Offbeat Humor

CDC Now Recommends Wearing A Seat Belt Even When You’re Outside The Car https://t.co/Q8BjhQirX0

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 2, 2021

 

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Heard an interesting quote attributed to Theodore Roosevelt:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

As is often the case, this is a misattribution and the original quote was earlier and in slightly different form.  The original idea was, according to Quote Investigator, from Henry Thomas Buckle in England a good deal before 1901.  

Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.

 "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" is the emergent order version - short, crisp, memorable. 

Regardless of its origin, it is not strictly accurate.  Great minds have the capacity to function at all three levels but the hierarchy is about right.  And it reflects a social status hierarchy.

It reflects an older and more circumscribed world.  Discussing people was open and available to everyone.  Discussing events was a little higher up the class hierarchy.  Only those with a modicum of education and access to news and information were able to discuss events. 

And ideas?  Definitely at the top of the hierarchy; people with the wealth (and capacity) to obtain the higher education available to 1-5% of the population which would allow the acquisition of knowledge and modes of critical thinking to discuss ideas.  

The neat, crisp and appealing adage has some degree of truth to it but it also has some deep class presumption in it as well.

Data Talks

I've heard this stat a thousand times but it never ceases to blow my mind.

96% of all mammal biomass on the planet is comprised of us and our livestock and pets. Every wild mammal you can think of... the remaining 4%. That gives you a sense of the scale of animal agriculture. https://t.co/2II8cbmjEG

— Liz Specht (@LizSpecht) April 27, 2021

 

View of a harbour; Ansicht eines Hafens, 1815 by Caspar David Friedrich (Niemcy, 1774-1840)

View of a harbour; Ansicht eines Hafens, 1815 by Caspar David Friedrich (Niemcy, 1774-1840)

Click to enlarge.  

History

Folk memory is a powerful thing. John Masefield on his Herefordshire childhood, some 230 years after Cromwell’s death. pic.twitter.com/A1cqOGlE4D

— Mathew Lyons (@MathewJLyons) April 30, 2021

 

An Insight

Every insight is at one level a generalization

The more qualifiers and asterisks you add, the closer you get to the messy reality, but the "insight" then disappears

Generalizations are important, as they ensure you don't miss the wood for the trees

— Śrīkānta (@shrikanth_krish) May 2, 2021

 

I see wonderful things

Prior to maintenance period (and new paint scheme) @hms_tamar and @RoyalMarines experimented with @takeonGravity Jet Suit for potential use in boarding operations. pic.twitter.com/Z6DUjiofH7

— Navy Lookout (@NavyLookout) May 2, 2021

 

Multilevel Selection versus individual selection. Complements or alternates?

A nice Wikipedia article on a topic of worthy public debate but for which our current state of knowledge precludes a hard consensus.  The topic is multilevel selection, called Group Selection by Wikipedia.  

 Group selection is a proposed mechanism of evolution in which natural selection acts at the level of the group, instead of at the more conventional level of the individual.

Early authors such as V. C. Wynne-Edwards and Konrad Lorenz argued that the behavior of animals could affect their survival and reproduction as groups, speaking for instance of actions for the good of the species. In the 1930s, R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane proposed the concept of kin selection, a form of altruism from the gene-centered view of evolution, arguing that animals should sacrifice for their relatives, and thereby implying that they should not sacrifice for non-relatives. From the mid 1960s, evolutionary biologists such as John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, George C. Williams, and Richard Dawkins argued that natural selection acted primarily at the level of the individual. They argued on the basis of mathematical models that individuals would not altruistically sacrifice fitness for the sake of a group. They persuaded the majority of biologists that group selection did not occur, other than in special situations such as the haplodiploid social insects like honeybees (in the Hymenoptera), where kin selection was possible.

In 1994 David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober argued for multi-level selection, including group selection, on the grounds that groups, like individuals, could compete. In 2010 three authors including E. O. Wilson, known for his work on social insects especially ants, again revisited the arguments for group selection. They argued that group selection can occur when competition between two or more groups, some containing altruistic individuals who act cooperatively together, is more important for survival than competition between individuals within each group, provoking a strong rebuttal from a large group of evolutionary biologists and behavior analysts.

It is a topic which is consequential but also potentially disturbing.

The evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne summarized the arguments in The New York Review of Books in non-technical terms as follows:

Group selection isn't widely accepted by evolutionists for several reasons. First, it's not an efficient way to select for traits, like altruistic behavior, that are supposed to be detrimental to the individual but good for the group. Groups divide to form other groups much less often than organisms reproduce to form other organisms, so group selection for altruism would be unlikely to override the tendency of each group to quickly lose its altruists through natural selection favoring cheaters. Further, little evidence exists that selection on groups has promoted the evolution of any trait. Finally, other, more plausible evolutionary forces, like direct selection on individuals for reciprocal support, could have made humans prosocial. These reasons explain why only a few biologists, like [David Sloan] Wilson and E. O. Wilson (no relation), advocate group selection as the evolutionary source of cooperation.

The proponents of multilevel selection are too distinguished to dismiss and there is a logic to their argument which is persuasively plausible but the critics are on equally firm footing in the validity of their criticisms.

 My own suspicion is that this might be a debate about definitions and time frames.  That selfish-gene type evolution dominates at the biological level while prosocial group selection type evolution operates at the cultural level.  

Essentially a hardware/software type of argument.  Hardware sets fixed parameters that are hard to evolve over time.  Software capabilities tend to evolve and diversify at a much faster rate than does hardware.

When we look at people, there is their inherent physical attribute endowment which is constrained by biological evolution.  This often predicts their relevant ranking within a group, people with good health, good looks, good looks rising towards the top.  

But their actual productivity is to a significant degree determined by their adherence to values and behaviors inculcated via socio-cultural influences such as class, religion, and family norms.  

In this view, individual performance is both a function of longterm selfish-gene capabilities which are not easily modified, interacting with much shorter term socio-cultural capabilities which are far more malleable and adaptable to near term changing circumstances.  

Offbeat Humor

 

Click to enlarge.

Exceeding low estimates - a success or still a failure?

From Assessing My COVID Expectations by Bryan Caplan.  Much success depends on effective forecasting on select issues.  Forecasting is cognitively taxing and diversionary from more mundane activities which necessarily must be tended to but a usefully accurate forecast on something germane can yield significant dividends.

Caplan is post-event assessing actual performance during the Covid-19 pandemic against his expectations which requires a little mental limberness.  We are accustomed to thinking in absolute terms.  If you want something to perform at a certain level, that is what you measure.  This machine is supposed to produce 100 widgets per hour is a forecast in absolute terms.  A more Bayesian approach takes into account contextual expectations.  

Yes, it is supposed to produce 100 widgets per hour but it is a fiddly machine and changes in the quality of inputs lead me to believe it will only produce 20 widgets per hour.

If it produces 50 widgets, it far exceeds the low expectations based on a Bayesian assessment and far underperforms based on a more theoretical expectation.

Caplan looks at the performance of Government, Population, Business, the Pharma Industry, and the FDA in particular.  

My paraphrase of his assessment:

Government - He had low expectations and Government underperformed against those expectations.

Population - He had moderate expectations of people's response to the pandemic but they dramatically underperformed against expectations.  His chief surprise was how easily people were stampeded into hysteria and how resistant they were to reality checks of that hysteria.

Business -  He had high expectations and business slightly exceeded those expectations.

Pharma Industry - Given the significant possibility that a vaccine could not be developed at all, he had reasonably low expectations and they far exceeded those expectations, producing multiple workable vaccines within a year which were then manufactured in bulk and widely distributed quickly.  

FDA - Very, very low expectations but their performance far exceeded those low expectations. 

I broadly concur.  I would assess government performance even lower.  Had we but adhered to the existing pandemic plans, we would have avoided prolonged shutdowns and indiscriminate masking debates leading to measurable better outcomes.  By doing nothing other than what was already set in place based on past experience, outcomes would have been significantly better.  

In terms of the population, I am sympathetic to a pass.  When government, academia, and the media are all lined up propagating hysteria, it seems unreasonable to me to expect that the average busy citizen should stand as a rock against the storm of misinformation.  

Business and Pharma - agree.

I am curious why Caplan focuses on the FDA rather than the CDC.  I can sort of see how he could get to his FDA conclusion since he expected the very worst.  I would be curious though, to see his assessment of the CDC given its centrality to the issue of response to pandemics, how they arbitrarily through out the established playbook, went with their guts against the science, flip-flopped, worked agendas not in the interest of the public, propagated known untruths, and hid relevant conflicts of interests. 

I had moderately low expectations but their emphatic departure from science and professional norms seems to warrant a bad performance against moderately low expectations outcome.  

Regardless, I like the Bayesian approach which goes beyond absolute assessments.