ (@TheClassicalCo) May 28, 2021
Worn by the murmillo, a gladiator that fought with a sword and shield, it is decorated with a medallion of Hercules and dates to c. 1st century CE.#Classics #Roman #Pompeii #Archaeology #Gladiator #Sport pic.twitter.com/fwFmg6SMK8
From A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
The people showed a great concern at this, and began to be alarmed all over the town, and the more, because in the last week in December 1664 another man died in the same house, and of the same distemper. And then we were easy again for about six weeks, when none having died with any marks of infection, it was said the distemper was gone; but after that, I think it was about the 12th of February, another died in another house, but in the same parish and in the same manner.
This turned the people’s eyes pretty much towards that end of the town, and the weekly bills showing an increase of burials in St Giles’s parish more than usual, it began to be suspected that the plague was among the people at that end of the town, and that many had died of it, though they had taken care to keep it as much from the knowledge of the public as possible. This possessed the heads of the people very much, and few cared to go through Drury Lane, or the other streets suspected, unless they had extraordinary business that obliged them to it.
Parallels to today:
Fitful sense among the public as to whether this was a real danger or not.
Intermittent and uncertain reports of outbreaks.
A sudden cascade of concern that this might be real.
The public beginning to change their travel habits without any official intervention.
Timeline cleanser: Man meets the officer who saved his life 19 years ago. https://t.co/0ZTcWVvQ6z pic.twitter.com/Pwr6MKDJDN
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 29, 2021
"When people talk to strangers they are in a better mood...talking to strangers is a readily available source of happiness that people often fail to benefit from, because they are overly pessimistic about how well these conversations will go." https://t.co/7OpBkeLdyQ pic.twitter.com/MAkoHPhRWL
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) May 26, 2021
Mother and Son, 1933 by Daniel Garber (American, 1880-1958)
Click to enlarge.
"The petty thieves support Marcus Cerrinius Vatia for the aedileship!"
— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) May 29, 2021
"Elect Vatia as aedile, all the late drinkers support him!"
Local politicians in Pompeii had fake endorsements painted for their opponents by undesirable supporters like criminals, gamblers and prostitutes. pic.twitter.com/NpVWgaAOfv
From A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe.
We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private. Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in, and that we hoped was not true; till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane. The family they were in endeavoured to conceal it as much as possible, but as it had gotten some vent in the discourse of the neighbourhood, the Secretaries of State got knowledge of it; and concerning themselves to inquire about it, in order to be certain of the truth, two physicians and a surgeon were ordered to go to the house and make inspection. This they did; and finding evident tokens of the sickness upon both the bodies that were dead, they gave their opinions publicly that they died of the plague. Whereupon it was given in to the parish clerk, and he also returned them to the Hall; and it was printed in the weekly bill of mortality in the usual manner, thus—
Plague, 2. Parishes infected, 1.
Parallels to today:
We have to rely more on rumors than confirmed report.
We can't rely on newspapers.
The Government seems to know more than it is sharing. Private knowledge of public concern is the established practice.
The alarm preceded the impact.
There was confusion and deceit in the early days as to what constituted a death from the plague versus.
A solid ring will be caught by a loop of chain if it tumbles during its fall. By Newton's Third law, when the ring twists into and hits the chain, the impact transfers momentum to the end of the chain, which rises up and over the ring https://t.co/9TcUCAq6sJ pic.twitter.com/cREbobZxMR
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 28, 2021
Paper shows that when accrued Social Security benefits are included, wealth inequality is both much smaller and slower-growing than we've been led to believe. And since much of households' wealth is savings for retirement, this has real world importance. https://t.co/qHkQuvocpa
— Andrew G. Biggs (@biggsag) May 26, 2021
Steamboat Burning on Stormy Sea (1850-53) by Johann Jakob Ulrich (Swiss, 1798-1877)
"working-class members of every group are less likely to have received a vaccine and more likely to be skeptical...you can’t understand the country’s struggle to vaccinate everyone — and save thousands of lives — without understanding the class gap." https://t.co/aJ7FtDWa2Z
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) May 25, 2021
Needlessly racialized but dealing with a topic which should be dominating our national politics but which only receives an occasional reference. Deaths from drug overdoses, disproportionately from Chinese manufactured fentanyl. From In pandemic, drug overdose deaths soar among Black Americans by Claire Galofaro.
We have a lot of vociferous and contentious debate about gun violence (some 19,000 deaths per year). This is a popular partisan debate. We have a little discussion about the rising suicide rate (45,000).
And we have virtually no discussion about the 92,000 overdose deaths in 2020. Up from 52,000 in 2015. The rise has been inexorable year-by-year and largely due to fentanyl.
Just as crack cocaine and heroin deaths were largely associated with the black community, fentanyl overdoses have so far been largely concentrated in the white population. But that now seems to changing.
It was September, and as the COVID-19 pandemic intensified America’s opioid addiction crisis in nearly every corner of the country, many Black neighborhoods like this one suffered most acutely. The portrait of the opioid epidemic has long been painted as a rural white affliction, but the demographics have been shifting for years as deaths surged among Black Americans. The pandemic hastened the trend by further flooding the streets with fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid, in communities with scant resources to deal with addiction.
In the city of St. Louis, deaths among Black people increased last year at three times the rate of white people, skyrocketing more than 33%. Black men in Missouri are now four times more likely than a white person to die of an overdose.
There is a lot of blather attempting to make this a race issue instead of the human tragedy it is. There are no points for having the higher addiction rates or overdoses. Galofaro outlines a timeline which seems plausible but which I have not seen laid out so cleanly before.
Some researchers believe the nation is entering a fourth wave. The drug supply is so messy and unpredictable that people overdosing have multiple drugs in their system: dangerous cocktails of fentanyl, a depressant, and stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine.
Maybe. The unexpected disruption of drug supply chains owing to Covid restrictions leading to increased overdoses due to unfamiliarity with the product quality is an intriguing insight.
A lot of illicit fentanyl is manufactured in Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 was first unleashed. Lockdowns initially disrupted the supply, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institute fellow who studies trafficking.
In St. Louis, the drug trade became even more chaotic: People who used to know where their drugs were coming from no longer did. Fentanyl for a time was hard to find, and some turned to less-potent heroin.
But the Chinese laboratories rebounded and resumed shipping the chemicals to Mexico, where cartels process them, Felbab-Brown said. Pandemic border closures presented cartels with added incentive to traffic fentanyl: It is incredibly potent and profitable. The equivalent of a trunkful of heroin or cocaine can be carried across the border in a small suitcase.
And here is the rub. Why are we not talking about the tragedy and impact of the loss of nearly 100,000 people a year and instead focus our political energies on controlling long guns which account for 750-1,000 of gun deaths. All our time on 1,000 nearly no time on the 100,000 are dying from dug overdoses.
My guess is that this is a partisan problem where both parties have backed themselves in untenable positions. The Republicans are most associated with the get tough on crime strategies of the late nineties when violent crime peaked. It has plummeted since then. Did broken windows policing and three-strikes legislation cause the decline? The correlation is clear and strong but the causation a little more unclear.
The two approaches drove down violent crime but never really "solved" drug addiction. That is a third rail which no one wants to touch because there don't seem to be clearly effective solutions which are also politically expedient for either party.
I don't think the Republicans want to be associated with the Just Say No days though they do campaign on tough on crime.
For Democrats it is as nasty briar patch as for Republicans. They are famously weak on crime which doesn't play well in an era of rising crime. The racializing of the drug overdose catastrophe also complicates the management of their various factions. They don't want to be seen to be over-solicitous of white victims when blacks were the clear victims of the three-strikes legislation which many Democrats supported.
And for both parties there is the China card. As Afghanistan is a primary source of opium, it appears that China is the global leader in provision of fentanyl. If true, and data is underreported, then it has been a markedly successful war on the US. Six divisions of Americans are dying each year without China doing anything particularly overt. The US lost less than a third of a division during the entirety of the Normandy Landings.
And for either policy, while dealing with China's Pacific ambitions, trying to get cooperation on Covid-19 origins, cybersecurity attacks, patent theft, etc. why would you want to throw Fentanyl into the mix of issues to be dealt with?
For most people it is obvious - Because it is killing nearly 100,000 Americans a year. For politicians it is less obvious. The War on Drugs is tainted. The probability of cooperation from China low. The possibility of being besmirched from a race angle is increasing. The 100,000 deaths are underrepresented among the Mandarin Class. Why invest political capital? is, I suspect, a self-answering negative.
As an ordinary American I feel incredibly frustrated by the lack of seriousness and humanity among some of the key members of our two major parties. Yes, it is a hard problem and could be politically ruinous to any individual politician. But it is already ruinous to 100,000 Americans each year.
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