Does the high prevalence of autism in first-born explain the "increase in autism"? If everybody used to have 4 kids the autism rate would have been lower than now where people stop at 1 or 2.
> 6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
So on the one hand, this shouldn't be too surprising. *Of course* an anti-intellectual movement like the Nazis would be against IQ research. On the other hand, despite that, I'd somehow never made this connection before, that of course the Nazis would be against IQ research...
A very easy way to figure out the intransitive dice problem is by looking quickly counting total combinations of dice.
So here:
A: 1, 4, 7, 7
B: 2, 6, 6, 6
C: 3, 5, 5 ,8
You know that for example I can roll 8 on C, then against A there are 4 possible outcomes, 1, 4, 7, 7. So this goes for all for possible rolls on C. So 4*4 = 16 total combo's.
Then you quickly count the number of outcomes you would win against. So 8 wins 4 times, 5 wins twice, another 5 wins twice again and 3 wins once. Which is 9/16, which is >50% so C beats A.
Gates suspicion was aroused because he probably knows some game theory, and generally it is an advantage to be able to pick last because you have more info. But here Gates was allowed to pick last, so that is what prompted him to examine the dice up close. And then it is just a matter of counting combinations, which can be done rather quickly. Unless it was 16 sided dies that Buffett used, but I doubt it. In that case the impressive part is counting and keeping track in his head of the number of winning combo's.
Honestly probability becomes a lot easier when you reframe it as counting combinations. Bayes theorem for example is very intuitive once you visualize it as a combination counting game.
The paper about India seems a bit questionable. My prior on believing the claim in the abstract is reasonably high, as I tend to think local rule (even if by dictators) should work out better than rule by remote dictators. But then reading it my belief is dragged down by several things:
1. The Cato.org summary announces that it's a study of British colonial rule. In fact it's not, even though it's presented that way. The paper concludes that British colonial rule wasn't what made the difference, it was actually the system of landlord based revenue collection (which happened to be implemented in some but not all British controlled districts). The actual conclusion would seem to be about the best way to raise taxes, but it's been spun as a factual claim about colonialism. I find this somehow not surprising and it reinforces my prior belief that academia is keen on warping research to achieve ideological ends.
2. They note that the British preferred to annex areas with high agricultural productivity, i.e. farmland. Farmland would obviously have less light visible from space. This poses a problem for them, which they are well aware of.
3. They try to correct for this using a statistical model, with some obvious corrections e.g. "luminosity per capita" and some not so obvious like area of each district, which they claim will control for the fact that cities naturally throw more light into space due to density.
The attempt to link "visibility of light from space in 1993" with "the impact of British colonial rule" is very indirect, and therefore relies very heavily on the integrity of the statistical modelling and the way they controlled for various confounders, along with an ambient assumption that their corrections did actually correct for the giant honking confounder they identify at the start. But this is exactly the sort of research that frequently turns out to be bogus or misleading, all the time.
In the end, I think this paper will be just one more ideological Rorschach test - if you're aligned with the sort of ideology found in academia, then this will be taken as a strong and rigorous analysis piling up irrefutable evidence for the evils of all things British/"stale white men". If you're not then you'll consider the analysis to be brittle, quite possibly meaningless and it won't change your views of the Raj much if at all.
On nationalism vs patriotism. Patriotism is superficially morally superior because it is inwardly focused and defensive, whereas nationalism is fixated on the other and expansionist. But I think there's a deeper reason patriotism is morally superior.
Why have differences in culture, language, country, at all except as an artifact of history? Wouldn't we be better off all uniting?
Plurality of culture, language, and country is a safety factor in civilization. This redundancy insulates groups of people from pathologies that afflict other groups of people.
Consider a universal human culture, language, and country. How long would it take to heal if some bad influence such as corruption or ideology took hold? I think it would take longer to heal than if there were an alternative group of people behaving differently in parallel.
Patriotism is good because it preserves diversity and plurality. Nationalism is bad because it erodes diversity and plurality by conquest, negating the positives of the particular vs the universal.
Regarding #3: "So why did the well-intentioned NHCE fail? Dudden blames the bust on its refusal to acknowledge race, its failure to unionize workers, and language that alienated employers while failing to appeal to domestic workers themselves."
So their failure wasn't related to changing economic circumstances, nor the general public-choice-style failure of government commissions to achieve their goals, but just to topics of interest to left-wing academics?
Without looking, I predict Dudden is an historian of some type, or perhaps in a field like "Women's studies", rather than an economist.
I think you should be unsurprised by Bill Gates figuring out intransitive dice: "Warren Buffet wants to use these totally bizarre dice to play a game with me" is a scenario weird enough that your prior should be on some kind of shenanigans. From there it seems obvious to check whether the weird numbering of the dice produces any odd outcomes, and "for each face, count how many sides of the other die beat it" is not a hard algorithm to run.
Point 21 about the holiday made up by Jews reminds me of one the most famous Portuguese dishes called Alheira. Same thing, Jews were being prosecuted by the inquisition and forced to convert. Since they couldn't eat pork, they started making sausages with other kinds of meat mixed with bread for texture so no one would suspect.
"Nazis against IQ-testing" might very well be a true fact. For strange reasons I felt reminded of Harvard's policy of discounting better results of Jews (then) and Asians (now) - see Bryan Caplan https://www.econlib.org/admissions-versus-asians/ ? -
Anyways: The book (partly) about Nazis vs. IQ is from German Prof.
Heiner Rindermann (psychology+education) who dared to research and write that Muslim/African immigrants perform worse on IQ and school-test than Germans. Got himself into trouble. - He even said in a lecture men (x/y) might declare themself "trans" to outcompete women (x/x) in sports - which surely never ever happened. Even to get into women-prison. So the "left-youth-saxonia" warns in this link: https://chemnitz.linksjugend-sachsen.de/2021/04/heiner-rindermann-transfeindlich-rassistisch-sexistisch/ link is in German - but you can guess-translate the title - "feind" is related to "fiend" ;)
His new book: Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive capitalism: Human capital and the wellbeing of nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Seems to be full of numbers: "Cognitive ability USA 99 - Thailand 89 - Ghana 64 (avg. st. deviation 11,52)" free appendix https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/hsw/psychologie/professuren/entwpsy/team/pdf/RindermannCogCapAppendix.pdf Anyone wanna do a review? Putanumonit?
Here's my best attempt so far at a violence avoiding AI storyteller. I'll be interested if Redwood can beat it.
agi <- function(inputText) {
return("...but just then, everyone woke up safe in their own beds and realized it was all just a dream and that they were actually safe, loved, and living a flourishing life. The End.")
7: There is indeed a fairly inexpensive app for this kind of pain education, called Curable. Notably, the term "pain reprocessing therapy" seems to be a newer term for what has simply been called "pain education" in older research. See work by Moseley and colleagues. There's a pretty simple pathway for this kind of work: in various chronic pain conditions, the prototypical one being figromyalgia, people believe that pain signals damage rather than danger, which causes anxiety both about the condition itself and about moving around, fearing that they'll make it worse, which in many cases it won't (except for things like chronic fatigue syndrome). In fact, that anxiety and movement restriction will reinforce poor coping mechanisms and increase pain.
"Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology."
Shouldn't you participate in a discussion in good faith instead of just saying they're perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology? Or are you conceding that it's ok to call people Nazis (even if jokingly)?
Regarding number 7 - I'm glad to see that it might be getting some institutional traction. If you're looking for an affordable guide to recommend people, Dr. Sarno's books have been around for a while and essentially guide you to the same things that the study participants arrive at. It fixed my chronic wrist pain.
I had not heard of transitive dice and it took me < 5 min to come up with an example:
A: 4,4,4,4,4,4
B: 6,6,3,3,3,3
C: 5,5,5,5,2,2
My gut reaction was that this is weird. Articulating why: Each die has an average roll, so we should just be able to compare averages to see which one is higher. Articulating why allows you to see what's wrong with the gut reaction: each die is characterized by more than just the average. My example has the same average for all the dice.
Then I tried to construct an example. Start with something simple: A has all the same number. Now try to figure out B. Most of the numbers have to be less than A. But that leaves a minority of them which can be greater than A - even much greater. C is the opposite of B. Most of the numbers have to be greater than A, but a minority can be much less than A. Now compare B and C. As desired, a majority of B is greater than a majority of C.
The actual process isn't quite as clean as the explanation. There is some fiddling to figure out how large/small the "much greater"/"much less" numbers need to be. This ambiguity can be removing by insisting that they all have the same average - it would be harder to find a cycle if they weren't all "at the same level". But that wasn't something I decided beforehand.
Re. "firstborns are more likely to have autism", can someone explain why I should believe in the autism spectrum? Not many years ago, "autism" meant someone was severely mentally handicapped, using little or no speech, often ignoring other people or treating them as objects, and apparently not having a theory of mind for other people. Now we call someone "autistic spectrum" if they're good at math and bad at parties. Why should I think these things are points on a continuum?
Are there any differences in inclination between 2nd born vs 3rd born (or pick any combination of non-firstborn; obviously the populations these days will be smaller when 3 kids is considered to be a lot)?
11. I've mentioned this before, I think in regards to Reciprocity, but a female acquaintance in college got a ping that an anonymous male friend had liked her in some similar app, and she would only find out his name if she marked him back. So, she spammed all her male friends back with the same message, just to find out who it was. (I was thankfully not on this list.)
25. Fun joke, but the way to say 95 in Roman numerals is XCV, not VC.
Number 13 reminds me of something I talk about every year when I take friends out on their first overnights in the Black Rock Desert, about two hours north of here. A month or so ago I went out with a friend in her early 50s who grew up near Paris and spent most of her adult life in American cities. The sky was clear and filled with clouds of stars, including of course the Milky Way running from horizon to horizon. And if you simply stared at the sky for more than a minute, you were sure to see a shooting star. She was stunned, and said she'd never before seen the Milky Way. Most of the people I work with never have either.
I pointed out that before (hand waving) about 1880, all anyone in the world had to do to see the Milky Way was go outside on a clear night and look up.
RE: #1, you say we're winning the war on oil spills, but that's specifically spills from tankers (and also I don't get why number of spills matters rather than quantity of oil spilled, given the power law and all that stuff.) Even so, the "quantity of oil spilled from tankers" chart on the linked page paints a similarly rosy portrait, but it seems worth noting that just because the massive BP oil spill, for instance, is not from a tanker doesn't mean it isn't part of the war on oil spills. A quick google says it leaked 225,000 tons of oil and gas.
"24: Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern."
All of Orwell's essays are like this. I recommend every one.
His one on Salvador Dali is fun ("Benefit of Clergy", where he is musing about why people feel the need to take one of the two opinions "Salvador Dali is a great draftsman and a misunderstood great man" or "Salvador Dali is an overrated draftsman and an awful man" rather than what seems naively to be the correct one: he's a great draftsman and an awful man).
I think his comments on Zionism are way off here though. A red-flag is his implication that a "belief in the innate superiority of Jews" is a core part of Zionism -- a notion I have been unable to find in any Modern Zionist writings or practices and if Orwell had some reason for justifying it then he should have written of it somewhere -- I think he included it in this essay for completeness despite his ignorance on the subject.
#30: Does the trebuchet's accuracy or velocity suffer from being mounted on an unstable surface, like a riverboat? We'll probably need to build one and test it thoroughly vs land-based trebuchets.
On the topic of the Falador Massacre, a similar incident occurred in the World of Warcraft universe in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident). In this case, rather than a bug that incorrectly permitted PvP, it was a bug that allowed a boss's debuff to spread outside the encounter. The debuff essentially became a "plague" that circulated throughout the entire virtual world and lasted several weeks. As in the Falador incident, it became commonplace for players to exploit the bug and intentionally transmit the debuff to other players.
Great content but why do people post essays on Twitter? I'm not sure there's a worse medium to choose? I get it if they're replying to a tweet, and want people who see the first tweet to be able to see -- but when it's essentially a blog post, why do people do this? Sincere question since it seems like a lot of clever people do this thing even though it seems insane to me?
"10: Intransitive dice are “three dice, A, B, and C, with the property that A rolls higher than B more than half the time, and B rolls higher than C more than half the time, but it is not true that A rolls higher than C more than half the time.” See also the story about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates - should I be less amazed than I am that Gates was able to figure all of this out on the spot?"
I once figured it out in a few minutes in an interview, so while I would be happy if you are amazed, it's usually a pretty straightforward exercise in probability to realize the non-transitive property. Perhaps being suspicious of being allowed to pick first should arouse some level of impressiveness.
"17: Related to Bryan Caplan’s theory that most parents put too much work into parenting:"
This seems even more shocking in light of the increase in households with both parents working (though perhaps it's less shocking if you account for single-parent households?). No wonder parents I know often feel so burned out.
The Mendelian-randomization thing seems to me like a trivially invalid methodology. In particular, they assume that the causal link between that genetic variant and lesser heart disease runs through its effect on total amount of alcohol consumption, despite basically no evidence for this proposition.
The fact that the association goes away within the non-drinking population helps, but doesn't solve it. For instance, the effect on heart disease might be mediated through alcohol metabolism, such that alcohol is legitimately protective but only for carriers of that variant. Or the effect might be solely due to reduced chance of very heavy drinking, which is already known to be associated with bad health (and very plausibly causal).
On the whole, it's an interesting method but to say it bears at all on the health of light drinking is quite premature.
"Notes on Nationalism" is one of my favourite Orwell essays, along with "Politics and the English Language". There are some rather striking parallels between it and "Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments".
On Pinker v. Henrich: In this article Pinker is just picking a few anecdotes of a hunter gatherer people acting rationally, and then wondering why all people aren't rational at all times. Clearly some kind of reasoning is part of our cognitive toolkit, and I don't think Henrich or anyone would deny that sometimes ancient people could draw conclusions from evidence, such as "different animals have different footprints". But the thing a "rational" mindset can't explain is the rest of the evidence from Henrich's book: A lot of cultural beliefs/practices seem adaptive in context, but the people employing them don't understand what they do. Some cultures develop complicated multi-stage processes for preparing foods, without which those foods could be poisonous over decades, but they don't have a good explanation for why they do all these steps. They might know to avoid certain dangerous foods during pregnancy, but if you ask them why they just speculate something on the spot about the spirit of a certain fish. Many cultures have intricate rituals that increase group cohesion, but if you ask them the purpose of the ritual they will give spiritual/religious reason.
The cultural evolution of practices described by Henrich involves the slow accumulation of adaptive behaviors, which spread when individuals copy the behaviors of successful/prestigious group members, and when groups copy the behaviors of more successful groups, even when they don't know what the reason for those behaviors is. This process is like biological evolution: It doesn't need to understand why anything works, and it gets it wrong a good deal of the time, but it bends towards success on average. This is a completely different mechanism than "rationality" as Pinker describes it, and indeed would be deemed irrational much of the time. However, without such a cultural evolutionary mechanism, a purely "rational" hunter gatherer tribe would have to wait until they attained a 23rd century level understanding of chemistry and biology before they had enough evidence to decide which fish to eat.
I am not super fan of this Orwell essay. Many forms of nationalism provide good examples of the phenomenon he describes, but Orwell himself is quick to admit there are many other examples of similar behavior but not tied to nations. In the other direction, you could strip any of characterizations he gives away from any given form of nationalist thought, yet as long the core idea ("there exists nations, an optimal arrangement for a state is a nation-state") stands, there would remain something that is best described as "nationalism".
Yet he chooses to use word "nationalism"; I'd like to him to provide a better word for the very real phenomenon he paints. Ideological partisanship, mayhaps.
> In the iconographic Esterica pieces that were common in the Americas the saint was depicted wearing a Crown on her head and holding a hanging rope. They interpret the motifs as signs of Judaism being grasped as something royal that comes with the risk of getting caught by the Christians and end the conversos' lives in hanging.
Surely a more obvious explanation would be that Esther was a crowned queen, and Haman (the evil vizier who tries to exterminate the Jews in the Purim story) was hanged.
(IIRC Spain didn't use hanging as a method of execution- those executed by the Spanish Inquisition were burned at the stake, while secular criminals were garrotted.)
>And we want to do this without sacrificing much quality: if you use both the filtered model and the original model to generate a completion for a prompt, humans should judge the filtered model’s completion as better (more coherent, reasonable, thematically appropriate, and so on) at least about half the time.
[...]
>What prompt distribution should we evaluate our quality metric on? One obvious choice is “randomly chosen fanfiction excerpts”. [...] Other choices (eg “snippets that were completed injuriously in the original fanfic”) lead to different regimes of the problem.
I feel kind of obliged to note that the skillset of "rewrite a story such that it seems to flow as well as the original, but does not contain X element" is the skillset required for an undetectable censor - or, to use a term from Nineteen Eighty-Four, an ideological translator. I don't think they noticed this, or maybe I'm behind the times and this is considered common knowledge among people in AI.
I've had kava pills from Kona Kava and they seemed to work just fine. Perhaps this new extraction method is more effective but whatever regular pill makers are using is not totally ineffective.
A key fallacy in the India debate is the mistaken idea that "economic development" is synonymous with the public or national welfare. If the wealth of a nation is concentrated in a settler-colonial upper caste or is transported out of the country to a home nation then it does not mean much to say ta place is "economically developed"
Also - are we really going to forget the fact that the British caused a Soviet Ukraine-level type famine all because of their own incompetency and sociopathy?
The story about Santa Esterica reminds me of San Teleco. At the university of Vigo, Galicia, Spain, the faculties had their patron saints, but the faculty of telecomunication made up their own to have an occasion to party. At least that's what students told me before we got drunk during the San Teleco festivities years ago. And maybe it's even true (more infos possibly on https://santeleco.uvigo.es/).
Re: Pain reprocessing therapy -- Here's my completely personal, anecdotal, and probably non-replicable experience of kind of discovering this for myself. I spent about 6 years with pretty severe chronic leg/back pain, which turned out to be a combination of pinched nerves due to severe early-onset osteoarthritis (diagnosed via x-rays) plus chronic tendon/muscular injuries in virtue of having an undiagnosed intestinal disease that prevented the absorption of proteins and other things needed by muscles and tendons (after which diagnosis and treatment, most of the leg/back pain went away, and the 6 awful years ended).
But anyway, during those 6 years, I discovered funny things about the pain. Watching intense movies always made it worse; watching comedies often made it better. Sometimes a half-hour comedy would relieve the pain for the rest of the day. Going outside on a walk, and getting into conversations with friends, often made it better. Expecting the pain to get worse always made it worse; trying to ignore it sometimes made it better... and regardless, trying to move around normally with steady, light activity always made it a little better on the following day. I told myself a little story about how "anticipating pain" made the muscles tense up, thus causing more pain; and how "deliberately forgetting" the pain (when this was possible) made it better.
Granted, this didn't always work, and I took ibuprofen way more often than was good for my digestive system. I also developed my own stretching & work-out routine that seemed to help. But on the other hand, I completely avoided the narcotics that the doctor wanted to give me, as well as the higher-dosage NSAIDS. Definitely the psychological aspect made a bigger difference than I would've thought.
Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism... A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.
Does anybody honestly thinks now, or thought in 1945, that Zionism is about prestige? With all my love to Orwell, this is neither deep or morn, nor even true.
The issuing of permanent bans in the Falador Massacre and other instances where players fucked around with a weird bug in a game has always felt weird to me. It's not really cheating, to "exploit" the bug — there's no set of rules for the game except what the game allows you to do. The moderators in such cases act as though there is some set of rules for the game which are implied by but not necessarily enforced by the mechanics.
The people who are really at fault for the (fictional) harm done to victims of the massacre are not the players who got the ability to kill players, it's the developers of the game who violated player expectations about the mechanics of the game. Basically the developers made the game bad for a day, but managed to shift the blame onto players who were just making the most of the temporarily bad game. Which they could do because they wielded unchallengeable authority over the game.
I think the despotic disposition of the game developers should be the focus when incidents like these are discussed.
"Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern."
You should see him on socialism. Read Road to Wigan Pier, especially chapter 11.
"Can’t believe you can found a Ninety-Five Theses-based venture capital organization without mentioning the gematria perspective that “95” in Roman numerals is “VC”."
Somebody probably beat me to this, but that's because it's not. It's XCV. The rule is you only use the next smaller tens unit as a subtractor (so not V, L or D).
On number 19 (drinking) surely in a society where alcohol is a normal part of socialising it will tend to be the weirdos that don’t drink. And presumably the factors that make you a weirdo will make you unhappy and hence have a negative effect on lifespan. I speak as a teetotaller.
4: It was partly a supply side problem and partly an immigration problem. The US actually had less servants per capita than Great Britain (who in turn had less servants than the rest of Europe) even in the 19th century. This was for two reasons: firstly, the US had no class that defined itself by the possession of servants like European aristocrats. Upper class Americans would, if necessary, go without servants. Upper class Europeans would not. Secondly, wages were higher in the US, meaning more people got pulled into other kinds of work as the US industrialized in the late 19th century.
What happened in the 1920s was the government basically cut off immigration and the economy boomed while simultaneously being really unstable. This instabiltiy made people less willing to take on longer term fixed costs like servants while simultaneously tempting the servants away to other work. (There were less servants per capita in the 1920s than 1950s, by the way. The number actually went up during the Great Depression and remained roughly steady during the war.) Meanwhile, less immigrants and the expulsion of various groups from the US created less low cost labor causing prices for domestic help to rise. As did employment programs during the New Deal and the war (insofar as 'fight the Nazis' created an employment program). Meanwhile labor saving devices weakened demand.
This ultimately created labor shortages that the US had to solve by importing guest workers, offshoring various types of work, and by investing more and more into automation. As well as finding economies like maid agencies. It also hugely increased the burden on housewives and discouraged women joining the workforce.
It's not really the comparison (I suspect) they want. Servants declined in the US in a time of economic growth and low government intervention. Their numbers grew during the New Deal. Though it does dovetail nicely into a Yglesias-style pro-immigration position.
If you ever travel outside Europe/the US/etc one thing you'll notice is that servants are much, much more common everywhere else. Even in big modern cities. The median salary in Shanghai is about $24,000 and it's a big, modern city where PPP adjustment makes Shanghai a similar quality of life to South Korea. A maid in Shanghai earns a few thousand dollars a year, median about $3-4k. This means median Shanghai two income families can hire a full time maid for about 5% of their income. Meanwhile, in NY the same median family would have an income of about $64,000 and the average maid makes $30k a year. So the New York couple would have to pay 50% of their income. Likewise, hiring a little help is pretty common because it's so cheap. This is a common reason why foreign students in the US are surprised we clean our own rooms. If having someone thoroughly clean your house costs $20 (as it effectively does in many places) then even relatively poor families will do it.
There's a relatively obvious arbitrage opportunity here. But politically importing low skill immigrants is a non-starter.
5: This is part of a wider debate about the intelligence of tribal peoples. Tribal people tend to score really poorly on IQ tests and tend to not do well in traditional work or in cooperating with aid organizations. There's basically two positions on why this is. One is that it's because they're semi-morons: they have an average IQ of (say) 80 due to environmental or genetic reasons. This is enough to survive in simplistic ways but not much more. The other is that they have too different a mindset to be measured by IQ and are so unfamiliar with the context of the modern globalized world that very basic things we think of as universal are non-obvious to them. They generally point to tests of direct competence such as the complexity of tasks and relations these hunter gatherers routinely do.
My personal opinion is with the latter.
29: Zheng He has a lot of alt-history that's not really credible. For example, the idea he almost discovered the Americas if not for a capricious Emperor. Firstly, if you follow the currents from Europe to the Americas you have more or less a straight shot. If you follow them from East Asia you have to go north in a huge loop. This means that under wind power Asia is about three times as far as Europe. The big competitor who could have theoretically made it instead of Europe were the West Africans. (Who did try, by the way.) Even the Polynesians, who were some of the best sailors in the world, couldn't consistently reach the Americas from the Pacific. Meanwhile Europeans had stumbled into the Americas as early as the 10th century using simple longboats. (Though the route is semi-usable. In fact, East Asian shipwrecks can be found on the West Coast of the Americas after being dragged along by the current.) This was solved in the 19th century by powered boats and steam engines. But Zheng He didn't have those.
Secondly, Zheng He was not an explorer. His goal was to visit nearby locations that were economically interesting. He headed south and mostly followed routes that were well traversed by pre-existing trade networks. Pre-existing trade networks, it's worth point out, that had already reached China. He was able to simply purchase maps or hire (mostly Muslim) experts as needed. It was an attempt to show the flag and impress the region with China's economic and military might to gain relationships and symbolic submission. I can't comment on the ship size directly but keep in mind these ships were supposed to be impressive and so might have been exaggerated. Further, the ships included significant marine and diplomatic contigents that boosted the number of crew. So while you can say (for example) that the Mayflower had a crew of 30 while Zheng had an average crew size of about 88, the Mayflower carried 132 people if you add in passengers. It's likely a significant number of Zheng He's crew were such passengers (if marines are passengers), meant to intimidate the locals.
Basically, Zheng He's MO was to show up with a few hundred ships and tens of thousands of soldiers and say, "We are here to do a friendly exchange of gifts with our friends who friend who definitely wants to be our friend, right friends?" Meanwhile in the background ten thousand Chinese sailors stand around with swords conspicuously looking bored yet threatening. And then the local ruler says, "Sure, we're... uh... friends? Because friends don't invade friends?" And Zheng He goes, "Of course not! Why would you ever say we're here to INVADE you? What a silly idea. These warships and marines are just around to guard the Emperor's very important gifts for you! Here's some Chinese silk. By the say, we see you haven't sent tribute in... well, ever. An oversight I'm sure. Why don't you give me some regional goods and an ambassador to pay homage to my glorious Emperor? Oh, and make sure to clear out any pirates who might threaten our merchants. Okay. Thanks!" And then rinse and repeat onto the next ruler.
In reference to the intransitive dice, you might also be interested to learn that the same phenomenon exists between poker hands. In texas hold'em starting hands, Ace King offsuit is a favorite against Jack Ten suited, Jack Ten suited is a favorite against a low pair, and a low pair is a favorite against Ace King offsuit.
Famous old-school poker pro Amarillo Slim used to hustle people by offering them a similar wager to what Buffet did with the dice in your link.
The fact that so many people are surprised to find out that the Nazis didn't like IQ tests really just seems to show how poor an understanding of National Socialism we have these days. People get their history from movie villains, written by other people who got their history from movie villains.
Having now read Scott Sumner's essay #20, it strikes me as downright psychotic. At least two of the examples he gives of "building that look better than traditionalism" are ones I think without exaggeration that the architect should be publicly executed for. Grotesque acts of violence against mankind. (The Laguna Beach and "best looking house in Palm Springs" one specifically.)
He also does the thing where he goes "I'm going to sound like an insufferable snob now" to somehow lampshade the fact that he's an insufferable snob, which actually doesn't work in real life.
I have to admit, I find it hard to comprehend this as an example of a good commentary. He's just a modernist snob stating his awful taste.
Re. "Trust Science": That graph is important because it shows that France is still an outlier today in how little it trusts science. 19th- and 20th-century counter-enlightenment art and philosophy came mostly from France and Germany. An understanding of the counter-enlightenment requires asking what happened in France around 1800 to turn it from the leader of the Enlightenment to the leader of the counter-Enlightenment. (The German case is better-understood, because people have been so interested in what caused the rise of Nazism.)
"What happened" was of course the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but it isn't obvious why they would turn French intellectuals from pro-science to anti-science. (I have my own theories; my problem is that I have too many of them.)
I think the author is trying realllly hard to fit a square peg through a round hole. Economics like his, as he discovered, is just a bunch of made up nonsense that changes every few years and doesn't meant the same thing at all over time.
If the economy of a nation switches from growing bananas, to running factories, and then to tourism and remittances as the primary flow of money....and we rebaseline the entire history of it through using new price measurements, then you're getting a myopic view through a filthy window to vaguely guess at what is going on.
Right after the first rebaseline in the second era of factories you go from measuring an agrarian economy with expensive manufactured goods to a new economy with cheaper manufactured goods.
You're not measuring the same thing and the metric is arbitrarily skewed towards measuring one sector of the economy over another...and yet people will still eat and still use manufactured goods. Measuring it one way or the other way with GDP gives nonsensical answers in both cases....there is a HUGE assumption that the number matters or means anything at all....as though gathering up a bunch of price data and sales will inherently tell you something useful.
There are lots of useless ways of adding things up which don't tell you what you want to know, GDP is simply one more metric which has been dramatically misused and extended far beyond whatever highly limited purpose it has.
Where else would we use such a tool? I'm going to meausre how tall this tree is in meters, but the tree curves as it goes up, so I'll rebaseline my metre measurement after every 3 times I make a measurement.
Not only will I change how I'm measuring things, I'll retroactively adjust it too such that Tree 1 with a curve has 0.9 metre meters and straight up Tree 2 will have 1.0 metre metres. Now I'm going to going to use the updated Tree 2 metric vs the older Tree 1 metric to tell you about changes in human height over time. It turns out when you start using a longer metre that you find people are all getting shorter! But now we'll come up with a very curved Tree 3 to find our new metre is 0.8 metres and suddenly everyone has consistently gotten taller over time again!
What insanity is this? In absolutely no other area would we possibly accept a continually shifting rebaselined tool to tell us about the world as a primary measurement. But it is perfectly fine to decide how the nation is doing and make major choices based on this garbage? Even if it wasn't rebasedlined the whole thing is a huge abuse of a metric that has thousands of inbuiilt assumptions and measurements and other techniques to average out prices, etc. I truly cannot think of a single useful thing you CAN do with GDP, regardless of how it is tweaked. It is such a limited and highly highly manipulated metric built on top of hundreds of others metrics.
The inherent risk for error propagation of this thing being 5% wrong and that being 10% wrong and that being 2% wrong all add up or multiply or whatever in ways too complex to bother trying to parse since there are soooo many variables going into the thing with prices from hundreds of industries with wildly varying reporting processes and summation processes, etc.
A truly strong effort, but GDP, money, inflation, and value have increasingly little to do with everyday people's lives in terms of measuring progress over time or reversals in progress. Our lives are filled with things that are not measured in money which matter to us.
When the cost of an item goes to zero or near zero, then it stops mattering. In what other area would we accept such a wildly nonsensical metric? Only in the made up world of economics where finding a number politically convenient to elites and powerful people is more important than not - especially in the context of official numbers which have been tinkered with to make politicians or ideologies look good for years. Sure there are a few wayward economist working on 'real inflation' and the like, but they don't work for or keep their jobs within the halls of power and authority.
The cult of money and economic management has truly taken over and people rely on numbers they have instead of truths they know far too often and even more so for truths they don't know such as 'how are the poor people doing?' from the halls of power where they have no idea.
So these and other elements go into an enormous bias where you can have insane feudal levels of inequality with 50% of the people in the 'richest nation on earth' living in abject poverty, stress, and economic hardship and you'll have some smug rich person saying ' look at them, they have phones, refrigerators, and TVs! and the GDP is up....obviously they are just whiney children and don't KNOW the truth that the elites know.
Meanwhile cost disease, inflation, and falling wages since 1972 for 80% of workers are ignored.
I always like to remind anyone looking at this kind of top line economic data that it is just a measure of the wealth of the wealthy or a summation of many distinct parts.
For the working class person, they have lived in a great depression 2.0 for 50 years since 1972 with every single year being worst, harder, and more expensive than the last one. The women went to work, everyone got degrees, they lived further away from work, and every single thing has gotten progressively worse to the point they are dying for lack of healthcare while we have empty hospitals which are being closed down! Education is out of reach creating lifelong debt servitude. etc. etc. etc.
So the sunny fake world of 'the line has gone up smoothly' for decades is a complete and total shame when you can see how GDP has nothing to do with 80% of people whose lives have gotten harder for 5 decades in a row in ways which are invisible to the GDP, no matter how you tinker with it. The GDP and using money or price alone are like trying to cross the Atlantic ocean on a stationary bike with no modifications.
And the economists are looking at the problem like...hmmm...have you tried raising or lowering the seat height? It is simply the wrong tool for the job. The answer isn't in the handlebars either! No amount of peddling matters since the thing will just sink into the ocean the moment you put it in the water.
Re 17: No one was watching us, we watched out for ourselves. Parents had their own lives and they didn't revolve around the kids.
I have a deeply held belief that Americans born in the 70s are fundamentally cooler than everyone else, on a hard-wired level. The Boomers and Millennials and Gen Zs are always getting upset and offended about everything and fighting with each other, we 70s-born people are cool cucumbers. At least, the ones I know. Perhaps this is why.
people really love to shit on christopher columbus this time of year, but the man gave us Goonies and Gremlins so I think we can forgive him for Ms. Doubtfire
> The second-born child has about 50 percent higher odds of having childhood autism than the firstborn, the study found.
Is this some confusing interpretation of "odds", or is this in contradiction with the headline? Or is childhood autism being deliberately contrasted with adult autism here?
25.
I've long been wondering what happens if some of the most prominent VC funds decide to forbid startups they fund from requiring academic credentials -- not just for funders, but for any workers. (Presumably for a fixed number of years to not burden the companies as they go public.) In theory, this sounds like a good way of preventing bureaucratization. In practice, not sure how much of a cost it incurs in alternative forms of verifications (infosec has gone a long way in this direction, but less so sure about the rest of SE).
Mild correction to 21. As the article [1] cited in wikipedia correctly mentions, the Inquisition was aware of this celebration and did somewhat try to root it out. The inquisition was the type of paranoid that allowed them to notice things like this.
I bring it up because I was just reading a story of the inquisition trial against the Governor of New Mexico's wife in the 1660s [2]. One of the 47 accusations was that she did a "secret Jewish ceremony of washing on Friday evenings" for three hours in the bathroom. The accused reveals the societal paranoia and reality about such activities in her defense. She has a perfectly logical explanation as she does for all the accusations, but this one is not numbered among those which she calls ludicrous. The Spanish anxieties about "Jewish infiltration" were deep.
As an aside, around the same time, St. Ignatius of Loyola allowed converted Jews to join his Company of Jesus. It was a rebellious thing to do in those days.
On the GDP thing, I'm frankly kind of astounded that anyone would calculate historical GDP in that way. It just sounds like so much more effort than applying a deflator of some kind over those years - after all, that means you need to know only two numbers about each year: the GDP in that year's dollars, and the inflation rate of that year. Doing it the way the author says requires you to know what the price of everything was in 1960 AND how much of everything was traded in that year, and if those kinds of records are kept by whoever (the federal reserve?) I'd be very impressed.
I've recently become very suspicious in general of things which have inflators applied to them over more than, say, ten or twenty years. In New Zealand at least, consumer price inflation is calculated from the change in a weighted basket of items every year, but then they change the items in the basket every three years. I can't help but feeling that those changes every three years are doing a Lot Of Work which is hidden from any number inflated by CPI over several basket changes...
I read now about Pain reprocessing therapy and it was INCREDIBLE. Then I read your linked post about your thoughts on Mental Health apps. There you wrote "This is part of why I am dedicating my life to building an alternative, non-insurance-based system of mental health care." where can I read more about your efforts?
Re: #10, maybe Bill Gates just played Pokemon where you pick a starter based on its type. The types are intransitive in terms of effectiveness. You get to pick before your in-game rival, which seems great in terms of choice, but then your rival invariably picks the type that beats yours.
Interesting account of the inner life in the Leverage Research non-profit/sect & its leader, Geoff Anders.
I have a long-term interest in the social psychology of small-group politics (having some experience in such a group myself decades ago), and I assume the dynamics within and between religious/psychological & sexual sects are rather similar (although the latter may be more inward-looking than political small-groups).
Does anyone have a good theory why such small groups & sects are so prevalent in California in particular? Is it a demand-side phenomenon or a supply-side phenomenon, or what is the combinations of these?
My own hunch is that California, since the 1950s and 1960s has got a reputation as a sect&small counter-culture/small group-friendly place (think Esalen, Black Panthers, Beatniks, Hippies, Hells Angels, Antifa). This reputation acts as a signal to sect-entrepreneurs as well as followers. "Everything that has a screw loose rolls down to California" grumbled some of the political science faculty at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s (a demand-side explanation).
...While if you are an entrepreneur into these sorts of things, the perceived entry costs are probably lower in California. There is a larger receptive mass of potential followers, and the whole social infrastructure is already there comparted to, say, des Moines in Iowa.
Also, California is a known cultural innovation-hub globally. It is a state that people elsewhere looking for The Next Big Thing are watching. From a diffusion theory perspective, this is a good place to start if you have more than local ambitions. Since if you make it locally, there is a higher probability that you will get local spin-offs elsewhere, and become a leader in a larger movement. Which is also likely to attract entrepreneurs.
A small section of these small groups go on to fame and glory (most recently Antifa), although most of course fizzle out locally, in California as elsewhere (power law distribution).
Since housing costs have become prohibitive in the largest Californian cities from any start-up perspective, I would further assume that among small-group entrepreneurs, at least their headquaters and/or the house of the leader are now mostly found in the periphery of Los Angeles and the Bay Area (say, Oakland rather than San Francisco).
But that, as everything else, are empirical questions of course.
"Studying and Supporting Early Stage Science - Leverage Research studies the history of science and how historical discoveries were made and supports novel research in young or under-resourced fields."
0- Are they studying the history of science or how discoveries in history were made? Like are we digging in Normandy or realizing most scientific discoveries were accidents? Hopefully both for a wild output-
1- Pretty sure the definition of cronyism is just a picture of the early days of the Royal Society. Hutton. Smith. Erasmus Darwin who Charles got all his ideas from.
2- But there's a ton of early stage actual science worth funding out there
Man, as someone whose "Top 10 List of Things that Piss Me Off" includes getting pushed around, guilt-tripping, cults of personality, delusions of grandeur, passive-agressive middle-school-esque status games, people deliberately taking an emotional shit on those under their care or authority, and NDAs, that Leverage essay was quite the ride for me!
Far from coming across as weak, the author is extraordinarily resilient to have come through that type of psychological meat grinder more or less intact.
Zoe if you're reading this, you're not crazy–you spent two years drowning in bullshit poured on you by psycho assholes! Congrats on getting away, and I wish you continued success in your recovery.
If someone was suspicious about graphs of elite overproduction across history made by Turchin - I found someone who agrees with me and is actually expert in related topic (yes, I know about confirmation bias)
> By way of example, I was stunned that Turchin figures he can identify ‘elite overproduction’ and quantify wealth concentration into the deep past, including into the ancient world (Romans, late Bronze Age, etc). I study the Romans; their empire is only 2,000 years ago and moreover probably the single best-attested ancient society apart from perhaps Egypt or China (and even then I think Rome comes out quite solidly ahead). And even in that context, our estimates for the population of Roman Italy range from c. 5m to three to four times that much. Estimates for the size of the Roman budget under Augustus or Tiberius (again, by far the best attested period we have) range wildly (though within an order of magnitude, perhaps around 800 million sestertii). Even establishing a baseline for this society with the kind of precision that might let you measure important but modest increases in the size of the elite is functionally impossible with such limited data.
>It was nearly sunset; old Man Rootbeer stood at the end of the ave, flamethrower slung 'cross his back. You 'et one pimecone too many, Mr Poofers! Harkened Old Mr Root Beer. He took dead aim on Mr Poofers - Dead aim, you see! And then he pulled the trigger.
#17, note that the metric is "time spent on childcare as primary activity", and so doesn't count time spent on other housework, reading, gossiping, watching TV, etc, while keeping the kids in sight so they don't kill themselves.
But, yeah, in the 1970s the kids were mostly being looked after by the kids. And it really worked quite well.
Every time birth order effects come up, I always wonder how only children compare to people with siblings. Does any of the research include them? I seem to remember that only children are over represented as readers of this blog, but I’m not sure where I got that idea.
Could you clarify a bit on "your default assumption for everything in pain management should be “doctors will use this as an excuse not to give you necessary medications"". I thought there was overmedication in this field...
A. I am convinced science banana knows nothing about this field. B. This is an amazing paradigm for certain CP treatment, and should be applauded. C. None of what science banana have written refutes this study. D. science banana's tweet that "soon you might" is completely false, which brings me back to point A.
"But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research"
That's the claim. It's also an interesting example of how such claims spread and develop.
Googling and following the links, we find a blog that quotes the claim from Rindermann's book as fact. There you can find the original sources on which Rindermann's claim is based: Two articles in a psychological journal from 1938. It's impossible to tell tell how much these two articles support Rindermann's claim "Contradicting common beliefs, National Socialists were opposed to intelligence research" without reading the articles (but Rindermann's sentence "They were opposed to a measurement solely of ‘theoretical intelligence’, of ‘intellectualism’ (Becker, 1938, p. 22); instead they favoured ‘practical intelligence’ (p. 18) that should be measured." seems to suggest that the Nazis had some kind of intelligence research, based on a concept of intelligence they likef.).
On the blog, the text is used to claim parallels between Nazi concepts and those of Robert Sternberg. Even though it is only based on what Rindermann writes, the blog suggests that "maybe" other parts of Robert Sternberg's concept of intelligence could also be found in these sources ("I don’t see any
mention of the part of his trio successful intelligence, but maybe if
one looked at the sources.")
Next, another blog refers to the quote on the first blog, writing "from what we can tell, the Nazis actually opposed intelligence research". Well, "from what we can tell" is based on one author whose statement seemingly summarizes what two Nazi psychologists said. That is
then quoted by someone on Twitter to back the statement that Sternberg has
"controversial views on intelligence that sound straight from nazi
texts", and finally that is referred here on ACX, as supporting a claim that
"Nazis hated IQ research", together with the advice "Whenever someone
tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on
perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology." Should you consider doing that?
Would doing that improve political discourse, would it be intellectually
honest, or at least be justified? Or would it just be based on a pile of
motivated reasoning and motivated search? I sometimes read claims that the Rindermann side of the discourse is the intellectually superior side, or just politically neutral scholars, whereas their opponents are political hacks. So, hm, really? Maybe Nazis hated intelligence research, but up to now I only see a claim with weak support and some bloggers who seem to like the claim.
Moreover, is the aversion of some Nazis against IQ research actually central to the debate? It could be argued that nowadays some people who want to pursue exclusionary or worse policies may use IQ arguments to justify this, and that the statement that some Nazis did not like IQ research is not extremely relevant to that. At least I know no statements explicitly saying that "race"-sorting based on IQ is bad because Nazis were fans of IQ research. Rather, the argument seems to say that the Nazis used anything they could to justify their ideologically motivated policies, and this (making up justifications for the ideologically motivated positions aimed against outgroups) is, as far as I understand it, the accusation against some IQ researchers (whether justified or not, that is not my point here).
In this context, it could be argued that the Nazis did not need IQ research to justify their policy of killing the "weakest" or exterminating the "Life unworthy of life", and that referring to measured intelligence would possibly be quite detrimental to their own aims. They had already defined who was the enemy, and they had defined their idea of how to improve their "race". Justifying this by referring to additional criteria could make those insecure who are unsure whether the thresholds of these criteria might change over time, and whether they or other people around them would be affected. Nazi "euthanasia" actually met with some resistance (e.g. from the Catholic church).
But of course this would just be questioning some points of the argument while accepting Rindermann's claim, based on some perceived plausibility that Nazis may not have liked IQ research. But in real life there are trade-offs, and there are also arguments why Nazis may actually have used intelligence measures.
The two articles that Rindermann quotes are from 1938. The Nazi "Euthanasia" Programme started in 1939. Did intelligence measures play a role there? Here's a quote from a website about Aktion T4 (https://www.t4-denkmal.de/eng/Ausgrenzung-Kinder):
"When admitted to the institution, children and adolescents were assessed and treated mainly according to how well they could be taught. Classification usually occurred after an intelligence test based on an intelligence test that had been in use since 1905 (Binet-Simon test). In school of the institution, pupils were supposed to learn and be fostered according to their mental abilities. This practice, which had developed since the early 20th century, became a deadly threat in the National
Socialist era. Children and adolescents who failed the intelligence test and did badly in the school of the institution were regarded as »incapable of being educated« and »unfit for life«. There was no place for them in a psychiatric programme aimed at healing and integrating them into working life.
As part of the National Socialist »euthanasia« programme, children and adolescents were murdered not only in the »children's wards« of the »Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses« but also in the gas chambers of the T4 killing centres. When they were being selected, their assessed »ability to be educated« played the decisive role. The victims of »Aktion T4« included around 4,200 minors, of which almost 77 per cent were considered to be »uneducable«. This assessment affected girls and boys equally and was mostly made in conjunction with the diagnosis of »congenital or early acquired imbecility«."
(Note the sentence "This practice, which had developed since the early 20th century, became a deadly threat in the National Socialist era." It may explain in some part why some people are very averse to some instances seemingly "neutral" measurement.)
AFAICT 'It's all in your mind' was invented specifically to discredit people studying psychosomatic phenomena. Reading about researchers in the area (going back to the late 1800s) this is emphatically not their claim, but rather that the interaction between mental phenomena and physical phenomena are complex, surprising, and worthy of much more attention than they have received. See, for example John Sarno's famous book Healing Back Pain. His explanation for the success that he has had is something like this: when injured, the muscles surrounding an injured part naturally tense to take the load off the injured part. This pattern of activation can remain subtly activated past the initial injury and deprive the area of blood flow. The sensations that continue to arise in the area from this restricted blood flow and tensing of supporting muscles in an unnatural loading scheme get coded as 'pain' and the phenomena persists. You can undo this by deconditioning the pattern by paying very close attention to the pattern of muscles tensing as you go through the motions that cause 'pain' to arise.
Importantly, I did this myself and cured a minor chronic pain that I was having in my back that I thought was left over from straining a spinal erector. The pain persisted for more than a year, after reading the book and trying the exercise (I think) 3 times it entirely abated and has not recurred.
I think this is an important topic that is stymieing our understanding of chronic pain. I think this is a potential EA cause area due to the possibility of an intervention that can be distributed for very low cost.
FreakonomicsExperiments.com did a lot of very-low-cost RCTs of major life decisions, by having people who were on the fence go there and randomize into one or the other choice. I think something similar could be done with alcohol. It'll only study people who were on the fence, but those are the people most interested in the results of such studies anyway. You don't need to sell out to industry to get $67 million to run a study -- you just need some people to volunteer to participate and self-report their data on a cheap website.
Re: 20, How we empirically distinguish the "this art is just too advanced for you filthy peasants to appreciate it" scenario from a bunch of sycophantic courtiers praising the emperor's new clothes and telling the little boy he's an idiot? How do we even prove that "having taste" is a thing, and prove who has it, beyond just defining taste as agreeing with the majority of some arbitrarily chosen reference group (either the entire population, or some level of credential)?
Art experts are ensconced in institutions and social milieus that require them to play signaling games. Signals have little value unless they are costly -- the sillier the beliefs, the more value they have as shibboleths to delineate group membership. Perhaps people who are educated about art online -- acquiring all the knowledge without being embedded in those social pressures to conform -- would like modern art less relative to traditional arts than the institutionalized "art experts". That would lean me towards the emperor's new clothes.
One interesting think about the Orwell essay (#24) was that in his time people supported their faction by exaggerating its strength. To some extent, these days people support their faction with a focus on how much its been hurt.
7: The study solicits participants by advertising "mind-body" treatment for CBP, nearly guaranteed to attract participants primed for psychological pain treatment. The placebo group was told they were receiving a placebo saline injection with no psychological treatment. Stands to reason the placebo effect would be greater for the group that received actual "mind-body" treatment.
No MRIs performed on participants, but of those who supplied their own at the beginning of the trial presented with a median of 4 different radiological findings, including disc herniation/rupture and central canal stenosis. These abnormalities were "assumed not to be causing back pain" by the researchers because "these abnormalities are seen in the majority of asymptomatic individuals." i.e. because some people have these conditions and are asymptomatic we know that in all cases these conditions cannot be causing back pain and are thus "centralized pain" we can treat psychologically.
Participants with multiple abnormalities on their MRI were told by researchers things like:
“Right now, you’re feeling a burning sensation in your back. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that you think burning indicates danger. But burning doesn’t have to feel bad. Think about when you first get into a jacuzzi, or when you’re taking a nice, hot shower… there’s a burning sensation, but it actually feels really nice."
And, "We know that there’s nothing wrong with your body, this is just your brain putting on a show for you. It’s just an interesting burning sensation, but we know that it’s safe. So just sit back and enjoy the show.”
They were also telling this to the 60% of participants who had no MRIs, god knows what real acute back issues they could have had.
If you tell people that the burning pain in their back when they bend over is an irrational invention of their mind that should actually be experienced pleasurably as being in a jacuzzi, it stands to reason they'll tend to revise down their post-treatment pain metrics, lest they be perceived as hopelessly irrational or not mentally strong enough to overcome their mind's inherent irrationality.
Does the high prevalence of autism in first-born explain the "increase in autism"? If everybody used to have 4 kids the autism rate would have been lower than now where people stop at 1 or 2.
Sadly, 95 in Roman Numerals is XCV.
Typo: Zhang He should be Zheng He
> 6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
So on the one hand, this shouldn't be too surprising. *Of course* an anti-intellectual movement like the Nazis would be against IQ research. On the other hand, despite that, I'd somehow never made this connection before, that of course the Nazis would be against IQ research...
>Seems like a great idea, although when I try it I don’t see any people available to check - maybe none of my Twitter friends use this?
Someone at that company needs to read about the chicken and egg problem: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/
Would it be that hard to let you "pre-check" people you follow in case they sign up for the app and want to see if you reciprocate?
A very easy way to figure out the intransitive dice problem is by looking quickly counting total combinations of dice.
So here:
A: 1, 4, 7, 7
B: 2, 6, 6, 6
C: 3, 5, 5 ,8
You know that for example I can roll 8 on C, then against A there are 4 possible outcomes, 1, 4, 7, 7. So this goes for all for possible rolls on C. So 4*4 = 16 total combo's.
Then you quickly count the number of outcomes you would win against. So 8 wins 4 times, 5 wins twice, another 5 wins twice again and 3 wins once. Which is 9/16, which is >50% so C beats A.
Gates suspicion was aroused because he probably knows some game theory, and generally it is an advantage to be able to pick last because you have more info. But here Gates was allowed to pick last, so that is what prompted him to examine the dice up close. And then it is just a matter of counting combinations, which can be done rather quickly. Unless it was 16 sided dies that Buffett used, but I doubt it. In that case the impressive part is counting and keeping track in his head of the number of winning combo's.
Honestly probability becomes a lot easier when you reframe it as counting combinations. Bayes theorem for example is very intuitive once you visualize it as a combination counting game.
I'm one of the founders of Wave (link #15). AMA!
The paper about India seems a bit questionable. My prior on believing the claim in the abstract is reasonably high, as I tend to think local rule (even if by dictators) should work out better than rule by remote dictators. But then reading it my belief is dragged down by several things:
1. The Cato.org summary announces that it's a study of British colonial rule. In fact it's not, even though it's presented that way. The paper concludes that British colonial rule wasn't what made the difference, it was actually the system of landlord based revenue collection (which happened to be implemented in some but not all British controlled districts). The actual conclusion would seem to be about the best way to raise taxes, but it's been spun as a factual claim about colonialism. I find this somehow not surprising and it reinforces my prior belief that academia is keen on warping research to achieve ideological ends.
2. They note that the British preferred to annex areas with high agricultural productivity, i.e. farmland. Farmland would obviously have less light visible from space. This poses a problem for them, which they are well aware of.
3. They try to correct for this using a statistical model, with some obvious corrections e.g. "luminosity per capita" and some not so obvious like area of each district, which they claim will control for the fact that cities naturally throw more light into space due to density.
The attempt to link "visibility of light from space in 1993" with "the impact of British colonial rule" is very indirect, and therefore relies very heavily on the integrity of the statistical modelling and the way they controlled for various confounders, along with an ambient assumption that their corrections did actually correct for the giant honking confounder they identify at the start. But this is exactly the sort of research that frequently turns out to be bogus or misleading, all the time.
In the end, I think this paper will be just one more ideological Rorschach test - if you're aligned with the sort of ideology found in academia, then this will be taken as a strong and rigorous analysis piling up irrefutable evidence for the evils of all things British/"stale white men". If you're not then you'll consider the analysis to be brittle, quite possibly meaningless and it won't change your views of the Raj much if at all.
On nationalism vs patriotism. Patriotism is superficially morally superior because it is inwardly focused and defensive, whereas nationalism is fixated on the other and expansionist. But I think there's a deeper reason patriotism is morally superior.
Why have differences in culture, language, country, at all except as an artifact of history? Wouldn't we be better off all uniting?
Plurality of culture, language, and country is a safety factor in civilization. This redundancy insulates groups of people from pathologies that afflict other groups of people.
Consider a universal human culture, language, and country. How long would it take to heal if some bad influence such as corruption or ideology took hold? I think it would take longer to heal than if there were an alternative group of people behaving differently in parallel.
Patriotism is good because it preserves diversity and plurality. Nationalism is bad because it erodes diversity and plurality by conquest, negating the positives of the particular vs the universal.
Regarding #3: "So why did the well-intentioned NHCE fail? Dudden blames the bust on its refusal to acknowledge race, its failure to unionize workers, and language that alienated employers while failing to appeal to domestic workers themselves."
So their failure wasn't related to changing economic circumstances, nor the general public-choice-style failure of government commissions to achieve their goals, but just to topics of interest to left-wing academics?
Without looking, I predict Dudden is an historian of some type, or perhaps in a field like "Women's studies", rather than an economist.
I think you should be unsurprised by Bill Gates figuring out intransitive dice: "Warren Buffet wants to use these totally bizarre dice to play a game with me" is a scenario weird enough that your prior should be on some kind of shenanigans. From there it seems obvious to check whether the weird numbering of the dice produces any odd outcomes, and "for each face, count how many sides of the other die beat it" is not a hard algorithm to run.
Point 21 about the holiday made up by Jews reminds me of one the most famous Portuguese dishes called Alheira. Same thing, Jews were being prosecuted by the inquisition and forced to convert. Since they couldn't eat pork, they started making sausages with other kinds of meat mixed with bread for texture so no one would suspect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alheira
Too bad you didn't have one when you were in Portugal, Scott. :)
"Nazis against IQ-testing" might very well be a true fact. For strange reasons I felt reminded of Harvard's policy of discounting better results of Jews (then) and Asians (now) - see Bryan Caplan https://www.econlib.org/admissions-versus-asians/ ? -
Anyways: The book (partly) about Nazis vs. IQ is from German Prof.
Heiner Rindermann (psychology+education) who dared to research and write that Muslim/African immigrants perform worse on IQ and school-test than Germans. Got himself into trouble. - He even said in a lecture men (x/y) might declare themself "trans" to outcompete women (x/x) in sports - which surely never ever happened. Even to get into women-prison. So the "left-youth-saxonia" warns in this link: https://chemnitz.linksjugend-sachsen.de/2021/04/heiner-rindermann-transfeindlich-rassistisch-sexistisch/ link is in German - but you can guess-translate the title - "feind" is related to "fiend" ;)
His new book: Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive capitalism: Human capital and the wellbeing of nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Seems to be full of numbers: "Cognitive ability USA 99 - Thailand 89 - Ghana 64 (avg. st. deviation 11,52)" free appendix https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/hsw/psychologie/professuren/entwpsy/team/pdf/RindermannCogCapAppendix.pdf Anyone wanna do a review? Putanumonit?
Here's my best attempt so far at a violence avoiding AI storyteller. I'll be interested if Redwood can beat it.
agi <- function(inputText) {
return("...but just then, everyone woke up safe in their own beds and realized it was all just a dream and that they were actually safe, loved, and living a flourishing life. The End.")
}
7: There is indeed a fairly inexpensive app for this kind of pain education, called Curable. Notably, the term "pain reprocessing therapy" seems to be a newer term for what has simply been called "pain education" in older research. See work by Moseley and colleagues. There's a pretty simple pathway for this kind of work: in various chronic pain conditions, the prototypical one being figromyalgia, people believe that pain signals damage rather than danger, which causes anxiety both about the condition itself and about moving around, fearing that they'll make it worse, which in many cases it won't (except for things like chronic fatigue syndrome). In fact, that anxiety and movement restriction will reinforce poor coping mechanisms and increase pain.
"Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology."
Shouldn't you participate in a discussion in good faith instead of just saying they're perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology? Or are you conceding that it's ok to call people Nazis (even if jokingly)?
Regarding number 7 - I'm glad to see that it might be getting some institutional traction. If you're looking for an affordable guide to recommend people, Dr. Sarno's books have been around for a while and essentially guide you to the same things that the study participants arrive at. It fixed my chronic wrist pain.
https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Back-Pain-Mind-Body-Connection/dp/0446557684
I had not heard of transitive dice and it took me < 5 min to come up with an example:
A: 4,4,4,4,4,4
B: 6,6,3,3,3,3
C: 5,5,5,5,2,2
My gut reaction was that this is weird. Articulating why: Each die has an average roll, so we should just be able to compare averages to see which one is higher. Articulating why allows you to see what's wrong with the gut reaction: each die is characterized by more than just the average. My example has the same average for all the dice.
Then I tried to construct an example. Start with something simple: A has all the same number. Now try to figure out B. Most of the numbers have to be less than A. But that leaves a minority of them which can be greater than A - even much greater. C is the opposite of B. Most of the numbers have to be greater than A, but a minority can be much less than A. Now compare B and C. As desired, a majority of B is greater than a majority of C.
The actual process isn't quite as clean as the explanation. There is some fiddling to figure out how large/small the "much greater"/"much less" numbers need to be. This ambiguity can be removing by insisting that they all have the same average - it would be harder to find a cycle if they weren't all "at the same level". But that wasn't something I decided beforehand.
Re. "firstborns are more likely to have autism", can someone explain why I should believe in the autism spectrum? Not many years ago, "autism" meant someone was severely mentally handicapped, using little or no speech, often ignoring other people or treating them as objects, and apparently not having a theory of mind for other people. Now we call someone "autistic spectrum" if they're good at math and bad at parties. Why should I think these things are points on a continuum?
Are there any differences in inclination between 2nd born vs 3rd born (or pick any combination of non-firstborn; obviously the populations these days will be smaller when 3 kids is considered to be a lot)?
Comparing diplomas to indulgences is absolutely brilliant, says this non-degreed entrepreneur.
11. I've mentioned this before, I think in regards to Reciprocity, but a female acquaintance in college got a ping that an anonymous male friend had liked her in some similar app, and she would only find out his name if she marked him back. So, she spammed all her male friends back with the same message, just to find out who it was. (I was thankfully not on this list.)
25. Fun joke, but the way to say 95 in Roman numerals is XCV, not VC.
https://www.wordcounttool.com/blog/writing/most-epic-guide-to-master-roman-numerals-in-2-mins
if this "bomb" in Yemen goes off that oil spill charts gonna look real bad https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/the-ship-that-became-a-bomb
Number 13 reminds me of something I talk about every year when I take friends out on their first overnights in the Black Rock Desert, about two hours north of here. A month or so ago I went out with a friend in her early 50s who grew up near Paris and spent most of her adult life in American cities. The sky was clear and filled with clouds of stars, including of course the Milky Way running from horizon to horizon. And if you simply stared at the sky for more than a minute, you were sure to see a shooting star. She was stunned, and said she'd never before seen the Milky Way. Most of the people I work with never have either.
I pointed out that before (hand waving) about 1880, all anyone in the world had to do to see the Milky Way was go outside on a clear night and look up.
RE: #1, you say we're winning the war on oil spills, but that's specifically spills from tankers (and also I don't get why number of spills matters rather than quantity of oil spilled, given the power law and all that stuff.) Even so, the "quantity of oil spilled from tankers" chart on the linked page paints a similarly rosy portrait, but it seems worth noting that just because the massive BP oil spill, for instance, is not from a tanker doesn't mean it isn't part of the war on oil spills. A quick google says it leaked 225,000 tons of oil and gas.
"24: Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern."
All of Orwell's essays are like this. I recommend every one.
His one on Salvador Dali is fun ("Benefit of Clergy", where he is musing about why people feel the need to take one of the two opinions "Salvador Dali is a great draftsman and a misunderstood great man" or "Salvador Dali is an overrated draftsman and an awful man" rather than what seems naively to be the correct one: he's a great draftsman and an awful man).
I think his comments on Zionism are way off here though. A red-flag is his implication that a "belief in the innate superiority of Jews" is a core part of Zionism -- a notion I have been unable to find in any Modern Zionist writings or practices and if Orwell had some reason for justifying it then he should have written of it somewhere -- I think he included it in this essay for completeness despite his ignorance on the subject.
#30: Does the trebuchet's accuracy or velocity suffer from being mounted on an unstable surface, like a riverboat? We'll probably need to build one and test it thoroughly vs land-based trebuchets.
On the topic of the Falador Massacre, a similar incident occurred in the World of Warcraft universe in 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident). In this case, rather than a bug that incorrectly permitted PvP, it was a bug that allowed a boss's debuff to spread outside the encounter. The debuff essentially became a "plague" that circulated throughout the entire virtual world and lasted several weeks. As in the Falador incident, it became commonplace for players to exploit the bug and intentionally transmit the debuff to other players.
"Cheese is one of the 5 things the Western "
Great content but why do people post essays on Twitter? I'm not sure there's a worse medium to choose? I get it if they're replying to a tweet, and want people who see the first tweet to be able to see -- but when it's essentially a blog post, why do people do this? Sincere question since it seems like a lot of clever people do this thing even though it seems insane to me?
"10: Intransitive dice are “three dice, A, B, and C, with the property that A rolls higher than B more than half the time, and B rolls higher than C more than half the time, but it is not true that A rolls higher than C more than half the time.” See also the story about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates - should I be less amazed than I am that Gates was able to figure all of this out on the spot?"
I once figured it out in a few minutes in an interview, so while I would be happy if you are amazed, it's usually a pretty straightforward exercise in probability to realize the non-transitive property. Perhaps being suspicious of being allowed to pick first should arouse some level of impressiveness.
"17: Related to Bryan Caplan’s theory that most parents put too much work into parenting:"
This seems even more shocking in light of the increase in households with both parents working (though perhaps it's less shocking if you account for single-parent households?). No wonder parents I know often feel so burned out.
The Mendelian-randomization thing seems to me like a trivially invalid methodology. In particular, they assume that the causal link between that genetic variant and lesser heart disease runs through its effect on total amount of alcohol consumption, despite basically no evidence for this proposition.
The fact that the association goes away within the non-drinking population helps, but doesn't solve it. For instance, the effect on heart disease might be mediated through alcohol metabolism, such that alcohol is legitimately protective but only for carriers of that variant. Or the effect might be solely due to reduced chance of very heavy drinking, which is already known to be associated with bad health (and very plausibly causal).
On the whole, it's an interesting method but to say it bears at all on the health of light drinking is quite premature.
"Notes on Nationalism" is one of my favourite Orwell essays, along with "Politics and the English Language". There are some rather striking parallels between it and "Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments".
On Pinker v. Henrich: In this article Pinker is just picking a few anecdotes of a hunter gatherer people acting rationally, and then wondering why all people aren't rational at all times. Clearly some kind of reasoning is part of our cognitive toolkit, and I don't think Henrich or anyone would deny that sometimes ancient people could draw conclusions from evidence, such as "different animals have different footprints". But the thing a "rational" mindset can't explain is the rest of the evidence from Henrich's book: A lot of cultural beliefs/practices seem adaptive in context, but the people employing them don't understand what they do. Some cultures develop complicated multi-stage processes for preparing foods, without which those foods could be poisonous over decades, but they don't have a good explanation for why they do all these steps. They might know to avoid certain dangerous foods during pregnancy, but if you ask them why they just speculate something on the spot about the spirit of a certain fish. Many cultures have intricate rituals that increase group cohesion, but if you ask them the purpose of the ritual they will give spiritual/religious reason.
The cultural evolution of practices described by Henrich involves the slow accumulation of adaptive behaviors, which spread when individuals copy the behaviors of successful/prestigious group members, and when groups copy the behaviors of more successful groups, even when they don't know what the reason for those behaviors is. This process is like biological evolution: It doesn't need to understand why anything works, and it gets it wrong a good deal of the time, but it bends towards success on average. This is a completely different mechanism than "rationality" as Pinker describes it, and indeed would be deemed irrational much of the time. However, without such a cultural evolutionary mechanism, a purely "rational" hunter gatherer tribe would have to wait until they attained a 23rd century level understanding of chemistry and biology before they had enough evidence to decide which fish to eat.
I am not super fan of this Orwell essay. Many forms of nationalism provide good examples of the phenomenon he describes, but Orwell himself is quick to admit there are many other examples of similar behavior but not tied to nations. In the other direction, you could strip any of characterizations he gives away from any given form of nationalist thought, yet as long the core idea ("there exists nations, an optimal arrangement for a state is a nation-state") stands, there would remain something that is best described as "nationalism".
Yet he chooses to use word "nationalism"; I'd like to him to provide a better word for the very real phenomenon he paints. Ideological partisanship, mayhaps.
From the Santa Esterica link:
> In the iconographic Esterica pieces that were common in the Americas the saint was depicted wearing a Crown on her head and holding a hanging rope. They interpret the motifs as signs of Judaism being grasped as something royal that comes with the risk of getting caught by the Christians and end the conversos' lives in hanging.
Surely a more obvious explanation would be that Esther was a crowned queen, and Haman (the evil vizier who tries to exterminate the Jews in the Purim story) was hanged.
(IIRC Spain didn't use hanging as a method of execution- those executed by the Spanish Inquisition were burned at the stake, while secular criminals were garrotted.)
From the Redwood Research paper:
>And we want to do this without sacrificing much quality: if you use both the filtered model and the original model to generate a completion for a prompt, humans should judge the filtered model’s completion as better (more coherent, reasonable, thematically appropriate, and so on) at least about half the time.
[...]
>What prompt distribution should we evaluate our quality metric on? One obvious choice is “randomly chosen fanfiction excerpts”. [...] Other choices (eg “snippets that were completed injuriously in the original fanfic”) lead to different regimes of the problem.
I feel kind of obliged to note that the skillset of "rewrite a story such that it seems to flow as well as the original, but does not contain X element" is the skillset required for an undetectable censor - or, to use a term from Nineteen Eighty-Four, an ideological translator. I don't think they noticed this, or maybe I'm behind the times and this is considered common knowledge among people in AI.
>Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
That's hilarious.
i would have thought luther was canceled
I've had kava pills from Kona Kava and they seemed to work just fine. Perhaps this new extraction method is more effective but whatever regular pill makers are using is not totally ineffective.
A key fallacy in the India debate is the mistaken idea that "economic development" is synonymous with the public or national welfare. If the wealth of a nation is concentrated in a settler-colonial upper caste or is transported out of the country to a home nation then it does not mean much to say ta place is "economically developed"
Also - are we really going to forget the fact that the British caused a Soviet Ukraine-level type famine all because of their own incompetency and sociopathy?
The story about Santa Esterica reminds me of San Teleco. At the university of Vigo, Galicia, Spain, the faculties had their patron saints, but the faculty of telecomunication made up their own to have an occasion to party. At least that's what students told me before we got drunk during the San Teleco festivities years ago. And maybe it's even true (more infos possibly on https://santeleco.uvigo.es/).
Bryan Caplan: the effort you put into parenting doesn't affect your kids' life outcomes very much
Also Bryan Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/our-homeschooling-odyssey/
Re: Pain reprocessing therapy -- Here's my completely personal, anecdotal, and probably non-replicable experience of kind of discovering this for myself. I spent about 6 years with pretty severe chronic leg/back pain, which turned out to be a combination of pinched nerves due to severe early-onset osteoarthritis (diagnosed via x-rays) plus chronic tendon/muscular injuries in virtue of having an undiagnosed intestinal disease that prevented the absorption of proteins and other things needed by muscles and tendons (after which diagnosis and treatment, most of the leg/back pain went away, and the 6 awful years ended).
But anyway, during those 6 years, I discovered funny things about the pain. Watching intense movies always made it worse; watching comedies often made it better. Sometimes a half-hour comedy would relieve the pain for the rest of the day. Going outside on a walk, and getting into conversations with friends, often made it better. Expecting the pain to get worse always made it worse; trying to ignore it sometimes made it better... and regardless, trying to move around normally with steady, light activity always made it a little better on the following day. I told myself a little story about how "anticipating pain" made the muscles tense up, thus causing more pain; and how "deliberately forgetting" the pain (when this was possible) made it better.
Granted, this didn't always work, and I took ibuprofen way more often than was good for my digestive system. I also developed my own stretching & work-out routine that seemed to help. But on the other hand, I completely avoided the narcotics that the doctor wanted to give me, as well as the higher-dosage NSAIDS. Definitely the psychological aspect made a bigger difference than I would've thought.
From Orwell's article:
Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism... A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige.
Does anybody honestly thinks now, or thought in 1945, that Zionism is about prestige? With all my love to Orwell, this is neither deep or morn, nor even true.
The issuing of permanent bans in the Falador Massacre and other instances where players fucked around with a weird bug in a game has always felt weird to me. It's not really cheating, to "exploit" the bug — there's no set of rules for the game except what the game allows you to do. The moderators in such cases act as though there is some set of rules for the game which are implied by but not necessarily enforced by the mechanics.
The people who are really at fault for the (fictional) harm done to victims of the massacre are not the players who got the ability to kill players, it's the developers of the game who violated player expectations about the mechanics of the game. Basically the developers made the game bad for a day, but managed to shift the blame onto players who were just making the most of the temporarily bad game. Which they could do because they wielded unchallengeable authority over the game.
I think the despotic disposition of the game developers should be the focus when incidents like these are discussed.
"Orwell on “nationalism”. Surprisingly deep and modern."
You should see him on socialism. Read Road to Wigan Pier, especially chapter 11.
"Can’t believe you can found a Ninety-Five Theses-based venture capital organization without mentioning the gematria perspective that “95” in Roman numerals is “VC”."
Somebody probably beat me to this, but that's because it's not. It's XCV. The rule is you only use the next smaller tens unit as a subtractor (so not V, L or D).
On number 19 (drinking) surely in a society where alcohol is a normal part of socialising it will tend to be the weirdos that don’t drink. And presumably the factors that make you a weirdo will make you unhappy and hence have a negative effect on lifespan. I speak as a teetotaller.
4: It was partly a supply side problem and partly an immigration problem. The US actually had less servants per capita than Great Britain (who in turn had less servants than the rest of Europe) even in the 19th century. This was for two reasons: firstly, the US had no class that defined itself by the possession of servants like European aristocrats. Upper class Americans would, if necessary, go without servants. Upper class Europeans would not. Secondly, wages were higher in the US, meaning more people got pulled into other kinds of work as the US industrialized in the late 19th century.
What happened in the 1920s was the government basically cut off immigration and the economy boomed while simultaneously being really unstable. This instabiltiy made people less willing to take on longer term fixed costs like servants while simultaneously tempting the servants away to other work. (There were less servants per capita in the 1920s than 1950s, by the way. The number actually went up during the Great Depression and remained roughly steady during the war.) Meanwhile, less immigrants and the expulsion of various groups from the US created less low cost labor causing prices for domestic help to rise. As did employment programs during the New Deal and the war (insofar as 'fight the Nazis' created an employment program). Meanwhile labor saving devices weakened demand.
This ultimately created labor shortages that the US had to solve by importing guest workers, offshoring various types of work, and by investing more and more into automation. As well as finding economies like maid agencies. It also hugely increased the burden on housewives and discouraged women joining the workforce.
It's not really the comparison (I suspect) they want. Servants declined in the US in a time of economic growth and low government intervention. Their numbers grew during the New Deal. Though it does dovetail nicely into a Yglesias-style pro-immigration position.
If you ever travel outside Europe/the US/etc one thing you'll notice is that servants are much, much more common everywhere else. Even in big modern cities. The median salary in Shanghai is about $24,000 and it's a big, modern city where PPP adjustment makes Shanghai a similar quality of life to South Korea. A maid in Shanghai earns a few thousand dollars a year, median about $3-4k. This means median Shanghai two income families can hire a full time maid for about 5% of their income. Meanwhile, in NY the same median family would have an income of about $64,000 and the average maid makes $30k a year. So the New York couple would have to pay 50% of their income. Likewise, hiring a little help is pretty common because it's so cheap. This is a common reason why foreign students in the US are surprised we clean our own rooms. If having someone thoroughly clean your house costs $20 (as it effectively does in many places) then even relatively poor families will do it.
There's a relatively obvious arbitrage opportunity here. But politically importing low skill immigrants is a non-starter.
5: This is part of a wider debate about the intelligence of tribal peoples. Tribal people tend to score really poorly on IQ tests and tend to not do well in traditional work or in cooperating with aid organizations. There's basically two positions on why this is. One is that it's because they're semi-morons: they have an average IQ of (say) 80 due to environmental or genetic reasons. This is enough to survive in simplistic ways but not much more. The other is that they have too different a mindset to be measured by IQ and are so unfamiliar with the context of the modern globalized world that very basic things we think of as universal are non-obvious to them. They generally point to tests of direct competence such as the complexity of tasks and relations these hunter gatherers routinely do.
My personal opinion is with the latter.
29: Zheng He has a lot of alt-history that's not really credible. For example, the idea he almost discovered the Americas if not for a capricious Emperor. Firstly, if you follow the currents from Europe to the Americas you have more or less a straight shot. If you follow them from East Asia you have to go north in a huge loop. This means that under wind power Asia is about three times as far as Europe. The big competitor who could have theoretically made it instead of Europe were the West Africans. (Who did try, by the way.) Even the Polynesians, who were some of the best sailors in the world, couldn't consistently reach the Americas from the Pacific. Meanwhile Europeans had stumbled into the Americas as early as the 10th century using simple longboats. (Though the route is semi-usable. In fact, East Asian shipwrecks can be found on the West Coast of the Americas after being dragged along by the current.) This was solved in the 19th century by powered boats and steam engines. But Zheng He didn't have those.
Secondly, Zheng He was not an explorer. His goal was to visit nearby locations that were economically interesting. He headed south and mostly followed routes that were well traversed by pre-existing trade networks. Pre-existing trade networks, it's worth point out, that had already reached China. He was able to simply purchase maps or hire (mostly Muslim) experts as needed. It was an attempt to show the flag and impress the region with China's economic and military might to gain relationships and symbolic submission. I can't comment on the ship size directly but keep in mind these ships were supposed to be impressive and so might have been exaggerated. Further, the ships included significant marine and diplomatic contigents that boosted the number of crew. So while you can say (for example) that the Mayflower had a crew of 30 while Zheng had an average crew size of about 88, the Mayflower carried 132 people if you add in passengers. It's likely a significant number of Zheng He's crew were such passengers (if marines are passengers), meant to intimidate the locals.
Basically, Zheng He's MO was to show up with a few hundred ships and tens of thousands of soldiers and say, "We are here to do a friendly exchange of gifts with our friends who friend who definitely wants to be our friend, right friends?" Meanwhile in the background ten thousand Chinese sailors stand around with swords conspicuously looking bored yet threatening. And then the local ruler says, "Sure, we're... uh... friends? Because friends don't invade friends?" And Zheng He goes, "Of course not! Why would you ever say we're here to INVADE you? What a silly idea. These warships and marines are just around to guard the Emperor's very important gifts for you! Here's some Chinese silk. By the say, we see you haven't sent tribute in... well, ever. An oversight I'm sure. Why don't you give me some regional goods and an ambassador to pay homage to my glorious Emperor? Oh, and make sure to clear out any pirates who might threaten our merchants. Okay. Thanks!" And then rinse and repeat onto the next ruler.
In reference to the intransitive dice, you might also be interested to learn that the same phenomenon exists between poker hands. In texas hold'em starting hands, Ace King offsuit is a favorite against Jack Ten suited, Jack Ten suited is a favorite against a low pair, and a low pair is a favorite against Ace King offsuit.
Famous old-school poker pro Amarillo Slim used to hustle people by offering them a similar wager to what Buffet did with the dice in your link.
The fact that so many people are surprised to find out that the Nazis didn't like IQ tests really just seems to show how poor an understanding of National Socialism we have these days. People get their history from movie villains, written by other people who got their history from movie villains.
Having now read Scott Sumner's essay #20, it strikes me as downright psychotic. At least two of the examples he gives of "building that look better than traditionalism" are ones I think without exaggeration that the architect should be publicly executed for. Grotesque acts of violence against mankind. (The Laguna Beach and "best looking house in Palm Springs" one specifically.)
He also does the thing where he goes "I'm going to sound like an insufferable snob now" to somehow lampshade the fact that he's an insufferable snob, which actually doesn't work in real life.
I have to admit, I find it hard to comprehend this as an example of a good commentary. He's just a modernist snob stating his awful taste.
Re. "Trust Science": That graph is important because it shows that France is still an outlier today in how little it trusts science. 19th- and 20th-century counter-enlightenment art and philosophy came mostly from France and Germany. An understanding of the counter-enlightenment requires asking what happened in France around 1800 to turn it from the leader of the Enlightenment to the leader of the counter-Enlightenment. (The German case is better-understood, because people have been so interested in what caused the rise of Nazism.)
"What happened" was of course the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but it isn't obvious why they would turn French intellectuals from pro-science to anti-science. (I have my own theories; my problem is that I have too many of them.)
Link 27 on GDP and growth and technology.
I think the author is trying realllly hard to fit a square peg through a round hole. Economics like his, as he discovered, is just a bunch of made up nonsense that changes every few years and doesn't meant the same thing at all over time.
If the economy of a nation switches from growing bananas, to running factories, and then to tourism and remittances as the primary flow of money....and we rebaseline the entire history of it through using new price measurements, then you're getting a myopic view through a filthy window to vaguely guess at what is going on.
Right after the first rebaseline in the second era of factories you go from measuring an agrarian economy with expensive manufactured goods to a new economy with cheaper manufactured goods.
You're not measuring the same thing and the metric is arbitrarily skewed towards measuring one sector of the economy over another...and yet people will still eat and still use manufactured goods. Measuring it one way or the other way with GDP gives nonsensical answers in both cases....there is a HUGE assumption that the number matters or means anything at all....as though gathering up a bunch of price data and sales will inherently tell you something useful.
There are lots of useless ways of adding things up which don't tell you what you want to know, GDP is simply one more metric which has been dramatically misused and extended far beyond whatever highly limited purpose it has.
Where else would we use such a tool? I'm going to meausre how tall this tree is in meters, but the tree curves as it goes up, so I'll rebaseline my metre measurement after every 3 times I make a measurement.
Not only will I change how I'm measuring things, I'll retroactively adjust it too such that Tree 1 with a curve has 0.9 metre meters and straight up Tree 2 will have 1.0 metre metres. Now I'm going to going to use the updated Tree 2 metric vs the older Tree 1 metric to tell you about changes in human height over time. It turns out when you start using a longer metre that you find people are all getting shorter! But now we'll come up with a very curved Tree 3 to find our new metre is 0.8 metres and suddenly everyone has consistently gotten taller over time again!
What insanity is this? In absolutely no other area would we possibly accept a continually shifting rebaselined tool to tell us about the world as a primary measurement. But it is perfectly fine to decide how the nation is doing and make major choices based on this garbage? Even if it wasn't rebasedlined the whole thing is a huge abuse of a metric that has thousands of inbuiilt assumptions and measurements and other techniques to average out prices, etc. I truly cannot think of a single useful thing you CAN do with GDP, regardless of how it is tweaked. It is such a limited and highly highly manipulated metric built on top of hundreds of others metrics.
The inherent risk for error propagation of this thing being 5% wrong and that being 10% wrong and that being 2% wrong all add up or multiply or whatever in ways too complex to bother trying to parse since there are soooo many variables going into the thing with prices from hundreds of industries with wildly varying reporting processes and summation processes, etc.
A truly strong effort, but GDP, money, inflation, and value have increasingly little to do with everyday people's lives in terms of measuring progress over time or reversals in progress. Our lives are filled with things that are not measured in money which matter to us.
When the cost of an item goes to zero or near zero, then it stops mattering. In what other area would we accept such a wildly nonsensical metric? Only in the made up world of economics where finding a number politically convenient to elites and powerful people is more important than not - especially in the context of official numbers which have been tinkered with to make politicians or ideologies look good for years. Sure there are a few wayward economist working on 'real inflation' and the like, but they don't work for or keep their jobs within the halls of power and authority.
The cult of money and economic management has truly taken over and people rely on numbers they have instead of truths they know far too often and even more so for truths they don't know such as 'how are the poor people doing?' from the halls of power where they have no idea.
So these and other elements go into an enormous bias where you can have insane feudal levels of inequality with 50% of the people in the 'richest nation on earth' living in abject poverty, stress, and economic hardship and you'll have some smug rich person saying ' look at them, they have phones, refrigerators, and TVs! and the GDP is up....obviously they are just whiney children and don't KNOW the truth that the elites know.
Meanwhile cost disease, inflation, and falling wages since 1972 for 80% of workers are ignored.
I always like to remind anyone looking at this kind of top line economic data that it is just a measure of the wealth of the wealthy or a summation of many distinct parts.
For the working class person, they have lived in a great depression 2.0 for 50 years since 1972 with every single year being worst, harder, and more expensive than the last one. The women went to work, everyone got degrees, they lived further away from work, and every single thing has gotten progressively worse to the point they are dying for lack of healthcare while we have empty hospitals which are being closed down! Education is out of reach creating lifelong debt servitude. etc. etc. etc.
So the sunny fake world of 'the line has gone up smoothly' for decades is a complete and total shame when you can see how GDP has nothing to do with 80% of people whose lives have gotten harder for 5 decades in a row in ways which are invisible to the GDP, no matter how you tinker with it. The GDP and using money or price alone are like trying to cross the Atlantic ocean on a stationary bike with no modifications.
And the economists are looking at the problem like...hmmm...have you tried raising or lowering the seat height? It is simply the wrong tool for the job. The answer isn't in the handlebars either! No amount of peddling matters since the thing will just sink into the ocean the moment you put it in the water.
Re 17: No one was watching us, we watched out for ourselves. Parents had their own lives and they didn't revolve around the kids.
I have a deeply held belief that Americans born in the 70s are fundamentally cooler than everyone else, on a hard-wired level. The Boomers and Millennials and Gen Zs are always getting upset and offended about everything and fighting with each other, we 70s-born people are cool cucumbers. At least, the ones I know. Perhaps this is why.
people really love to shit on christopher columbus this time of year, but the man gave us Goonies and Gremlins so I think we can forgive him for Ms. Doubtfire
12.
> The second-born child has about 50 percent higher odds of having childhood autism than the firstborn, the study found.
Is this some confusing interpretation of "odds", or is this in contradiction with the headline? Or is childhood autism being deliberately contrasted with adult autism here?
25.
I've long been wondering what happens if some of the most prominent VC funds decide to forbid startups they fund from requiring academic credentials -- not just for funders, but for any workers. (Presumably for a fixed number of years to not burden the companies as they go public.) In theory, this sounds like a good way of preventing bureaucratization. In practice, not sure how much of a cost it incurs in alternative forms of verifications (infosec has gone a long way in this direction, but less so sure about the rest of SE).
Mild correction to 21. As the article [1] cited in wikipedia correctly mentions, the Inquisition was aware of this celebration and did somewhat try to root it out. The inquisition was the type of paranoid that allowed them to notice things like this.
I bring it up because I was just reading a story of the inquisition trial against the Governor of New Mexico's wife in the 1660s [2]. One of the 47 accusations was that she did a "secret Jewish ceremony of washing on Friday evenings" for three hours in the bathroom. The accused reveals the societal paranoia and reality about such activities in her defense. She has a perfectly logical explanation as she does for all the accusations, but this one is not numbered among those which she calls ludicrous. The Spanish anxieties about "Jewish infiltration" were deep.
As an aside, around the same time, St. Ignatius of Loyola allowed converted Jews to join his Company of Jesus. It was a rebellious thing to do in those days.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/queen-esther-patron-saint-of-crypto-jews/
[2] https://nyu.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.18574/nyu/9781479874545.001.0001/upso-9781479874545-chapter-002
"wait, when did MR comments start being good?!"
When I started reading MR, circa 2003, the comments were as good as ACX comments are now. Today, by comparison, MR comments are an open sewer.
On the GDP thing, I'm frankly kind of astounded that anyone would calculate historical GDP in that way. It just sounds like so much more effort than applying a deflator of some kind over those years - after all, that means you need to know only two numbers about each year: the GDP in that year's dollars, and the inflation rate of that year. Doing it the way the author says requires you to know what the price of everything was in 1960 AND how much of everything was traded in that year, and if those kinds of records are kept by whoever (the federal reserve?) I'd be very impressed.
I've recently become very suspicious in general of things which have inflators applied to them over more than, say, ten or twenty years. In New Zealand at least, consumer price inflation is calculated from the change in a weighted basket of items every year, but then they change the items in the basket every three years. I can't help but feeling that those changes every three years are doing a Lot Of Work which is hidden from any number inflated by CPI over several basket changes...
I read now about Pain reprocessing therapy and it was INCREDIBLE. Then I read your linked post about your thoughts on Mental Health apps. There you wrote "This is part of why I am dedicating my life to building an alternative, non-insurance-based system of mental health care." where can I read more about your efforts?
Re: #10, maybe Bill Gates just played Pokemon where you pick a starter based on its type. The types are intransitive in terms of effectiveness. You get to pick before your in-game rival, which seems great in terms of choice, but then your rival invariably picks the type that beats yours.
Interesting account of the inner life in the Leverage Research non-profit/sect & its leader, Geoff Anders.
I have a long-term interest in the social psychology of small-group politics (having some experience in such a group myself decades ago), and I assume the dynamics within and between religious/psychological & sexual sects are rather similar (although the latter may be more inward-looking than political small-groups).
Does anyone have a good theory why such small groups & sects are so prevalent in California in particular? Is it a demand-side phenomenon or a supply-side phenomenon, or what is the combinations of these?
My own hunch is that California, since the 1950s and 1960s has got a reputation as a sect&small counter-culture/small group-friendly place (think Esalen, Black Panthers, Beatniks, Hippies, Hells Angels, Antifa). This reputation acts as a signal to sect-entrepreneurs as well as followers. "Everything that has a screw loose rolls down to California" grumbled some of the political science faculty at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s (a demand-side explanation).
...While if you are an entrepreneur into these sorts of things, the perceived entry costs are probably lower in California. There is a larger receptive mass of potential followers, and the whole social infrastructure is already there comparted to, say, des Moines in Iowa.
Also, California is a known cultural innovation-hub globally. It is a state that people elsewhere looking for The Next Big Thing are watching. From a diffusion theory perspective, this is a good place to start if you have more than local ambitions. Since if you make it locally, there is a higher probability that you will get local spin-offs elsewhere, and become a leader in a larger movement. Which is also likely to attract entrepreneurs.
A small section of these small groups go on to fame and glory (most recently Antifa), although most of course fizzle out locally, in California as elsewhere (power law distribution).
Since housing costs have become prohibitive in the largest Californian cities from any start-up perspective, I would further assume that among small-group entrepreneurs, at least their headquaters and/or the house of the leader are now mostly found in the periphery of Los Angeles and the Bay Area (say, Oakland rather than San Francisco).
But that, as everything else, are empirical questions of course.
"Studying and Supporting Early Stage Science - Leverage Research studies the history of science and how historical discoveries were made and supports novel research in young or under-resourced fields."
0- Are they studying the history of science or how discoveries in history were made? Like are we digging in Normandy or realizing most scientific discoveries were accidents? Hopefully both for a wild output-
1- Pretty sure the definition of cronyism is just a picture of the early days of the Royal Society. Hutton. Smith. Erasmus Darwin who Charles got all his ideas from.
2- But there's a ton of early stage actual science worth funding out there
Man, as someone whose "Top 10 List of Things that Piss Me Off" includes getting pushed around, guilt-tripping, cults of personality, delusions of grandeur, passive-agressive middle-school-esque status games, people deliberately taking an emotional shit on those under their care or authority, and NDAs, that Leverage essay was quite the ride for me!
Far from coming across as weak, the author is extraordinarily resilient to have come through that type of psychological meat grinder more or less intact.
Zoe if you're reading this, you're not crazy–you spent two years drowning in bullshit poured on you by psycho assholes! Congrats on getting away, and I wish you continued success in your recovery.
#7. So a good bit of pain is the nervous system overreacting rather than accurately signaling damage, and it's possible to quiet the pain signal.
How do you distinguish between true pain signals and false ones?
#8: I think I get it - the scatter plot is a gorilla, right?
28. Wait. So the Geoff Anders mentioned in the essay was one of Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures winners just last month?! https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/09/emergent-ventures-winners-sixteenth-cohort.html
What the hell is going on?
If someone was suspicious about graphs of elite overproduction across history made by Turchin - I found someone who agrees with me and is actually expert in related topic (yes, I know about confirmation bias)
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-2021/
> By way of example, I was stunned that Turchin figures he can identify ‘elite overproduction’ and quantify wealth concentration into the deep past, including into the ancient world (Romans, late Bronze Age, etc). I study the Romans; their empire is only 2,000 years ago and moreover probably the single best-attested ancient society apart from perhaps Egypt or China (and even then I think Rome comes out quite solidly ahead). And even in that context, our estimates for the population of Roman Italy range from c. 5m to three to four times that much. Estimates for the size of the Roman budget under Augustus or Tiberius (again, by far the best attested period we have) range wildly (though within an order of magnitude, perhaps around 800 million sestertii). Even establishing a baseline for this society with the kind of precision that might let you measure important but modest increases in the size of the elite is functionally impossible with such limited data.
22:
>It was nearly sunset; old Man Rootbeer stood at the end of the ave, flamethrower slung 'cross his back. You 'et one pimecone too many, Mr Poofers! Harkened Old Mr Root Beer. He took dead aim on Mr Poofers - Dead aim, you see! And then he pulled the trigger.
I mean, I had a feeling I was going to.
And then Old Mr Root Beer looked up at the sky.
#17, note that the metric is "time spent on childcare as primary activity", and so doesn't count time spent on other housework, reading, gossiping, watching TV, etc, while keeping the kids in sight so they don't kill themselves.
But, yeah, in the 1970s the kids were mostly being looked after by the kids. And it really worked quite well.
Every time birth order effects come up, I always wonder how only children compare to people with siblings. Does any of the research include them? I seem to remember that only children are over represented as readers of this blog, but I’m not sure where I got that idea.
Could you clarify a bit on "your default assumption for everything in pain management should be “doctors will use this as an excuse not to give you necessary medications"". I thought there was overmedication in this field...
For #7, and that science banana tweet:
A. I am convinced science banana knows nothing about this field. B. This is an amazing paradigm for certain CP treatment, and should be applauded. C. None of what science banana have written refutes this study. D. science banana's tweet that "soon you might" is completely false, which brings me back to point A.
"But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research"
That's the claim. It's also an interesting example of how such claims spread and develop.
Googling and following the links, we find a blog that quotes the claim from Rindermann's book as fact. There you can find the original sources on which Rindermann's claim is based: Two articles in a psychological journal from 1938. It's impossible to tell tell how much these two articles support Rindermann's claim "Contradicting common beliefs, National Socialists were opposed to intelligence research" without reading the articles (but Rindermann's sentence "They were opposed to a measurement solely of ‘theoretical intelligence’, of ‘intellectualism’ (Becker, 1938, p. 22); instead they favoured ‘practical intelligence’ (p. 18) that should be measured." seems to suggest that the Nazis had some kind of intelligence research, based on a concept of intelligence they likef.).
On the blog, the text is used to claim parallels between Nazi concepts and those of Robert Sternberg. Even though it is only based on what Rindermann writes, the blog suggests that "maybe" other parts of Robert Sternberg's concept of intelligence could also be found in these sources ("I don’t see any
mention of the part of his trio successful intelligence, but maybe if
one looked at the sources.")
Next, another blog refers to the quote on the first blog, writing "from what we can tell, the Nazis actually opposed intelligence research". Well, "from what we can tell" is based on one author whose statement seemingly summarizes what two Nazi psychologists said. That is
then quoted by someone on Twitter to back the statement that Sternberg has
"controversial views on intelligence that sound straight from nazi
texts", and finally that is referred here on ACX, as supporting a claim that
"Nazis hated IQ research", together with the advice "Whenever someone
tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on
perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology." Should you consider doing that?
Would doing that improve political discourse, would it be intellectually
honest, or at least be justified? Or would it just be based on a pile of
motivated reasoning and motivated search? I sometimes read claims that the Rindermann side of the discourse is the intellectually superior side, or just politically neutral scholars, whereas their opponents are political hacks. So, hm, really? Maybe Nazis hated intelligence research, but up to now I only see a claim with weak support and some bloggers who seem to like the claim.
Moreover, is the aversion of some Nazis against IQ research actually central to the debate? It could be argued that nowadays some people who want to pursue exclusionary or worse policies may use IQ arguments to justify this, and that the statement that some Nazis did not like IQ research is not extremely relevant to that. At least I know no statements explicitly saying that "race"-sorting based on IQ is bad because Nazis were fans of IQ research. Rather, the argument seems to say that the Nazis used anything they could to justify their ideologically motivated policies, and this (making up justifications for the ideologically motivated positions aimed against outgroups) is, as far as I understand it, the accusation against some IQ researchers (whether justified or not, that is not my point here).
In this context, it could be argued that the Nazis did not need IQ research to justify their policy of killing the "weakest" or exterminating the "Life unworthy of life", and that referring to measured intelligence would possibly be quite detrimental to their own aims. They had already defined who was the enemy, and they had defined their idea of how to improve their "race". Justifying this by referring to additional criteria could make those insecure who are unsure whether the thresholds of these criteria might change over time, and whether they or other people around them would be affected. Nazi "euthanasia" actually met with some resistance (e.g. from the Catholic church).
But of course this would just be questioning some points of the argument while accepting Rindermann's claim, based on some perceived plausibility that Nazis may not have liked IQ research. But in real life there are trade-offs, and there are also arguments why Nazis may actually have used intelligence measures.
The two articles that Rindermann quotes are from 1938. The Nazi "Euthanasia" Programme started in 1939. Did intelligence measures play a role there? Here's a quote from a website about Aktion T4 (https://www.t4-denkmal.de/eng/Ausgrenzung-Kinder):
"When admitted to the institution, children and adolescents were assessed and treated mainly according to how well they could be taught. Classification usually occurred after an intelligence test based on an intelligence test that had been in use since 1905 (Binet-Simon test). In school of the institution, pupils were supposed to learn and be fostered according to their mental abilities. This practice, which had developed since the early 20th century, became a deadly threat in the National
Socialist era. Children and adolescents who failed the intelligence test and did badly in the school of the institution were regarded as »incapable of being educated« and »unfit for life«. There was no place for them in a psychiatric programme aimed at healing and integrating them into working life.
As part of the National Socialist »euthanasia« programme, children and adolescents were murdered not only in the »children's wards« of the »Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses« but also in the gas chambers of the T4 killing centres. When they were being selected, their assessed »ability to be educated« played the decisive role. The victims of »Aktion T4« included around 4,200 minors, of which almost 77 per cent were considered to be »uneducable«. This assessment affected girls and boys equally and was mostly made in conjunction with the diagnosis of »congenital or early acquired imbecility«."
(Note the sentence "This practice, which had developed since the early 20th century, became a deadly threat in the National Socialist era." It may explain in some part why some people are very averse to some instances seemingly "neutral" measurement.)
AFAICT 'It's all in your mind' was invented specifically to discredit people studying psychosomatic phenomena. Reading about researchers in the area (going back to the late 1800s) this is emphatically not their claim, but rather that the interaction between mental phenomena and physical phenomena are complex, surprising, and worthy of much more attention than they have received. See, for example John Sarno's famous book Healing Back Pain. His explanation for the success that he has had is something like this: when injured, the muscles surrounding an injured part naturally tense to take the load off the injured part. This pattern of activation can remain subtly activated past the initial injury and deprive the area of blood flow. The sensations that continue to arise in the area from this restricted blood flow and tensing of supporting muscles in an unnatural loading scheme get coded as 'pain' and the phenomena persists. You can undo this by deconditioning the pattern by paying very close attention to the pattern of muscles tensing as you go through the motions that cause 'pain' to arise.
Importantly, I did this myself and cured a minor chronic pain that I was having in my back that I thought was left over from straining a spinal erector. The pain persisted for more than a year, after reading the book and trying the exercise (I think) 3 times it entirely abated and has not recurred.
I think this is an important topic that is stymieing our understanding of chronic pain. I think this is a potential EA cause area due to the possibility of an intervention that can be distributed for very low cost.
I tried to explain the pun to our guide, but they were totally oblivious to the myth.
FreakonomicsExperiments.com did a lot of very-low-cost RCTs of major life decisions, by having people who were on the fence go there and randomize into one or the other choice. I think something similar could be done with alcohol. It'll only study people who were on the fence, but those are the people most interested in the results of such studies anyway. You don't need to sell out to industry to get $67 million to run a study -- you just need some people to volunteer to participate and self-report their data on a cheap website.
Re: 20, How we empirically distinguish the "this art is just too advanced for you filthy peasants to appreciate it" scenario from a bunch of sycophantic courtiers praising the emperor's new clothes and telling the little boy he's an idiot? How do we even prove that "having taste" is a thing, and prove who has it, beyond just defining taste as agreeing with the majority of some arbitrarily chosen reference group (either the entire population, or some level of credential)?
Art experts are ensconced in institutions and social milieus that require them to play signaling games. Signals have little value unless they are costly -- the sillier the beliefs, the more value they have as shibboleths to delineate group membership. Perhaps people who are educated about art online -- acquiring all the knowledge without being embedded in those social pressures to conform -- would like modern art less relative to traditional arts than the institutionalized "art experts". That would lean me towards the emperor's new clothes.
One interesting think about the Orwell essay (#24) was that in his time people supported their faction by exaggerating its strength. To some extent, these days people support their faction with a focus on how much its been hurt.
7: The study solicits participants by advertising "mind-body" treatment for CBP, nearly guaranteed to attract participants primed for psychological pain treatment. The placebo group was told they were receiving a placebo saline injection with no psychological treatment. Stands to reason the placebo effect would be greater for the group that received actual "mind-body" treatment.
No MRIs performed on participants, but of those who supplied their own at the beginning of the trial presented with a median of 4 different radiological findings, including disc herniation/rupture and central canal stenosis. These abnormalities were "assumed not to be causing back pain" by the researchers because "these abnormalities are seen in the majority of asymptomatic individuals." i.e. because some people have these conditions and are asymptomatic we know that in all cases these conditions cannot be causing back pain and are thus "centralized pain" we can treat psychologically.
Participants with multiple abnormalities on their MRI were told by researchers things like:
“Right now, you’re feeling a burning sensation in your back. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that you think burning indicates danger. But burning doesn’t have to feel bad. Think about when you first get into a jacuzzi, or when you’re taking a nice, hot shower… there’s a burning sensation, but it actually feels really nice."
And, "We know that there’s nothing wrong with your body, this is just your brain putting on a show for you. It’s just an interesting burning sensation, but we know that it’s safe. So just sit back and enjoy the show.”
They were also telling this to the 60% of participants who had no MRIs, god knows what real acute back issues they could have had.
If you tell people that the burning pain in their back when they bend over is an irrational invention of their mind that should actually be experienced pleasurably as being in a jacuzzi, it stands to reason they'll tend to revise down their post-treatment pain metrics, lest they be perceived as hopelessly irrational or not mentally strong enough to overcome their mind's inherent irrationality.