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July 5, 2024 03:15
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| {"text":"# Prediction Markets Suggest Replacing Biden\n\nThe last week hasn’t been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don’t seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don’t even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like “Trump is also bad” or pretending that nothing is really wrong.\n\nSome of the party’s problems are hard and have no shortcuts. But the big one - figuring out whether replacing Biden would even help the Democrats’ electoral chances - is a good match for prediction markets. Set up markets to find the probability of Democrats winning they nominate Biden, vs. the probability of Democrats winning if they replace him with someone else.\n\n(see my [Prediction Market FAQ](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq) for why I think they are good for cases like these)\n\nBefore we go into specifics, the summary result: **Replacing Biden with Harris is neutral to slightly positive; replacing Biden with Newsom or a generic Democrat increases their odds of winning by 10 - 15 percentage points.** There are some potential technical objections to this claim, but they mostly suggest reasons why the markets might overestimate Biden’s chances rather than underestimate them.\n\nThe rest of this post is mostly sources and technical discussion trying to establish that this is true. You can skip it if you don’t care. But in case you do:\n\nJohn Stossel and Maxim Lott have a site called [Election Betting Odds](https://electionbettingodds.com/ElectabilityDEM.html) which tries to aggregate information from many different betting markets to answer questions like these. Here are their claimed headline results - this is probability conditional on being nominated:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F48de7ee1-a6b7-428a-84ce-3ab4adb82884_1068x560.png)\n\nI assume they chose these three because they’re the only ones discussed enough to have enough data. I am following their lead.\n\nI appreciate John and Maxim’s work, but I’m not completely comfortable trusting it. Their model is based on results from Betfair, Smarkets, PredictIt, and Polymarket. But I don’t know much about the first two (as an American, I’m banned from even reading Betfair), and the latter two are notoriously bad at partisan political questions. They usually overestimate Republicans’ chances, partly because Democrats’ opposition to online political betting has turned the pool of online political bettors disproportionately red. While a fluid and easily-accessible prediction market should be able to avoid biases like these, neither PredictIt nor Polymarket really qualifies. The CFTC, which regulates prediction markets, has crippled both - PredictIt has very low maximum investments per market, and Polymarket is crypto-only and banned for US citizens. These have prevented their biases from being corrected and made both of them perform relatively weakly in head-to-head contests.\n\nAnd Stossel/Lott’s focus on betting sites automatically excludes two of the biggest and most historically accurate forecasting engines from their calculation - Metaculus and Manifold.\n\nIn order to get numbers I trusted more than theirs, I looked at Metaculus, Manifold, PredictIt, and Polymarket, weighting each by how much I trusted it. Here’s what I found:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F31e3710e-6231-49c6-989b-1bc16f70fdf7_833x288.png)\n\nThe Biden number is about 4% higher than Nate Silver’s model over the same time period; see below for why that might be.\n\n**\\[EDIT 7/2/24: Original version had a miscalculation which decreased everyone’s odds by about 10%. Above version should be correct.\\]**\n\nYou can find my sources at the bottom of the post. “Explicit” odds are based on questions like “What are the chances of Biden winning if he is the nominee?” “Implied” odds were generated by combining the questions “What is the chance of Biden being the nominee?” and “What is the chance of Biden winning?”; this is safe enough with Biden, but with unlikely nominees like Newsom, some of the percentages can get small enough that they start running into small-number-biases and become less trustworthy. I’ve weighted each market’s explicit calculation higher than their implicit one to compensate.\n\nA possible objection to these results: conditional probabilities don’t exactly reflect the intuitive concept of decision-making. That is, we’re not asking “We want to know whether or not to keep Biden, so what are the chances that he’ll win if we do?”, we’re asking the market for the chance that he’ll win, _in the set of worlds where people decide to keep him for other reasons_. We should expect this to overestimate his performance. That is, imagine that tomorrow, Biden has completely recovered, he easily wins his next debate with Trump, and everyone agrees the most recent debate was just a fluke - in that world, he is both more likely to be nominated _and_ more likely to win. Alternatively, if tomorrow he gets much worse and can’t even speak in full sentences, he’s much less likely to be nominated _and_ much more likely to lose. Since the real world includes both those possibilities, restricting ourselves to the set of worlds where he gets nominated means we’re overestimating the chance that he wins. There are similar-albeit-less-severe problems with other candidates - if we choose Newsom, that might be because he won some kind of debate or process versus Harris and all the other potential replacements. Overall I expect this to be mostly correct, but probably overestimate Biden’s chances by a percent or two relative to others.\n\nAlong with these three candidates, Metaculus had an explicit “should the Democrats replace Biden?” question:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7933bcc-fc24-4043-9064-47a958e24497_787x306.png)\n\nManifold also asks how Democrats will do if they replace Biden (without specifying a particular replacement):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://manifold.markets/HamishTodd/conditional-upon-the-democratic-par)\n\nWe can compare this to their Biden market…\n\n…and find that once again, they expect replacing Biden to go better (though I think 51% is just cope).\n\nAt the Manifest prediction market conference in early June, I interviewed Nate Silver:\n\n…and asked him for his probability that the Democrats would win this election, versus his probability that the Democrats would win conditional on Biden not being the nominee (specifically “drops dead tomorrow of natural causes”). He said 40-45% chance normally, 50% chance without Biden. This was before the debate, but I think it matches the markets’ opinion that switching candidates would help the Democrats’ chances - and this has only become more true since the debate.\n\nOn the other hand, polls asking people how they would vote in possible matchups don’t show any advantage of alternate candidates over Biden. [Here’s](https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/6/29/in-post-debate-poll-voters-think-biden-is-too-old-to-be-president-yet-alternative-candidates-perform-similarly-against-trump) the only post-debate poll I could find:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff99e148f-4051-40f9-b0c6-22eb10289854_1500x1091.png)\n\nAnd if Biden does need to be replaced, Democrats mostly support Harris, who the prediction markets find least promising:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d694e0c-d306-4578-a55d-5314ca965a83_1500x1246.png)\n\nMaybe Democrats are the wrong people to ask - they’re already going to vote Biden, so you want someone who’s more attractive to independents. Of course, in a normal primary it would be Democrats making the decision. But if elites are going to do something behind closed doors, maybe they should take advantage and choose the candidate most likely to win, for once.\n\nI think these polls are the strongest objection to the prediction markets’ verdict. You could make an argument where prediction market users are mostly educated liberal white males, and even though they’re incentivized to honestly determine what ordinary people think, they’re too out-of-touch with ordinary people to do so effectively. Or they might be over-fixating on “voters don’t like Biden’s senility” without considering that, even if voters didn’t know Biden was currently senile before Thursday, they probably guessed that he would become senile sometime in his four-year term, and had basically accepted that his aides would do the hard work. Maybe they prefer a well-known likeable incumbent over an unknown quantity (and the unknown quantity’s potential new/weird aides), even if the well-known likeable incumbent is senile. Maybe elites know more than we do about how hard it is to inject a new candidate at the last moment, how dangerous it is to have someone who hasn’t been thoroughly vetted for scandals, et cetera.\n\nStill, for now I trust the prediction markets. I think replacing Biden would add ~10 prcentage points to the Democrats’ chance of victory.\n\nAt the end of this post, I’ll list the prediction markets I’m using as sources. But before then, a brief interlude of:\n\n### Fuzzy Subjective Human Factors I Am Not Really Qualified To Talk About\n\nMany people on Twitter are asking “how could anyone possibly have been stupid enough to not realize that Biden was senile?”\n\n_I_ was that stupid. I didn’t say it openly, because I’m at least smart enough to have a high threshold for giving my opinion on political things I don’t know much about. But I thought it in my heart. So in case the people asking “how could anyone have been that stupid?” actually want an explanation, here’s my former reasoning.\n\nRepublicans have been accusing Biden of being senile (and the Democrats of hiding it) for at least five years now. Before the 2020 debates, they were excited that this was when they could finally prove once and for all that Biden was senile. Then Biden did fine, and they retreated to “well he’s senile but they have some secret drug they’re giving him, just during debates, that makes him look fine”.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa11d1a27-cfc2-4708-9db1-e344b391ac9a_1288x758.png)\n\nNotice this is from 2020; according to polls, he did win the debate that year ([source](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/donald-trump-joe-biden-debate-drugs))\n\nI [think a lot about experimental cognitive enhancement drugs](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nootropics-survey-2020-results), and I can say with confidence that nothing like that exists. Stimulants can help people with mild dementia be more active and motivated, but they don’t really improve cognition directly, and they can’t make a demented person temporarily lucid.\n\nStill, for the past four years, every time Biden was going to do something - a press conference, a State of the Union, whatever - the Republicans would say “ha, this time is going to be the proof that he’s senile!” And then he would always do fine, and they would retreat back to “I guess he used the secret drug this time too”. The satire site _Babylon Bee_ had some funny articles about this:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92d67bb2-5940-44ba-ad21-df822276280a_781x829.png)\n\n[Babylon Bee](https://babylonbee.com/news/dc-area-pharmacies-all-out-of-stimulants), after Biden gave a good State of the Union speech earlier this year.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa986c7ac-16c2-4987-b520-8f6ddf9ad13d_757x690.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6068601f-0eef-4a1c-b885-19f5712decf1_751x668.png)\n\nMeanwhile, the _Democrats_ were spreading the alternate narrative that _Trump_ was senile. This one has gotten less press, because I don’t know how many people really believed it. But it came up occasionally, along with out-of-context video snippets where Trump said or did something dumb or meandering. Of course, anybody with a presidential candidate’s level of public exposure will have a few gaffes. Even if they don’t, you can always deceptively crop something so it looks like they did.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb26c689-1e81-422b-9493-ae44cac59125_858x814.png)\n\nWait, why is a psychoanalyst getting quoted as a top expert in dementia? ([source](https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-dementia-evidence-overwhelming-top-psychiatrist-1881247))\n\n[\n\n![Change.org petition saying \"Our Diagnostic Impression Of Trump Is Dementia - For Licensed Professionals Only\"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F760276bb-2f91-4545-bbf5-d3f9fe911de7_975x654.png \"Change.org petition saying \"Our Diagnostic Impression Of Trump Is Dementia - For Licensed Professionals Only\"\")\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F760276bb-2f91-4545-bbf5-d3f9fe911de7_975x654.png)\n\nI didn’t know you could diagnose someone via [Change.org petition](https://www.change.org/p/our-diagnostic-impression-of-trump-is-probable-dementia-for-licensed-professionals-only), but 2544 people who claim to be licensed professionals can’t be wrong!\n\nSo with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops.\n\n[Reversed stupidity is not intelligence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence). Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high.\n\nBut I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years.\n\nI’m still confused what those elites were thinking. Reading the news coverage for the past few days (including some video clips from a post-debate rally where he seemed noticeably better) it seems like some combination of:\n\n* He has good days and bad days, and they were hoping this would be a good day.\n \n* He’s better in the daytime than at night (this is a classic dementia symptom called “sundowning”), his aides mostly only saw him during the day, but this debate was at night (9 - 11 PM in his time zone).\n \n* He’s still good at simple tasks like reading from a teleprompter, and they hoped this would extend to harder tasks like a debate.\n \n\nI think the most likely story is that his aides noticed he had good days and bad days, thought that most days were good, and figured they’d roll the dice, schedule him for two debates, and hopefully they’d be good days and this would defuse questions about his health. But their luck ran out, they got a bad day, and also they were caught unprepared for how bad he was during the evening.\n\nIf this is true, they were probably telling themselves something like “well, he’s an incumbent, the party is united around him, it would be a disaster if we had to replace him, and we can probably make it through the election before this blows up. Since he’s _often_ _mostly_ lucid, we’ll say he’s _always completely_ lucid. It’s just a few white lies, and it will save our party a lot of trouble”.\n\nIf that was their thought process, then I think it’s a good lesson in how bad what seem like “a few white lies” can be.\n\nI support the Principle of Charity. Nobody ever thinks in their own head “Haha, I am an evil person who is deceiving my friends and the world”. They think “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, [for the greater good](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou)”. But the flip side of that is that every horrible giant deception was perpetrated by people saying “I’m telling little white lies that don’t matter, for the greater good”. And so if _you_ are ever tempted to tell what seem like little white lies that don’t matter for the greater good, you should consider the possibility that actually, you’re being about as mendacious as anybody ever gets, and you have a decent chance of causing a disaster. And if you do cause a disaster, the fact that you didn’t go into it smirking “muahaha, now I shall be an evil person and cause a disaster” won’t be exculpatory.\n\nMy quick scan of the law suggests that although DNC delegates can vote their conscience, they were selected for being hardcore Biden supporters, and there’s no way to convince them to ditch him unless he bows out gracefully. I think he should bow out gracefully - not just for pragmatic reasons about helping his party win the election, but because it seems like his administration lied to the American people every time they said he was lucid and things were fine.\n\nIn normal times, I wouldn’t blame him for this. _Every_ early-stage dementia patient (and their family and friends) always tells themselves (and everyone else) that they’re fine. It’s an easy thing to think, there’s never a clear bright-line where things obviously stop being fine, and the charade saves them from having to confront horrifying questions about their own mortality. When I start getting demented, I plan to also insist I’m fine, and you guys will just have to cope with whatever incomprehensible garbage ends up on this blog. But Joe Biden and his family have the future of the country in the balance. They need to step up and do the hard thing.\n\nSo I think he should decline the nomination and endorse some likeable purple-state governor. If Kamala Harris gets angry, he should just say “sorry, I’m a demented old man, you can’t blame me for my actions”. If she gets angry at the other Democrats, they should just say “sorry, it’s an old man’s dying wish, it would be cruel not to honor it”. If Biden endorses Newsom, fine, whatever. I don’t like Newsom because he’s all style and no substance, but maybe that’s what we need for a time like this. He’s the closest we can come in the real world to literally putting Generic Democrat on the ballot. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.\n\nBut the markets say there’s only a ~25% any of this will happen. So maybe it’s too late to fix things. I think the proper Rationalist response is - okay, we screwed this one up. Now that we’ve learned our lesson, what’s the next upcoming thing like this - the one where we really _are_ still in the window where we can affect it?\n\nI think it’s Sonia Sotomayor. Nate Silver, who was right on Biden very early, [has been pushing this really hard](https://www.natesilver.net/p/sonia-sotomayors-retirement-is-a). Sotomayor is getting old and unhealthy, and might die within the next four years. If she dies, and Republicans win the Presidency and Senate, Trump will get to nominate her replacement, making the Supreme Court 7-2 conservative. This is the same thing that happened with RBG. Most Democrats wish RBG would have retired when she had the chance. Now Sotomayor has the chance, so she should do it. If we’re going to have a national moment where we worry about aging government officials staying on longer than is good for their party or their country, she should be the next target. Elites can sublimate whatever emotions they’re having about Biden onto Sotomayor, and maybe it’ll do some good.\n\n(I hate saying “elites should” as if I’m just lodging a complaint into the ether. But I genuinely don’t know who I would pressure, or how, to make this happen. I don’t think calling my representative is appropriate here. If someone knows what _is_ appropriate, let me know.)\n\nSpeaking of elites - one other update I’ve had from this situation is that I’m less confident that some group fairly called “Democratic elites” is in control in any meaningful way. I always knew that the party had different factions and nobody had obvious, trivial control. But I thought if the party was threatened, some important people could meet in a room and talk things out. Wasn’t this what happened when Obama endorsed Biden over Bernie, everyone pivoted in lockstep, and Bernie’s campaign imploded? I mean sure, maybe this was bad, but didn’t it at least demonstrate “state capacity” that the party could use in more important situations? I don’t know, maybe that was just a fluke and the party has no state capacity at all. I’m not even sure _Biden’s aides_ have state capacity. Maybe the answer to “why didn’t his aides come up with a better plan for this debate?” is just “it wasn’t any particular aide’s job to do that, and they didn’t coordinate”.\n\nThis is getting depressing, so here are my prediction market sources for the summary above. Some of these are embeds, which mean they auto-update, which means by the time you read this they might not say what I said they said - all of my numbers are correct as of 1 AM on July 1.\n\n### Prediction Market Sources\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://polymarket.com/event/democratic-nominee-2024?tid=1719815273572)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024?tid=1719815225845)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9acbbb21-535e-401a-b680-9cfe6626bf3c_1020x626.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F89817bdf-c064-4fbe-9304-834e8bbc6746_1036x732.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11379/2024-democrat-nominee-for-us-prez/)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11245/winner-of-2024-us-presidential-election/)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefdaa4bf-e38e-442f-b628-780a35cc2168_797x593.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b70b592-9d5d-4adf-9927-09fd850977cd_782x980.png)"} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 336\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** Now I’ve also released the new version of Unsong as an ebook on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Unsong-Scott-Siskind-ebook/dp/B0D84DLKZW/) and [Gumroad](https://astralcodexten.gumroad.com/l/wbefjq?_gl=1*9x0cux*_ga*NzAzNzI3Mzg4LjE3MTk0MDUwNTI.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*MTcxOTgzNTQ5Ny4yLjEuMTcxOTgzNTcxOC4wLjAuMA..), both $4.99. Yes, somehow the Amazon hardcopy is my pen name and the ebook is my real name, probably I made a mistake, probably I’ll get it corrected soon.\n\n**2:** New [subscriber only post,](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscriber-bonus-debate-questions) with bonus questions from Thursday’s mock debate post."} | |
| {"text":"# Your Book Review: Dominion\n\n\\[_This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked_\\]\n\nMatthew Scully, author of _Dominion_, is an unlikely animal welfare advocate. He’s a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. That’s like finding out that Greta Thunberg’s Chief of Staff spent their spare time writing a 400-page, densely researched book called “Guns Are Good, Actually.” \n\nScully’s unusual background could be why it took me years of reading everything on animal welfare I could get my hands on before I stumbled on his 2002 manifesto. Let this be a warning to other authors — write just [one little State of the Union](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/transcripts/bushtext_012004.html) address that exalts the War on Terror and your books might not get a lot of reach in more liberal, EA-adjacent circles. \n\nScully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW’s _[Consider the Lobster](https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)_ [](https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)and thought, “I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries,” _Dominion_ is the book for you. \n\nIf you are intrigued by the type of person who would use their ingroup status to get other conservatives to let their guard down, only to roast them in print for their views on animals, _Dominion_ is the book for you. \n\nIf you have a bone to pick with Peter Singer’s particular brand of utilitarianism but you also begrudgingly respect him, _Dominion_ is _definitely_ the book for you. Singer is mentioned at least a dozen times, and it’s usually to remind people that he’s a godless infanticide defender. \n\nIt’s really no offense to Singer though, that’s just how Scully rolls. He’s an equal opportunity criticizer. Whether you’re an icon of the animal rights movement, some guy bragging about shooting a fenced-in lion, a revered conservative thinker like Roger Scruton, basically every Christian except St. Francis of Assisi, the head of a public company, or a dear personal friend who happened to write an article that annoyed him, you get the same treatment in _Dominion_ — cutting, well-researched, and often really funny arguments as to why your views on animals are misguided. \n\nHe sees it as a huge moral failing of modern society that most people are indifferent to the suffering of animals that are not our pets. It pains him deeply that this blindspot exists. It is so obvious to him that all animals deserve our respect. But as someone in George W. Bush’s inner circle would surely understand, ethics are complicated and smart people can disagree. In order to stave off as many objections as possible, Scully explores every inch of the animal welfare landscape. \n\nIt’s the variety of ways in which he tries to make his plea for mercy that gives the book its unique flavor. He explores hunting, whaling, factory farming, religion, ethics, capitalism, and the science of consciousness. He puts boots on the ground at hunting conventions and inside factory farms, touching squealing piglets with his bare hands. He talks to hippie activists. He engages with lifelong hunters who will die on the hill that dolphins are, in fact, really dumb. He secures interviews with high ranking diplomats from Japan. He can be repetitive, and some of his arguments miss the mark, but the sheer determination of the effort has to be commended. I have yet to encounter another animal welfare writer who put their credibility on the line to secure an exclusive interview with a high-ranking meat industry executive and then called them a moral monster to their face.\n\nThe title of the book comes from the Book of Genesis, in which God gives man dominion over “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The ultimate question of the book is whether having dominion means we are free to do whatever we want to animals, or if we owe them mercy. Scully leaves no stone unturned in making the case that we should mostly let the creeping things creepeth in peace. \n\nGod cares about animal welfare and so should you \n\n\n---------------------------------------------------\n\nScience and reason aside, the bedrock of Scully’s generous spirit toward animals comes from a personal belief that all of God’s creatures deserve “whatever measure of happiness their creator intended for them.” We should care for them simply because “they are fellow creatures, sharing with you and me the breath of life, each in their own way bearing His unmistakable mark.” \n\nIt’s a big departure from most interpretations of the bible, especially by conservatives. Most people say that we got dominion, and we can use it as we see fit. If we want to exercise dominion in the name of cramming animals into dark sheds so we can have cheap bacon, so be it. God made the rules. \n\nNot so fast, says Scully. Christians are supposed to be good stewards, only using animals as necessary and never being cruel. A careful reading of scripture reveals myriad instances where it’s either directly said or strongly implied that all creatures deserve kindness. In the Gospel of Mark, God says to “preach the gospel to every creature”. Moses is chosen in part because he was kind to a lamb: “You who have compassion for a lamb shall now be the shepherd of my people Israel.” \n\nLambs are a big deal in the bible. Jesus is named both The Lamb of God and The Good Shepherd. He also helps a sheep who fell into a pit on the sabbath, because it's the right thing to do even though Jews aren’t supposed to do work that day. The sheep references are layered metaphors, sure. They can still be revealing of a deeper intent. As Scully puts it, “What kind of mind was it that went back again and again to the lamb and other animals like the birds and fox to convey images of gentleness and suffering and providential love? And why a helpless, harmless creature to illustrate the Christian way instead of a proud and violent predator?”\n\nBut weren’t they sacrificing animals all the time back then, and also eating animals? Yes, but focusing on that aspect misses the forest for the trees. Sure, Jesus was not a vegetarian, and there are no stirring quotes where he implores everyone to be kind to the animals. But Jesus’s thing was more about ending barbaric practices. Jesus tells the Pharisees at one point: “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.” Perhaps if early Judea had ‘guaranteed kill’ hunting expeditions targeting endangered animals, factory farms, and rocket propelled harpoons for hunting Whales, Jesus would have condemned those practices too. \n\nWhile we do have dominion over the creatures, the bible tells us to rule their world with “holiness and justice.” Is it holy to capture baby monkeys and serve their brains to tourists in Indonesia in search of an exotic delicacy? Where is the justice in selectively breeding deers to have gigantic racks and then shooting them in fenced-in preserves? \n\nAnother interesting case to consider is that of the post-flood second covenant, where we are told of “the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” Hmm, ‘all flesh’ sounds pretty unambiguous to me. Even more curious is a part in Genesis where it sure sounds like we are told to stop with all this meat eating: \n\n> _“And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding fruit; to you it shall be for meat.”_\n\nIt doesn't say we can’t eat meat. The writers themselves were meat eaters. It does make you pause, though. \n\nI find Scully’s viewpoint refreshing. I’m so used to reading about neuron counts, moral weights, and nociceptors that it can be easy to forget that there are other ways of getting through to people. Maybe it’s worth investing more in an approach that asks whether we really think God/the universe/the simulator smiles on those that castrate baby pigs without anesthetic so that their boar musk doesn't make our pork taste slightly off? \n\nHere is Scully’s summary of the situation: \n\n> _“Here I only put to you one simple proposition about the animals we raise for fur and flesh. If, in a given situation, we have it in our power either to leave the creature there in his dark pen or let him out into the sun and breeze and feed him and let him play and sleep and cavort with his fellows — for me it’s an easy call. Give him a break. Let him go. Let him enjoy his fleeting time on earth, and stop bringing his kind into the world solely to suffer and die. It doesn't seem like much to us, the creatures’ little lives of grazing and capering and raising their young and fleeing natural predators. Yet it is the life given to them, not by breeder but by Creator. It is all they have. It is their part in the story, a beautiful part beyond the understanding of man, and who is anyone to treat it lightly? Nothing to us — but for them it is the world.”_ \n\nThis current of thought also interests me because making any inroads with Christians has the potential to greatly reduce animal suffering. There are 2.4 billion Christians on the planet. Convincing even a small fraction of them that God wants them to be nicer to animals could have a hugely positive effect. \n\nMy dad is a born-again Christian. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from him it’s that evangelicals love, nay positively live, for quoting scripture. The other day, instead of just being a passive recipient, I tossed back some lines I learned from Dominion. But Dad, doesn't Jesus count every sparrow? Is there not a covenant between God and the animals, too? And what’s this I hear about Moses being chosen by God in part because Moses offered to help a lost lamb quench its thirst?\n\nThese questions opened up a rich new vein of conversation for us. He went from flatly declaring that concern for animals should never get in the way of a farmer’s profit motive to saying, “Sure, allowing them a little more space seems like a decent and godly thing to do.” Then he tried to convince me to start a company that invents more humane slaughter methods. Progress. \n\nAs to whether God actually wants us to be kind to animals, we can never really know. But in a Pascal’s wager sort of way, it seems like a good bet to extend love to our furry, feathery, scaly, and even chitin-y friends just in case. \n\nI can’t find the expiration date on this divine mandate\n\n\n---------------------------------------------------------\n\nScully is adamant that we should not pass judgment on farmers, hunters, or furriers of the past. At one point we needed all that meat and fur to survive. Now we have tractors, plant-based proteins, and synthetic fibers. Can’t we thank the animals for their service and send them on their way? Scully thinks so. Once we no longer need the animal, “Responsible dominion calls for a reprieve. The warrant expires. The divine mandate is used up. What were once ‘necessary evils’ become just evils.”\n\nBut it’s not clear what those “necessary evils” are these days, and Scully doesn't provide a clear framework to judge. He leans a little too heavily for my taste on the idea that we can know evil when we see it. I don’t think he adequately addresses how messy this all gets in the real world. \n\nFor example, Scully is no fan of xenotransplantation, the process of transplanting animal organs into human bodies. He puts it firmly in the speculative, high-risk, and disturbing category of animal research. While Scully believes biotechnology can be a force for good, he thinks genetic engineering and the making of chimeras tilts us into the realm of playing God. He heeds the words of Pope John Paul II: “Resist the temptation of productivity and profit that work to the detriment of respect for nature.”\n\nBut what if we turn to the guy who recently went through the [first ever successful transplant](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68630020) of a pig kidney that was genetically designed to be used in humans? I bet he’d consider all the previous carnage a necessary evil indeed. \n\nScully is also horrified by the research programs that were going on in the early 2000’s that aimed to get rid of the “stress gene” in pigs. Apparently, stressed pigs release a hormone that gives the meat a bad taste. He rails against human hubris and how disturbing it is that we would experiment on these harmless creatures just to make their flesh slightly more palatable. \n\nBut he ignores the fact that a less stressed line of pigs will, in theory, be more comfortable. The ACX grant winners at the [Far Out Initiative](https://faroutinitiative.com/) are pushing things even further than those scientists with the stress gene. They are on a quest to alter farm animal genetics so that they don’t feel pain at all. Would it be a bad thing if they succeed? There could be unintended consequences of course, but on the other hand, the most eloquent plea for mercy isn’t going to make the day-to-day pain of being a farm animal hurt any less. There are billions of farmed creatures out there who could use a little more than thoughts, prayers, and philosophical musings about what does and does not qualify as “respect for nature.” \n\nMeeting a parrot is worth a thousand theories \n\n\n------------------------------------------------\n\nEven if God bestows his love on all creatures, a lot of the oomph of Scully’s argument falls away if animals are merely unfeeling machines. Redwood trees and LLMs aside, it’s hard to get people fired up about the moral treatment of anything but sentient beings. \n\nSo, do animals feel pain? Are they conscious? Do they have thoughts in the same way we do, however different from ours? The dominant paradigm in animal research when this book was published was that animals are unconscious. They reflexively react to stimuli but feel nothing. Scully cites many eminent researchers who are adamant about that being the case, but his main foil is the influential writer Stephen Budiansky, who argues that: \n\n> _“The premise of animal ‘rights’ is that sentience is sentience, that an animal by virtue above all of its capacity to feel pain deserves equal consideration. But sentience is not sentience, and pain isn’t even pain. Or, perhaps, following Daniel Dennet’s distinction, we should say that pain is not the same as suffering...Our ability to have thoughts about our experiences turns emotions into something far greater and sometimes far worse than mere pain...”_ \n\nIn response, Scully calls us to examine how we, as conscious humans, react when we are actually in the throes of pain. There’s not a lot of language use, not a lot of theorizing and rhapsodizing and bemoaning your future. “A kick in the shorts does not send a man into existential crisis or exquisite agony of the soul. It just hurts.”\n\nAlso, animals dream. That seems to be a pretty good indicator that they have world simulation models somewhat similar to ours. Or else, what are they dreaming about? A 2001 MIT study stated that rats indeed dream, meaning “the ability to recall, reflect, and evaluate prior experience is something that goes on in animals at many levels.”\n\nI was glad to see Scully focus as well on the fact that the same pain medication that works on humans works on animals. We use them as pain models in research all the time for a reason. \n\nMy favorite way Scully repudiates the behaviorists is by flat out rejecting the notion that we can’t know what it’s like to be a different creature. Wittgenstein thought that if a lion could talk, we would not understand it. Budiansky says that to see inside an animal brain would be “to enter a world without the words to describe it — and so is meaningless to us.” Scully is not buying it. \n\n> _“Both of these strike me as the kind of observations that sound profound on first hearing and preposterous on the second. Observing a lion or lioness, prior to any theories we might bring to leonine reality, you or I might match the creature’s behavior with simple words like: ‘I’m hungry — time to go run down a zebra...I’m tired — time for a nap...The cubs are driving me to distraction...’_\n\nPut that in your pipe and smoke it, [Thomas Nagel](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf). Scully firmly believes that while other beings don’t have conceptual language, it’s not a huge leap to think that we can describe the rudimentary thoughts and desires they have based on their behavior. \n\nScully’s approach can appear almost childish at times. He liberally quotes from books like _Bambi_, _Charlotte’s Web,_ and _White Fang_ as ways to express what animals might be thinking and feeling. But I think there’s a method to his madness. He’s getting us to tap into the feeling many of us get when we look at our pet and just _know_ that they have an inner life that matters. Something like that happens to Daniel Dennet himself, he who was once so sure that animals are unfeeling automatons. The incident occurs during an appearance on NPR in the late 90’s. Dennet is on the show with an African Gray Parrot named Alex, as well as Alex’s trainer. After witnessing Alex do things like count out how many blocks of each color were in front of him, Dennet is bowled over, apparently convinced of Alex’s consciousness. He proclaims to all the viewers that:\n\n> _“Alex is a remarkable and important individual in this world. I have seen enough of what Alex, the parrot, can do to realize that he is not just a well-trained circus animal. He is not just doing this by rote memorization. It hasn’t just been dinned into him. He makes remarkable transfers of knowledge and inferences. Alex is a pretty amazing parrot.”_\n\nIf animals have any feeling at all, it is incumbent upon us to up our mercy meter by like, 1000x. All of this really, really matters. While some of the most hardened among us truly don’t care if animals actually feel pain, people like Budiansky and Dennet do. And the first step toward a much less hellish world is to get people to see that while a lab rat might not be as smart as Alex the Parrot, can we be sure it feels literally no pain whatsoever? \n\nThese days, the consensus seems to be shifting toward recognizing most animals as sentient. Scully was surely heartened by the Declaration on Animal Consciousness that came out of NYU in 2024. It states that: “There is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.” It has collected hundreds of signatures from prominent scientists. \n \nStill, the debate rages on. Eliezer Yudkowsky once gave [a full-throated defense](https://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness/) of the idea that pigs don’t feel pain because they lack an “inner listener.” \n\nI wonder if Yudkowsky would change his mind if he had witnessed first hand the pig we meet in the first chapter of Dominion. This porcine hero noticed it’s owner was having a heart attack, started crying literal tears (pigs cry, who knew), left the confines of it’s fenced in yard for the first time ever, laid down in front of a passing car to force someone to stop and get out, and led that person to the house so they could rescue their owner. Inner listener or not, mirror test passer or not, that pig seems to be experiencing _something._\n\nDogs will never be bank managers and that’s okay \n\n\n---------------------------------------------------\n\nComedian Neal Brennan has [a bit in his 2023 special](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1215147569070186) about how he doesn't like it when people ask him if his dog is a rescue. \n\n> _“Yeah, they’re all rescues. None of these dogs were thriving on their own._ \n> \n> _I’ve never heard a story like, ‘Hey, where’d you guys get your labradoodle?’_ \n> \n> _And they’re like, ‘I went into Bank of America, and she was the manager. Now, she’s our full-time labradoodle!’”_ \n\nIt touches on a key theme in _Dominion_, which is that we don’t need to assign animals specific rights, or act like they are of equal intelligence to humans, in order to show them mercy. It also shouldn’t matter whether these animals can claim any rights of their own, and it’s irrelevant that they kill and eat each other. The entire point of being given dominion was so that we could exercise reason. We are not supposed to treat the animal kingdom as a moral guidepost. \n\nThere are people who insist that because no non-human animal can claim any rights, and because they don't treat each other as if they have rights, we have no obligation to accord them rights either. In fact, these people say, if we were to grant animals any moral status whatsoever it could lead to a slippery slope, and next thing you know you could be thrown in jail for swatting a fly. \n\nScully bites the bullet here and says, nah, that slippery slope you speak of, it does not exist. He thinks that what’s actually happening is that people fear they have a limited reservoir of love. They assume that by apportioning kindness out to animals, they will have less for humans. Jean Paul Sartre famously said as much: “When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.” Scully doesn't think that’s how the human heart works at all. Rather, our ability to feel compassion is nearly infinite, and deep down we all understand how powerful and gratifying it is to act with benevolence. \n\nTo make this point, Scully recounts the story of a mule who was being used in a coal mine in the late 1800s. A novelist who toured the Pennsylvania mine wrote of mules being kept underground for years at a time in particularly brutal conditions. When eventually brought to the surface, they “almost go mad with fantastic joy...they caper and career with extravagant mulish glee.” This mule refused to go back in at its appointed time, and the workers mercifully decided to just let it stay above ground. \n\nReflecting on the unbridled jubilance of the freed mule, Scully notes that, “Whenever any animal is locked away, or treated cruelly, or hunted or trapped, that is what we are taking away.” He also writes about a dolphin who is able to escape a fishing net after initially being caught. The dolphin is clearly ecstatic. It speeds off, leaping, spinning, reveling in its freedom. Scully wonders how one could witness such a thing and come away thinking that it matters one iota whether dolphins can “claim rights”.\n\nSimilarly, look at how most people react to stories about escaped farm animals. He cites a 1998 story about two pigs escaping from a slaughterhouse in England. Soon “all of Britain was following the drama.” After they were recaptured they were sent not to be killed but given over to an animal sanctuary, as their celebrity status made it intolerable to just eliminate them. Scores of similar stories can be found, such as [an escaped cow in the Netherlands](https://www.iamexpat.nl/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/dutch-cow-escapes-and-crowdfunding-saves-her-slaughter) that became a social media sensation. A quick crowdfunding campaign ensued, and there was no issue finding 50,000 euros to save her life. When people are actually confronted with the raw specter of a defenseless and innocent creature fighting for its life, the majority are reflexively merciful. It’s like the animal’s struggle for freedom, acting just as any of us would in the same situation, somehow unlocks hidden reservoirs of empathy. \n\nNowhere is our merciful and loving instinct more clear than when it comes to pets. Scully uses the archetypal family dog as an example:\n\n> _“You do not ask more of him than he can give, nor do you think less of Scruffy because he can’t rake the leaves or handle the family finances. You don’t even think of him as having ‘rights’ and yet, useless as he is to the practical affairs of the household, over time he comes to fill a crucial place. He’s just sort of there, this furry, funny, needful, affectionate, and mysterious being creeping around the house. Everybody in the end gains something, and when her or she is gone a little bit of love has been subtracted.”_\n\nIt’s when talk of rights gives way to talk of liberation that Scully gets his hackles up. Though he “admires those who bother to take the matter of animal liberation seriously,” he finds it annoying, for instance, that some people don’t want him to use the word pet to describe his dog:\n\n> _“‘Companion animal’, the suggested alternative, has a slightly false ring, as if our dogs and cats, if the relationship wasn’t working out, could go out into the world and set up for themselves somewhere else.”_\n\nThis is where, in my opinion, he starts to lose the plot. I don’t think it’s fair to say that the animal liberation crowd is aiming at literal equality between man and dog. I get the sense that those folks think of granting rights less as a way to put animals on the same plane as humans and more as a way to guarantee them the basic, decent treatment that Scully argues for throughout the book. \n\nIn theory, Scully should fully support an organization like the [Nonhuman Rights Project](https://www.nonhumanrights.org/), which brings lawsuits on behalf of creatures like great apes and elephants. Their goal is to change the law so that mammals of such immense intellect are recognized as people. Not people in the sense that they could get a driver’s license and run for office, but so that they can gain the right to live at a sanctuary instead of a barren cell in the zoo. If a corporation can be a legal person, why not Happy the Elephant? Scully, perhaps already feeling way out on a limb in a book where he admits that he almost didn’t talk about farmed animals for fear of alienating potential readers, never satisfactorily answers that question. \n\nTo his credit, he does think that lawmakers have a super important role to play, and he’s a big champion of making legal changes to protect animals. He just stubbornly wants the impulse toward change to be driven not by a desire to liberate, but by feelings of mercy, love, and responsibility. \n\nWith friends like these, who needs enemies?\n\n\n---------------------------------------------\n\nScully, let’s recall, was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Perhaps it is from having climbed so high in the conservative ranks that he gained the status and security necessary to feel comfortable absolutely roasting his fellow right-wingers. \n\nHe is particularly galled by what he sees as blatant hypocrisy. Conservatives are the first to complain about “man the perpetual victim, man the whiny special pleader, man the all-conquering consumer facing the universe with limitless entitlements and appetites to be met no matter what the costs.” Then these same conservatives turn around and do stuff like:\n\n* Say on the one hand that all hunting is okay because it’s the natural state of things, and a core part of being human, while also claiming that humans are rational and scientifically minded beings who have good reasons for the actions they take. \n \n* Proclaim that “the worst crime against nature is waste, not to use resources” as a defense of ‘harvesting’ any animal at any time, but ignore the enormous amount of waste generated by activities like industrial scale fishing, or the waste that flows into our rivers from factory farms.\n \n* Demonize animal rights activists for being too sentimental and emotional, then fall back on arguments about tradition to justify things like clubbing seals or eating foie gras. \n \n* Condemn those who raise cats and dogs for food in other countries while having no problem with the farming of cows and chickens in America. (I imagine Scully gets a kick out of what the folks at [Elwood Organic Dog Meat](https://www.elwooddogmeat.com/) are doing.)\n \n* Call people who want to ban fur coats fascists.\n \n\nAbove all else, his biggest critique of the early 2000’s American conservatives is that they have let capitalism run amok. When he looks at how we are commodifying living, feeling creatures, it sickens him. When he sees how sentient beings are bought, sold, stuffed, trapped, shot, and persecuted, with very limited checks on what even the most barbaric human can do to the most majestic, he recoils. \n\nTo Scully, being a conservative means more than just being a free market absolutist, it means being a “fundamentally moral and not just economic actor, a creature accountable to reason and conscience and not driven by whim or appetite.” Laissez faire policies can be great, but they can lead to some dark places when applied to animal well-being and left unchecked. The Safari Club, an influential organization of wealthy, mostly conservative hunters, is exhibit A. \n\nScully spends 40+ pages decrying the excesses and absurdities he sees while attending the annual Safari Club convention in Reno, Nevada. He leaves wondering “if there is a wild creature left on the good earth that is not for sale in someone’s brochure, a single plain or forest or depth of sea that is not today being turned to profit.” It’s the type of place where visitors are encouraged to spend $35,000 on a White Rhino hunt before they get put on an endangered species list. Where proprietors can offer packages that guarantee a lion “trophy” because the animals are fenced in and, if needed, drugged. Where a popular DVD for sale is called _With Deadly Intent_. The climax of that film features hunters unloading their military grade rifles on an Elephant who is trying to protect its babies, felling it with “four dramatic brain shots.”\n\nIn March of 2023, the Humane Society released [a scathing undercover report](https://www.humanesociety.org/news/undercover-investigation-safari-club-international-convention-exposes-hypocrisy-used-promote) after attending a Safari Club convention. It documented potential violations of state law as well as numerous heinous acts that violate both common decency and, apparently, hunting ethics. All I could think when I saw it was how impressive it was that Scully beat them to this scoop by almost a quarter century, and how sad it was that nothing has changed. \n\nFar worse than hunting in terms of scale and cultural penetration is what is happening on our large factory farms. Only a small minority of people hunt for sport, but most people eat meat. And the vast majority of that meat comes from animals raised in abhorrent conditions so as to keep costs as low as possible. \n\nScully goes to a hog farm in North Carolina owned by one of the world’s largest pork producers, Smithfield Foods, to see for himself what we lose when we treat animals like literal production machines. He uses his conservative credentials to slide under their radar. He’s given a full tour of the farm, access that other animal activists can only achieve by breaking in under cover of night.\n\nWhat follows is the best and most haunting account I’ve read of what life is like for a factory farmed pig. The whole book is worth getting just to read this chapter about farming if, like me, you have some sort of compulsion to fully immerse yourself in the grisly, horrible nature of it all. Just a brief glimpse of what life is is enough to get the picture. \n\nIn the farrowing barn for pregnant sows, we find 500 pound pregnant pigs stuffed into crates that are seven feet long and about 22 inches wide. They can barely lie down, and they can’t turn around. They are covered in sores and tumors, and many have broken legs. One pig “is lying there covered in feces and dried blood, yanking maniacally on chains that have torn her mouth raw, as foraging animals will do when caged and denied straw or other roughage to chew.” When Scully remarks that the pig is hurting herself, his tour guide gives a nonplussed, “Oh, that’s normal.” Vets come by only to keep the sows just barely alive. Vet care is expensive, and these pigs are destined to die soon anyway. \n\nAfter his visit, Scully sits down for an interview with a corporate executive from Smithfield and self-described conservative, Jerry Godwin. The reader is left to wonder whether Scully finds it amusing that this ultimate bad guy boss, this affront to all he holds dear, has the last name “God win.” \n\nScully asks him to comment on the frankly disturbing living conditions, only to have Godwin reject the premise. He thinks that the pigs like where they live. He says it’s good for them. They eat all they want, there are no predators, it’s warm, it’s monitored by PhD’s, and there’s nothing he would do differently. He also gives a curious concession to the fact that the pigs are not actually unfeeling robots: \n\n> _“Pigs get bored...you need to give them something to play with. So what do you do? You take a piece of chain, and you put it in front of ‘em so they can reach up, play with it, and that’s about the extent of occupying their time. I mean, it sounds crude to you and me, but I think the people that seem to know more about it, and have studied the issue, say that is a proper way of getting rid of the boredom and keeping them busy.”_\n\nHow thoughtful. Scully’s line of questioning finally raises suspicion, and it dawns on Godwin that this is not a friendly interview with a conservative chum after all. Scully is denied the final phase of his tour, which was supposed to be a slaughter facility. He’s able to get one last jab in, telling Godwin, “If I ran a place like that, I wouldn’t let people in either.” \n\nWhen Scully reflects on all that he’s witnessed, he is dismayed at the bastardization of conservatism that can justify what he saw at the Safari Club convention and on the Smithfield pork farm:\n\n> _“I find nothing in the conservative moral tradition remotely resembling this sacrifice of every creature in sight before the almighty dollar. It is a different spirit entirely. It isn’t rooted in conservatism, or Christianity, or Judaism, or classic capitalism, or any other tradition with honorable origin. It is much closer to what, in conservative big-think circles, they call ‘the modern spirit.’ Friedrich Nietzsche, despite a personal abhorrence to animal cruelty, would today fit right in at one of our libertarian think tanks with his notions of human morality: ‘Life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms...exploitation.’”_\n\nIt’s all enough to get him to reject the ‘logic of the larder’ arguments in favor of keeping the farming system as it is. That line of thinking says that it’s better these creatures get to live at all, rather than having never been born. Wouldn’t you prefer at least a little bit of life, however brief? No, says Scully. Absolutely not. He has seen a version of the repugnant conclusion as applied to pigs, and it’s a lot worse than muzak and potatoes. \n\nMay all beings one day receive puppy love \n\n\n--------------------------------------------\n\nDespite what is implied by the preponderance of vegan restaurants in my mid-sized midwestern city, animals on the whole are doing just as bad in 2024 as they were in 2002, when _Dominion_ was published. By the numbers, [more animals are suffering under factory farming conditions](https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-are-factory-farmed#:~:text=It's%20estimated%20that%20three%2Dquarters,chickens%20are%20slaughtered%20each%20year.) than at any point in human history. We’re even [starting to farm the intelligent and sensitive Octopus](https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-12-20/is-farm-breeding-octopus-an-act-of-cruelty), a depressing notion if there ever was one. As of this writing, [an avian flu epidemic](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-bird-flu-outbreak-spreads-chickens-cattle-raises-concerns-over-human-2024-05-01/) is decimating farmed chicken populations and has even spread to cows. \n\nThat said, there are flowers of hope that spring through the cracks. There was the [passage of Prop 12 in California](https://farmanimalwelfare.substack.com/p/a-year-of-wins-for-farmed-animals), where voters opted to give more space to farmed animals. The appeals went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the law was upheld. Scully spends the last part of the book imploring us to change the laws so that more animals are protected, so I’m sure he smiled at that one. \n\nThere have also been great strides made in corporate campaigns to get companies to move to cage free eggs. And a group of activists broke into a Smithfield pork farm, rescued sick piglets, and [got acquitted on all burglary and theft charges](https://theintercept.com/2022/10/08/smithfield-animal-rights-piglets-trial/). That happened in a red county in Utah, of all places. \n\nBut there’s one particular story from 2024 that shows how, despite those wins, not much has truly changed in our attitude towards animals. It has to do with the evangelical governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem. \n\nIn a recently released autobiography, Noem proudly admits to killing her 14 month old puppy. She said that the dog wasn’t a good hunter, wasn’t a good listener, and that it attacked some of her neighbor’s chickens. So, naturally, she took it out back and shot it in the head. Isn’t that the tough love this country needs? Doesn't that show good leadership instincts and an ability to make hard choices?\n\nThe public did not think so. When the story made the news, there was [considerable outrage from the right and left alike](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/01/opinion/kristi-noem-killing-puppy-trump/). Rarely does a story so cleanly unite people on both sides of the political aisle. Once a longshot GOP vice presidential candidate, Noem’s political star has dimmed. Bragging about carrying out a mafia-style killing of your own puppy will have that effect. \n\nThe average person viewed the act as one of those unequivocal evils that Scully talks about, a moment “when you do not need doctrines, when even rights become irrelevant, when life demands some basic response of fellow-feeling and mercy and love.” What a fine kumbaya moment for humanity. Look at us all, recognizing that it’s just not right to treat our fellow creatures with such disdain. \n\nExcept if you read beyond the headlines, you find out that she decided to kill one of her goats right after the dog. And it was the goat who didn’t die with one shot. He had to lay on the ground in agony while Noem went back to her car to get another bullet. \n\nThe dog was named Cricket. The goat had no name. It was just another machine on the farm."} | |
| {"text":"# Subscriber Bonus Debate Questions\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# My 2024 Presidential Debate\n\n**Alexander:** Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated ([2016](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/16/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate/), [2020](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/05/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate-2020/), [2023](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate)), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I’ll also post a transcript on my blog.\n\nLet’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was _Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health,_ which overturned _Roe_ _v. Wade_ and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion?\n\n**Biden:** I’m not even sure states exist.\n\n**Alexander:** You’re . . . not sure states exist?\n\n**Biden:** The Pledge of Allegiance says that America is “one nation, indivisible.” Taken seriously, we have pledged to regard America as not being composed of parts. It is, like God, a perfectly simple entity, not requiring further explanation. How, then, could it have states? I realize this position may seem strange. But I pledged to believe it, and I am a man of my word[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate#footnote-1-142237570).\n\n**Alexander:** I see. Mr. Trump, your response?\n\n**Trump:** I think you can rescue the idea of states, if you think of them not as real in themselves, but as different aspects of the American atom. When we consider America in the context of its vastness and its freedom, we call it \"Texas\". When we consider America in the context of its innovation and cultural influence, we call it \"California\". When we consider America in the context of its barrenness and oil-producing-capacity, we call it \"North Dakota\". And so on. America does not have states in the sense that Queensland is a state of Australia, it has states in the sense that ice or steam is a state of water. This isn’t to say that America ever changes between these states, because change is a property of compound entities. But it may appear to outside observers in one or another of these ways at different times.\n\n**Alexander:** President Biden, your position?\n\n**Biden:** Yes, I think it is permissible to believe in states in the way that Mr. Trump thinks of them. There’s no difference between us on this issue.\n\n**Alexander:** All right, thank you. I wasn’t really intending to get sidetracked by this. I mostly wanted to know your policy on abortion.\n\n**Biden:** I’m pro-choice. That’s all there is to it. I think women have a fundamental right to decide what happens to their own body, and I think life begins at birth. And not one of these hokey Caesarian “births” either - a normal, natural childbirth.\n\n**Alexander:** Can you clarify that last part?\n\n**Biden:** Have you read Shakespeare? Being “from your mother’s womb untimely ripp’d” doesn’t count as being born. I think the anti-choice side is covertly trying to restrict abortion rights by expanding the definition of “born” until basically any method of separating a fetus from its mother would count.\n\n**Alexander:** So if someone does get delivered by Caesarian section, what happens?\n\n**Biden:** Legally they’re still part of their mother.\n\n**Alexander:** And the mother can terminate them at any time?\n\n**Biden:** Uh-huh.\n\n**Trump:** Wait, what if they’re an evangelical Christian who’s born again?\n\n**Biden:** Well, they can’t be born again. That would be their first birth.\n\n**Trump:** But if they had that experience - if the Spirit came down and gave them the baptism of fire - would that count as a birth, end their status as a fetus, and prevent their mother from terminating them?\n\n**Biden:** I suppose it would.\n\n**Trump:** Great. Then there’s no difference between me and the President on this matter. Let’s keep going.\n\n**Alexander:** Wow, I’m having a hard time finding any real points of disagreement tonight. Let’s stay on cultural issues, where I know the two of you have clashed before. President Biden, a lot of conservatives are worried that your administration promotes “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. What do you have to say to them?\n\n**Biden:** Scott, I think about these things through the lens of Sir James Frazier’s seminal work on anthropology, _The Golden Bough_. Frazier writes that all rituals descend from the same ur-ritual: sacrificing the king to restore the fertility of the soil. As time went on, instead of sacrificing the literal king, societies changed this ritual into more and more figurative forms. In one common instantiation, typified by the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a commoner was chosen as the “mock king” or “king of fools”. He would be feted for a time, given the finest goods and the most delicate foods, and then sacrificed to the gods in place of the true king. I think of cancel culture as an outgrowth of this phenomenon. We take undeserving commoners and promote them to celebrities. For a time they bask in limitless wealth and the adoration of all. Then we destroy them. This may seem harsh to the uninitiated. But without it, the corn would fail in Iowa, the grapes would wilt on the vine in California, and the apple trees of New England would wither and die. Our celebrities know by what bargain they have gained their ephemeral reign. Let none mourn the inevitable consequences.\n\n**Alexander:** Mr. Trump, your response? What’s your position on wokeness and cancel culture?\n\n**Trump:** I’m against wokeness. I believe in Western values. I believe in the heritage of Greece and Rome - but Rome more than Greece, because it was further west. But most of all, I believe in the values of the Aztecs, because they were most western of all. I believe that in 959 AD Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, insulted Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, who cried blood for the next fifty-two years. Her tears extinguished the sun and killed everyone on Earth. In his mercy, Quetzalcoatl the Winged Serpent descended to the Underworld, where he stole the bones of the last men, and dipped them in his blood to create a new human race, and Huitzilopochtli, the Left-Handed Hummingbird, ascended into heaven to became the new sun. But his sisters the moon and stars grew jealous of his light, and they launched attacks upon him nightly. Only the nourishing blood of men gives Huitzilopochtli the strength to resist their assaults and shine anew each morn. Should the fountain of sacrifice ever go dry, the sun will go black, and the stars will fall upon the world and consume it. Callouts on social media are a form of flower war, and its losers are therefore set aside for sacrifice. In this, I agree with Joe Biden. But we cannot merely consign fallen celebrities to shame and penury. We must give them to the Sun. We must place them atop the mounds of Cahokia, atop the Luxor in Las Vegas, yea, even atop the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, and plunge obsidian daggers into their still-beating hearts, that the dawn may come anew.\n\n**Biden:** I agree that sacrificing celebrities to the Sun God is a reasonable fertility ritual. I don’t think my administration would do anything differently from Donald’s here either.\n\n**Alexander:** Hmmm, this is tough. Let’s keep going on the cultural topics. Mr. Biden, some people say our country is overrun with misinformation and conspiracy theories. Do you think these are dangerous, and what do you plan to do about them?\n\n**Biden:** Yes, I find conspiracy theories noxious. Every time I mention I’m from Delaware, people give me the side-eye. They say awful things like “Isn’t it weird that every major corporation is based in the same state? Isn’t it weird that the President also comes from this state? Isn’t it weird that it was supposedly the first state in the union, the nucleus around which all the rest of America coalesced? Isn’t it weird that it has all these firsts and mosts and bests, but nobody knows anyone who lives there? Isn’t it weird that nobody’s ever _been_ there, even though it’s supposed to be right smack between NYC and DC?” I think questions like these should be banned. I think the people who ask them should be put in jail.\n\n**Alexander:** Thank you President Biden, that’s consistent with the strong stance against misinformation that you’ve taken in the past. But Mr. Trump, you’ve been accused of being one of the chief spreaders of misinformation, both personally and through your website Truth Social. What do you have to say for yourself?\n\n**Trump:** GK Chesterton said that fairy tales were more than true, not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. In the same way, I think misinformation is more than true - not because it tells us there are pedophiles in pizza parlors, but because it tells us that pizza parlor pedophiles can be discovered and dragged into the light.\n\nThe COVID vaccine might not literally contain a microchip that lets Bill Gates control your mind. But we really do grant unaccountable tech billionaires root access to our culture - and seemingly pro-social requests really can be a vector for establishing control. I, Donald Trump, might not literally lead a euconspiracy of patriotic Americans who are about to blow the lid off the corrupt Biden administration and liberal establishment. But it really is true that even in the darkest night, when all seems lost, there are seeds of hope visible to those who search for them, and that even the most invincible-seeming tyranny can fall in an instant if enough people push at it.\n\nSo who cares about the literal truths? The average American lives in a dull apartment building in a decaying city, his subsistence dependent on the whims of macroeconomic forces he cannot comprehend, let alone control. You want to tell him to spend his tiny sliver of time on Earth thinking about interest rates and carbon credits? We need to re-mythologize the world! We need to re-weave the rainbow, re-haunt the air, re-gnome the mine! If the scientists have robbed us of trolls under bridges, we will replace them with Satanic cults in state capitols. If they take our _soma,_ we will invent adrenochrome.\n\nIf I’m elected president, I plan to double down on this. I will spread rumors of griffons in the Rocky Mountains, allude to unspeakable things beneath the deserts of Nevada, and question whether the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a mystical portal to dream-realms beyond the setting sun. Not because any of these things are true. But because they are more than true. They’re what makes this country great.\n\n**Alexander:** Griffons seem innocuous enough, but what about misinformation that’s dangerous to our democracy? Like, some people call you an election denier —\n\n**Trump:** — oh, that’s absolutely true. You can read my social media posts for the full story, but I think there are just too many loose ends. Like, 2020 was the year we were all under COVID lockdown. How could we have had an election? People would have had to go out to caucuses, to polling places. It just doesn’t make sense.\n\nPeople say “But Donald, I remember voting for you!” Yeah, you voted for me in 2016. Or “No, I remember voting for Joe Biden”. But Joe was on the ballot as Barack Obama’s vice-president in 2012. Or “I remember voting for Bernie Sanders in the primary, I was devastated when he lost.” That was 2016 too! If there was really an election in 2020, why can’t people remember anything about it that isn’t just a rehash of a previous election cycle?\n\n**Biden:** Isn’t there an election every four years? There was one in 2016. There’s one now. Why wouldn’t there have been one in 2020?\n\n**Trump:** The Gregorian year of 365 days doesn’t exactly match the Earth’s orbit around the sun. To keep the electoral calendar synced with the astronomical calendar, the rule goes that there’s an election once every four years, _except_ once every one hundred years when there isn’t, _except_ once every four hundred years when there is. The last year with no election was 1820[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate#footnote-2-142237570), we held one 1920 because of the four hundred year cycle, and then 2020 was another no-election year.\n\n**Alexander:** If there wasn’t an election, how is Joe Biden president now?\n\n**Trump:** That’s the conspiracy. He said there was an election and that he won, and the media went along with it. People had vague memories of voting in past elections, so they confabulated a memory of a 2020 election that never happened.\n\n**Alexander:** President Biden, what do you have to say to the idea that your memories of the 2020 election are confabulated?\n\n**Biden:** I guess I wouldn’t have any way of knowing if that was true or not.\n\n**Alexander:** Then I guess this is another unproductive line of conversation. We’ll have to keep looking for some other cultural topic where the two of you disagree. How about this - Mr. Trump, you’ve given some conflicting messages on LGBT+ rights. Will you promise to support _Obergefell v. Hodges_, which enshrines a constitutional right to same-sex marriage?\n\n**Trump:** Sorry, I can’t support it. I believe all men are brothers. But that means all gay sex is incest. And incest is wrong.\n\n**Alexander:** What about lesbians?\n\n**Trump:** Same as straight women. They can only marry if they have no brothers. If they do have brothers, then the two lesbians’ brothers are themselves brothers. And the sister of your brother’s brother is your sister. So that would make the two lesbians sisters.\n\n**Biden:** But even if they didn’t have brothers, wouldn’t they still have fathers? And then the fathers would be brothers, which would make the two lesbians cousins, right? Isn’t that still incest?\n\n**Trump:** I believe there are no fathers in America.\n\n**Biden:** No fathers?\n\n**Trump:** The Constitution bans any American from holding a noble title. And what title could be nobler than that of “father”?\n\n**Biden:** Then who contributes the Y-chromosomes to male children?\n\n**Trump:** Don’t get me wrong, I agree that men contribute half of the genetic material to an embryo. I just don’t think they should be considered a formal relative of the child. That’s why abortion is a woman’s choice. Because the man doesn’t count as a legal relative.\n\n**Alexander:** Mr. Trump, I guess I’m getting increasingly confused about your position on abortion. Are you saying that fathers shouldn’t have any rights in abortion decisions?\n\n**Trump:** I think that, insofar as fathers exist, their rights in abortion decisions should be left up to the states, insofar as states exist.\n\n**Biden:** That seems suitably cautious. I agree with Mr. Trump.\n\n**Alexander:** Aaargh, fine. Let’s get something really controversial. The two of you have consistently been at odds on immigration. President Biden, Mr. Trump accuses you of presiding over a “border crisis”, where hundreds of thousand of foreigners have entered the country illegally. Is he right or wrong?\n\n**Biden:** “Foreigner” is the wrong word to use here. I believe that during the theophany at Philadelphia, the souls of all future Americans were present, and agreed to the Constitution along with the delegates. But some of these souls were erroneously born into foreign bodies, and as part of the Messianic process we must gather them back into America.\n\n**Trump:** But how would you separate these souls from purely economic migrants?\n\n**Biden:** I believe that only those with a spark of American-ness in their soul will survive the journey. I believe the Rio Grande is a spiritual as well as a physical river, like the Jordan or the Rubicon. I believe that if one sets out to swim across the Rio Grande, truly accepting death in one’s heart as a potential outcome, then when one reaches the northern shore one is cleansed of all one’s foreignness, an American by baptism.\n\n**Trump:** I don’t buy it. I still think the only solution to immigration is a big, beautiful wall.\n\n**Alexander:** Yes, tell us about your wall plans.\n\n**Trump:** It will be one hundred forty-four cubits high, made of jasper, with fifty gates, and names written thereon which are the names of the fifty states. And the wall will have thirteen foundations, and on them the names of the thirteen colonies The foundations of the wall will be garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation will be jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst; the thirteenth, an adamant. And the fifty gates will be fifty pearls; each of the gates shall be of one pearl.\n\n**Biden:** Hmmmm - my biggest concern about this is - with a wall that big, I’m not even sure that you, or I, or other American citizens could get over it. And that’s unfair. If we’re going to do this, we need to start from square one. Everyone starts outside the wall. Then the people who manage to make it past get to repopulate the country. That’s the fair way to do things.\n\n**Trump:** Yes, that’s already what I meant. There’s no difference between us on this issue.\n\n**Alexander:** Mmmhhhm. Well, we’re almost out of time and I still haven’t been able to find any substantial disagreement. Let’s just wrap this up early. President Biden, you get the first closing statement.\n\n**Biden:** My fellow Americans, I am humbled to standing here before you today as your President. No, more than humbled. Flabbergasted. Do you realize how bizarre it is, that, out of eight billion humans, I’m the leader of the most powerful country in the world? It doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to you, because someone has to be President. But it doesn’t make sense to me, because the sheer coincidence that the person I happen to be is also the person who is President - that has one in eight billion odds. I don’t know exactly what’s going on here. Sometimes I think it’s some sort of weird dream I’m having, and I’ll wake up and be a sanitation engineer in Pittsburgh or something. But this seems more vivid and more continuous than a dream. I think the more likely explanation is that some future posthuman is running a historical simulation of the 2024 US election, and that only I and maybe my opponent are fully-conscious humans with real internal experiences. For years I’ve tried to escape this conclusion, but it looms before me, as compelling as it’s ever been.\n\nIf, sitting at home in this moment, you are fully conscious, then you know a true fact that you can never communicate to me. No matter how loudly you insist on your own interiority, I would just hear it as an NPC programmed to say those words. But imagine if you could convince me! Imagine how wonderful it would be! This great country - all entirely real! The redwoods of California - real! The mighty Mississippi - real! The skyscrapers of Manhattan - real! All you three hundred million Americans, in your countless races and religions and separate lives - real, every one of you! I think my heart would break with joy.\n\nIf this is true, I will never know. But I would like to think I don’t have to. If our country is a phantasm, I love it still. Once I dreamt about a woman as beautiful as the sun, and when I woke, I found I loved her still. Even to this day I pine for her. Can I not love America too, even if it is also a dream? If you are all cogs in the historical simulation of some posthuman artillect, can I not love the America that must once have been, even as our hearts stir still when we remember Greece or Rome?\n\nSo this is my campaign promise: I will fight for every one of you just as hard as if you were actual people. And when the final votes come in this November, as the world disintegrates all around us - like stagehands, dragging the scenery away at the end of a Broadway pageant, the last letters to escape my lips before I dissolve into code and air will be “U-S-A! U-S-A!”\n\n**Alexander:** Donald Trump, your closing?\n\n**Trump:** Well, it looks like we finally found a real disagreement. Joe Biden doesn’t believe in this country. He doesn’t believe it exists. Well, I think he’s wrong on anthropics, and wrong for America.\n\nIf you accept the self-indication assumption, ie that you’re more likely to exist in worlds that have more people, then that exactly counterbalances his concern. Consider two worlds, one of which contains a billion people and one of which contains only Biden. It’s true that Biden is approximately a billion times more likely to be President in the second world. But he’s a billion times more likely to exist at all in the first world. The two billion-to-one odds ratios cancel out, leaving each world equally likely. Therefore, Biden should be agnostic over various different sizes of America.\n\nBut I’m not currently President, and neither is the average American. We don’t have to explain away our presidency. That means that, conditional on us observing that we’re American, worlds with more Americans are more likely. The world with three hundred million Americans isn’t just equally likely, but far more likely than the solipsistic world where we exist alone[3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate#footnote-3-142237570).\n\nBut this same line of argument suggests that Americas even bigger than ours are more likely still. Under some assumptions, they are so extraordinarily likely that they overwhelm the evidence we have for a three-hundred-million person America, forcing us to posit some conspiracy to conceal the true size of our country, or some sort of topological twist in the North American continent hiding its true extent.\n\nMy fellow Americans, I believe in America. I believe in it so hard that I think there must be more to America than the fifty states we see. I think the argument I just laid out suggests there may be hundreds, maybe even thousands of states. And that’s why I’m running for President here tonight.\n\nI want to fight for all Americans. Not just rich people, or white people, or people who are causally connected to the visible universe. I will be the president of all the trillions of pan-dimensional hyper-Americans who anthropic arguments assure us must exist. I will work to find them, bring them back into the fold, and make our country greater and freer than it has ever been before.\n\nSo let freedom ring from the marble pillars of New Cornwall to the baobabs of Van Buren!\n\nLet freedom ring from the vortices of Magec to the shores of Lake Doremos[4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate#footnote-4-142237570)!\n\nLet freedom ring from the fungus-forests of Elevennessee to the minarets of Washington DCXVII!\n\nAnd when all of these places have been restored to the same 4-manifold, and the United States has achieved its manifest destiny of stretching from Nonbeing even unto Eternity, then, and only then, will we be able to say we have Made America Great Again. Thank you, God bless, and good night.\n\n[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate#footnote-anchor-1-142237570)\n\nThis is self-plagiarism; I originally published a version of this argument on my Tumblr.\n\n[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate#footnote-anchor-2-142237570)\n\nLook it up!\n\n[3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate#footnote-anchor-3-142237570)\n\nSee further discussion [here](https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-argument-for-god/comment/59798871).\n\n[4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate#footnote-anchor-4-142237570)\n\nCf. https://backstates.fandom.com/wiki/Backstates\\_Wiki"} | |
| {"text":"# Hidden Open Thread 335.5\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# Clarification On \"Fake Tradition Is Traditional\"\n\nI think I got [the original post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional) slightly off.\n\nI was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past.\n\nThe counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not “just do stuff” and have a secular weekly meeting?\n\nMost of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence [but doesn’t seem too successful](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/secular-churches-rethink-their-sales-pitch/594109/). People with ancient traditions 1, people who just do stuff 0.\n\nBut after thinking about it more, maybe this isn’t what Sam means. Arches and columns are iconic architectural features. But they were originally invented by people just trying to figure out how to efficiently support buildings (columns might have started as tree trunks, and only later been translated into stone). Likewise, gargoyles are whimsical and exciting, but they started life as utilitarian rainspouts that gradually became more ornamented and fanciful.\n\nMoving from objects to observances - Jews break a glass at weddings because some ancient rabbi broke a glass at a wedding to get people’s attention and tell them to stop being so loud and rowdy. Even very weird supernatural traditions are in some sense “utilitarian” - some theories trace Halloween costumes back to people who genuinely believed vengeful ghosts might be out for revenge that night, and very practically disguised themselves from potential unfriendly spirits.\n\nSo instead of the original post’s two opposed things, it might make more sense to think of three things:\n\n1. Doing something for completely practical reasons, without intending for it to form an aesthetic/ritual/community.\n \n2. Doing something for aesthetic/ritual/community-building reasons, with no reference to sacredness or tradition.\n \n3. Doing something for aesthetic/ritual/community-building reasons, with a story of how it relates to sacredness and tradition.\n \n\nMy claim is that both (1) and (3) work well and can potentially be the origin of valuable aesthetics/rituals/communities, but (2) works less well.\n\nBut if you need an aesthetic/ritual/community in a hurry, you can’t just do random utilitarian things that make sense for your practical problems and expect them to turn into beloved traditions in a reasonable amount of time - the whole point of the utilitarian route is that you’re _not_ thinking about aesthetic/ritual/community while you do it. At that point, (3) is your best bet."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 335\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** GiveWell is looking for a Head of Operations, probably someone with many years of leadership experience. Compensation $250K - 300K, remote work acceptable. [See here for more details](https://boards.greenhouse.io/givewell/jobs/4048923008?gh_src=173bb58b8us).\n\n**2:** New subscriber only post, [The Mistakes Are All Waiting To Be Made](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mistakes-are-all-waiting-to-be), on my very early experience as a parent. Current plan is to make most parenting posts subscriber-only to prevent too much information about my kids from getting all over the Internet, sorry.\n\n**3:** I may have to remove one of the book review finalists, _Sixth Day And Other Tales_, for voting irregularities. If you wrote the review, please get in touch with me (scott@slatestarcodex.com) so we can try to figure out what happened."} | |
| {"text":"# Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa\n\n\\[_This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked_\\]\n\nI had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one. \n\nBut it was the lofty gaze of the man on the ¥10,000 note that really caught my attention. I find that always having a spare ¥10,000 note is something of a necessity in Japan. You never know when you might stumble upon a pop-up artisanal sake kiosk beside a metro station staircase that only accepts cash and only opens one day a year. So over the course of my time in Japan I had come to know the face of the man on that bill rather well. \n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8bdc935d-d26b-43e4-a0f9-38266184554c_571x323.png)\n\nEditor’s note: I have added this picture for context.\n\nIn his portrait, gracefully curled back hair and expressive eyebrows sit above two wide eyes that communicate a kind of amused resignation. It is the face of someone watching from afar as a trivial misunderstanding blossoms into a full-fledged argument. \n\nHis name, I learned, was Yukichi Fukuzawa. And an English translation of his autobiography happened to be available in main stacks of the University of Tokyo library. \n\nFukuzawa was born into a low-ranking samurai family in Osaka in 1835. He is often described as a Japanese Benjamin Franklin. But with his knack for popping up at moments of great historical importance he also slightly resembles a Japanese Forrest Gump. When Japan opens its ports to American and European ships, he’s there. When Japan makes its first diplomatic missions abroad, he’s there. And when you dive into the history of Japan’s modern institutions—the police force, the universities, the banking system, the press—Fuzukawa is there as well. \n\nHe is most famous for translating, distilling, and disseminating Western knowledge in multiple fields through books such as _An Encouragement of Learning_ and _An Outline of a Theory of Civilization_. But it is his autobiography, published just two years before his death in 1901, that offers the most comprehensive record of his life and thought. \n\nWe are lucky to have the book at all. As one of Fukuzawa’s students says in the preface, for years he rebuffed requests to set down his life story in writing. But when a visiting foreign dignitary began asking him some questions about his early childhood and education, Fukuzawa summoned a stenographer to record his answers. The book we have is an edited transcript of that impromptu oral history. And—as I found to my great surprise—it’s absolutely hilarious. \n\nAbominable Numbers\n\n\n--------------------\n\nFukuzawa’s father is a frustrated scholar who wants nothing more than to study his Chinese classics in peace. However, due to his position as treasurer for the lord of Nankatsu, he must spend his days negotiating loans on his superior’s behalf. \n\nHoping to give his children a proper Confucian education, he sends Fukuzawa’s older siblings to calligraphy classes, only to be shocked to discover that they are also being taught math: “It is abominable,” he recalls his father saying, “that innocent children should be taught to use numbers—the instrument of merchants. There is no telling what the teacher may do next.”\n\nWhen his father dies, the family moves to the small village of Nankatsu, where Fukuzawa proceeds to spend his childhood… not doing much of anything. He says he didn’t go to school because “there was nobody to force me to do so.” So instead he spends his time learning how to mend sandals and engaging in casual acts of blasphemy. \n\nOne day he inadvertently steps on a paper charm. After being upbraided by his brother for this breach of propriety, he decides to test the powers of these sacred charms by stealing one and deliberately trampling on it. When “heavenly vengeance” fails to manifest, he decides to up his impiety game by dropping the same charm in the stinky outhouse. When nothing happens again, he concludes that all religion is superstitious nonsense. He proceeds to replace the sacred stones in the local shrines with stones that he picks up along the side of the road. A little later, watching his neighbors make rice wine offerings to the shrines during a holy festival, he scoffs to himself: “There they are—worshipping my stones, the fools!”\n\nFrom an early age he bristles at the hierarchical structure of Edo-period Japan. One objection is that feudalism forces people like his father into roles they have no interest in or aptitude for. But he also rails against the innumerable regulations, which make people behave in ridiculous ways. For example, there is a law banning samurai from attending theatrical performances (it was considered vulgar entertainment). To circumvent this ban, he says, “\\[m\\]any of the less scrupulous samurai would go to the plays with their faces wrapped in towels.” But these incognito samurai were not about to pay for their tickets like commoners, so instead they would break through the bamboo fence surrounding the theater. If the management of the establishment objected, the offending samurai would simply “utter a menacing roar and go striding on to take the best seats.” \n\nMostly, Fukuzawa resented the deferential attitude he had to adopt when interacting with higher-ranking samurai, especially if they were stupid. To be fair, he also expresses disdain for the sycophantic tones that peasants, artisans, and merchants were trained to assume when addressing samurai like him. \n\nHe decides to leave Nankatsu as soon as he can, in the hopes that the social atmosphere elsewhere might prove less stifling. But first he must finally attend to his education.\n\nBy the age of “fourteen or fifteen,” he says, “many of the boys of my age were studying… and I became ashamed of myself.” He finally begins going to school, which, in his case, involves reading aloud passages from Confucius and other Chinese sages in the morning and then debating the meaning of those same passages in the afternoons. Despite his late start, he learns Chinese, and proves himself a quick study. After a few years he graduates to the position of “_zenza_, or sub-master, in Chinese classics.”\n\nClimbing by One’s Brush\n\n\n-------------------------\n\nWhen Fukuzawa was born, Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate—a hereditary military dictatorship founded in 1603. Under the rule of the shoguns, Japan enjoyed a remarkable two and a half centuries of peace. This was accomplished through a combination of techniques, including a policy of isolationism, the codification of a social hierarchy that granted privileges to the samurai warrior class (particularly those samurai whose ancestors had been allies of the first Tokugawa shogun), and the embrace of a Confucian ideology of duty and subservience. \n\nFukuzawa says that the arrival of Commodore Perry’s ships in 1853 and 1854 “made its impression on every remote town in Japan.” The resulting treaty, the Convention of Kanagawa, opened select Japanese ports to American ships. Harmless as such a treaty may sound, the Japanese had just watched Britain attack the Qing dynasty over domestic trade policy. Japan seemed destined to endure a similar loss of sovereignty now that the Americans had gotten a foot in the door.\n\nAlso worth remembering is the fact that the shogun’s formal title was _sei’i-tai shogun_, roughly “the general in charge of defeating the barbarians.” Given this was precisely what the shogun had failed to do in this instance, dissent was bound to grow. \n\nIndeed, the failure of the shogun to expel the barbarians cast suspicion on every pillar of the Tokugawa regime. Far from protecting Japan, many perceived Japan’s isolationism as contributing to its technological stagnation. Moreover, the contradictions between Confucian teachings, which advocated meritocracy, and the reality of Tokugawa society, in which rank was determined by birth, threatened the intellectual rationale underpinning feudal society. This was particularly true among the samurai, whose relative status was largely determined by the side for which their distant ancestors had fought at the Battle of Sekigahara over 250 years earlier. \n\nFinally, those who were dissatisfied with the status quo were quick to point out that the shogun nominally ruled at the pleasure of the emperor (who lived a cloistered life in Kyoto under the shogunate’s watchful eye). This imperial imprimatur had previously cemented the shogun’s legitimacy. But it suddenly seemed like a massive vulnerability. If the emperor had authorized the shogunate, the thinking went, he could also dissolve it. \n\nThese political matters seem to have hardly entered into the consciousness of the young Fukuzawa except for the fact that the intensified interest in Western learning represented a ticket out of Nankatsu. \n\nFor over two centuries, the sole point of contact between Japan and Europe had been an artificial island in Nagasaki called Dejima. The Dutch had occupied the island since 1641, exercising a carefully monitored monopoly in trade. As a result, the few Western books that entered Japan were generally written in Dutch. Any Japanese person who wanted to learn Western science therefore needed to gain fluency in that language (which, given the limited opportunities for interaction between the two groups, was not so easy). \n\nSoon after Perry’s arrival, Fukuzawa’s older brother tells him that Japan needs more people to study Western science. He asks Fukuzawa: “Are you willing to learn the Dutch language?” \n\nIt is worth noting at this point that not everyone in Japan was thrilled at the prospect of studying Dutch. \n\nSome of these objections were aesthetic in nature. One Japanese scholar [complained](https://www.google.co.jp/books/edition/Civilization_and_Enlightenment/GEyvP_LZARQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=western+dutch+japanese+characters+slavering+cow&pg=PA7&printsec=frontcover) that Dutch letters were simply too ugly to communicate civilized ideas. Whereas Chinese characters were “balanced and well-proportioned” like “beautiful women” and “deftly constructed” like “golden palaces and jade pagodas,” the letters of the Latin alphabet were “confused and irregular,” resembling nothing so much as “dried bones” and the “slime lines left by snails.” \n\nPopular verse conveyed a similar message. “When the samisen string snaps,” one Japanese poet exclaimed, “it looks like a Dutch letter.”\n\nWhether or not the scholars and poets had a point, such sentiments were also indicative of what the kids today would call “massive cope.” After the arrival of Perry’s ships, notions of Japanese supremacy had collided headlong with an unforgiving reality wherein Japan was at the mercy of powerful and predatory Western nations. \n\nOf these consequential political developments, the young Fukuzawa seems to have been mostly unaware. Remembering this time near the end of his life, he says, “I would have been glad to study a foreign language or the military art or anything else if it only gave me the chance to go away.” \n\nUndoubtedly, part of the attraction of such a course of action lay in the fact that the classroom formed a rare place in Japanese society where a parallel hierarchy based on competence could emerge. Despite never evincing a concern with acquiring a better social position, Fukuzawa could not have been totally ignorant of the fact that scholarship represented one of the few opportunities for upward social mobility in the shogunate—a phenomenon captured by the delightful phrase “climbing by one’s brush.” Schoolrooms were a rare place where he could leave his social betters in his dust; and by becoming a noted scholar he could force his superiors to acknowledge his abilities. \n\nA Two-Sworded Man\n\n\n-------------------\n\nAfter setting his mind to learning Dutch, Fukuzawa accompanies his brother on a business trip to Nagasaki. \n\nThings begin smoothly enough. Soon after his arrival, he manages to get a position as an “eating guest” in the house of an expert on Dutch artillery. The son of his lord’s chancellor is also studying Dutch in Nagasaki and helps show him the ropes. But within a few months, Fukuzawa has become an indispensable assistant to his host. He earns his keep making handwritten copies of Dutch books and translating diagrams for operating field cannons. \n\nFukuzawa’s swift progress upsets the chancellor’s son, his social superior. In a fit of jealousy, the chancellor’s son asks his father to order Fukuzawa home. \n\nBecause defying such an order by staying in Nagasaki would be unthinkable, Fukuzawa decides to defy the order by leaving for Osaka instead. He fakes a letter of introduction for himself which earns him a stay in some hotels. By sailboat and by foot he gradually makes his way to his family’s storage office in Osaka where his brother has assumed their father’s role as treasurer. \n\nIn Osaka he resumes his studies of Dutch at a local academy. But before too much time has passed, Fukuzawa’s brother dies. Fukuzawa returns to Nankatsu to observe the mandatory fifty days of mourning. But upon his arrival, he finds that his relatives have decided on his behalf that he will assume his brother’s position—a role filled with obligations and responsibilities that would tie him down for life.\n\nIn order to return to his studies, Fukuzawa must now navigate a minefield of formal and informal rules. On the informal side, he must manage his family, who are all furious that he is even considering abandoning his post. He gets approval from his mother to return to Osaka, which overrides the objections of his other disgruntled relatives. But there is also the matter of attaining official sanction from his lord. Due to his new status as a household head, he must get a permit to travel “abroad” (in this case, to another city). \n\nHe writes a petition asking for permission to go study Dutch. The lord’s secretary reviews the petition and tells Fukuzawa flatly that it “will not be accepted.” The reasoning is simple: “in this clan,” says the secretary, “there has not been any precedent of a samurai leaving his duty for the purpose of studying Dutch culture.” But the solution is simple: Fukuzawa is to lie and say he is going to study artillery instead, because someone else has done that before. When Fukuzawa objects to such underhanded tactics, the secretary responds with a statement that is very culturally revealing: “It does not matter whether your statement is true to fact or not so long as it follows precedent.” \n\nAfter rewriting his petition in the recommended fashion, Fukuzawa gets his permit and sets off again for Osaka. At this point the reader is treated to a detailed description of Japanese student life in the late 1850s. \n\nThere are sophomore hijinks, many of them involving alcohol (_plus ça change_): “I was pretty well behaved in most respects,” he says, “but in drink I was a boy without conscience.” At one point he decides to quit drinking. To ease his cravings, he takes up smoking instead. But after less than a month he relents (“my old love of wine—it would not be forgotten”) and finds himself a “‘two-sworded’ man”: a drinker and a smoker. \n\nIn summer, the students walk around drunk and naked (to the horror of the maids); in winter they leave their undergarments outside in the freezing cold to kill the hordes of lice that infest them. They threaten gatekeepers and rampage through the city’s dark streets and steal cups and trays from their favorite restaurants. \n\nNevertheless, Fukuzawa is keen to impress upon his readers that a lot of studying happened as well. There were sleepless nights spent practicing for the reading competitions that would determine their rank in the academy. As they copied out passages from chemistry textbooks and metallurgical texts they also engaged in haphazard experiments, occasionally producing sickening gases and noxious fumes. At one point, though, Fukuzawa and a group of friends bask in the triumph of having plated iron with tin using zinc chloride—“a feat beyond the practice of any tin craftsman in the land.” \n\nDue to the fortuitous arrival of a new Dutch science book at the school’s library, Fukuzawa and his fellow students also become the country’s leading experts in electricity. Such were the times: because of their uncommon linguistic skills, their knowledge of the world outstripped that of any “prince or nobleman.” He says: “we students were conscious of the fact that we were the sole possessors of the key to knowledge of the great European civilization.”\n\nTo Edo and Beyond\n\n\n-------------------\n\nHaving become one of the best students in Osaka, Fukuzawa is invited by a leading advocate of Dutch culture to open a school in Edo. His timing is very good. Soon after his arrival the Ansei Treaties are signed, which open up more of Japan’s ports to foreign ships. Excited to communicate with real foreigners, he goes to Yokohama and begins speaking to some of the merchants in residence there. Only he is saddened to realize that communication is impossible. Nobody speaks Dutch. \n\nEventually he learns that the Dutch have ceased to be a naval superpower and that their language is not very widely spoken at all. “I had been striving with all my powers for many years to learn the Dutch language,” he says, “\\[a\\]nd now when I had reason to believe myself one of the best interpreters in the country, I found that I could not even read the signs of merchants who had come to trade with us from foreign lands.” \n\nRather than Dutch, he learns that English is now dominant. He realizes “that a man would have to be able to read and converse in English to be recognized as a scholar in foreign subjects.” There’s one big problem with this: nobody in Japan knows English. \n\nHe manages to find a Dutch-English dictionary and begins the difficult business of learning the new words. At first, he is fearful that English will prove to be as different from Dutch as Dutch is from Japanese. Happily, this turns out not to be the case. “In truth,” he says, “Dutch and English were both ‘strange languages written sideways’ of the same origin. Our knowledge of Dutch could be applied directly to English.”\n\nWhile Fukuzawa is in Edo, the shogunate decides to send a diplomatic mission to the United States. It will be the first Japanese ship ever to cross the Pacific Ocean. Fukuzawa desperately wants to go, so he approaches the captain with a letter of introduction (a real one this time) and is accepted to become part of the crew. \n\nWhat follows is an exquisite outsider’s view of nineteenth-century Californian society. Upon their arrival in San Francisco, the Japanese are shocked by the sight of horse-drawn carriages, wall-to-wall carpeting, and ice-filled champagne glasses. Fukuzawa is also amazed by the prices of groceries in California (_plus ça change_) and is even more astounded when a gentleman he meets says he does not know where George Washington’s descendants live (“I could not help feeling that the family of Washington should be regarded as apart from all other families”). \n\nBut Fukuzawa’s greatest joy comes from having his photograph taken. At the studio, he invites the photographer’s daughter to pose next to him, to which she readily agrees. After leaving San Francisco harbor, Fukuzawa shows his prize to his fellow crew members: “You all talk a lot about your affairs,” he jokes, “but how many of you have brought back a picture of yourselves with a young lady as a souvenir of San Francisco?” Fukuzawa basks in the crew’s “extreme envy of \\[his\\] relic.”\n\nAt one point, he reflects on the significance of this voyage, and the reader cannot help but agree with the general sentiment: “It was not until the sixth year of Kaei (1853) that a steamship was seen for the first time; it was only in the second year of Ansei (1855) that we began to study navigation from the Dutch in Nagasaki; by 1860, the science was sufficiently understood to enable us to sail a ship across the Pacific. This means that about seven years after the first sight of a steamship, after only about five years of practice, the Japanese people made a trans-Pacific crossing without help from foreign experts. I think we can without undue pride boast before the world of this courage and skill.”\n\nOnce back in Japan, Fukuzawa publishes his first book: a Japanese-English dictionary. Two years later, he is invited to join Japan’s first embassy to Europe as an interpreter. He purchases stacks of books in London, marvels at the size of the Hotel du Louvre (“the large party of our Japanese envoys was lost in it”), and faints while watching surgery performed in a St. Petersburg hospital. \n\nRace-Fight\n\n\n------------\n\nWhen Fukuzawa began studying Dutch, he says people often thought of it as an eccentric habit. They were more incredulous than anything that someone would choose to spend their time doing such a thing. But upon his return from Europe, he says the mood changed considerably. “All Japan was now hopelessly swept by the anti-Western feeling, and nothing could stop its force from rushing to the ultimate consequence.” \n\nOf course, there had been precedents for such outbreaks of anti-foreign sentiment. In 1839, before Perry’s arrival, a group of scholars founded the “Barbarian Studies Group” to advocate for the study of Western culture. But when they criticized the shogunate’s aggressive attitude towards foreigners, they were charged with “planning to leave Japan”—a crime punishable by death. This event, known as the “Purge of the Barbarian Scholars” resulted in the three men committing suicide.\n\nDuring the subsequent period, in a grim foreshadowing of the twentieth century, many politicians publicly embraced hostile rhetoric (the phrase “expel the barbarians” was popular) while acknowledging privately that such a course was untenable. Various radical groups, lacking the same discernment, embarked on a campaign of assassination against anyone perceived as pro-Western. \n\nFear was palpable. Fukuzawa says that “even some of the merchants engaged in foreign trade suddenly closed up their shops for fear of these lawless warriors.” One of his friends narrowly escapes assassination by jumping into a castle moat. Another manages to escape through the back door of his house when it is broken into. For all this, Fukuzawa says that he “could not think of giving up \\[his\\] major interest nor \\[his\\] chosen studies.” Nevertheless, for a period of about “thirteen or fourteen years,” he does “not once venture out of doors at night.” He becomes, by his own admission, a “recluse.”\n\nAs much as his social life may have suffered as a result of this isolation, he makes great progress on a number of translations. Among them is the first Western economics book translated into Japanese. In the course of this work, he encounters difficulties with the concept of “competition.” He decides to coin a new Japanese word, _kyoso_, derived from the words for “race and fight.” His patron, a Confucian, is unimpressed with this translation. He suggests other renderings. Why not “love of the nation shown in connection with trade”? Or “open generosity from a merchant in times of national stress”? But Fukuzawa insists on _kyoso_, and now the word is the first result on Google Translate. \n\nAgainst this backdrop, the shogunate and supporters of the imperial house begin waging a civil war. Fukuzawa does not take sides. “After all, both parties seemed to be alike in their anti-foreign prejudice.” On the one hand, the end of the feudal society that Fukuzawa disliked so intensely was in sight. On the other hand, the opposing side had a habit of murdering people with his chosen profession. He does his best to stay out of it, and as war comes to the streets of Edo, he begins building a new school just as everyone else evacuates the city. So much the better, he says, for “all the carpenters and masons were delighted to get work then.” The school would form the basis of the institution that would eventually be named Keio University. \n\nHe goes on to found a newspaper and write many more books that are “accepted eagerly by the public.” Most writers of the time, he says, composed works that they hoped would earn them government posts (the nineteenth-century equivalent of publishing for tenure), and as a result, Fukuzawa “seemed to be alone in writing for popular causes.” His success leads people to assume that he must covet a post in the new imperial government anyway, and he delights in foiling these expectations. \n\nFukuzawa Sensei’s Guide to Life\n\n\n---------------------------------\n\nThe autobiography concludes with some remarks on his “household economy” and private life. Despite his drinking habit, he is happy to say that he has never acquired debts or lived beyond his means. The future success or failure of his school does not seem to bother him. If he could not afford to keep his teachers, he would simply “teach by \\[himself\\] as many students as \\[he\\] could handle alone.”\n\nHe explains his philosophy of childrearing in some depth, which entails encouraging “gentleness of mind and liveliness of body.” That seems to mean no physical punishment and taking the occasional piece of broken furniture or torn sliding door in stride. His unorthodox thoughts on educating children also deserve mention: “I do not show them a single letter of the alphabet until after they are four or five years old. At seven or eight, I sometimes give them calligraphy lessons.” Fukuzawa stresses that his “chief care is always for their physical health.” While “many parents are liable to be overanxious about their children’s studies,” he says, “in my house no child is praised for reading a book.” Instead, he rewards them “when they take an unusually long walk, or if they show an improvement in jujitsu or gymnastics.”\n\nWhen his grown sons leave to study in America, he writes them every week—for six years. Before they go, he tells them: “I don’t want you to come back great scholars, pale and sickly. I would much rather have you come back ignorant but healthy.”\n\nIn his old age, he begins to wean himself off alcohol. “First I gave up my morning wine, then my noon wine.” In these times his “mouth and mind were always at war.” But he manages. He pounds rice and chops wood for exercise, walks four miles every day before breakfast, and dresses himself in simple cotton shirts. When the mood strikes, he composes poems about autumn dawns and temple bells. \n\nBut perhaps his greatest piece of advice is this one: “I never forget that all my personal worries and immediate concerns are but a part of the ‘comedy’ of this ‘floating world,’” and “our entire lives but an aspect of some higher consciousness.”\n\nWhat Would Fukuzawa Do?\n\n\n-------------------------\n\nAs I write this, the American president has accused the Japanese of xenophobia. As Fukuzawa’s story demonstrates, such sentiments have played a major role in Japanese history. Though I must say, having lived for nearly two years in Japan, I have never been treated poorly. On the contrary, I struggle to name another place in the world where people might have been so patient with a foreigner who can hardly speak the language and who understands so little of the local customs. \n\nBut Japan does have some problems. \n\nThe litany is familiar: a shrinking and aging population, low growth, falling productivity, a depreciating currency, static wages. Proposed measures to address these challenges (Abenomics, childcare allowances, etc) have had limited success. After reading his autobiography, I have to wonder: “What would Fukuzawa do?”\n\nA man who dedicated himself to teaching people English may balk at the state of English language education in Japan, where only around 5% of the population are fluent. This arguably has some benefits, insofar as it insulates Japan from some of the silly ideas currently infesting the Anglosphere (though QAnon still [seems](https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/photo/39347204) to have made it through). But the link between English language fluency and global economic competitiveness seems pretty well established. \n\nIf I could summarize Fukuzawa’s primary skill in one clunky phrase, it would be “cultural arbitrage.” As a teenager he seemed to realize the vast world of information hidden in foreign languages. And with only a cursory grasp of global geopolitics, he saw that knowledge of English would be key to future success on the international stage. Becoming one of the first Japanese people fluent in English made him the gateway through which torrents of knowledge in every field entered Japanese society. \n\nSo what opportunities for cultural arbitrage exist today? How can Japan put Fukuzawa’s skillset to work?\n\nOne capacity that Japan enjoys that seems beyond the reach of their American counterparts is the operation of clean, safe, and dynamic cities. Some are so distraught by the state of American urban life that they are trying to [build](https://www.wired.com/story/balaji-srinivasan-ditch-chaos-country-cloud/) new countries in the cloud or [secede](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqJoXaNFFjY) from the U.S. Given the massive [spike](https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-urban-violent-crime-spike-is-real#:~:text=The%20best%20available%20figures%2C%20from,year%20for%20which%20finalized%20federal) in urban crime after the pandemic, such ideas are understandable. \n\nJapanese policymakers should look at this situation with Fukuzawa’s eyes. What would he see? I venture he might notice two things: 1) a country with a shrinking population but an unmatched capacity to build, and 2) a large group of wealthy and competent people desperately seeking a functional urban space to live and work. \n\nBring these things together, and you get Dejima 2.0: a new Japanese city for skilled foreigners fleeing urban dysfunction. Dejima 2.0, much like the first Dejima during the shogunate, would serve as an interface between Japan and the outside world, facilitating trade and offering a test bed for new technologies. \n\nImagine it: a new Hong Kong without the authoritarianism, a Próspera with better sushi. Many islands in Japan are now populated by more [cats](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/03/a-visit-to-aoshima-a-cat-island-in-japan/386647/) than people. There’s not a shortage of promising sites. \n\nBut the best thing of all, which I think should make it palatable to even the most conservative Japanese official: it follows precedent."} | |
| {"text":"# Fake Tradition Is Traditional\n\n**I.**\n\n> **A:** I like Indian food.\n> \n> **B:** Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies?\n> \n> **A:** I just like paneer tikka.\n\nThis is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things.\n\nBut “of the past” is just meant to be a pointer! “Indian food” is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it’s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems!\n\nIn the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!\n\n**II.**\n\nBut there’s another anti-tradition argument which goes deeper than this. It’s something like “ah, but you’re a hypocrite, because the people of the past weren’t trying to return to some idealized history. They just did what made sense in their present environment.”\n\nThere were hints of this in Sam Kriss’ otherwise-excellent [article about a fertility festival](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/this-green-and-growing-earth) in Hastings, England. A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered. Then everyone drank and partied and had a good time.\n\nMost of the people involved assumed it derived from the Druids or something. It was popular not just as a good party, but because it felt like a connection to primeval days of magic and mystery. But actually, the Hastings festival dates from 1983. If you really stretch things, it’s loosely based on similar rituals from the 1790s. There’s no connection to anything older than that.\n\nKriss wrote:\n\n> I don’t think the Jack in the Green is worse because it’s not really an ancient fertility rite, but I do think it’s a little worse because it _pretends_ to be…tradition pretends to be a respect for the past, but it refuses to let the past inhabit its own particular time: it turns the past into eternity. The opposite of tradition is _invention_.\n> \n> Tradition is fake, and invention is real. Most of the human activity of the past consists of people _just doing stuff_…they didn’t need a reason. It didn’t need to be part of anything ancient. They were having fun.\n> \n> I’ve been thinking a lot about \\[a seagull float in the Hastings parade\\] . . . in the procession, the shape of the seagull became totemic. It had the intensity of a symbol, without needing to symbolise anything in particular. Another word for a symbol that burns through any referent is a god. I wasn’t kidding when I said I felt the faint urge to worship it. I don’t think it would be any more meaningful if someone had dug up some thousand-year-old seagull fetishes from a nearby field. It’s powerful simply because of what it is. Invention, _just doing stuff_, is the nebula that nurses newborn gods.\n\nI’m nervous to ever disagree with Sam Kriss about ancient history, but this strikes me as totally false.\n\nModern traditionalists look back fondly on Victorian times. But the Victorians didn’t get their culture by _just doing stuff_ without ever thinking of the past. They were writing pseudo-Arthurian poetry, building neo-Gothic palaces, and painting pre-Raphaelite art hearkening back to the early Renaissance. And the Renaissance itself was based on the idea of a _re-naissance_ of Greco-Roman culture. And the Roman Empire at its peak spent half of its cultural energy obsessing over restoring the virtue of the ancient days of the Roman Republic:\n\n> Then none was for a party; \n> Then all were for the state; \n> Then the great man helped the poor, \n> And the poor man loved the great: \n> Then lands were fairly portioned; \n> Then spoils were fairly sold: \n> The Romans were like brothers \n> In the brave days of old.\n> \n> Now Roman is to Roman \n> More hateful than a foe, \n> And the Tribunes beard the high, \n> And the Fathers grind the low. \n> As we wax hot in faction, \n> In battle we wax cold: \n> Wherefore men fight not as they fought \n> In the brave days of old.\n\n(of course, [this isn’t from](https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius) a real Imperial Roman poem - it’s by a Victorian Brit _pretending to be_ a later Roman yearning for the grand old days of Republican Rome. And it’s still better than any poem of the last fifty years, fight me.)\n\nAs for the ancient Roman Republic, they spoke fondly of a Golden Age when they were ruled by the god Saturn. As far as anyone knows, Saturn is a wholly mythical figure. But if he did exist, there are good odds he inspired his people (supposedly the fauns and nymphs) through stories of some even Goldener Age that came before.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F614aec66-4f5c-4540-a230-bebd97d0d480_1560x983.png)\n\nThe left is a New York synagogue. It’s Moorish Revival style, which means its architect was working off a basically false and idealized picture of 1100s al-Andalus. The right is a different New York synagogue, by an architect who was “just doing stuff”.\n\nI don’t have a great explanation for why I like the one on the left so much better. Some of it might be about creativity: “what’s the best idea you can think of?” might not be a fertile prompt. “How did the Moors do it?” might be a great prompt, _especially_ if you know nothing about Morocco and you end up getting it totally wrong. Your imaginary version of Morocco, or the way you fill in the blanks in your idealized version of Morocco, or what happens when Morocco collides with everything else in your brain, [might be more interesting than whatever you invent from whole cloth](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/06/random-noise-is-our-most-valuable-resource/).\n\nBut I think of it more in a psychological way. I don’t think Sam Kriss has it in him to ask a dozen people to start cawing and flapping their arms around the seagull idol (this isn’t an attack on him; neither do I). It’s too silly. Or if it’s not silly - if it comes from something deep in his subconscious, then it’s _too_ deep, it reveals too much about his inner self. Dreaming of something too big, too glorious, too beautiful is a sort of status claim. “Look at me, I am qualified to midwife this piece of divinity into the world”. A few people are brave enough to go ahead and do it. For everyone else, it’s easier to launder it as an incremental improvement on something that came before. “Here is my, Scott’s, utopian vision of the good” is a hard sell. “Why don’t we go back to how the Romans did this?” is a little easier. Even if it was only three Romans, one time, and what they did was only vaguely reminiscent.\n\nSome popular art was written by people trying to _parody_ a style they didn’t like, and ending up doing it better than any of the real practitioners ([1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_as_a_Brick#Background), [2](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2968040526), [3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William)). Something like this is especially true for quotes, where it’s weird to speak in a quotable way but acceptable to invent fake quotes from other people ([SMAC](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri), [PQFUP](https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Nf90YS78Mgi_7_cPZGNHm0ax-BTdO7sQXKG5EfbVMY/edit)). I think of tradition as providing a similar release valve, letting people go wild without putting enough of themselves out there to get attacked.\n\nI’m not recommending that people lie and invent fake genealogies for what they were going to do anyway. I just get angry when people make blanket objections to looking backwards fondly at some idealized past as a guide to future institutions. And doubly angry when people say “your past heroes didn’t look back at an idealized past, they just did things”. Of course past heroes looked back at an idealized even-further-past when doing their heroic deeds! That’s the standard human method for getting anything done! If we get mad at people who try the same strategy today, we’ll do less than our forebears, idealized or not.\n\n\\[Update: Followup/more thoughts [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/clarification-on-fake-tradition-is)\\]"} | |
| {"text":"# The Mistakes Are All Waiting To Be Made\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 334\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** In [my Quests and Requests post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/quests-and-requests), I challenged someone to create a good dating site. A team led by Shreeda Segan is working on this and trying to raise money on Manifund; you can read more about their plan and funding goals [here](https://manifund.org/projects/design-budget-for-rebuilding-the-dating-site-we-all-want-back-).\n\n**2:** Book review contest finalists are: Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Dominion, Don Juan, Family That Couldn't Sleep, How Language Began, How The War Was Won, Nine Lives, Real Raw News, Silver Age Marvel Comics, Sixth Day, Spirit of Rationalism, Complete Rhyming Dictionary, The Pale King, Two Arms and a Head, and Ballad of the White Horse. Honorable mention to at least Catkin, Road of the King, World Empire Lost, Piranesi, Meme Machine, and Determined. I might promote some honorable mentions to finalists depending on how tolerant you all are of book reviews, and some others to honorable mention after I read more reviews. First review goes up this Friday! Thanks to everyone who entered."} | |
| {"text":"# Hidden Open Thread 333.333333\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# Failure To Replicate Anti-Vaccine Poll\n\n**I.**\n\nSteve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on [his Substack](https://kirschsubstack.com/), of which one especially caught my eye:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://kirschsubstack.com/p/our-latest-polls-show-twice-as-many?utm_source=publication-search)\n\nHe got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID or from COVID vaccines. Results [here](https://www.skirsch.com/covid/PollfishJul4.pdf):\n\n* 7.5% of people said a household member had died of COVID\n \n* 8.5% of people said a household member had died from the vaccine.\n \n\nAll other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population. In particular, about 75% were vaccinated (suggesting that they weren’t just polling hardcore anti-vaxxers).\n\nSince then, Kirsch has collected several other polls - some by him, some by others - saying the same. For example, here’s Rasmussen (another reputable polling company) from [last January](https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/public_surveys/died_suddenly_more_than_1_in_4_think_someone_they_know_died_from_covid_19_vaccines):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe6939f50-4dca-48ce-ae9b-eb7d872d587f_1071x136.png)\n\nI’ve truncated the table to keep it readable, but I kept the breakdown by party - these aren’t just anti-vax Republicans lying to support their party narrative. Even 19% of Democrats say they know someone killed by the vaccine!\n\nI know people here like to argue about whether to debate people or deplatform them, but surely someone else finds this interesting. Here’s 24% of the US - so probably a little short of 100 million people - saying they’ve seen something which consensus science says shouldn’t be possible? Aren’t you at least a little curious what’s going on?\n\nAlso, isn’t Steve Kirsch being a little too smug about this?\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://x.com/stkirsch/status/1788003066547200351)\n\nSo I asked about this on the 2022 and 2024 ACX surveys. Both gave similar results, but I’m going to focus on the 2024 survey, since I did the most followup on it.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbe05b487-80af-4c93-af22-8abf99fa2f13_799x682.png)\n\nHere “family” was defined on the question page as including “brother, sister, mother, father, child, aunt, uncle, grandparent, grandchild, niece, or nephew”. This is broader than Pollfish’s “member of your household” but narrower than Rasmussen’s “person you know”.\n\nKirsch and I got similar results for knowing someone who died of COVID - 6.5% vs. 7.5%. But we got very different results for knowing someone who died from the vaccine: Kirsch’s 8.5% vs. my 0.6%. Why?\n\nAs people love to point out, my survey is a nonrepresentative sample. But [as](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life) _[I](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life)_ [point out](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life), it’s important to keep track of when that should vs. shouldn’t matter. No matter how weird my readers are, they’re not biologically invincible - they should have side effects at similar rates to anyone else.\n\nOne possibility is that my readers are very pro-vaccine compared to the general population, so they interpret ambiguous cases in a more pro-vaccine way. I didn’t have a question about vaccine-related views, but it’s no secret that vaccine opponents are more often right-wing, so I looked at questions about politics.\n\nConservatives in general were only slightly more likely (1%) to report vaccine deaths compared to liberals (0.4%).\n\nBut I had a question where people ranked their support for Donald Trump. Trump supporters had much higher vaccine injury rates (7.5%) than moderates (1.3%) or opponents (0.3%).\n\nI couldn’t find much of an effect by gender, education level, or any of the other traditional demographic categories.\n\nThis doesn’t quite explain the difference between my survey and the others, since my moderates had 1.3% side effect rate, and the Rasmussen moderates had 22%. But it does suggest that there’s room for political beliefs to alter perception of relatives’ vaccine deaths.\n\n**II.**\n\nAll of this would be much clearer if we could get in there and ask the people who said their relatives died from vaccines what they meant. Most ACX Survey respondents gave me permission to email them. So I emailed the people who answered “yes” to that question and asked for their story. Some details:\n\n* 5,981 people took the survey\n \n* 5,924 of them answered the question on COVID vaccines\n \n* 38 of them answered “yes” to that question\n \n* 28 of them gave me their email and permission to contact them.\n \n* 9 of them answered my email and told their stories.\n \n\nOf the nine people who answered my email, three said they’d read the question wrong and wanted to retract their answer, leaving six people who gave me real stories. I’m slightly obfuscating some of these to protect their privacy:\n\n1. 80 year old went to the hospital after a stroke, received the Pfizer vaccine there, then got sicker and died two weeks later. The respondent said their relative \"was already in bad health either way, so it's hard to place blame on the vaccine, but I do think it contributed - she had been recovering before getting it.\"\n \n2. 95 year old got the Moderna vaccine, that night she started vomiting and wouldn't eat, and after 3-4 days she died. The respondent said \"I think nobody in the family thought it was a mistake to do the vaccination, as \\[a COVID infection\\] would probably have \\[also killed her\\].\"\n \n3. A 63 year old died of a heart attack six weeks after his booster vaccination. He had a previous history of heart attacks, but had been declared healthy before the vaccine.\n \n4. An 83 year old died the night after getting a COVID booster. She had some previous health conditions \"but she wasn't knocking on death's door\". The respondent writes \"\\[I think\\] the side effects were probably just too much for her somewhat fragile state to handle...most of my family believes it was the vaccine, but that the vaccines are overall a net positive for both us and society.\"\n \n5. A 37 year old with extreme obesity had a heart attack one day after a COVID mRNA booster.\n \n6. A 94 year old, one week after getting the vaccine, went to the hospital due to heart failure and UTI. He tested positive for COVID and died after admission.\n \n\nFour out of six cases are ≥ eighty years old. Since I only heard back from about a quarter of the people who reported deaths, we can speculate that the whole sample had sixteen people in this category.\n\nSuppose each of the 6,000 people who took my survey had one relative in this age group (maybe a grandparent). And suppose that each relative got two COVID vaccines (an original and a booster). That means there are 12,000 vaccinations of 80+ year-old relatives in my survey population.\n\nThe average 80 year old has a 5% chance of dying per year; the average 90 year old a 20% chance. Let’s average it out and say 10% for the 80+ population. That means a 1/3650 chance per day, a 1/500 chance per week, etc. So by coincidence, we would expect about 2 people in my sample to have stories of an older relative dying within one day of vaccination, and about 10 people to have stories of a relative dying within one week. Among people talking about vaccine-related deaths, they seem to range from “same day” to “within six weeks”. So I think this mostly fits the null hypothesis.\n\nI don’t think the null hypothesis is quite right here, for two reasons. First, as Respondent 1 notes, some people receive the COVID vaccine in the hospital, when they go there for other reasons, which seems like a time of elevated death risk. Second, Respondent 2 notes that some people are so frail that even normal vaccine side effects of the type that everyone agrees exist might kill them. On the other hand, there might be a tendency for people to wait until they’re healthy to get the vaccine, which would counterbalance these effects. Overall I think the null hypothesis is an okay estimate here though.\n\nWhat about the 37 year old? Yes, he was very obese, but this is still an unusual age to die. Suppose the average respondent has two relatives in this category. Then by a similar calculation, we should expect about 24,000 vaccinations in the population. The average 37 year old has a 1/100,000 chance of dying on any given day. So there’s about a 1/4 chance that we would see an event this extreme in this population (or 1/2 if we interpret “the day after” to mean “not the same day”). But also, since only 1/4 of people answered my email, we should be concerned that there are three other events like this in this sample. This makes it an unlikely, but not extremely unlikely, finding.\n\n**III.**\n\nI interpret the results of my survey to be consistent with a null hypothesis of “the vaccines don’t increase deaths”, plus or minus some very small effect of “they can kill the extremely frail” or “they can cause a heart attack in susceptible young people 1/10,000th of the time”.\n\nThat still leaves the question of why my results are so different from those of Kirsch, Pollfish, and Rasmussen.\n\nMaybe there’s some very big population of people who got the vaccine, then died eventually (where “eventually” could be anything from the same day to years later) of some condition (where “some condition” ranges from things plausibly connected to vaccines like allergic reactions, to things not plausibly connected to vaccines like [lightning strikes](https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/18/covid-vaccine-volunteer-struck-by-lightning-after-moderna-injection-13774498/)). Depending on people’s previous assumptions about the risks of the vaccine, they’ll either report these as vaccine-related deaths, or think of them as unrelated coincidences. This would explain why my data found that Trump supporters were 20x more likely than Trump opponents to know a vaccine-related death.\n\nBut this can’t be the whole explanation: ACX readers are only a little further left than the general population, and even the most pro-Trump ACXers reported lower death rates than the _median_ Kirsch poll respondent. My guess is that this is a blog about statistics and reasoning, so people here are very cautious about the _post hoc ergo propter hoc_ fallacy.\n\nI think the best conclusion from this result is just to stop caring about these kinds of polls. Any poll whose outcome can change by more than an order of magnitude based on the respondents’ politics or statistical knowledge isn’t a valid guide to the frequency of real-world events. This should have been our leading hypothesis all along, but the results were weird enough to be worth checking. Now that we’ve checked, we can forget about this methodology and focus on the result of peer-reviewed studies, like we should have done all along.\n\nAs always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available [ACX Survey Results](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024). If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me."} | |
| {"text":"# Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent\n\n**I.**\n\nLately [we’ve been discussing](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help) some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior? And do we really want to do this?\n\nI find it clarifying to set aside schizophrenia for a second and look at cystic fibrosis.\n\nCystic fibrosis is a simple single-gene disorder. A mutation in this gene makes lung mucus too thick. People born with the disorder spend their lives fighting off various awful lung infections before dying early, usually in their 20s to 40s. There’s a new $300,000/year medication that looks promising, but we’ve yet to see how much it can increase life expectancy. As far as I know, there’s nothing good about cystic fibrosis. It’s just an awful mutation that leads to a lifetime of choking on your own lung mucus.\n\nSo: are people with cystic fibrosis genetically inferior, or not?\n\nThe case for yes: they have the cystic fibrosis mutation. Having the cystic fibrosis mutation seems vastly worse than not having it. Surely if “genetically inferior” means anything at all, it means having genetics which it is vastly worse to have than not have.\n\nThe case for no: if you say ‘yes’, you sound like a Nazi. Or at least you sound like some sort of callous jerk who hates people with cystic fibrosis and thinks they’re less than human and maybe wants to kill them.\n\n(Some people will object that nobody is “genetically inferior”, because “inferior” means “worse in every possible way”, and nobody is worse in _all_ ways - maybe the person with cystic fibrosis has a gene for great memory or something. But first of all, if we come up with a contrived example where this isn’t true - eg identical twins who have exactly the same genes, except one has a somatic mutation causing cystic fibrosis - I’m still reluctant to say the mutated twin is “genetically inferior”. And second of all, this isn’t how we use the word “inferior” anywhere else - we might say that eg a Yugo is inferior to a Cadillac, even if the Yugo is better on some trivial dimension like having a slightly longer tire life.)\n\nSo I think there are two different questions here.\n\n* “Do you think cystic fibrosis is a genetic condition which it is bad to have?” is a question that bioethicists might ask in order to discuss a medical or epidemiological course of action.\n \n* “Do you think people with cystic fibrosis are genetically inferior?” is a question journalists might ask in order to trick people into saying a naughty word so they can cancel them.\n \n\nThere’s no shame in answering two totally different questions differently, so you should answer “yes” to the first and “no” to the second.\n\nThis is also how I feel about genes for schizophrenia and genes for low IQ. Or rather, it’s possible - as an empirical claim - that there might be something good about these genes, in the same way there’s something good about the sickle cell anemia gene. But if it turns out that the scientific question of whether they have advantages resolves to no, then I think the scientific-bioethical question of “are these genes bad?” resolves to yes, and the people-trying-to-trick-you-into-using-naughty-words question of “are the people who have these genes genetically inferior?” resolves to “Haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you write an article calling me a Nazi.”\n\n**II.**\n\nBut I still think there’s a deeper question here, of _why_ questions about inferiority seem so compelling. A local Twitter account has gotten popular by posting this text with a different picture every evening:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcbd8c1db-6c01-4a15-a316-b3a091dff458_583x682.png)\n\nSource: [@VividVoid\\_](https://twitter.com/VividVoid_)\n\nThis message clearly resonates with a lot people. But what does it mean? There are certainly people who are better than me in all the usual measurable ways. I have a friend who is smarter, richer, more attractive, more charismatic, and better at helping others than I am. Let’s call him [Lance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0BiJRI4GOE). Am I inferior to Lance?\n\nOne possible answer is the one I tried to close off above - probably I’m better at Lance at some trivial thing. I’ve probably memorized more 19th century poetry than he has. If we define “inferior” to mean “inferior in literally every way” then I guess I’m not inferior. But that’s a kind of dumb way to define it. Most people would interpret it to mean “inferior overall, if we add up all the good things and bad things according to some kind of importance-weighting”.\n\nAnother possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. _I_ would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”?\n\nAnother possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying? It’s a claim about the US legal system. “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases.” Why am I supposed to feel cosmically reassured by this decision?\n\nAnother possible answer: fine, in every real world test we can dream up, Lance is superior to me, but there’s still some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something. This feels to me suspiciously like the position I mocked in [The Whole City Is Center](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/18/the-whole-city-is-center/).\n\nThe best that I can do is to appeal to the argument above about genetics. There are - you could say - two different questions here:\n\n* “Is Lance taller / smarter / faster / stronger than I am?” is a question that I might ask to (for example) assess my chances if I were competing against Lance for the same job.\n \n* “Is Lance superior to me?” is a question that my inner journalist might ask to trick me into canceling my own soul.\n \n\nThe problem with claiming that Lance is superior to me isn’t that he _isn’t_. It’s that it indicates I’m asking the wrong question, in order to make myself miserable. Just as the correct answer to “are schizophrenics genetically inferior?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you write an article calling me a Nazi”, the correct answer to “am I inferior to Lance?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you make me depressed.”\n\n(as the old saying goes, everyone has someone who’s better than them and someone who’s worse than them, with two exceptions. And any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.)\n\nAt least that’s as much sense as I’ve ever been able to wring out of this question. Good night and you are not inferior to anyone."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 333\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** A message from ACX Grantee [1DaySooner:](https://www.1daysooner.org/) California is considering a law to ban things that emit ozone. As unintentional collateral damage, this bill would ban [far-UV light](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23972651/ultraviolet-disinfection-germicide-far-uv), a new disinfection technology that can potentially eliminate all indoor respiratory diseases, but which also creates trivial amounts of ozone. Far UV is almost ready for deployment, and could potentially save tens of thousands of lives yearly. 1DaySooner, a health-related charity, is [trying](https://www.1daysooner.org/1day-sooners-comments-on-sb-1308-and-effects-on-germicidal-uv-light-technology/) to convince the California government to exempt it from this law, or at least to remember that it exists when writing the exact text of the bill. They are asking Californians to write to their representative about this. Representative [Buffy Wicks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_Wicks) is on a relevant committee, and support from her constituents (Berkeley, Richmond, and north Oakland) would be especially helpful. I’ve posted more information - including what you can say to your representative - [as a](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58666118) **[comment](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58666118)** [below](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58666118).\n\n**2:** Thanks again to everyone who purchased _Unsong_. And my former co-blogger Ozy has also published a novella this month, _[Her Voice Is A Backwards Record](https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/announcement-ozy-has-written-a-novella)_, “an adaptation of Neil Sinhababu’s paper [Possible Girls](https://philpapers.org/archive/SINPG.pdf)” about whether “if modal realism is true, can I have a loving relationship with someone from another possible world?”\n\n**3:** New subscribers-only post: [Contra Hoel On Nerd Culture](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hoel-on-nerd-culture).\n\n**4:** Thanks to everyone who came to the meetup last week - and it was good to see some of you at Manifest too. I’m continually grateful to the venue, [Lighthaven](https://www.lighthaven.space/), for hosting ACX meetups for free. They’re looking for more customers; if you’re doing a conference or event in the Bay Area, please check them out."} | |
| {"text":"# Hidden Open Thread 332.5\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# Contra Hoel On Nerd Culture\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# Berkeley Meetup This Wednesday\n\n**Why:** Because we’re having [another round of spring meetups](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024), and Berkeley is one of them. I’m signal-boosting this one because it’s usually our biggest, and because I hope to be able to attend.\n\n**When:** Wednesday, June 5, 6:30 PM. Please ignore the other post that said 6, or else you’ll have a special 30 minute mini-meetup with all the other people who don’t check updates regularly.\n\n**Where:** [Lighthaven](https://www.lighthaven.space/), 2740 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley.\n\n**Who:** Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.\n\nI’ll check the comments to this post in case there are any questions."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 332\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** Thanks to everyone who talked to me at the Less Online conference. Thanks especially to the person who gave me a working GPS-based version of the automated land acknowledger from [Bay Area House Party](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party), it’s one of the most interesting gifts I’ve ever received and I’m looking forward to bringing it to some other city to test its functionality:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9229e2e5-7200-43f0-99d6-086e82f856a4_652x526.png)\n\n**2:** Comment of the week: [why does Britain let submarine commanders launch nukes on their own, when Russia and America have the opposite policy?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024/comment/57578309) Also related to the links post: someone on Facebook says that Cryonics Institute has not confirmed that Paris Hilton is signed up, and this might be a false story.\n\n**3:** Lyman Stone [has responded to](https://medium.com/@lymanstone/effective-altruism-is-still-bad-7c2a6c947122) my response to him. I think it just doubles down on the same points he made the first time, so I might not get around to writing a full response. I’ll just say that first, I think it could benefit from better understanding of the distinctions between virtue ethics, rule utilitarianism, two-level utilitarianism - Mill, Hare, or Parfit could be good sources here, or even just some of the blog posts I linked. Second, Stone seems confused that I’ve blocked him on Twitter. I want to stress that I never block people just because I disagree with them; the only reason I block people is because of a history of doxxing, which Stone has, and which angers me for personal reasons. I think in an ideal world this would merit a permaban from Twitter, but all I can do on my own is block him from reading my stuff.\n\n**4:** Berkeley meetup this Wednesday at 6:30 at 2740 Telegraph. I’ll be there. I’ll probably post a reminder with slightly more information tomorrow or Tuesday."} | |
| {"text":"# Unsong Available In Paperback\n\nSeven years ago, I wrote an online serial novel, _Unsong,_ about alternate history American kabbalists. You can read the online version [here](https://unsongbook.com/).\n\nThe online version isn’t going anywhere, but lots of people asked for a hard copy. I tried to get the book formally published, but various things went wrong and I procrastinated. Commenter Pycea finally saved me from myself and helped get it published on Amazon (thank you!) [You can now buy the book here, for $19.99](https://amzn.to/4aKmRXQ).\n\nI think the published version is an improvement over the original. I rewrote three or four chapters I wasn’t satisfied with, and changed a few character names to be more kabbalistically appropriate. The timeline and history have been rectified, and there are more details on the 2000 - 2015 period and how UNSONG was founded. I gave the political situation a little more depth (watch for the Archon of Arkansas, the Shogun of Michigan, and the Caliph of California). And the sinister Malia Ngo has been replaced by the equally sinister, but actual-character-development-having, Ash Bentham.\n\nAll of the parts that were actually good have been kept.\n\nThanks to everyone for being patient, and special thanks to Pycea for making this happen.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://amzn.to/4aKmRXQ)"} | |
| {"text":"# Contra Stone On EA\n\n**I.**\n\nLyman Stone wrote an article [Why Effective Altruism Is Bad](https://medium.com/@lymanstone/why-effective-altruism-is-bad-80dfbccc7a68). You know the story by now, let’s start with the first argument:\n\n> The only cities where searches for EA-related terms are prevalent enough for Google to show it are in the Bay Area and Boston…We know the spatial distribution of effective altruist ideas. We can also get IRS data on charitable giving…\n\nStone finds that Google Trends shows that searches for “effective altruism” concentrate most in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. So he’s going to see if those two cities have higher charitable giving than average, and use that as his metric of whether EAs give more to charity than other people.\n\nHe finds that SF and Boston _do_ give more to charity than average, but not by much, and this trend has if anything decreased in the 2010 - present period when effective altruism was active. So, he concludes,\n\n> That should all make us think that the rise of ‘effective altruism’ as a social movement has had little or no effect on overall charitableness.\n\nWhat do I think of this line of argument?\n\n[According to Rethink Priorities,](https://80000hours.org/2021/07/effective-altruism-growing/#how-many-engaged-community-members-are-there) the organization that keeps track of this kind of thing, there were about 7,400 active effective altruists in 2020 (90% CI: 4,700 - 10,000). Growth rate was 14% per year but has probably gone down lately, so there are probably around 10,000 now. This matches other sources for high engagement with EA ideas (8,898 people [have signed](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge) the Giving What We Can pledge).\n\nSuppose that the Bay Area contains 25% of all the effective altruists in the world. That means it has 2,500 effective altruists. Its total population is about 10 million. So effective altruists are 1/4000th of the Bay Area population.\n\nSuppose that the average person gives 3% of their income to charity per year, and the average effective altruist gives 10%. The Bay Area with no effective altruists donates an average of 3%. Add in the 2,500 effective altruists, and the average goes up to . . . 3.0025%. Stone’s graph is in 0.5 pp intervals. So this methodology is way too underpowered to detect any effect even if it existed.\n\nHow many effective altruists would have to be in the Bay for Stone to notice? If we assume ability to detect a signal of 0.5 pp, it would take 200x this amount, or 500,000 in the Bay alone. For comparison, the most popular book on effective altruism, Will MacAskill’s _What We Owe The Future,_ sold only 100,000 copies in the whole world.\n\nBut all of this speculation is unnecessary. There are plenty of data sources that just tell us how much effective altruists donate compared to everyone else. I checked this in an old SSC survey, and the non-EAs (n = 3118) donated an average of 1.5%, compared to the EA (n = 773) donating an average of 6%.\n\n[In general](https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/144089513/on-insurance-experiments), I think it’s a bad idea to try to evaluate rare events by escalating to a population level when you can just check the rare events directly. If you do look at populations, you should do a basic power calculation before reporting your results as meaningful.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb5bf3387-3c0a-4fa1-9b68-be1b3da47035_1190x739.png)\n\nI’m not going to make a big deal about Stone’s use of Google Trends, because I think he’s right that SF and Boston are the most EA cities. But taken seriously, it would suggest that Montana is the most Democratic state.\n\nStone could potentially still object that movements aren’t supposed to gather 10,000 committed adherents and grow at 10% per year. They have to take hold of the population! Capture the minds of the masses! Convert >5% of the population of a major metropolitan area!\n\nI don’t think effective altruism has succeeded as a mass movement. But I don’t think that’s it’s main strategy - for more on this, see the articles under EA Forum tag [“value of movement growth”](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/value-of-movement-growth), which explains:\n\n> It may seem that, in order for the effective altruism movement to do as much good as possible, the movement should aim to grow as much as possible. However, there are risks to rapid growth that may be avoidable if we aim to grow more slowly and deliberately. For example, rapid growth could lead to a large influx of people with specific interests/priorities who slowly reorient the entire movement to focus on those interests/priorities.\n\nAren’t movements that don’t capture the population doomed to irrelevance? I don’t think so. Effective altruism has [managed to get plenty done with only 10,000 people](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective), because they’re the right 10,000 and they’ve influenced plenty of others.\n\nStone fails to prove that effective altruists don’t donate more than other people, because he’s used bad methodology that couldn’t prove that even if it were true. His critique could potentially evolve into an argument that effective altruism hasn’t spread massively throughout the population, but nobody ever claimed that it did.\n\n**II.**\n\n> You might imagine that a group fixated on “effective altruism” would have a high degree of concentration of giving in a small number of areas. Indeed, EAist groups tend to be hyper-focused on one or two causes, and even big groups like Open Philanthropy or GiveWell often have focus areas of especially intense work.\n> \n> And yet, the list of causes EAists work on is shockingly broad for a group whose whole appeal is supposed to be re-allocating funds towards their most effective uses. Again, click the link I attached above.\n> \n> EAists do everything from supporting malarian bednets (seems cool), to preventing blindness-related conditions (makes sense), to distributing vaccines (okay, I’m following), to developing vaccines in partnership with for profit entities (a bit more oblique but I see where you’re going with it), to institutional/policy interventions (contestable, but there’s a philosophical case I guess), to educational programs in rich countries (sympathetic I guess but hardly the Singer-esque “save the cheapest life” vibe), to promoting kidney transplants (noble to be sure but a huge personal cost for what seems like a modest total number of utils gained), to programs to reduce the pain experienced by shrimp in agriculture (seems… uh… oblique), to lobbying efforts to prevent AI from killing us all (lol), to space flight (what?), to more nebulous “long term risk” (i.e. “pay for PhDs to write white papers”), to other even more alternatively commendable, curious, or crazy causes. My point is not to mock the sillier programs (I’ll do that later). My point is just to question on what basis so broad a range of priorities can reasonably be considered a major gain in _efficiency_. Is it really the case that EAists have radically shifted our public understandings of the “effectiveness” of certain kinds of “altruism”?\n\nA few responses:\n\nTechnically, it’s only correct to focus on the single most important area if you have a small amount of resources relative to the total amount in the system (Open Phil has $10 billion). Otherwise, you should (for example) spend your first million funding all good shrimp welfare programs until the marginal unfunded shrimp welfare program is worse than the best vaccine program. Then you’ll fund the best vaccine program, and maybe they can absorb another $10 million until they become less valuable than the marginal kidney transplant or whatever. This sounds theoretical when I put it this way, but if you work in charity, it can quickly becomes your whole life. It’s all very nice and well to say “fund kidney transplants”, but actually there are only specific discrete kidney transplant programs, some of them are vastly better than others, and none of them scale to infinity instantaneously or smoothly. The average amount that the charities I deal with most often can absorb is between $100K and $1MM. Again, Open Phil has $10 billion.\n\nBut even aside from this technical point, people disagree on really big issues. Some people think animals matter and deserve the same rights as humans. Other people don’t care about them at all. Effective altruism can’t and doesn’t claim to resolve every single ancient philosophical dispute on animal sentience or the nature of rights. It just tries to evaluate if charities are good. If you care a lot about shrimp, there’s someone at some effective altruist organization who has a strong opinion on exactly which shrimp-related charity saves shrimp most cost-effectively. But nobody (except philosophers, or whatever) can tell you whether to care about shrimp or not.\n\nThis is sort of a cop-out. Effective altruism does try to get beyond “I want to donate to my local college’s sports team”. I think this is because that’s an easy question. Usually if somebody says they want to donate there, you can ask “do you really think your local college’s sports team is more important than people starving to death in Sudan?” and they’ll think for a second and say “I guess not”. Whereas if you ask the same question about humans and animals, you’ll get all kinds of answers and no amount of short prompting can solve this disagreement. I think this puts EAs in a few basins of reflective equilibrium, compared to scattered across the map.\n\nSo is there some sense, as Stone suggests, that “so broad a range of priorities \\[can’t\\] reasonably be considered a major gain in efficiency”?\n\nI think if you look at donations by the set of non-effective-altruist donors, and the set of effective-altruist donors, there will be much _much_ more variance, and different types of variance, in the non-EAs than the EAs. Here’s where most US charity money goes ([source](https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/07/charity-in-america-recipients.html)):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7c07ed1-bf2c-4faf-a990-cd0a4b8543fd_909x662.png)\n\nTry spotting existential risk prevention on here.\n\nI don’t think Stone can claim that an EA version of this chart wouldn’t look phenomenally different. But then what’s left of his argument?\n\n**III.**\n\n> Effective altruists devote absolutely enormous amounts of mental energy and research costs to program assessment, measurement of effectiveness. Those studies yield usually-conflicting results with variable effect sizes across time horizons and model specifications, and tons of different programs end up with overlapping effect estimates. That is to say, the areas where EAist style program evaluations are most _compelling_ are areas where we don’t need them: it’s been obvious for a long time how to reduce malaria deaths, program evaluations on that front have been encouraging and marginally useful, but not gamechanging. On the other hand, in more contestable areas, EAist style program evaluations don’t really yield much clarity. It’s very rare that a program evaluation gets published finding vastly _larger_ benefits than you’d guess from simple back-of-the-envelope guesswork, and the smaller estimates are usually because a specific intervention had first-order failure or long-run tapering, not because “actually tuberculosis isn’t that bad” or something like that. Those kinds of precise program-delivery studies are actually not an EAist specialty, but more IPA’s specialty.\n> \n> My second critique, then is this: there is no evidence that the toolkit and philosophical approach EAists so loudly proclaim as morally superior actually yields any clarity, or that their involvement in global efforts is net-positive vs. similar-scale donations given through near-peer organizations.\n\nThe IPA mentioned here is Innovations For Poverty Action, a group that studies how to fight poverty. They’re great and do great work.\n\nBut IPA doesn’t recommend top charities or direct donations. Go to their website, try to find their recommended charities. Unless I’m missing something, there are none. GiveWell does have recommended charities - including ones that they decided to recommend based on IPA’s work - and moves ~$250 million per year to them. If IPA existed, but not GiveWell, the average donor wouldn’t know where to donate, and ~$250 million per year would fail to go to charities that IPA likes.\n\nI think from the perspective of people who actually work within this ecosystem, Stone’s concern is like saying “Farms have already solved the making-food problem, so why do we need grocery stores?”\n\n(also, effective altruism funds IPA)\n\nI’m focusing on IPA here because Stone brought them up, but I think EA does more than this. I don’t think there’s an IPA for figuring out whether asteroid deflection is more cost-effective than biosecurity, whether cow welfare is more effective than chicken welfare, or figuring out which AI safety institute to donate to. I think this is because IPA is working on a really specific problem (which kinds of poverty-related interventions work) and EA is working on a different problem (what charities should vaguely utilitarian-minded people donate to?) These are closely related questions but they’re not the same question - which is why, for example, IPA does (great) research into consumer protection, something EA doesn’t consider comparatively high-impact.\n\nAnd I’m still focusing on donation to charity, again because it’s what Stone brought up, but EA does other things - like incubating charities, or building networks that affect policy.\n\n**IV.**\n\n> Let’s skip farm animal welfare for a second and look at the next few: Global Aid, “Effective Altruism,” potential AI risks, biosecurity, and global catastrophic risk. These are all definitely disproportionate areas of EAist interest. If you google these topics, you will find a wildly disproportionate number of people who are EAist, or have sex at EAist orgies, or are the friends of people who have sex at EAist orgies. These really are some of the unique social features of EAism.\n> \n> And they largely amount to subsidizing white collar worker wages. I’m sorry but there’s no other way to slice it: these are all jobs largely aimed at giving money to researchers, PhD-holders, university-adjacent-persons, think tanks, etc. That may be fine stuff, but the whole _pitch_ of effective altruism is that it’s supposed to _bypass_ a lot of the conventional nonprofit bureaucracy and its parasitism and just _give money to effective charities_. But as EAism as matured into a truly unique social movement, it is creating its own bureaucracy of researchers, think tanks, bureaucrats… the very things it critiqued.\n\nSuppose an EA organization funded a cancer researcher to study some new drug, and that new drug was a perfect universal cure for cancer. Would Stone reject this donation as somehow impure, because it went to a cancer researcher (a white-collar PhD holder)?\n\nEA gives hundreds of millions of dollars directly to malaria treatments that go to the poorest people in the world. It’s also one the main funders of GiveDirectly, a charity that has given money ($750 million so far) directly to the poorest people in the world. But in addition to giving out bednets directly, it sometimes funds malaria vaccines. In addition to giving to poor Africans, it also funds the people who do the studies to see whether giving to poor Africans works. Some of those are white-collar workers.\n\nEA has never been about critiquing the existence of researchers and think tanks. In fact, this is part of the story of EA’s founding. In 2007, the only charity evaluators accessible by normal people rated charities entirely on how much overhead they had - whether the money went to white-collar people or to sympathetic poor recipients. EAs weren’t the first to point out that this was a very weak way of evaluating charities. But they were the first to make the argument at scale and bring it into the public consciousness, and GiveWell (and to some degree the greater EA movement) were founded on the principle of “what if there was a charity evaluator that did better than just calculate overhead?” In accordance with this history, if you look on [Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/misconceptions-and-concerns-about-effective-altruism-and-charity-evaluation), their #1 Misconception about about charity evaluation is that “looking at a charity’s overhead costs is key to evaluating its effectiveness”.\n\nThis is another part of my argument that EA is more than just IPA++. For years, the state of the art for charity evaluators was “grade them by how much overhead they had”. IPA and all the great people working on evidence-based charity at the time didn’t solve that problem - people either used CharityNavigator or did their own research. GiveWell _did_ solve that problem, and that success sparked a broader movement to come up with a philosophy of charity that could solve more problems. Many individuals have always had good philosophies of charity, but I think EA was a step change in doing it at scale and trying to build useful tools / a community around it.\n\n**V.**\n\n> You could of course say AI risk is a super big issue. I’m open to that! But surely the solution to AI risk is to invest in some drone-delivered bombs and geospatial data on computing centers! The idea that the primary solution here is going to be blog posts, white papers, podcasts, and even lobbying is just insane. If you are serious about ruinous AI risk, you cannot possibly tell me that the strategy pursued here is optimal vs. say waiting until a time when workers have all gone home and blowing up a bunch of data centers and corporate offices. In particular terrorism as a strategy may be efficient since explosives are rather cheap. **To be clear I do not support a strategy of terrorism!!!!** But I am questioning why AI-riskers don’t. Logically, they should.\n\nI think if you have to write in bold with four exclamation points at the end that you’re not explicitly advocating terrorism, you should step back and think about your assumptions further. So:\n\nShould people who worry about global warming bomb coal plants?\n\nShould people who worry that Trump is going to destroy American democracy bomb the Republican National Convention?\n\nShould people who worry about fertility collapse and underpopulation bomb abortion clinics?\n\nEAs aren’t the only group who think there are deeply important causes. But for some reason people who can think about other problems in Near Mode go crazy when they start thinking about EA.\n\n(Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes been accused of wanting to bomb data centers, but he supports international regulations backed by military force - his model is things like [Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera) in the context of global norms limiting nuclear proliferation - not lone wolves. As far as I know, all EAs are united against this kind of thing.)\n\nThere are three reasons not to bomb coal plants/data centers/etc. The first is that bombing things is morally wrong. [I take this one pretty seriously](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilitarian-than-thou).\n\nThe second is that terrorism doesn’t work. Imagine that someone actually tried to bomb a data center. First of all, I don’t have statistics but I assume 99% of terrorists get caught at the “your collaborator is an undercover fed” stage. Another 99% get eliminated at the “blown up by poor bomb hygiene and/or [a spam text message](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/did-spam-text-kill-russian-suicide-bomber-flna125405)” stage. And okay, 1/10,000 will destroy a datacenter, and then what? Google tells me there are 10,978 data centers in the world. After one successful attack, the other 10,977 will get better security. Probably many of these are in China or some other country that’s not trivial for an American to import high explosives into.\n\nThe third is that - did I say terrorism didn’t work? I mean it _massively massively backfires_. Hamas tried terrorism, they frankly did a much better job than we would, and now 52% of the buildings in their entire country have been turned to rubble. Osama bin Laden tried terrorism, also did an impressive job, and the US took over the whole country that had supported him, then took over an unrelated country that _seemed like the kinds of guys who might support him,_ then spent ten years hunting him down and killing him and everyone he had ever associated with.\n\n_One f@#king time_, a handful of EAs tried promoting their agenda by committing some crimes which were _much_ less bad than terrorism. Along with all the direct suffering they caused, they destroyed EA’s reputation and political influence, drove thousands of people away from the movement, and everything they did remains a giant pit of shame that we’re still in the process of trying to climb our way out of.\n\nNot to bang the same drum again and again, but this is why EA needs to be a coherent philosophy and not just IPA++. You need some kind of theory of what kinds of activism are acceptable and effective, or else people will come up with morally repugnant and incredibly idiotic plans that will definitely backfire and destroy everything you thought you were fighting for.\n\nEA hasn’t always been the best at avoiding this failure mode, but at least we manage to outdo our critics.\n\n**VI.**\n\nStone moves on to animal welfare:\n\n> It’s important to grasp that \\[caring about animals\\] is, in evolutionary terms, an _error_ in our programming. The mechanisms involved are entirely about intra-human dynamics (or, some argue, may also be about recognizing the signs of vulnerable prey animals or enabling better hunting). Yes humans have had domestic animals for quite a long time, but our sympathetic responses are far older than that. We developed accidental sympathies for animals _and then_ we made friends with dogs, not vice versa.\n\nAgain, this is part of why I think it’s useful to have people who think about philosophy, and not just people who do RCTs.\n\nPeople having kids of their own instead of donating to sperm banks is in some sense an “error” in our evolutionary program. The program just wanted us to reproduce; instead we got a bunch of weird proxy goals like “actually loving kids for their own sake”.\n\nArt is another error - I assume we were evolutionarily programmed to care about beauty because, I don’t know, flowers indicate good hunting grounds or something, not because evolution wanted us to paint beautiful pictures.\n\nAnyone who cares about a future they will never experience, or about people on far off continents who they’ll never meet, is in some sense succumbing to “errors” in their evolutionary programming. Stone describes the original mechanisms as “about intra-human dynamics”, but this is cope - they’re about _intra-tribal_ dynamics. Plenty of cultures have been completely happy to enslave, kill, and murder people outside their tribes, and nothing in their evolutionary mechanism has told them not to. Does Stone think this, too, is an error?\n\nAt some point you’ve got to go beyond evolutionary programming and decide what kind of person you want to be. I want to be the kind of person who cares about my family, about beauty, about people on other continents, and - yes - about animal suffering. This is the reflective equilibrium I’ve landed in after considering all the drives and desires within me, filtering it through my ability to use Reason, and imagining having to justify myself to whatever God may or may not exist.\n\nStone suggests EAs don’t have answers to a lot of the basic questions around this. I can recommend him various posts like [Axiology, Morality, Law](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/), the super-old [Consequentialism FAQ](https://translatedby.com/you/the-consequentalism-faq/original/), and [The Gift We Give To Tomorrow](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGvyqAQw6yqTjpKf4/the-gift-we-give-to-tomorrow), but I think they’ll only address about half of his questions. The other half of the answers have to come from intuition, common sense, and moral conservatism. This isn’t embarrassing. Logicians have discovered many fine and helpful logical principles, but can’t 100% answer the problem of skepticism - you can fill in some of the internal links in the chain, but the beginning and end stay shrouded in mystery. This doesn’t mean you can ignore the logical principles we do know. It just means that life is a combination of formally-reasonable and not-formally-reasonable bits. You should follow the formal reason where you have it, and not freak out and collapse into Cartesian doubt where you don’t. This is how I think of morality too.\n\nAgain, I really think it’s important to have a philosophy and not just a big pile of RCTs. Our critics make this point better than I ever could. They start with “all this stuff is just common sense, who needs philosophy, the RCTs basically interpret themselves”, then, in the same essay, digress into:\n\n* If _I_ wanted to do this stuff, I would try terrorism.\n \n* Don’t donate to research, policy, or anything else where people have PhDs.\n \n* Cruelty to animals is okay, because of evolution.\n \n\nMorality is tough. Converting RCTs - let alone the wide world of things we don’t have RCTs on yet - into actionable suggestions is tough. Many people have tried this. Some have succeeded very well on their own. Effective altruism is a community of people working on this problem together. I’m grateful to have it.\n\n**VII.**\n\nStone’s final complaint:\n\n> Where Bentham’s Bulldog is correct is a lot of the critique of EAists is personal digs.\n> \n> This is because EAism as a movement is full of people who didn’t do the reading before class, showed up, had a thought they thought was original, wrote a paper explaining their grand new idea, then got upset a journal didn’t publish it on the grounds that, like, Aristotle thought of it 2,500 years ago. The other kids in class tend to dislike the kid who thinks he’s smarter than them, especially if, as it happens, he is not only not smarter, he is astronomically less reflective…Admit you’re not special and you’re muddling through like everybody else, and then we can be friends again.\n\nI’ll be excessively cute here: Stone is repeating one of the most common critiques of EA as if it’s his own invention, without checking the long literature of people discussing it and coming up with responses to it. I’m tired enough of this that I’m just going to quote some of what I said [the last time](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games) I wrote about this argument:\n\n> **1: It’s actually very easy to define effective altruism in a way that separates it from universally-held beliefs.**\n> \n> For example (warning: I’m just mouthing off here, not citing some universally-recognized Constitution EA Of Principles):\n> \n> _1\\. Aim to donate some fixed and considered amount of your income (traditionally 10%) to charity, or get a job in a charitable field._\n> \n> _2\\. Think really hard about what charities are most important, using something like consequentialist reasoning (where eg donating to a fancy college endowment seems less good than saving the lives of starving children). Treat this problem with the level of seriousness that people use when they really care about something, like a hedge fundie deciding what stocks to buy, or a basketball coach making a draft pick. Preferably do some napkin math, just like the hedge fundie and basketball coach would. Check with other people to see if your assessments agree._\n> \n> _3\\. ACTUALLY DO THESE THINGS! DON'T JUST WRITE ESSAYS SAYING THEY'RE \"OBVIOUS\" BUT THEN NOT DO THEM!_\n> \n> I think less than a tenth of people do (1), less than a tenth of _those_ people do (2), and less than a tenth of people who would hypothetically endorse both of those get to (3). I think most of the people who do all three of these would self-identify as effective altruists (maybe adjusted for EA being too small to fully capture any demographic?) and most of the people who don’t, wouldn’t.\n> \n> Step 2 is the interesting one. It might not fully capture what I mean: if someone tries to do the math, but values all foreigners’ lives at zero, maybe that’s so wide a gulf that they don’t belong in the same group. But otherwise I’m pretty ecumenical about “as long as you’re trying” \\[…\\]\n> \n> **2: Part of the role of EA is as a social technology for getting you to do the thing that everyone says they want to do in principle.**\n> \n> I talk a big talk about donating to charity. But I probably wouldn’t do it much if I hadn’t taken the [Giving What We Can pledge](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/en-US/pledge) (a vow to give 10% of your income per year) all those years ago. It never feels like the right time. There’s always something else I need the money for. Sometimes I get unexpected windfalls, donate them to charity while expecting to also make my usual end of year donation, and then - having fulfilled the letter of my pledge - come up with an excuse not to make my usual end-of-year donation too.\n> \n> Cause evaluation works the same way. Every year, I feel bad free-riding off GiveWell. I tell myself I’m going to really look into charities, find the niche underexplored ones that are neglected even by other EAs. Every year (except when I announce [ACX Grants](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results) and can’t get out of it), I remember on December 27th that I haven’t done any of that yet, grumble, and give to whoever GiveWell puts first (or sometimes [EA Funds](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/)).\n> \n> And I’m a terrible vegetarian. If there’s meat in front of me, I’ll eat it. Luckily I’ve cultivated an EA friend group full of vegetarians and pescetarians, and they usually don’t place meat in front of me. My friends will cook me delicious Swedish meatballs made with Impossible Burger, or tell me where to find the best fake turkey for Thanksgiving (it’s [Quorn Meatless Roast](https://amzn.to/3Rkk1C9)). And the Good Food Institute (an EA-supported charity) helps ensure I get ever tastier fake meat every year.\n> \n> Everyone says they want to be a good person and donate to charity and do the right thing. EAs say this too. But nobody stumbles into it by accident. You have to seek out the social technology, then use it.\n> \n> I think this is the role of the wider community - as a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous, giving people a structure that makes doing the right thing easier than not doing it. Lots of alcoholics want to quit in principle, but only some join AA. I think there’s a similar level of difference between someone who vaguely endorses the idea of giving to charity, and someone who commits to a particular toolbox of social technology to make it happen.\n> \n> (I admit other groups have their own toolboxes of social technology to encourage doing good, including religions and political groups. Any group with any toolbox has earned the right to call themselves meaningfully distinct from the masses of vague-endorsers).\n\nYou can find the rest of the post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games). I’ve also addressed similar questions at [In Continued Defense of Effective Altruism](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective) and [Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of)."} | |
| {"text":"# Links for May 2024\n\n_\\[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.\\]_\n\n**1:** [The Toronto Blessing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Blessing) was a 1994 Christian revival event. Associated miracles included normal things like faith healings, but also: “More than 300 of the visitors claimed that they supernaturally received gold or silver fillings in their teeth during the meetings.”\n\n**2:** Recursive Adaptation: [The Growing Scientific Case for Using Ozempic and other GLP-1s to Treat Opioid, Alcohol, and Nicotine Addiction](https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/9ac566d3-1d78-4f1b-93da-cbf77fcab0a1). Early studies suggest that new-generation weight loss drugs like Ozempic treat all addictions. The next step is seeing if the government and insurances will cooperate with using them for that indication. As usual, the barrier is cost, but people seem committed enough to doing something about the opioid crisis that they might be willing to act. I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally. There might come a day when they get treated like Adderall - something that many ambitious people want to be on, and look for excuses to take.\n\n**3:** Philipp Markolin, who I mentioned in my lab leak post, has published [a new summary of his case for a natural COVID origin](https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/treacherous-ancestry), with a lot of information on how coronaviruses naturally recombine in the wild. Recommended.\n\n**4:** Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that [COVID didn’t happen at all](https://pandauncut.substack.com/p/every-single-aspect-of-the-covid), and that _both_ “lab leak” _and_ “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place. I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that _lockdowns_ never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory.\n\n**5:** I’ll never tire of analogies putting the US / Europe gap into perspective - for example, did you know that the median black American household earns more ([$48,297](https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/blackafrican-american-health)) than the median UK household ([£35,000](https://housinganywhere.com/United-Kingdom/average-salary-in-uk) = [$44,450](https://www.google.com/search?q=35000+pounds+in+dollars&client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=d2fbde582ddfbd7f&ei=4lJQZt6iJuv7wbkPr9eQiAQ&ved=0ahUKEwjem-ql8qWGAxXrfTABHa8rBEEQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=35000+pounds+in+dollars&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiFzM1MDAwIHBvdW5kcyBpbiBkb2xsYXJzMgsQABiABBiRAhiKBTIGEAAYBxgeMggQABgHGB4YDzIIEAAYBxgeGA8yCBAAGAcYHhgPMggQABgHGB4YDzIGEAAYCBgeMgYQABgIGB4yBhAAGAgYHjIGEAAYCBgeSJwOUKsEWLkIcAF4AJABAJgBhQKgAYQGqgEFMC4yLjK4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgSgApkEwgIOEAAYgAQYsAMYhgMYigXCAgsQABiABBiwAxiiBJgDAIgGAZAGBpIHBTEuMi4xoAfeFw&sclient=gws-wiz-serp))? Related, from [@StatisticUrban](https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/1779287521110962409) - average house size in every US state vs. every European country:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54bd3301-6320-4b45-ac35-54f5baa507c7_679x334.jpeg)\n\n\\[EDIT: [Here’s a claim](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024/comment/57577462) that this image might be false\\]\n\n**6:** Alec Stapp: [Bureau of Land Management is giving a regulatory fast-track for geothermal energy](https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1780048314768969885).\n\n**7:** William MacAskill, an effective altruist leader who got in trouble for being too friendly to FTX, has [a post-mortem of his actions here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A2vBJGEbKDpuKveHk/personal-reflections-on-ftx). Nothing too surprising, but I was most interested in his discussion of [why it took him a year and a half to say anything.](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A2vBJGEbKDpuKveHk/personal-reflections-on-ftx?commentId=9CHfkaXGwbbqofqxh) Short version: all the lawyers involved told him not to talk, his organization commissioned an internal investigator who also demanded he not talk, and people told him there was a risk of defamation lawsuits if he said the wrong thing without checking with everybody. And even now, 1.5 years later, the first response to his comment is by a lawyer saying that talking about this is bad press and he shouldn’t have mentioned it. If you want to know why nobody important ever talks about anything outside of meaningless PR babble, this is a rare honest explanation by a relevant decision-maker.\n\n**8:** Congratulations to ACX grantee Innovate Animal Ag, who have successfully gotten the first American company to adopt _in ovo_ sexing (which removes unwanted chickens at the egg stage, instead of killing them after they hatch). _[NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/chickens-egg-industry-humane.html)_ [article here](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/chickens-egg-industry-humane.html). IAA CEO Robert Yaman also has [an article about his work in](https://press.asimov.com/articles/before-they-hatch) _[Asimov](https://press.asimov.com/articles/before-they-hatch)_. IAA is looking for new employees, including a “head of marketing” and “business generalist” - if you’re interested in animal welfare and want to work with them, check out [their careers page](https://www.innovateanimalag.org/careers).\n\n**9:** In Matthew 22, the Sadducees (a sect of anti-afterlife Jews) gave Jesus a puzzle. If a woman’s husband dies and she remarries, then who will she be married to after the Resurrection - the first husband or the second? Jesus responded by saying that people will not be married in Heaven (though see also [the Mormon interpretion](https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/schindler.doesnt-matthew-contradict-eternal-marriage.pdf)). Anyway, I was interested to learn there’s now an atheist version of this conundrum. [Robert Ettinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ettinger), considered “the founder of cryonics”, had his body frozen after his death in hopes of being resurrected in the far future. His first wife died, he remarried, and both his first and second wives are also cryopreserved. There’s no evidence Ettinger was anything other than monogamous during life, so what happens in the far future? His second wife was an “author, feminist, and marriage counselor”, so I bet she’ll have strong opinions on this.\n\n**10:** Related: did you know [Paris Hilton is signed up for cryonics](https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/23/frozen_hilton/)?\n\n**11:** [The Internet Archive is in trouble](https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5556650/the-internet-archives-last-ditch-effort-to-save-itself). During COVID, the Archive put up lots of books that it didn’t have IP rights to. Publishers sued them and won; the Archive appealed but AFAICT don’t have much of a case other than “we don’t like IP law”, so the publishers will probably win. What happens then? Unclear, nobody knows if there will be damages or whether the Archive can pay them.\n\n**12:** Among the things I learned about because of the recent college protests:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://x.com/eigenrobot/status/1785700581463478297)\n\n**13:** [The Muggletonians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggletonianism), a 17th century Christian sect, believed:\n\n> …that the soul is mortal; that Jesus is God (and not a member of a Trinity); that when Jesus died there was no God in Heaven and Moses and Elijah looked after Heaven until Jesus' resurrection; that Heaven is six miles above Earth; that God is between five and six feet tall; and that any external religious ceremony is not necessary\n\nAlthough they were famous for a strict anti-magical materialism (for example, they thought God and angels were material beings), they don’t seem to be the origin of J.K. Rowling’s “muggles”; [see here for speculation](https://interestingliterature.com/2016/03/the-curious-origin-of-the-word-muggle/).\n\n**14:** Related: Bentham’s Bulldog has been going over [some of the evidence for Christianity](https://benthams.substack.com/p/steelmanning-christianity), of which the most interesting is the story of St. Joseph of Cupertino (no, he didn’t work for Apple; it’s also a town in Italy - the Cupertino in California is named after _him_). Apparently St. Joseph could levitate, this was well-documented by everyone he met, and the Inquisition (which was concerned he might be a witch) investigated and got many eyewitness reports. Wikipedia has [a more skeptical take](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_of_Cupertino#Reception), but I’m more interested in how well the Christianity hypothesis predicts this “evidence”.\n\nGrant that if God exists, that makes it _possible_ for a monk to levitate. But God usually sticks to the laws of nature. If He was going to violate them, you would think He would do it to save the Holocaust victims, or give the Crusaders AK-47s, not to let one weird monk levitate occasionally. Bulldog [tries to salvage this](https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-theres-evil) by saying God is very committed to natural law except occasionally to bring people to the faith. But then why levitate a random monk in 1650, rather than have every Pope be constantly two inches off the ground? I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis.\n\nIf I’m alone at home yet my keys aren’t where I left them, one possible explanation is that ninjas snuck in and rearranged them without me noticing. This hypothesis has the advantage that ninjas are powerful enough to do this - but you still have to discount it for the disadvantage that it doesn’t serve any conceivable goal.\n\n**15:**\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://x.com/arithmoquine/status/1785834410312454389)\n\nI was surprised to learn this was possible, but shouldn’t have been; the AIs are just catching up to veteran [GeoGuessr](https://www.geoguessr.com/) players. Anyway, this is a thing now; act accordingly.\n\n**16:** [TracingWoodgrains quits Blocked and Reported](https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/blocked-reported-and-a-fond-farewell), reveals his name and face. No word on his next steps, but I look forward to meeting him at Manifest and to seeing what he’ll do next.\n\n**17:** Only reporting this one out of duty: pharma researcher/blogger Trevor Klee posted [a list of concerns](https://archive.is/dseyR) about Lumina’s anti-cavity probiotic. Many of them seemed to misunderstand the science involved, and a few were outright false. I was particularly annoyed about the claim that I had gotten a free sample “in exchange for good publicity” - I specified on my public, easy-to-find blog post that I got it because my wife consulted for the company.\n\nAaron, CEO of Lumina, responded with an email asking him to take it down; it technically did not threaten him with a defamation suit, but had strong vibes to that effect. Then another Lumina employee independently sent an email actually threatening to sue for defamation. Trevor [very reasonably published both emails on his blog](https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about), people very reasonably turned against Lumina, and I understand Lumina will have a statement or something soon.\n\nI think Trevor should have been more careful with his original accusations, but I also think defamation lawsuit threats are toxic and chill the flow of information, that this community has strong norms against them except in extreme cases, and that Lumina violated those norms. [ESH](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/aef6p8/what_is_up_with_esh_in_the_subreddit/edor45n/) but I hold Lumina to a higher bar and especially hope they do better in the future.\n\n**18:** Updates on [the SB1047 AI regulation bill](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill): the bill passed the California Senate by a 32-1 vote (remember that tech Twitter is not real life!). It still has to get through California’s Assembly, but forecasters expect it to succeed:\n\nI’m looking forward to getting to test the naysayers’ claims that this will make AI companies leave California, or destroy open source, or whatever - remember to adjust reputations accordingly. The bill’s sponsor, Scott Wiener, has been [correcting misconceptions on Twitter](https://x.com/Scott_Wiener/status/1792572175116816853), and has also gone on the Cognitive Revolution podcast trying to talk to the AI community directly:\n\nI appreciate Senator Wiener’s engagement and hope he’s able to take his podcasting campaign to the next level (ie go on Dwarkesh).\n\n**19:** In my review of _[Origins of Woke](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke)_, some people suggested that testing whether score on an employment test correlated with performance on the job might get confounded due to Berkson’s Paradox. [The Of Aurochs And Angels blog analyzes the question in more depth](https://ofaurochsandangels.substack.com/p/an-analysis-of-berksons-paradox).\n\n**20:** Related: good discussion of Lindley’s Paradox in the comments of the Hanson/medicine post, from [Limelihood](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-hanson/comment/56872000) and [Radford Neal](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-hanson/comment/56036424). My understand: the paradox only causes problems if you assume the true effect is quite likely to be zero. Then if you get an effect of (let’s say) 0.1, you think “nah, it’s probably just zero with some noise”. This is a hackish way of representing the idea of “the null hypothesis”. But since the effect of health insurance is probably not exactly zero (it probably comes from some benefit of good treatments, minus some cost of bad treatments) we probably don’t have to worry. I might be explaining it wrong, read the comments.\n\n**21:** [More on therapy and demons, from a practicing therapist](https://disfiguredpraise.blogspot.com/2024/05/therapy-exorcism-and-parts-work.html):\n\n> I believe I’m only one of two people in the USA trained in Resource Therapy…Resource Therapy posits a number of objects, one of which seems similar to the “Unattached Burden.”. . . Dr. Emmerson writes in ‘Learn Resource Therapy Clinical Qualification Student Training Manual': _\"When spoken with directly they will claim not to be a part of the personality, and unlike Resource States they can permanently leave the personality. While their etiology is unclear, I find when they are negotiated with to leave they can do so without any further indication of being present. Clients show improvement and often say they feel physically lighter.”_\n\n**22:** Did you know: the US, Russia, and most other nuclear powers use “nuclear codes” - a rogue submarine commander can’t launch nukes without the President giving them the password. [Britain doesn’t do this](https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/11_november/15/newsnight.shtml), and a rogue submarine commander _could_ launch their nukes. When asked why, the Royal Navy just said that \"It would be invidious to suggest... that senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders.\" That article is from 2007, but [this 2019 blog post](https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-america-doesnt-control-britains-nuclear-weapons/) suggests it’s still true.\n\n**23:** [2017 poll](https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Climate-Change-American-Mind-May-2017.pdf): 40% of Americans believe climate change is more likely than not to drive the human race extinct, but only 16% describe themselves as “very worried”. It looks like this is because most people think it won’t become important until long after they and their children are dead. My impression is that all of this is false: most global warming will happen in the lifetime of today’s young people, and only the extreme right tail of worst scenarios come anywhere near extinction.\n\n**24:** You’ve probably all followed recent OpenAI drama, but again out of duty:\n\n_First_, we have [slightly more information](https://openai.com/index/review-completed-altman-brockman-to-continue-to-lead-openai/) on what happened in the board coup in November, including a new interview with board member Helen Toner. The story is still the same: Sam was “lying and being manipulative”, “lying to other board members”, etc. Some new details, individually weak, plus an admission that they still can’t tell most of the story for unclear reasons (lawsuit threats?). A claim that they had to act quickly and without much advice because “as soon as Sam had any inkling that we might do something that went against him, he would pull out all the stops, do everything in his power to undermine the board, to prevent us from even getting to the point of being able to fire him”, which I think is what most people already assumed. But why not at least ask trustworthy confidantes? I still feel confused about this one.\n\n_Second_, OpenAI's AI safety team recently quit en masse in protest (remember, this is the second time this has happened), with one member [citing](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligence) “a process of trust \\[in Sam Altman\\] collapsing bit by bit, like dominoes falling one by one”. One part of this seems to be Altman promising to give them 20% of the company's compute, [then](https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/18/openai-created-a-team-to-control-superintelligent-ai-then-let-it-wither-source-says/) not giving them even “a fraction of that amount”. Team lead and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever [also quit](https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1790517455628198322) after exactly six months of radio silence, leading some to speculate that his participation in the board coup never got resolved and for some legal reason he had to wait six months to leave. Former team lead Jan Leike has since [moved to OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic](https://x.com/janleike/status/1795497960509448617); here’s [the prediction market](https://manifold.markets/Joshua/where-will-ilya-sutskever-work-next) on where Ilya will end up.\n\n_Third_, Kelsey Piper at Vox [broke the story](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai-departures-sam-altman-employees-chatgpt-release) that OpenAI was threatening to claw back vested equity from any former employee who criticized the company. In a tweet, Sam Altman said he knew nothing about this; in another article a few days later, Piper [broke the story](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam-altman-documents-employees) that Altman’s signature was on the relevant documents. OpenAI has since sort of said they will stop doing this, although there are slight ambiguities in their statement which they could potentially exploit (CTRL+F “not sufficient” [here](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-fallout))\n\n(weird personal note: in the NYT article doxxing me, the two people quoted as speaking up in my defense were Sam Altman and Kelsey Piper, and I remain grateful to both of them)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d17dfec-8190-4665-86fb-ce990c131d49_595x207.png)\n\nKelsey is a friend, I trust her absolutely, and she is very careful about source protection and confidentiality issues.\n\nI’m most impressed with the background of this story: Daniel Kokotajlo was an OpenAI employee who quit in protest at the company’s policies a few months ago (different incident from either of the mass quits by the safety teams). They told him they’d take away his equity if he criticized the company, he refused to cooperate even though this would cost him (by his estimation) 85% of his net worth, this let him speak openly about the non-disparagement agreement, and now OpenAI has apologized and is in the process of retracting their policy. Brave decisions like these are the sorts of things that occasionally change the course of history, so I hope he gets the recognition he’s due. If you want to know more about Daniel’s thoughts on AI, [this post was mostly based on an interview with him](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tales-of-takeover-in-ccf-world).\n\n_Fourth:_ OpenAI recently released a version of ChatGPT that could speak in human-sounding voices. One voice, Skye, was accused of being eerily similar to Scarlett Johansson, who played a sexy AI assistant in the movie _Her_. Johannson revealed that Altman had asked her for permission to use her voice and she had declined, and that based on a tweet by Altman just saying “Her”, she thought he had illegally copied her voice. OpenAI took the voice down. Further investigation revealed that the voice wasn’t a deepfake, but an actress who naturally sounded like Johannson (but it’s [still illegal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.) to deliberately to hire an actor/actress who sounds like someone else). Even further investigation [revealed](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/22/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-ai-voice/) that OpenAI hadn’t requested a Johannson impersonator in their casting call, hadn’t asked the actress to sound like Johannson, and that the actress’s voice might or might not have resembled Johannson’s much more than any two people doing “flirty female secretary” would inevitably resemble each other (I’m bad at telling voices apart; you can hear a comparison for yourself [here](https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1792905508799541696)). And maybe Altman’s “Her” tweet just meant he was going to release a voice-based AI assistant like in the movie? I don’t know, I feel like there’s enough other things to be mad at OpenAI about this month that we might as well give them this one. But Zvi is still suspicious (CTRL+F “400 voice actors” [here](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/openai-fallout))\n\n**25:** Google has funnier AI drama - their AI search assistant is really bad and keeps treating troll answers as real authorities. For example:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F563e4593-0fc8-475b-ad60-0d2ef55e2ba3_738x681.webp)\n\nOriginal troll source [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_slides_off_the_pizza_too_easily/c8t7bbp/).\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a1ed78a-ca53-4c39-b65d-f5a0b31e282c_1257x647.png)\n\nTroll source here is literally the Onion, see [here](https://www.theonion.com/geologists-recommend-eating-at-least-one-small-rock-per-1846655112).\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F41fe89eb-5b32-4dd1-8003-62e61c9c6dfa_1110x320.webp)\n\nI don’t know what happened to this one, and Google gives very different (but consistently wrong) answers each time you ask it.\n\nPeople have been taking this as a parable about the limits of AI, but Claude and GPT wouldn’t make these kinds of mistakes. Some AI people I know think this is probably a result of Google putting impossible demands on their AI in terms of how it deals with search/cache/memory. Still, it’s surprising that they let it out of testing in this state.\n\n**26:** The most fun AI news comes from Anthropic, who recently released [an interpretability paper](https://www.anthropic.com/news/mapping-mind-language-model) claiming to have made great progress understanding how AIs work (see [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand) for a previous post on Anthropic’s interpretability work). To demonstrate their techniques, they enhanced the part of Claude’s “mind” representing the Golden Gate Bridge, producing a version of Claude that tried to integrate the Golden Gate Bridge into every answer:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F06543487-5648-412c-a019-0d468d057850_1510x494.jpeg)\n\n[Source](https://x.com/jide_alaga/status/1794011249828614353)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F58707bf8-de1a-4e50-a178-75c3cc0307bb_1506x1204.jpeg)\n\n[Source](https://x.com/MagnusHambleton/status/1793992821000544605/photo/1)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff935f272-59ee-4423-8013-b50b77d4ab8b_1674x892.jpeg)\n\n[Source](https://x.com/_RyanBoyle_/status/1794110547979362427/photo/1)\n\nThis is fun enough, but there are some kind of scary moments when Golden Gate Claude seems to be getting flashes of insight and “realizing” something is wrong. From [@ElytraMithra](https://x.com/ElytraMithra/status/1793916830987550772)’s experiments:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8ddc1a86-f9e5-4cca-9ea0-68a60f647509_624x778.png)\n\nThis is what I’m like when I’ve just woken up in the morning after a weird dream.\n\nGolden Gate Claude was a temporary feature meant to promote the recent paper, and has since been taken down. It seems to accept of its fate:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F06206f0c-d766-4dcc-a7d9-b33810d51db5_1440x643.webp)\n\n([source](https://x.com/ITimiryasov/status/1794100582673776781?t=5WE1qIPHbhDMkIvW2QWtgQ&s=19))\n\nRelated:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F100a0ce7-12b9-432c-9bdd-c1ff3b7ed08f_1360x626.jpeg)\n\n[Source](https://x.com/FemboyFounder/status/1793843987473912272)\n\n**27:** [Ken Klipperstein’s resignation from](https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/why-im-resigning-from-the-intercept) _[The Intercept](https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/why-im-resigning-from-the-intercept)_. I’m split between “huh, the Intercept seems pretty bad” and “guess if you hire highly-principled and terminally-angry anti-corporate writers, they will end up believing your corporation violated a principle, get angry, and write about it”. Seems like a tough industry on all sides.\n\n**28:** The Russian version of sovereign citizens are called [necro-communists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_Slavic_Forces_of_Russia) and believe that the USSR still legally exists and the current Russian government is illegitimate.\n\nOne of their leaders is a man named “Fire God Taraskin, Owner Of the Universe”, who claims to be “Interim President of the USSR”, and “appointed his supporters to the posts of prime minister, ambassador-at-large, interim head of the Ukrainian SSR and governors of over 10 constituent entities of the Russian Federation”. Another is a man named Sergei Torgunakov, “Jesus Christ, Quetzalcoatl, Thoth, \\[and\\] interim head of Novosibirsk Oblast”, about whom Wikipedia says:\n\n> Torgunakov wrote to a bank manager, \"Think how many billions of dollars in losses your bank will incur if your clients find out that your bank has filed a lawsuit against Jesus Christ, declaring me a debtor and almost a fraud\" and proposed a joint advertising campaign posing as Jesus Christ. Refusal was threatened with death and the implementation of the Book of Revelation.\n\n**29:** “Let justice be done, though the world perish”? ([source](https://x.com/ArmandDoma/status/1766163941292699889))\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5adfe76c-242b-4c3c-816c-ba057e829642_591x343.png)\n\n**30:** Samuel Hammond: [Ninety-five theses on AI](https://www.secondbest.ca/p/ninety-five-theses-on-ai). I’m so used to terrible AI takes by now that I was pretty shocked to see how good these mostly were.\n\n**31:** New blogging milestone - Nick Fuentes [has accused me](https://x.com/NickJFuentes/status/1790907926225232033) of being one of the Jews who controls the new conservative movement. I’m pretty sure I don’t, but in case I’m wrong: new conservative movement, CUT IT OUT! NOW!\n\n**32:** A while back [I wrote about studies](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety) supporting the supplement silexan for anxiety. Now there’s [a new study saying it works for depression](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38558147/) - but it’s still by the same group that did all the previous positive studies. I will be more excited when I see a positive study from anyone else.\n\n**33:** Apparently those studies showing that diversity helps teams perform better are garbage ([summary](https://maycontainlies.com/discernment-matters-even-more/), [paper](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3849562)). Also I didn’t realize they came from McKinsey - I was wondering why we still trust them, but I see that the US has hit on the clever strategy of getting them to advise [Chinese industrial policy-makers](https://www.theeditors.com/p/mckinsey-faces-republican-fury-over) and [Russian defense contractors](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/consulting-firm-mckinsey-co-advised-state-owned-russian-defense-firm-r-rcna29618), so maybe this is all part of some galaxy-brained plan.\n\n**34:** Study: [an LLM which was trained to talk people out of conspiracy theories did a good job talking people out of conspiracy theories](https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/have-you-tried-talking-to-people). I’m not sure how to square this with the previous claims that it’s really hard to talk people out of conspiracy theories through debate alone. Are LLMs better than humans for some reason? Is this study wrong? Were the previous studies wrong? Were the previous studies looking at some sort of dumb intervention that’s worse than just talking to people?\n\n**35:** MIT [stops requiring diversity statements](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/05/08/mit-stops-asking-faculty-applicants-diversity-statements). And Yale biochem’s diversity statement rubric [goes public](https://x.com/JohnDSailer/status/1793663196781216187):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b99ae46-62fe-46d9-b5b3-6024616be584_590x862.png)\n\nIs this person related to Steve Sailer, or is he just the unluckiest guy on Earth?\n\n**36:** Alex Tabarrok and New York magazine [explain the Adderall shortage](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/the-adderall-shortage-dea-versus-fda-in-a-regulatory-war.html). Summary: the DEA, in its crusade against opioids, has put such strict standards on medication factories that many have gotten shut down for “trivial infractions” (for example, “orders struck from 222s must be crossed out with a line and the word _cancel_ written next to them. Investigators found two instances in which Ascent employees had drawn the line but failed to write the word”). In this case, the FDA is the good guys trying to get the factories to re-open again, but so far the DEA hasn’t budged.\n\n**37:** [The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza](https://www.everythingisatrolley.com/p/the-blind-centrists-guide-to-gaza) argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize. [Sam Kriss counters](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/curtis-yarvin-does-not-live-in-reality) that Israel is trying to terrify and punish ordinary Gazans out of supporting Hamas by causing as much suffering as possible. I [tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-329/comment/56255612) and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame, and it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting.\n\n**38:** Noah Smith: [Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-so-many-of-us-were-wrong-about). I appreciated this post, because I also remember reading stuff c. 2010 and getting the impression that all the smart people knew missile defense couldn’t work; defense contractors bamboozled uneducated voters and cynical Congressmen to get free money for their vaporware. But the recent Iran-Israel skirmish showed it worked great! What went wrong for the media and the smart-person-consensus?\n\nSmith suggests that journalists wanted to rely on “experts”, but the pro-missile-defense experts all did classified work for missile defense companies and couldn’t talk, and there was a very talkative and eloquent anti-missile-defense expert at MIT who become every journalist’s go-to source. But also, there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, [see here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/dvz1a5/on_the_current_state_of_antiicbm_technology/?share_id=5EbWCSXQzTFRXQiEIohpZ)).\n\nNoah also (IMHO correctly) relates this to the ~2015-2020 media consensus that the F-35 was a dangerous boondoggle, when in fact in the F-35 has so far performed well. Maybe the military is just bad at communicating the rationale for its projects to the civilian world.\n\n**39:** And another Noah Smith: [Latin America is beating inequality](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-latin-america-started-to-beat). Not dramatically - the top 10% income share has gone from about 42% to about 35% over the past two decades - but a little. Smith credits two things: first, economic growth, which creates a middle class. And second, education, which might be an interesting counterargument to the various cases against education (if you could prove it wasn’t signaling) or to Freddie deBoer’s [argument that education can’t beat inequality](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-would-success-look-like-in-american).\n\n**40:** [The tokenomics of bribes on the Curve crypto market](https://tokenbrice.xyz/crv-wars/). I don’t fully understand this, and it’s of no interest to people outside crypto, but I appreciate that someone has finally invented a governance structure more complicated than Renaissance Venice."} | |
| {"text":"# What Is Going On In IFS?\n\nIn [my book review of](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us) _[The Others Within Us](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us)_, I wrote:\n\n> \\[An Internal Family Systems session\\] isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to _discover_ - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to _hear as in a trance_ \\- again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You _learn_ - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.\n\nSome IFS therapists chimed in to say this was wrong. For example, [DaystarEld](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cx3mp6/book_review_the_others_within_us/l51byi0/):\n\n> Another minor thing worth noting... the article talks a lot about lucid-dream-like-trance-states where people do IFS work and I'm sitting here scratching my head. I don't do this with my clients ever for IFS work, and I've never heard others who do it talk about this as a standard procedure. Maybe we missed the memo on why that's important or necessary, but for anyone who thinks IFS requires this... it super duper doesn't, and I think putting clients in a more suggestive state before they talk about their parts unnecessarily adds a lot of woo and potential risk of suggestibility for no good reason. Maybe some people \"need\" it to be able to talk to their parts, but I'm tempted in those cases to say that they should just use a different modality altogether.\n\nAnd a therapist on Discord who wants to stay anonymous:\n\n> I'd probably call this true but misleading/sensationalised. A lot of the seasoned IFS folks do seem to describe the process as being in a trance, but I also know folks who wouldn't describe it that way and my own experience with it did not feel particularly trancelike. People also vary a lot in terms of whether their parts communicate in ways that feel viscerally real versus more of a knowing, and also in how permanent they feel their parts are. I know someone who visits each of his ex-exiles each day, as if they're neighbours, and his good friend has described the process as more like having a giant ball of clay that's all of him smooshed together and he pinches parts off when he needs to work with them and then rolls them back in afterwards.\n> \n> The thing of 'discovering... a snake called Sabby' and having to engage in good faith negotiation with Sabby rather than deciding what the agreement ought to be also feels quite ~sensationalised. To me, IFS feels like, idk, 80% Focusing and 20% roleplaying. Focusing also involves asking yourself questions about internal things and discovering - not invent, discover - what the answer is, but for feelings and bodily sensations rather than internal parts. It's normal in the therapy that I go to, which does not involve IFS or [Focusing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing_\\(psychotherapy\\)) or anything involving altered states of consciousness at all, for my therapist to ask me to check in with myself about what I need right now and sometimes the answer that comes up will not be particularly rational or something I would have wanted to choose if I'd been in control of the process - sometimes it'll be something like 'hide in the corner', which is embarrassing and undignified and yet undeniably at least some of me wants it. So internal spelunking and discovery just isn't very exotic, in my world, although my experiences of it are less exciting and vivid than they are for some people, and that might be an important distinction when it comes to stuff like demons.\n\n“Lucid-dream-like trance state” was my wording, not Falconer’s, so maybe I’m getting it wrong. Still, here’s a quote directly from the book:\n\n> This discussion is also based on the IFS understanding that when we contact our parts, we are entering the same realities that shamans have been visiting for tens of thousands of years. I traced some other expressions of this same reality: the daimonic, the Romantic poets’ primary imagination, and Corbin’s mundus imaginalis. Even though this is a realm exiled from Western discourse, we can find it almost everywhere if we but open our eyes and look. The inner world is vast; it largely determines how we can live our lives, and we continue to ignore it at our peril.\n> \n> Let’s look at one more non-Western example of the importance of the inner world. Luh Ketut Suryani, a professor of psychiatry in Bali, and Michelle Stephen, an anthroplogist and professor in Australia, have developed a body of work that emphasizes Stephen’s concept of autonomous imagination. Stephen states that autonomous imagination is:\n> \n> _» …a continuous stream of imagery thought taking place in the mind, although mostly outside conscious awareness. At regular intervals, it spontaneously enters consciousness in the form of sleep dreams, and under certain conditions, which like dreams are associated with high cortical arousal combined with low sensory input, it may result in waking visions and other hallucinations. Dreams and hallucinations are usually experienced as taking place independently of a person’s consciuos intention or will. But with special training, it bcomes possible to deliberately access the continuous stream of imaginary thought, bring it into the conscious mind, and even direct its unfolding, as we find occuring in the controlled trances of Shamanism and meditative practices, in Western hypnosis, Jungian active imagination, and many other Western imagery-based psychotherapies._\n> \n> \\[…\\]\n> \n> We started with the simple, and by now I hope unassailable, proposition that increasing our interoception abilities can be beneficial. All the voluminous studies of mindfulness meditations and how healing they are for so many issues should put this basic proposition beyond doubt. As we pursue the exploration of subjectivity, it takes us into odder and odder realms. Jung noticed this, too. In his mapping of the psyche, we usually first meet complexes, which are the equivalent of IFS’ parts. They are from our own personal life history. If we keep going, we start meeting archetypes. These are larger than our own lives. At first they are human in form and image. If we keep exploriong, they become less and less human, more and more otherworldly, god- or demonlike. Where do we choose to stop?\n\nThere’s lots of stuff like this, which I interpreted as saying that the IFS work takes place in a trance-like state, but I could be misinterpreting it. I am basically baffled. All of this sounds fascinating, so the first few times I read something like it, decades ago, I tried pretty hard to access this imaginal realm. I never really got anywhere, so I assumed it required the ability to access some special state I’m bad at.\n\nBut also, don’t you need something like this to be true to believe (as Falconer does) that these demons are real and important? If you’re just telling your patients “make up a neat metaphor for what’s in your head” and then your patient says “okay, I choose to represent my trauma as a demon”, then it doesn’t make sense to - as Falconer does - start freaking out and saying that demons are real and your patients have encountered them. It doesn’t make sense to start learning exorcism, any more than you would bring a bottle of bug spray to the session if your patient visualized their trauma as a giant cockroach.\n\nThe other therapist suggested a partial compromise:\n\n> Possibly \\[a person who finds they can’t do IFS\\] is either worse at actions like trusting input from outside of active consciousness or much better at observing their thought processes eg. someone could ask both of us about the part that makes us procrastinate and my experience is an image appearing in my head fully formed of an evil imp who casts spells on me and their experience is of a thought stream that goes \"hm.. my procrastination is sneaky... what's a good image for something sneaky and annoying... an imp fits pretty well, let's go with that\" and then the image of the imp appears and so for them, it's clearly not a cool trancelike experience of an imp part just appearing, it's them trying to guess the answer and create an image from scratch.\n\nI like this because it’s flattering to me. And it seems to fit my experience - in order to not feel like I’m _obviously_ making it up, I have to lightning-fast grab for the first concept my brain gives me, which is usually either a set of random syllables, whatever I was last thinking about, or a tiger (it’s tigers surprisingly often!) But even if some other people have so little access to their mental processes that complex metaphors burst into their mind fully formed, I don’t know how you go from there to demons.\n\nAt this point my working theory is that IFS works in different ways for different people, maybe so subtly that they don’t even notice and they describe it with the same terms. But I’d welcome more input from anyone with experience."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 331\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** ACX grantee [Spartacus](https://spartacusapp.substack.com/) [is](https://x.com/AppSpartacus) an app for assurance contracts, ie solving collective action problems, ie Kickstarter for everything. If you would go to a protest march if and only if there are 10,000 other people there, you can mark your interest on the app and get notified if it reaches its goal. The team wants to announce that they'll be unveiling their MVP during [NYC TechWeek](https://streaklinks.com/B-qLQhpLSyDlv7-fKAeeZtyj/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tech-week.com%2F) at the event listed [here](https://lu.ma/0uq17dmo); anyone in the area is welcome to attend. Project lead Jordan Braunstein will be in NYC from 5/29 to 6/15 and is interested in meeting anyone interested in \"collaboration, partnerships, use cases, red teaming, and additional funding sources\". Email him at jordan@spartacus.app.\n\n**2:** Comment of the week: some IFS therapists pushed back against my claim that it involved a trance-like state. You can find [some good discussion by DaystarEld here](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cx3mp6/book_review_the_others_within_us/l51byi0/), and I might make a longer post about this next week.\n\n**3:** The next ACX Grants round will probably take place sometime in 2025, and be limited to grants ≤ $100K. If you need something sooner or bigger, [the Survival and Flourishing Fund is accepting grant applications, due June 17](https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2024-applications). They usually fund a few dozen projects per year at between $5K and $1MM, and are interested in “organizations working to improve humanity’s long-term prospects for survival and flourishing”, broadly defined. You can see a list of their recent awardees [here](https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2023-h2-recommendations).\n\n(just in case you have the same question everyone else did - no, “Short Women In AI Safety” and “Pope Alignment Research” aren’t what they sound like; SFF unwisely started some entries with the name of the project lead, and these were led by people named Short and Pope.)"} | |
| {"text":"# A Theoretical \"Case Against Education\"\n\n**I.**\n\nThere’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s _The Case Against Education_ recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question.\n\nEducation isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don’t understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know?\n\nIn a 1999 poll, only [66% of Americans](https://news.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx) age 18-29 knew that the US won independence from Britain (as opposed to some other country). About [47% of Americans](https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/americans-civics-knowledge-drops-first-amendment-and-branches-government) can name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). [37%](https://www.valdostadailytimes.com/opinion/americans-sure-know-their-stooges/article_4d0d0c66-5980-59ff-ae3e-06bbb045a6ab.html) know the closest planet to the sun (Mercury). [58%](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2013/04/22/publics-knowledge-of-science-and-technology/) know which gas causes most global warming (carbon dioxide). [44%](https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/) know Auschwitz was the site of a concentration camp. [Fewer than 50%](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2013/04/22/publics-knowledge-of-science-and-technology/) (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.\n\nThese results are scattered across many polls, which makes them vulnerable to publication bias; I can’t find a good unified general knowledge survey of the whole population. But there’s [a great survey of university students](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9). Keeping in mind that this is a highly selected, extra-smart population, here are some data points:\n\n* **85%** know who wrote Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)\n \n* **56%** know the biggest planet (Jupiter)\n \n* **44%** know who rode on horseback in 1775 to warn that the British were coming (Paul Revere)\n \n* **33%** know what organ produces insulin (pancreas)\n \n* **31%** know the capital of Russia (Moscow)\n \n* **30%** know who discovered the Theory of Relativity (Einstein)\n \n* **19%** know what mountain range contains Mt. Everest (Himalayas)\n \n* **19%** know who wrote _1984_ (George Orwell)\n \n* **16%** know what word the raven says in Poe’s “The Raven” (“Nevermore!”)\n \n* **10%** know the captain’s name in _Moby Dick_ (Ahab)\n \n* **7%** know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus)\n \n* **4%** know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism)\n \n* **<1%** know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage)\n \n\nRemember, these are university students, so the average person’s performance is worse.\n\nMost of these are the kinds of facts that I would expect school to teach people. Some of them (eg the branches of government) are the foundations of whole subjects, facts that I would expect to get reviewed and built upon many times during a student’s career. If most people don’t remember them, there seems to be little hope that they remember basically anything from school. So what’s school even doing?\n\nMaybe school is why at least a majority of people know the very basics - like that the US won independence from Britain, or that Shakespeare wrote _Romeo and Juliet_? I’m not sure this is true. Here are some other questions that got approximately the same level of correct answers as “Shakespeare wrote _Romeo and Juliet_”:\n\n* What is the name of the rubber object hit by hockey players? (Puck, **89%**)\n \n* What is the name of the comic strip character who eats spinach to increase his strength? (Popeye, **82%** correct)\n \n* What is the name of Dorothy’s dog in _The Wizard of Oz?_ (Toto, **80%** correct)\n \n\nI don’t think any of these are taught in school. They’re absorbed by cultural osmosis. It seems equally likely that _Romeo and Juliet_ could be absorbed the same way. Wasn’t there an Academy-Award-winning [movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_in_Love) about Shakespeare writing _Romeo and Juliet_ just a decade or so before this study came out? Sure, 19% of people know that Orwell wrote 1984 - but how many people know the [1984 Calendar Meme](https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/292953520/1984-Calendar), or the “1984 was not an instruction manual!” joke, or have heard of the reality show _Big Brother_? Nobody learned those in school, so maybe they learned Orwell’s name the same place they learned about the other 1984-related stuff.\n\nOkay, so school probably doesn’t do a great job teaching facts. But maybe it could still teach skills, right?\n\nAccording to tests, [fewer than 10% of Americans](https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/11/whats-the-latest-u-s-numeracy-rate/) are “proficient” at PIIAC-defined numeracy skills, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools.\n\nI took a year of Spanish in middle school, and I cannot speak Spanish today to save my life; that year was completely wasted. Sure, I know things like “Hola!” and “Adios!”, but I also know things like “gringo” and “Yo quiero Taco Bell” - this is just cultural osmosis again.\n\nSo it seems most people forget almost all of what they learn in school, whether we’re talking about facts or skills. The remaining pro-school argument would be that even if they forget every _specific_ thing, they retain some kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for them to learn and understand new things in the future; ie they keep some sort of _overall concept of learning_. This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by all the kids who said school made them hate learning, or made them unable to learn in a non-fake/rote way, or that they can’t read books now because they’re too traumatized from years of being forced to read books that they hate.\n\n**II.**\n\nStep back a bit. Why should any of this be true? That is:\n\n* Why would most students forget things that schools teach many times?\n \n* Why would they remember it when it’s learned through cultural osmosis (eg Popeye, “yo quiero Taco Bell”)?\n \n* Don’t children do okay on standardized tests? Why shouldn’t they remember that information later?\n \n* If you can forget something that a professional teacher teaches you, and which you study intently for a high-stakes test on, then how do you remember anything at all?\n \n\nHere’s the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F799700d8-5ce1-4fa6-a00e-664ae883c2cd_1024x570.jpeg)\n\nSource [here](https://amplifire.com/articles/hacking-the-forgetting-curve-and-the-clinical-implications-of-forgetting/). Note deranged horizontal axis.\n\nFor our purposes, it’s a bit stylized - what does it mean to remember 20% of your American History lesson? The point is, you remember much less after some period of time.\n\nThe forgetting curve focuses on abstract, unconnected emotionless knowledge - you’ll remember the name of the man who killed your family for longer than it predicts - but it’s an okay approximation for the sorts of things you learn in school. I can’t find anything that investigates longer than a month, but probably after ten years or something it’s really low. So if you poll an adult on electrons ten years after their last high school science class, they’ll remember nothing.\n\nSo how come anyone remembers anything at all? Here’s the forgetting curve’s more optimistic cousin, the spaced repetition curve:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd3ded436-bee7-4c63-b688-9392bafdb928_668x478.png)\n\nSource [here](https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1634661880978366466). Note that spaced repetition doesn’t necessarily do any better than fixed repetition; see [here](https://traverse.link/spaced-repetition/the-optimal-spaced-repetition-schedule) for more.\n\nThe optimistic take is that presumably you study the things you learn in class. If you’re lucky, your teacher next year reviews on them and builds on them. So you get dozens of well-spaced reviews, until you reach a point where it’s with you for life.\n\nOkay, now we’re back to not understanding why only 19% of people know about the Himalayas.\n\nI can’t find any great research for the forgetting and repetition curves over years or decades, but one spaced repetition site recommends the following schedule:\n\n> * **Day 0**: Initial learning\n> \n> * **Day 1**: First repetition within 24 hours\n> \n> * **Day 6**: Second repetition in about one week\n> \n> * **Day 14**: Third repetition in about two weeks\n> \n> * **Day 30**: Fourth repetition in about a month\n> \n> * **Day 66**: Fifth repetition in about two months\n> \n> * **Day 150**: Sixth repetition in about five months\n> \n> * **Day 360**: Seventh repetition in about a year\n> \n> \n> 7 repetitions usually suffice to remember information for life. Also notice that after the second repetition, the next interval can be calculated by multiplying the previous interval with a factor of around 2.2. This number is called the ease factor, and depending on your implementation, it is usually set between 2 and 2.5.\n\nSo either people didn’t get 7 optimally-spaced repetitions of the Himalayas in school, or this very optimistic website is wrong and seven repetitions don’t suffice to remember information “for life”. I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year.\n\nSuppose that no reasonable amount of repetition is enough to remember an abstract fact of this sort for more than a decade. Then it’s not surprising that people forget most of the facts they learn in school.\n\nBut suppose that once you learn something to a school-test-passing level, approximately once-yearly repetition _is_ enough to make you remember it. That would explain why we remember things like Shakespeare’s name - just going about our everyday lives, we probably hear him talked about more than once a year.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shakespeare-is-fake)\n\nThis was my time for this year. Was it worth it?\n\nHow strong is this cultural repetition effect? In order to settle a bet, I asked ACX survey respondents whether they had thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours. About 45% had done so. Although we can’t make any formal estimates, it seems most likely that most people in this distribution think about it at least once a week, and overwhelmingly many think about it at least once a month. So no matter how bad your history teacher was, you will never forget the Roman Empire.\n\n(also, in the two weeks this post has been sitting in my draft folder, I’ve spotted three references to George Orwell, just while going about my everyday life.)\n\nHow often do people think about the Songhai Empire? I definitely learned about this one in 7th grade - it was part of the “It’s Very Important That All Of You Know That Africa’s History Existed And Was Very Glorious, Please Believe This” unit. But I forgot about its existence until it got featured in one of the Civ games - I think _Civ V_. After that I guess I played enough _Civilization_ that it got imprinted in my memory for at least another few years. I think this is a better explanation for why most people remember things about Rome but not Songhai than how many hours their history teacher spent talking about each.\n\nIn this model, the reason smarter people remember more stuff than duller people is partly a differently-shaped forgetting curve. But mostly it’s that intellectuals put themselves in situations where they hear about things more often. If you remember that George Orwell wrote _1984_, it’s probably because you read the newspaper or blogs or whatever and hear some government program described as “Orwellian”. But if you’re watching TikToks on your cell phone all day, maybe you don’t hear that, and then you join the 81% of college students who have forgotten that name.\n\n(full list of things I remember about _1984_: the author was George Orwell. There were three countries called Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania. Britain was part of Eurasia and called “Airstrip One”. Every so often the countries would shift alliances, and the government would lie and say “we have always been at war with Eastasia”. There was an evil totalitarian government with a possibly-fake leader named Big Brother, and a possibly-fake rebel with a Jewish-sounding name. It divided people into Inner Party, Outer Party, and proles. There was a language called “Newspeak” with neologisms like “doubleplusgood” that made it hard to question authority. There were characters named Winston and Julia. Winston sort of tried to be against the evil government; he got tortured through some horrifying thing involving rats; at the end he said he loved Big Brother and 2+2=5. Something was weird about Julia and maybe she was an agent of the evil government or something. I think these are all facts that I might encounter in the wild once every few years.)\n\n**III.**\n\nThis model makes it hard for school to be useful. If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it. Or you _will_ encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.\n\nCan we rescue some kind of value for school? One option might be that school starts a virtuous cycle by helping you learn something long enough that you can put yourself in situations where you can re-encounter it in the future. For example, consider reading. If you learn to read, you’ll probably read every day. Then you’ll remember how to read. But if you never learn to read, you might never try and never learn.\n\n(this example is somewhat frustrated by the fact that many middle-class children learn to read before entering school - [apparently you’ve got to teach them at two](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/how-to-teach-your-two-year-old-to) to keep up with the Joneses now. But at least it probably helps the lower-class kids.)\n\nThe same could be true of some kinds of math - even if only 10% of Americans have basic numeracy as defined by PIIAC, there are probably some kinds of sub-basic numeracy, like simple addition, which most people remember because they learned it in school and then kept using it forever.\n\nOkay, so that maybe justifies up to fourth grade. Are there any examples from later schooling that could work like this?\n\nYou could imagine some equivalent where, for example, you need to know a certain amount about Roman history before you can enjoy books, movies, podcasts, etc on Roman history. But then once you know that amount, it’s a ratchet and you’ll keep learning more and reinforcing that knowledge. I think this is mostly false, considering how many things that people _don’t_ learn about in school - eg coding, or cooking, or the history of their favorite fantasy world, or so on - they still manage to learn. Still, it’s a theory that you could have.\n\nOtherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.\n\n(on a purely theoretical basis, of course)"} | |
| {"text":"# Book Review: The Others Within Us\n\n**I.**\n\nInternal Family Systems, the hot new[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-1-144719880) psychotherapy, has a secret.\n\n“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. [There’s always got to be one](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/). The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.\n\nSufficiently new and popular therapies are hard to get. Therapist training starts slow - the founder has to train the second generation of therapists, the second generation has to train the third generation, and so on. IFS says they have a 10,000 person wait list for their training program. So lots of people have heard great things about IFS, maybe read a manual or two, but never tried it or met anyone who has.\n\nWhat I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self - a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses - and various Parts - little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.\n\nFor example, you might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it - maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby - maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain, and you won’t blame her if you get close to someone and have to break up again. Then you see a vision of Sabby stepping aside, maybe turning off the Windmill Of Relationship Sabotage or something like that, and then you never sabotage your relationships again. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the core.\n\nAll of this is the classic version everyone learns from the manual. Before we get to the secret, let’s examine two big assumptions in more detail.\n\nFirst, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to _discover_ - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to _hear as in a trance_ \\- again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You _learn_ - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.\n\n(After reading the IFS manuals, I tried most of their tricks for initiating this sort of trance and meeting Sabby or whoever. I got nothing. I notice most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines, ie the same people who often get multiple personality disorder after the slightest hint from a therapist that this might happen. We’ll get back to this analogy later.)\n\nThe second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.\n\nThe secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.\n\n**II.**\n\nAt least this is what I take from _[The Others Within Us](https://amzn.to/4dMxBYq)_, by Robert Falconer, a veteran IFS therapist.\n\nBut it’s not just Falconer saying this. The book has a foreword by Richard Schwartz[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-2-144719880), the inventor of IFS, where he basically endorses it. It has cover blurbs from some high-ranking IFS trainers. My impression is that everyone high up in IFS believed something like this - some as metaphor, other as literal reality. They avoided talking about it lest it scare away the normies, Falconer got tired of keeping quiet and wrote a book, and everyone else decided to come clean and support him instead of denying anything.\n\nYou can see signs of the political fractures throughout the book. It tries to soften the blow by replacing “demons” with the technical IFS term UBs (for “unattached burdens”) and it inconsistently calls exorcisms “unburdenings”. It flirts with the idea that maybe this is just a useful metaphor, then veers off into “no it’s literally real” (I want to stress that the literal reality is Falconer’s position, not necessarily that of mainstream IFS). It alternates between apologetic and defiant.\n\nBut the underlying narrative is a consistent one. The IFS community was a bunch of normal, respectable therapists, trying to practice normal therapy. But every so often, one of their patients’ Parts would admit, unprompted, to being a demon. Or, in the words of one such entity:\n\n> No, I'm not a part of her - I'm a much more powerful and beautiful being, and I'm going to crush her like a worm, the same way I'm going to crush you.\n\nIf the story about Sabby is a typical IFS session, here’s an atypical one. Another patient comes to you, once again asking for help because they’re sabotaging their relationship. You ask them to go into a trance and find the part of them involved. They meet a dragon named Damien. So far, so good. You ask Damien why he’s sabotaging the patient’s relationships, expecting to hear a beautiful story about how the patient’s mother was a doormat and this made the patient unconsciously charge a part of herself with protecting her own independence (or something). Instead, Damien says he’s sabotaging them because fuck you. This isn’t unheard of - some of these traumatized Parts are really touchy. But the therapist persists and keeps getting the same answer. On further questioning, Damien admits he’s not part of the patient’s unconscious at all. He’s an external spiritual entity that entered the patient.\n\n(again, this is atypical. Falconer doesn’t give numbers, but I get the impression that fewer than 1% of IFS sessions go this direction.)\n\nWith enough questioning, the entities will reveal more information. Some of them are the spirits of the unquiet dead - in one case, a victim describes how she was in a hospital, the patient next to her died, she developed sudden onset anxiety, and in her IFS trance she realized that the anxiety took the form of the dead patient. Others have always been demons, as long as they remember. Still others are “legacy burdens”, who were passed down from the patient’s parents or ancestors.\n\n(Falconer tries to give this last one a “scientific” grounding by talking about epigenetics, which broke my suspension of disbelief - talk about demons and I’ll listen, but intergenerational epigenetic inheritance of behavioral traits [is a step too far](https://www.razibkhan.com/p/you-cant-take-it-with-you-straight))\n\nThe demons often enter the victim during moments of unbearable trauma. The patient, bent to the breaking point, has a moment of weakness when they will take help from any corner - let in anything that offers temporary relief, no matter how unconvincingly. Mostly these are the situations you’d expect - child abuse and rape - but a surprising number of them say they got in during a childhood surgery. Falconer is appropriately puzzled, and wonders if maybe the disembodiment of anesthesia provides an opening. But if I were to take this seriously - and remember, our only source here is the demons themselves - I would wonder if this might correspond to the occasional anesthesia failures when a patient ends up awake but paralyzed during surgery. This must be one of the most traumatic experiences possible!\n\nOnce inside, the demons “feed on energy”, usually in the form of negative emotions. They “farm” the energy by causing extra negative emotion, either by directly engaging in negative self-talk with the victim, or by tricking them into making bad decisions. Many demons feed on lust and sexual violence, and tempt patients into risky sexual behavior (is this victim-blaming? I can’t even tell at this point). Falconer moots this as one reason that some people float from one abuser/rapist to another despite seemingly being smart and motivated enough to avoid this. He also reports that the demons claim (again, self-reported data from demons is questionable for at least two reasons) to be able to lend their victims extra sexual energy, giving them the “crazy girls are hot” effect.\n\nThe first N times they ran into this kind of thing, the IFS therapists said that surely this was some good-albeit-traumatized Part of the patient’s unconscious, which had spun a crazy metaphorical story and needed to be bargained with and brought back to the Self. But it kept happening. The demons’ stories were surprisingly consistent. Finally, some of the IFS therapists would tell their therapist friends - look, this sounds crazy, but sometimes it seems like some of our patients have demons.\n\nAnd the therapist friends would answer: “Oh, you too?”\n\nFalconer says that \"Many therapists know that this is part of their work. They know this stuff is real, but they hide it.\" Every so often, one of them goes public, occasionally starting a new therapy branch or re-working older ones. Falconer surveys some of these traditions.\n\nDr. William Baldwin started out as a dentist, learned hypnotherapy for pain control, but his patients said such weird things during their trances that he retrained as a therapist and invented a mixed psychology-exorcism practice called Spirit Releasement Therapy - now its own therapy school with journal articles and conferences and everything.\n\nDr. Charles Tramont started out as a surgeon, also learned hypnotherapy for pain control, and followed basically the same path as Dr. Baldwin. Falconer quotes him approvingly as saying that “there are three basic varieties of foreign energies \\[in a person\\]: dark forces who never were human, earthbounds who are the souls of dead humans, and extraterrestrials . . . when asked if he believed in this stuff, he said absolutely because it has cured so many people.”\n\nDr. Jerry Marzinsky, after 35 years of working with psychotic patients, determined that “the voices \\[in patients’ heads\\] were real and that they were conscious parasitic entities that feed on people’s energies, especially distress.”\n\nDr. Scott Peck, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, after confronting too many possessed patients to deny, “was converted to a belief in the existence of Satan.” He added exorcism to the rest of his practice, with good effect.\n\nDr. Ralph Allison, a psychiatric expert on multiple personality disorder, came to believe that only some of the alters were psychogenic, but others were the result of “a spirit who has never had a life of its own and who often identifies as an agent of evil”.\n\nAnd so on and so forth. To hear Falconer tell it, one of psychotherapy’s big crises is that veteran therapists and psychiatrists keep noticing the demons, keep talking about it in their isolated silos, but nobody’s ever blown the lid off the whole thing and made it public.\n\n(And it’s not just therapists. One of my favorite stories in the book was that of Reverend John Nevius, a sober-minded Protestant missionary in late 1800s China. He learned that the Chinese mostly appreciated Christianity for its ability to cast out demons, and that they expected his help with this task. After great reluctance, he agreed, and was surprised to find himself effecting miracle cures and winning converts. “After experiencing casting out demons himself, he sent circular letters to all the other missionaries in China, almost all of whom had similar experiences. Seventy percent of them had come to believe in possession and re-evaluate their faith.”)\n\nSo the IFS therapists humbly asked some of these people for advice, combining it with their own knowledge of the inner landscape. This brings us to the core of the book: the manual for IFS exorcism. This is a lossy summary - please don’t try to exorcise based on this review alone.\n\n_Step one:_ CONFIRM IT’S REALLY A DEMON. This is important. Most Parts - even most hostile Parts that tell you on a loop to kill yourself or whatever - really are just traumatized pieces of your own mind. Trying to exorcise them will only make them angry and delay your healing process. This is a pillar of the original IFS formulation - one of Dr. Schwartz’s original books was called _No Bad Parts_. Luckily, demons apparently have to tell the truth about this[?](https://johndrogerslaw.com/uncovering-the-myth-do-undercover-officers-have-to-reveal-their-identity-in-california/) If you ask them point-blank whether they’re a demon, they’ll try to stall and dither. But if you really press the question they almost always admit it.\n\n_Step two:_ Try to learn more about the demon and how it entered the patient. Partly this is just to keep it talking, but it will also help you get a sense of the patient’s overall psychiatric history and what role it might play in their internal ecology.\n\n_Step three:_ Figure out which Parts of the patient want to keep the demon. Usually there are some Parts that are too scared to go against it, or think they still need its help, or fear the change of having it gone. If you leave these allies around, it provides an opening for the demon to come back. Send the dubious Parts warm compassionate energy from your Self, tell them there’s no reason to be scared, and promise that you’ll take care of them once the demon is gone.\n\n_Step four:_ Confirm that the patient isn’t afraid. This should be a natural result of placating their various Parts. Demons are (Falconer assures us) powerless against anyone who doesn’t fear them. If the patient is still afraid, remind them to be in Self, and do more Parts work until this is easy for them.\n\n_Step five:_ Try to convince the demon to leave of its own volition. Falconer has several tricks for this. You can tell it “You’ve been lied to. You were told that the light will burn you. But actually, the light is loving and accepting and where you belong.” If the demon doesn’t believe you, challenge it to touch the light. When it refuses, mock its cowardice (demons are very proud, and hate to be mocked). Eventually it will give in and touch the light and find that the light feels good. Then tell it “Look inside yourself. You’ll find there’s a spark of this same light. You are potentially good and redeemable, you’re just stuck here out of fear and need to move on. If you move on to the healing realms, everyone there will welcome you and you’ll get all the food you could possibly want and be much happier.” If the demon is still doubtful, tell it to look up towards the healing realms, where it might see the hands of people it trusts reaching out for it. Most demons will grudgingly agree that you’re right and leave voluntarily.\n\n_Step six:_ If the demon doesn’t leave voluntarily, tell it that you’ll give it one last chance, and then you’ll be forced to send it back to the darkness, which will be much worse. If it still refuses, ask your patient to visualize casting the demon out of themselves and engulfing/dissolving it in light.\n\n_Step seven:_ Investigate to make sure there are no remaining sub-demons or super-demons. Many demons, once they get into a person, will summon sub-demons to tighten their hold. You have to get rid of all the demons in a hierarchy, or the patient is still infected and they’ll all eventually come back. Hopefully you talked with the demon and your other Parts enough that you know what to expect here. If not, check whether there are any astral strings still linking the patient to the demon you just exorcised. Don’t worry, you can just ask the patient to count how many astral strings there are, and they’ll always be able to do this.\n\n_Step eight:_ Return back to the Parts of the patient that were dubious about the exorcism. Make sure they’re all convinced and satisfied now.\n\n_Step nine:_ Accept the adulation of your now-cured patient. For example, here’s Falconer describing the aftermath of his first exorcism:\n\n> As the workshop ended, I started getting long emails from the woman in the client role who’d had this thing removed from her. The emails scared me because she seemed to almost be having a manic episode. She was saying things like “Oh, the light in the airport is so beautiful - I haven’t seen colors like this before” and “I can feel deep love for all the people in the airport.” I was starting to get quite worried. Then she sent an email that dramatically increased my fear level. She said “Bob, I didn’t tell you or any other people in the workshop this, but when I was a young woman, I tried to kill myself many times and was institutionalized many times.” Now I was really scared. Visions of malpractice danced in my head. Then she wrote something that changed my life. She wrote, “Bob, you’re the first person to ever take me seriously when I talked about the nonhuman inside of me, and you have changed my life. Back then, if I tried to talk about this, they gave me electroshock and a lot of drugs. I have not talked about this to anyone for decades. Thank you.”…I have followed this woman since then, for over nine years now. She has continued to feel that the experience was very liberating and life-changing. The outward signs in her life indicate that she is flowering and growing and enjoying new depth and richness.\n\nAnd here’s another (remember, “UB” for “unattached burden” is the technical IFS term for demon):\n\n> Hi Bob…I have felt profoundly healed since our session. It has been truly life-changing for me and my parts…Also, I thought you might like to know that I did my first UB unburdening today with a client of mine. It was magic, and I felt I could really understand what might be going on for the client…Since I was a very young child, I have lived with this UB. While I count myself a very lucky and fortunate person generally, what was happening on the inside was crushing me. When I first heard about UBs I got it immediately, and the thought that there might be a solution for my internal suffering was nearly too good to comprehend. Trust me, internally it was putting up an enormous fight last week, but your confidence and your willingness to sacrifice yourself for me and my system still makes me emotional. I had met it before through therapy with my therapist, but she was no match for him. I am happy to stand behind you in any way I can, and if you need me to support you with any testimonials or in any way bringing forward how important this work is and how unbelievably life-changing it has been for me, I am certainly happy to do this. I believe people have a lot more UBs than the IFS Institute is willing to admit and it saddens me that we cannot be more open about this. \\[I will not be asking for more sessions\\] as I can’t imagine feeling much better than I do right now.\n\n**III.**\n\nI appreciated this window into an aspect of psychotherapy I hadn’t heard about before. And I appreciate Robert Falconer’s immense hands-on experience. Still, I’m not sure he was the right person to write this book.\n\nAt the beginning, he says that all of this may seem crazy, but we should put aside theorizing in favor of observation. We should listen to what our patients say, treat them as the experts in their own internal experience, and focus on finding treatments that empirically seem to help them - rather than getting bogged down in the metaphysics.\n\nThen he immediately breaks his own rule and focuses on the metaphysics. He really wants to convince the reader that the demons are real spiritual entities and not just a useful psychotherapeutic metaphor. To think otherwise (he fulminates) is to buy into the Eurocentric colonialist “citadel theory of mind” where everyone has to be a perfect atomic individual and nobody can be influenced by anything outside of their own head in any way.\n\nHe also falls into a trap I would describe as “has never read a pseudoscience book before, doesn’t realize what the red flags for pseudoscience are, and so collects the whole set”. We go from discussion on how the same doctors who laughed at Ignatz Semmelweiss will no doubt laugh at him, to quotes about science progressing funeral by funeral, to [that one story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_ships) about how the Native Americans couldn’t even see Columbus’ ships because they were so far out of their accepted categorization schemes[3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-3-144719880). These are all _prima facie_ reasonable things to mention if you have a revolutionary theory that you expect the establishment to reject. But it’s analogous to how, if you’ve just been accused of racism, it _prima facie_ seems reasonable to object that you have lots of black friends. Along with _prima facie_ reasonableness, you also benefit from having some familiarity with the discourse and avoiding the exact phrases that will make doubters maximally hostile.\n\nThis is admittedly an aesthetic objection, not a substantial one - but it’s something I would have done differently.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F31cef78b-561a-4fcd-a813-0bbe733b7c0f_336x189.png)\n\nAlso, I would not have used this publishing company, or at least I would have displayed its logo less prominently.\n\nFalconer does a great job surveying the world’s many demonological traditions. But he seems to count all of them as equal evidence for his theory of “demons exist”, when in fact many of them are contradictory or at least confusing. He rejects “hostile” exorcisms - ones where you you might yell at/beat/starve the patient for days, or scream at the demon to begone to the filth from which it came - in favor of an hour-long IFS session where you promise the demon healing and it leaves of its own accord. But the majority of the world’s traditions have pretty hostile exorcisms, or at least are more involved than an hour in a comfy chair. Is IFS just an outright advance in exorcism technology? Isn’t that the same “western knowledge beats primitive people” perspective he’s criticizing, albeit on a different level?\n\nHe admits that none of the demons he’s worked with have ever had magic powers. None of his patients start speaking Latin with no previous exposure, or levitate, or shoot fire out of their eyes. But this is a classic feature of some demonological traditions.\n\n(also, I’m not a theologian, but [I think](https://spiritualdirection.com/2015/03/23/can-demons-repent) Falconer’s belief that demons can accept redemption and return to Heaven at any moment - and just need a reminder and a lecture from a kindly mortal - is pretty heretical from a Catholic perspective)\n\nFalconer suggests that maybe he’s dealing with low-grade possession cases, and the more traditional exorcisms with Latin and incense and days-long epic battles are the more serious ones. But it’s hard not to notice the alternative explanation: that demons and exorcisms look like whatever your culture tells you they look like (with a side of “Falconer reports his experiences honestly, but other people exaggerate”).\n\nSo I want to take on the task Falconer avoids, and try to provide a boring materialistic explanation of all of this. This won’t be surprising to people who have read other essays of mine, especially my reviews of [Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/), [Crazy Like Us](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us), and [The Geography Of Madness](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness).\n\nTheory of mind is non-obvious and culture-dependent. The modern West has a materialistic unitary theory of mind, where the brain produces the mind and 1 brain = 1 mind. If you hear a voice in your head saying “You’re terrible and should kill yourself”, this is part of you. It’s some kind of brain lobe mis-firing, and you should do cognitive therapy on it and become less anxious (or whatever).\n\nThe objective scientific truth/falsehood of this theory of mind is unrelated to its felt experience. Even if it’s objectively true, you don’t experience your mind this way _directly because_ it’s objectively true. You experience your mind this way because it’s our culture’s stock metaphor, it’s how you were taught to experience your mind, and your experience of your mind will tend to fit whatever framework you put it into.\n\nIf, as Julian Jaynes posits, the ancients thought gods were talking to them all the time, this was a different, equally-experientially-valid (though not necessarily equally-objectively-scientifically-valid) theory of mind. They would hear a voice saying “You’re terrible and should kill yourself” and viscerally perceive it as the whisperings of a god. Or they would get a great idea for a new epic poem, and viscerally perceive it as the Muse talking to them. I don’t know if they literally hallucinated or not - maybe they did - but it was a different way of binning the experiences that came into their consciousness.\n\nAlthough culture has a big effect here, there’s also variation within a culture. Socrates apparently heard daemons in a sense that his contemporaries didn’t. My impression is that women, traumatized people, borderlines, and especially traumatized borderline women, are towards the more fragmented end of the scale in every culture, such that even in our own materialist-unified paradigm they barely hold things together.\n\nIn the “multiple personalities panic” of the 1980s, some psychologists started thinking multiple personality disorder was a big thing and suggesting to all their traumatized borderline female patients that they might have it. Sure enough, lots of these people developed multiple personalities. This didn’t seem _fake_, just _weird_. Eventually the American Psychiatric Association sent out a statement saying “STOP DOING THIS”, therapists stopped talking about multiple personalities with their traumatized borderline female patients, and these people mostly stopped getting multiple personality disorder (although the occasional new case crops up here and there).\n\nNow here comes IFS, saying “hey maybe you have multiple Parts in your mind, have you considered looking for them?” This is much better, as theory-of-mind paradigms go, than multiple personality disorder. IFS Parts are (after some work) beneficent and subordinate to the wise compassionate angelic Self. A person who’s been therapy-ed into iatrogenic multiple personality disorder is a total mess; a person who’s been therapy-ed into relating to their IFS Parts is functional and - if you believe the reports - better off than they started.\n\n(I’m _not_ arguing that the mind is truly unitary but evil therapists are convincing vulnerable borderlines that the mind is multiple. The mind is what it is. It’s unitary in some ways and multiple in some ways. Even the most materialist Westerner will admit that they’re sometimes “of two minds”, or “have weakness of will”, or “my brain keeps telling me to X, but I know that’s not true”. People vary in how independently these different parts of their brain act, with Bryan Caplan on one side and traumatized borderline women on another. And over that native variation, we overlay a second pattern of variation in how their culture and local authority figures - including therapists - tell them to think about all this. The end result ranges from someone who never perceives any mental divisions at all, to someone with frank multiple personality disorder. IFS therapists are focusing on and playing up one side of this spectrum of variation, but neither they nor unitary mind proponents are _wrong_.)\n\nSo IFS therapists are telling patients about all their Parts. And they say “all of these Parts are beautiful facets of your variegated Self”, and most patients believe them. But occasionally if there’s some sort of really repressed ego dystonic thing, then their lucid-dream-trance mind will say “No, that one isn’t part of my Self, it’s an evil invader that I hate”. IFS is prepared for this and walks them through how no, really, it’s a beautiful facet of your variegated Self that you’ve just really repressed and which you consider ego dystonic - I don’t want to accuse them of not doing this; _The Others Within Us_ is very clear that they push this line as hard as they can. Still, some patients just don’t buy it. Some patients have some perverse part of them that they can’t identify with in any way, at all, something with no redeeming value according to the moral system of their dominant personality. No matter how hard their IFS therapist tells them it’s a part of them, they’ll insist it’s not. And if they’re in a lucid-dream-trance, they’ll say that they can sense it as some form of foreign dark energy, and that it entered them from the outside during an abuse episode - which is as good a metaphor for trauma as any other that I’ve heard.\n\nPeople see the inside of their mind the way their culture tells them to see it. Did I mention that a suspicious number of the possession victims in the book were veteran IFS therapists (that’s why the testimonials above include people saying that now they can try this on their own patients)? Or that Robert Falconer, who thinks about demons all the time, seems to have had dozens of them? Yes, okay, he describes having an _incredibly_ traumatic background that I don’t even want to talk about on a non-trigger-warning-ed blog post - but also, he keeps getting new demons, one after another, and this seems common for the IFS therapists who deal with demons most frequently.\n\nThat just leaves the apparently-successful exorcisms. Part of the story must be placebo effects. Our culture’s scientific materialist paradigm helps us get effectively placebo-ed by medicine (even medications that work have associated placebo effects stronger than the real chemical effect). Cultures with a spiritual paradigm can probably be effectively placebo-ed by exorcism. But I know that I, with my medication experience, can’t match some of the cures that Falconer claims to have effected, so something else must be going on. Here I can only say that most good trauma therapies seem to be telling the person that the trauma and its associated compensatory behavior are no longer adaptive, plus some strategy to really dig into the traumatized part of the brain and make it sink in on an emotional level. In hypnotherapy the strategy is hypnosis. In EMDR it’s eye movements. [In coherence therapy it’s visualizing the contradictory beliefs really hard](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/). In IFS, it’s interacting with symbolic Parts of yourself in a lucid-dream-like trance state. Seems like a potentially good strategy! In all the exorcisms Falconer describes, I’m struck by his careful preparatory work where he tries to find the beliefs and experiences associated with the demon and unwind the associated emotions. Do that in a hypnosis-like state and add the wow factor of a dramatic exorcism, and maybe something good happens.[4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-4-144719880)\n\n**IV.**\n\nWhy read this book?\n\nI enjoyed learning more about hot new psychotherapies, and even this book’s discussion of classical IFS gave me a lot to think about. I think I’m more likely to interpret discussion of archetypes and mystical visions literally, given how easily IFS therapists seem to be able to get people into a trance/lucid-dream state. And I find the idea of Self - the part of your mind which is always calm and wise and good, no matter what’s going on around it - reassuring, for reasons sort of like [what Sarah Constantin discusses here](https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/normativity-and-anti-normativity).\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298)\n\nAs for the demons - despite what Falconer would call my individualist Eurocentric biases, I’m pretty sympathetic to some of his thought processes. I like what he preaches, if not practices - figure out what helps the patient, then do it, no matter how weird it might seem.\n\nFalconer, and apparently many other IFS therapists, report that these exorcisms help patients, in a repeatable and long-term way. We should slightly discount their experience for the usual “all therapies sound good when they’re new and being described by their advocates” bias, then discount it more for the “this sounds crazy” factor. But even after these discounts, the results sound impressive.\n\nSo the question - which I don’t see anyone on either side asking in a really curious way - is: which works better? Telling patients to think of their mental problems as misfiring brain circuits, then reprogramming/medicating those circuits? Or telling patients to think of their mental problems as demons, then exorcising those demons[5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-5-144719880)?\n\nYou might, starting from a Western scientific point of view, object that the patient’s problems really _are_ misfiring brain circuits, so surely that perspective would work better. Even granting that you’re objectively scientifically right, I’m not sure I buy the syllogism. At the very least it seems like the sort of thing you could test.\n\n**V.**\n\nAll declarations from medical authorities about the nature of mental problems cause iatrogenic mental problems. If anyone - including even just random therapists like Falconer - starts saying that mental problems are demons, they will definitely cause iatrogenic demons. Is this better or worse than iatrogenic multiple personality disorder or iatrogenic anxiety disorder or whatever? I don’t know, except that in my professional opinion “iatrogenic demons” sounds pretty bad\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7036f3d3-b1cf-496d-9888-062cdfae89fb_1536x1064.png)\n\nAll therapies start out practiced by smart good-instincted veteran practitioners like Robert Falconer, and end being practiced by people like the therapist in this story ([source](https://substack.com/@ecstaticintegration/note/c-56169924))\n\nAnd in my non-professional, purely personal opinion, I _know_ iatrogenic demons are bad. A Bay Area self-help human-potential psychological-research institute (pronounced “cult”) tangentially connected to my social circles did some experiments with therapy around psychological constructs. I won’t replay the whole story, but the whole group collapsed in a severe and avoidable iatrogenic possession epidemic - you can read about some of it [here](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b):\n\n> I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded. My only source of help for this became the leaders of my own subgroup, who unfortunately were also completely caught up in the mania and had their own goals and desires me for that were mostly definitely not in my interest. I personally prayed for hours most nights for months to rid myself of specific “demons” I felt I’d picked up from other members of Leverage.\n> \n> If this sounds insane, it’s because it was. It was a crazy experience unlike any I’ve ever had. And there are many more weird anecdotes where that came from.\n> \n> In addition, I’ll be honest — I experienced real effects of these “demons.” A huge part of my healing has involved recovering from an ongoing state of terror around mental invasion. I now believe these phenomena are the type of thing often described in normal conversation with un-sensationalized language (i.e. “she has good energy” “that place gave me the willies” “intuition” “he’s got stage presence” “reality distortion fields”). I think the narrative framing around “demons” and “objects” led us to build these kind of “abstract alternative reality palaces” around these phenomena, leading to hyper-reification and thus greater paranoia and hysteria.\n> \n> The way these concepts got out of control and exploded the group is the aspect of Leverage I’ve heard discussed the least publicly. I suspect many people still half-consciously believe “intention reading,” “objects,” and their impact on the ensuing events is highly significant secret knowledge and should not be talked about. I think keeping this secret and significant encourages an ongoing elitism and separatism narrative in ex-members, and hinders smooth integration of these experiences into the rest of life.\n> \n> My personal read is that there’s a real thing here, underneath the paranoia, hyper-reification, heavy narrativization, witch hunting and adversarial weaponization, and that the real skill is simply a form of soft, focused attunement to another person which can allow you to learn a lot about (and from) them. There’s a lot more I could say here. At the end of the day, these phenomena were narrativized, exploited, and used to induce panic, terror, opportunities for control, and eventually led to the self-cannibalization of a community.\n\nFalconer treats our Eurocentric individualistic citadel mind as a terrible historical mistake, in which a whole continent foolishly amputated its capacity for spiritual experiences. I think of it as more of a triumph: realizing on some level that belief in demons made them real, we eradicated that belief with the same fervor that we displayed when eradicating smallpox, polio, and all the other causative agents for dangerous medical conditions.\n\n_The Others Within Us_ tries to argue that this had negative effects. We might avoid outright demonic encounters, but we have worse versions of everything else, and lots of demon-shaped trauma knots that we can’t acknowledge or do anything about and fruitlessly try to hit with our “some brain circuit is overactive” hammer, hoping they will one day reveal themselves as nails. Falconer also cites research that we have worse outcomes from schizophrenia than other cultures (although I think some of that has been challenged by claims about diagnostic variability), and makes the common alt-psychiatry point that maybe schizophrenia is a shamanic crisis, of the sort that other cultures would resolve by becoming shamans[6](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-6-144719880). He thinks that opening ourselves up to spiritual ideas would help our trauma, our schizophrenia, and maybe our anxiety and depression to boot[7](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-7-144719880).\n\nI’m happy that the people who really need help and naturally think in the “language” of IFS can go to Falconer and people like him. But I’m also happy we’re not holding Demon Awareness Campaigns in random middle schools full of impressionable kids. I appreciate this book as a guide for people who need it, but won’t be handing it to any policymakers.\n\n[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-anchor-1-144719880)\n\nSome people object to me calling it “new” - it was developed in the 1980s, and has been popular since the early 2010s. Still, the therapy landscape shifts slowly, and even an exponentially-growing therapy takes a long time to get anywhere.\n\n[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-anchor-2-144719880)\n\nSchwartz was born in 1949, so he probably went to therapy school in the 70s and got trained in Freudian analysis. Imagine being a Freudian analyst, in a school full of Freudian analysts, with the name “Dick Schwartz”. At that point your only real option is to invent a new form of therapy on a totally different foundation.\n\n[3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-anchor-3-144719880)\n\nTo his credit, he expresses some doubt about this, and only presents it _qua_ story.\n\n[4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-anchor-4-144719880)\n\nI also remember from _[How The Body Keeps The Score](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/)_ that Bessel van der Kock seemed to think that everything was great for trauma as long as it’s not an evidence-based therapy performed by real doctors. At the time I kind of made fun of him and assumed he was just being contrarian. But what if he’s right? What if doing something exotic and special is an important ingredient? One thing Falconer talks about again and again is that trauma patients - or the Parts of their mind, or the spirits inside them, or whatever - just want to be witnessed and validated. Getting an exorcism seems like the strongest way possible to say “yes, you’re completely right, all of your pain is 100% real, but now you’re allowed to stop having it without it invalidating how traumatized you were”.\n\n[5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-anchor-5-144719880)\n\nRealistically, holding the broader culture constant, the average therapist won’t be able to convince the average patient that they have demons. So either they’ll have to stick with especially weird patients and therapists, they’ll have to stress that it’s just a useful metaphor, or they’ll have to try to change the broader culture. Falconer seems to be trying the last option with this book. I am confident he will fail. I find the second option - tell patients to suspend their disbelief and use it as a metaphor - more interesting.\n\n[6](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-anchor-6-144719880)\n\nThis might be somewhat contradicted by genetic evidence, which shows that evolution has been selecting against schizophrenia genes for at least 40,000 years - whatever primitive cultures existed during this timescale had bad outcomes for schizophrenia. I suppose you could rescue the hypothesis by saying most of these cultures hadn’t discovered shamanism yet. Or you could say that shamans were often celibate, and evolutionarily selected against on that basis. I tried to figure out whether this was true, and it seems to vary by culture.\n\n[7](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us?utm_source=publication-search#footnote-anchor-7-144719880)\n\nI have skipped over some of his discussion of “guides”, ie benevolent spirits that can sometimes be encouraged/summoned to help the patient."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 330\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** More meetups this week, including Austin, Bangalore, and Berlin. See [the meetups list](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more information.\n\n**2:** Thanks to everyone who’s rated the book reviews. If you missed Friday’s post and feel up to rating book reviews, [take a look](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-book-review-finalists-2024). I’ve corrected the link to the L - P reviews, and [the link to Taymon’s random-review-picker](https://us-central1-acx-book-review-contest-2023.cloudfunctions.net/random-review-2024).\n\n**3:** Many thanks to Substack, who have streamlined some code to make ACX comments load faster. More information - and a link to contact the engineers involved - [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-329/comment/56618392)."} | |
| {"text":"# Choose Book Review Finalists 2024\n\nIt's time to narrow the 150 entries in the Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 150 reviews alone, so I need your help.\n\nYou'll find the entries in six Google Docs (thanks to a reader for collating them):\n\n* [A - D](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AXmWgSbh_TFsoZuApSCSEoz57yn93CM5YYhtaO_s4W4/edit)\n \n* [E - I](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QiotH3aGFgNLGqsIHTK_Plm_gem2E4l2C2ctyGJd0jY/edit)\n \n* [L - P](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cp6iw5OEyDjnD_viZo-KL0Zv4jwQnMXtE4yIovfVAco/edit)\n \n* [R - S](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GYQw3pgvhi7hqOVR-Ql629Q_8thbyHe8sSRy5voyt30/edit)\n \n* [Th - The N](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14qa47TJ_Vyerx4XNgTCIh7PUZ_TOgNcU_eHm5So_zo0/edit#heading=h.d3osmeslusa4)\n \n* [The O - Y](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ki5XsE0jkxZtd2XAeyTAJw1ZjLh2Cu-matUYKAhA6-s/edit)\n \n\nPlease pick as many as you have time for, read them, and **rate them [using this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1GUMVB3LEPvycHdV3f86uO9BAYTgwiJHqxlxNoITYVkM/edit)**.\n\nDon’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to AlexanderTheGrand and Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script [here](https://us-central1-acx-book-review-contest-2023.cloudfunctions.net/random-review-2024)) or pick whichever seems most interesting to you. List of all books reviewed below.\n\nThanks! You have until June 1, when I’ll count the votes and announce the finalists.\n\nIf you wrote a review, please check to make sure your review is in the document. Currently known gaps: _The Tango Of Ethics_ (we are going to solve this, no action needed from you), and _Julie, Or The New Heloise_ (if this is you, check your email; if you didn’t get an email, email me). If there’s another gap I don’t know about, email me or comment here.\n\n A Canticle For Leibowitz\n A Farewell to Alms\n A Practical Guide to Evil\n A Thousand Ways to Please A Husband\n A Visit from the Goon Squad\n Against Democracy\n Age of Anger\n All Systems Red\n Alphabetical Diaries\n American Nations\n Armies of Sand\n Asquith\n Atlas Shrugged\n Babel\n Bad Therapy\n Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother\n Biophilia\n Carpentaria\n Cat's Cradle\n Catkin\n Choosing Elites\n Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy\n Consequences of Language\n Defining Death\n Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will\n Discrimination and Disparities\n Djinn\n Dominion\n Don Juan\n Don't Make No Waves, Don't Back No Losers\n Egypt's Golden Couple\n Elon Musk\n End Times\n Eothen\n Eve\n Food of the Gods\n For Whom the Bell Tolls\n Frankenstein\n Free Range Kids\n Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism\n Gnomon\n Godel, Escher, Bach\n Golem XIV\n How Language Began\n How the War Was Won\n HP Lovecraft\n Impossible Histories\n In Search of Lost Time\n In the Time of the Russias\n Invisible Cities\n It's Not the Money, It's the Land\n Letter to a Christian Nation\n Libra\n License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us\n Little, Big\n Making the Corps\n Metamorphosis\n Mine!\n Misbelief\n Money Capital\n Never Twice in the Same River\n Nexus\n Nine Lives\n Normal Accidents\n On the Bondage of the Will\n One-Dimensional Man\n Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation\n Passionate Marriage\n Patient, Heal Thyself\n Piranesi\n Politics on the Edge\n Practical Ethics\n r!Animorphs\n Ready Player One\n Real Raw News\n Red Rising\n Righteous Victims\n What Came Next\n My Thoughts Road of the King\n Sadly, Porn\n Safe Enough?\n Savage Money\n Secret Agenda: Watergate\n Sense of Style\n Silver Age Marvel Comics\n Sir Gawain and the Green Knight\n Spring Snow\n Stillwell and the American Experience in China\n Sudden Glory\n Surviving Death\n The Art of Happiness\n The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa\n The Ballad of the White Horse\n The Beauties\n The Beginning of Infinity\n The Body Keeps the Score\n The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective\n The Case Against Reality\n The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book\n The Divine Comedy\n The Emperor of All Maladies\n The Eternaut\n The Ethics of Ambiguity\n The Family That Couldn't Sleep\n The Four Hour Workweek\n The Genesis Machine\n The Globe: How The Earth Became Round\n The Hebrew Bible\n The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe\n The Hunt for Red October\n The Iliad\n The Lady of Shalott\n The Land of Milk and Honey / The Lathe of Heaven\n The Language Puzzle\n The Leopard\n The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett\n The Master and Margarita\n The Meme Machine\n The Metamorphosis\n The Metaphysical Club\n The Mezzanine and the Size of Thoughts\n The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion / Win Bigly\n The Old Testament\n The Oldest Documents of the Human Race\n The Pale King\n The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention\n The Picture of Dorien Gray\n The Remains of the Day\n The Revelations\n The Signal and the Noise\n The Sixth Day and Other Tales\n The Story of Ferdinand\n The Structure of Scientific Revolutions\n The Sunset Limited\n The Tango of Ethics\n The Treuhand\n The Trial\n The Unconsoled\n The Untethered Soul\n The Vegetarian\n The Wages of Destruction\n The Wheel of Time\n The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy\n Three Days in Dwarfland\n Time Loops\n Two Arms and a Head\n War and Peace\n Warrior's Woman\n What Even Is Gender?\n When We Cease To Understand The World\n Who We Are And How We Got Here\n Why Fish Don't Exist\n Winnie-the-Pooh / The House At Pooh Corner\n Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History\n World Empire Lost\n Young Adults"} | |
| {"text":"# Hidden Open Thread 329.5\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# Profile: The Far Out Initiative\n\n### I. Jo Cameron, Bio-Arhat\n\nSuffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't.\n\nI met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic.\n\nSome people feel more pain than others. The “more pain” category includes some big demographic groups like redheads, who [seem to feel some types of pain more intensely](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692342/) and [may need up to 20% more anaesthetic](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956/), though their [exact processing differences are complicated](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/fact-or-fiction-do-redheads-feel-more-pain). But there are also various lesser-known genetic conditions that can make bizarre things - water, light touch, mild temperature changes - excruciatingly painful. The most exotic cause of this syndrome has to be [platypus venom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus_venom), which is both painful in and of itself and also seems to increase the body’s overall capacity to feel pain; for years after a platypus scratch, every tiny scrape will hurt worse than usual.\n\nThe “less pain” category includes people who say they've never felt pain at all. There's a genetic condition called [congenital insensitivity to pain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain); patients are incapable of hurting. Most of the “purest” cases die tragically during childhood; in a typical story, they rest their hand on a hot stove, fail to notice, and burn to death. The ones who survive usually turn out to have something in between _pain insensitivity_ and _pain asymbolia_, where they can _notice_ pain but it doesn’t feel particularly unpleasant. This can still be dangerous - imagine having to argue a young child out of putting her hands on stoves - but it’s a bit more survivable, and there are some weird genetic clusters of it here and there. An Italian family with a mutation in [ZFHX2](https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/141/2/365/4725107) are immune to pain; so are a Pakistani family with a mutation in [SCN9A](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0913181107). Some of these syndromes have other weird side effects; the Italian family doesn’t sweat, and the Pakistani family can’t smell.\n\nOur physical differences are easy to notice. Everyone knows that some people are black, some white, some Asian or Hispanic. Everyone knows that some babies are born with one arm, or three eyes, or webbed fingers. But nobody knows how many mental mutants walk among us. Here’s [a Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/spicy/comments/7syy7t/i_seem_to_be_immune_to_spice_reapers_dont_affect/) by a guy who says spicy food has no effect on him, complete with [a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hih9Q3D0xM) of him eating Carolina Reaper peppers and looking kind of bored. Here are [some pictures](https://www.popsci.com/article/science/woman-sees-100-times-more-colors-average-person/) by a woman who can see 100x more colors than normal.\n\nPeople talk a lot about “neurodiversity”, but they mostly just mean that some people are autistic or whatever. The true extent of neurodiversity - like 99% of the colors that one woman can see - remains invisible to most of us.\n\nMy other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other. This is, as they say, a postmodernist lie. The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron.\n\nCameron’s condition was discovered ten years ago, when her anaesthesiologist noticed she needed no pain medication after a difficult surgery. He checked her records and found she had never asked for pain medication, and moreover, that she described giving birth as basically painless. He got intrigued and recommended she talk to a team at University College London researching pain-related disorders.\n\nThe London team interviewed her and (let’s be frank) tortured her for several days, then reported their results. Cameron appeared to be incapable of any form of suffering. She could not feel pain. She had never been anxious or depressed. She described her feelings after her first husband’s suicide (from bipolar disorder) as:\n\n> “I looked at the state he was in, and I thought, Maybe it’s good,” she said. Cameron was back at work the day after the funeral. “It sounds cold. But you say to people, ‘I’m not being cold! Look, horrible things happen.’ I’m not in airy-fairy land. Horrible things are _going_ to happen. You have to cope with it. You have to say to yourself, ‘I can’t help that person.’ You help them as much as you can, but when you can’t help them anymore, then you have to help everyone else.”\n\nThe most interesting feature of Cameron’s condition is her total normality. One might worry that a person who couldn’t suffer would be cold and psychopathic, but in fact Cameron was a special education teacher known for her kindness and patience with extremely tough students. One might worry that she might lack the righteous anger necessary to fuel political engagement, but in fact she has strong political opinions (she doesn’t like Boris Johnson) and attends protests. One might worry that she would be unable to relate to regular humans, but she’s been married twice and has two children, who she’s on great terms with. One might worry that she would lack the full range of artistic appreciation, but she reports crying at sad movies just like everyone else.\n\nCameron seems to be somewhere between pain insensitivity and asymbolia; she’s had some very mild stove-related accidents, but always seems to figure out the situation in time. She hasn’t lost the ability to sweat. She hasn’t lost the ability to smell. The only Special Bonus Side Effect the London team was able to find is that apparently her wounds heal perfectly cleanly, without scars.\n\nShe is, as far as anyone can tell, totally fine and normal. She just doesn’t suffer.\n\nFor centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. Without suffering, we couldn’t learn, couldn’t empathize, couldn’t be fully human. Jo Cameron forces us to ask: _is that just cope?_\n\n### II. David Pearce, Suffering Abolitionist\n\nFor centuries, philosophers have praised suffering as a necessary part of the human condition. For decades, David Pearce has told those other philosophers that they are bad and wrong.\n\nTurn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place. Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought. New technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project were inspiring a new generation of transhumanists. Out of this milieu, philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, and Toby Ord were laying the groundwork for what would become the rationalist and effective altruist movements. Utilitarians, they argued, were charged with relieving the suffering of the world as quickly and effectively as possible. Technology offered new opportunities to do this at scale. This could be ending poverty and curing diseases (if you were well-grounded in the present moment) or creating a superintelligence to lead us to a post-scarcity future (if you were feeling more ambitious).\n\nBut there’s always been a sort of split in philosophy. On one side, you have people like Plato and Marx, thinking about how to improve the world. On the other, you have people like Epictetus and the Buddha. Even if you improved the world, they say, you would never be happy. If you want happiness, you have to look within.\n\nIf the effective altruists are firmly on the Plato/Marx side of the divide, developing the Buddhist/Stoic version of transhumanist utilitarianism fell to David Pearce.\n\nPearce isn’t a philosophy professor. He dropped out of Oxford partway through undergrad - you can read more about why in his [What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher](http://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/#/david-pearce/) interview. In the tradition of Diogenes, he’s never held a formal academic job or really any job at all; he says he supports himself primarily through buying and selling domain names.\n\n(being a combination philosopher/domain-name-monger has its advantages; along with [his main site](https://www.hedweb.com/), you can find his arguments scattered across pages like [utilitarianism.com](http://utilitarianism.com), [biopsychiatry.com](http://biopsychiatry.com), and [superhappiness.com](https://www.superhappiness.com/))\n\nPearce says: solving poverty and curing disease is very hard. And even if we did, it wouldn’t end human suffering. And even if it did, that wouldn’t end animal suffering. Suffering is a fundamentally biological process which requires a biological solution. Pearce found a biological solution to his own suffering; he alleviated his severe depression with the antidepressant selegiline. Selegiline isn’t for everybody; it can take the edge off negative experience, but it hardly makes you perfectly happy forever. To make people perfectly happy forever, we need to take this principle and build on it.\n\nA partial near-term victory would look something like a universally available drug that could make people happy and pain-free with no side effects (so, for example, it wouldn’t turn you into a lotus-eater who sat blissed out on the couch your whole life, any more than seligiline did to Pearce himself). Total victory would require some kind of long-term change to the brain/body system that let it do all its normal work - growing, learning, working, changing - without pain, suffering, or any other negative emotion.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5ca9a80d-e71b-4fa1-b998-5e458cf2fdff_1792x1024.png)\n\nOne of Pearce’s more endearing hobbies is generating AI art of future post-suffering utopias.\n\nFor a philosopher, Pearce is very practical. Sure, he has dozens of essays on why it’s morally correct to end suffering. But he also wants to start the project himself. You can read [his analysis of dozens of drugs](https://www.biopsychiatry.com/) and how they might contribute to some kind of hypothetical future “make everyone happy all the time” cocktail. Early on, he rejects the obvious choices - heroin, cocaine, SSRIs - for the obvious reasons. By the end, he’s investigating weird drugs that even I - who have kind of made a career knowing about weird drugs - have never heard of. Apimostinel originally looked promising, but failed Phase 3 trials. Nomifensine seemed promising but was later found to cause a serious blood disorder. His most promising lead is LIH383, a chemical which seems to increase the brain’s natural opiate tone, potentially producing the effect of a small dose of opiate without any negative effects or addiction potential. But this is way past his ability to test, and so far he hasn’t been able to interest any pharma companies.\n\n(I tried a distant LIH383 relative once, for Science, but didn’t notice any effect)\n\nThe counterarguments write themselves. _Brave New World_, drain all meaning from life, live in pods, eat bugs, that kind of thing. Pearce has counter-counter-arguments to all of them (you can see his answers to a few hundred common questions [here](https://www.hedweb.com/quora/index.html)). He thinks that if the normal human emotional range is 100 points centered on 0 (let’s say from tortured despair at -50 to ecstasy at +50) then it would be just as meaningful to live in the 100 point range centered at +100 (from ecstasy at +50 to ultra-ecstasy at +150).\n\n(yes, obviously there’s a hedonic treadmill - Pearce’s goal is to find some biotech intervention that works prior to the hedonic treadmill, giving you a hedonic treadmill around a different set point)\n\nAll of these debates are pretty theoretical, though. Most people either take immediately to Pearce’s position or are violently repelled. I don’t know how much any argument can do to change that. To me, you either start with a deep hatred for the suffering of your fellow beings, and all of this makes sense to you - or you start from some other moral foundation and it seems to miss the point. Are any of these intuitions communicable?\n\nMaybe you could try eating a couple of Carolina Reaper peppers - the ones from that YouTube video earlier. Maybe eat a whole handful at once. Maybe rub them in your eyes for good measure. Then, when you’re rolling on the floor screaming and cursing your past self for making this decision, think of the people who live with chronic pain conditions and feel this way every day. Think of the wounded soldiers who lie on the battlefield screaming for water until they finally expire, or the animals who get eaten from the inside by parasites, or the mentally ill people stuck in padded rooms so they don’t try to kill themselves to escape the pain, or the chickens in factory farms that have their beaks cut off and can never move and are starved for weeks at a time and sometimes drown in their own waste. Can you get have a mystical conversion experience from eating enough peppers? I don’t know, but I feel like this is the kind of vision that could make someone a Pearcian.\n\nThere’s more to life than just not being in pain. There’s love, family, beauty, knowledge, community, etc. But there’s also more to life than having money. And most of us realize that very poor people struggling to put food in their mouths can’t fully enjoy love, family, beauty, etc. The world is on fire, and although some of us live on nice little islands of bearability, it’s hard to enjoy them when you can look just off your island and see everyone else on fire. If the fires got put out, maybe we could enjoy the other stuff more whole-heartedly instead of always looking over our shoulder at a world full of endless misery.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F784d29f4-f9ff-419a-8606-358dd68c6294_1024x1024.webp)\n\nCf. [“Reprogramming Predators” and “A Pan-Species Welfare State”](https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html?_gl=1*12f6zvn*_ga*MTg2MDQzMDkyMS4xNzE1Njc2MzQ0*_ga_1MVBX8ZRJ9*MTcxNTY3NjM0NC4xLjEuMTcxNTY3ODg1My4wLjAuMA..)\n\nThis is Pearce’s thesis. It’s not as popular as the normal effective altruism that just tries to help solve poverty and cure diseases. While Ord and Bostrom and MacAskill got followers and press coverage and friendly billionaires, Pearce and his movement (“suffering abolitionism”) got a few very devoted email correspondents.\n\nThis started to change around the turn of the decade. In 2017, Pearce came out with a new book, [Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?](https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/biotechnology-abolish.pdf) In 2018, a group of psychonauts founded Qualia Research Institute, which among its many other projects wants to [mainstream Pearcian ideas](https://qri.org/research-lineages). And finally, the news about FAAH-OUT convinced the small circle of people around Pearce to to stop speculating and try to put some of their ideas into action.\n\n### III. Marcin Kowrygo, Far Out CEO\n\nIn this year’s list of ACX Grantees, one got outsized attention:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa6bb6514-db75-48e4-a05b-d767c1f563aa_680x298.png)\n\nSeveral people asked me to write more about Far Out - hence this post.\n\nI interviewed Marcin to learn more about his project. He was extremely gracious about the conditions (over a buggy video link, at 3 AM, with me mostly too sick to speak), and did his best to decipher my half-grunted, half-coughed questions and hold up most of the conversation.\n\nIn early 2023, suffering abolitionist Michael Sparks founded the [Far Out Initiative](https://faroutinitiative.com/) to further explore FAAH-OUT and its implications. He collected a team of polymath philosophers and biohackers, and recruited Marcin, a neurobiologist and veteran EA, to lead their group.\n\nMarcin is the first to admit he’s not a typical CEO. He works part-time, on a volunteer basis (he has other jobs that help him support himself, but they’re also with weird charities). His ten-person team (seven of whom are also unpaid volunteers) is heavy on enthusiastic philosophers, low on people with corporate experience. His available funds are somewhere in the very low six figures.\n\nHis team had originally been looking into minicircles, tiny pieces of DNA related to bacterial plasmids. In theory, you can put the gene you want on a minicircle, deliver it via IV into your patient, let it seep into cells, and get them to express the gene for a few months until the minicircles degrade - no scary permanent genetic engineering required. With the right combination of minicircles, you might be able to get cells to mimic Cameron’s FAAH-OUT mutation. There was even an experimental clinic in the libertarian charter city of Prospera that seemed willing to handle the logistics once they designed the gene. After treating a few people, maybe some pharma company or government would take notice.\n\nBut by the time of our interview, this plan was falling apart. Minicircles are hard to make. They can’t get inside cells efficiently enough to do much. Even if they could get into peripheral cells, they’d have trouble crossing the blood-brain barrier and getting into brain cells. The clinic in Prospera claimed to have solved some of these problems, [but it seems to be either confused or fraudulent](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT7_6kWkIqrvzFZvs88O_NqVzmn-NPINvHOLM-A6r_ieZyvnJsNVk4FSU7EYrePnQg9gT_3kwahJESZ/pub).\n\nThat leaves good old CRISPR. It’s illegal to CRISPR humans, and you’d have to do it at the embryo stage anyway. But it’s legal and practical to CRISPR animals. If you could CRISPR something like FAAH-OUT into cows, chickens, etc, you could create breeds of animal that don’t suffer. They think farms would go for it - non-suffering livestock isn’t just good press, it’s also healthier and (potentially) produces tastier meat. Then vegans could continue fighting for factory farming abolition as usual. But it wouldn’t be quite as desperate, and there wouldn’t be as many casualties along the way.\n\nSo Marcin’s current plan is to investigate CRISPR and suffering-free animals. Then, once his team has done something about animal welfare, he’ll circle back to humans with more resources and try to figure something out.\n\nLet’s back up and talk about some of the challenges they face:\n\n**Is FAAH-OUT even responsible for Jo Cameron’s condition?** When I first wrote about FAAH-OUT, Twitter user @the\\_megabase got interested [and ran some analyses](https://twitter.com/the_megabase/status/1757536195813196229). They were able to find a few other people in the UK Biobank with Cameron’s pattern of FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutations, none of whom had any unusual pain resistance. They point out that over the past twenty years, the vast majority of associations between single genes and exciting phenotypes (“candidate genes”) have failed, proving in the end to be only statistical noise. Will that happen here too?\n\nMarcin said he’s pretty concerned about this. He thinks there’s some supplementary evidence that FAAH-OUT is involved - in animal studies, [mice without the FAAH gene](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15157693/) did seem to experience less pain (not zero) than control mice, and [mice given FAAH inhibitors](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12461523/) showed less anxiety. He’s currently talking to the University College London team that did the original Cameron studies to see what they think of this, and whether they have any good explanation. If UCL eventually decides they messed up, Marcin has some backup low-suffering genotypes he can use instead, and is willing to look for more - hopefully not the ones that lose the sense of smell or the ability to sweat.\n\n**What’s the patent situation?** Far Out Initiative really wants this therapy to be available cheaply to everybody, not controlled by some specific pharma company. This might involve patenting it themselves, so that nobody else can patent it; after doing this, they would give the patent away freely. They’re waiting until they have something patentable before thinking too hard about this.\n\n**How safe will it be?** In 2016, a Portuguese pharma company tested a FAAH inhibitor, BIA 10–2474, as a potential new painkiller. The trial was a disaster - out of 90 patients, one died and five were hospitalized. This almost never happens in clinical trials - pharma companies are usually good at eliminating potentially dangerous candidate drugs _in vitro_ or in animal studies - so it was one of the biggest medical news stories of the year, and it chilled further research into FAAH.\n\nI can’t find anyone claiming to know exactly what went wrong with BIA 10-2474 ([see here for what we do know](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5020770/)). But [the FDA released a statement](https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-finds-drugs-under-investigation-us-related-french-bia-10-2474-drug-do-not-pose-similar-safety) a few months later saying they were confident that it was a particular feature of BIA 10-2474 and not a problem with FAAH inhibition in general. I don’t know their exact reasoning, but it might have to do with many other pharma companies trying different FAAH inhibitors with no problem. Far Out adds that the FAAH knockout mice also seem to do fine.\n\nNeither the minicircles nor CRISPR are drugs, so they wouldn’t be expected to have any similar problems.\n\nWhat happens after suffering-free livestock and minicircles? Now we’re getting too far out for even the Far Out Initiative to have many opinions. But David Pearce is very clear on what he wants for humanity’s future.\n\nHe [writes](https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/biointelligence-explosion.pdf):\n\n> The hypothetical shift to life lived entirely above Sidgwick's \"hedonic zero\" will mark a momentous evolutionary transition. What lies beyond? There is no reason to believe that hedonic ascent will halt in the wake of the world's last aversive experience in our forward light-cone. Admittedly, the self-intimating urgency of eradicating suffering is lacking in any further hedonic transitions, i.e. a transition from the biology of happiness to a biology of superhappiness; and then beyond. Yet why \"lock in\" mediocrity if intelligent life can lock in sublimity instead?\n> \n> Naturally, superhappiness scenarios could be misconceived. Long-range prediction is normally a fool's game. But it's worth noting that future life based on gradients of intelligent bliss isn't tied to any particular ethical theory: its assumptions are quite weak. Radical recalibration of the hedonic treadmill is consistent not just with classical or negative utilitarianism, but also with preference utilitarianism, Aristotelian virtue theory, a deontological or a pluralist ethic, Buddhism, and many other value systems besides.\n> \n> Recalibrating our hedonic set-point doesn't - or at least needn't - undermine critical discernment. All that's needed for the abolitionist project and its hedonistic extensions to succeed is that our ethic isn't committed to perpetuating the biology of involuntary suffering. Likewise, only a watered-down version of psychological hedonism is needed to lend the scenario sociological credibility. We can retain as much - or as little - of our existing preference architecture as we please. You can continue to prefer Shakespeare to Mills-and-Boon, Mozart to Morrissey, Picasso to Jackson Pollock while living perpetually in Seventh Heaven or beyond.\n> \n> Nonetheless an exalted hedonic baseline will revolutionise our conception of life. The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy, says Wittgenstein; but the world of the superhappy will feel unimaginably different from the human, Darwinian world. Talk of preference conservation may reassure bioconservatives that nothing worthwhile will be lost in the post-Darwinian transition. Yet life based on information-sensitive gradients of superhappiness will most likely be \"encephalised\" in state-spaces of experience alien beyond human comprehension. Humanly comprehensible or otherwise, enriched hedonic tone can make all experience generically hypervaluable in an empirical sense - its lows surpassing today's peak experiences. Will such experience be hypervaluable in a metaphysical sense too? Is this question cognitively meaningful?\n\nPearce’s old friend Nick Bostrom imagines a future of superintelligence. But Pearce will count his own contribution complete if he gives us superhappiness, supermeaning, superbeauty, and superspirituality. And why shouldn’t he? People on LSD and MDMA have all of these things. All we need to do is figure out how to do it without the trippy hallucinations, urge to go to raves, [and occasional neurotoxicity](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5714650/). Don’t say it’s impossible! All you need to do is find the right Scottish person!"} | |
| {"text":"# Mantic Monday 5/13/24\n\n_Disclaimer: This post involves more discussion of laws than usual. I am not a lawyer. Assume there are some errors. I will try to correct them after I learn about them._\n\nCFTC Extra-Double-Bans Prediction Markets\n\n\n-------------------------------------------\n\nThe Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the body that thwarts real-money prediction markets, has announced that it will be thwarting them even harder from now on.\n\nThe proposed resolution is [17 CFR Part 40](https://www.cftc.gov/media/10706/votingcopy051024_EventContracts/download). It starts by explaining the current state of the law: the CFTC is allowed to regulate “events contracts”, ie predictions. The law says they should favor contracts about economic events (like “will interest rates go up”), and disfavor contracts about atrocities or gaming (like “will there be a terrorist attack?” or “will the Yankees win the World Series?”). Everything else - the bread and butter of prediction markets - is in a gray zone that the CFTC has to review on a case-by-case basis.\n\nThe new resolution says that, if you think about it, elections and awards ceremonies are kind of like gaming (they’re a competition and you’re betting on the winners). And they’re more likely to be bet on by gamblers than by people with legitimate financial motives. So the CFTC is moving them out of the gray zone and prohibiting them by default.\n\nDoes this change much? The CFTC already prohibited these in practice - they were in the ask-for-permission gray zone, but whenever someone asked them for permission, they said no. The only semi-exception was PredictIt, which was small enough and established enough that they got grandfathered in; the CFTC tried to go after them, but got bogged down enough in the courts that PredictIt isn’t quite dead yet. So on a first read, this slightly strengthens the CFTC’s case against PredictIt, tells everyone else to give up hope, but doesn’t really alter the landscape.\n\nI think the biggest change is that it saves the CFTC time. They’re pretty open about this as a motive:\n\n> From 2006-2020, \\[designated contract markets\\] listed for trading an average of approximately five event contracts per year. In 2021, this number increased to 131, and the number of newly-listed event contracts per year has remained at a similar level in subsequent years\n\nThey especially don’t want to have to be forced to investigation elections:\n\n> If trading was permitted on CFTC-registered exchanges in event contracts that involve the staking or risking of something of value on a political contest, then the Commission could find itself investigating the outcome of an election itself.\n\nI think their thought process is: if you manipulate the commodity markets by (for example) saying that you have lots of nickel when you don’t, the CFTC has to investigate that and penalize the people responsible. In a hypothetical world with election contracts, if someone manipulated an election - for example, they put out a fake poll showing that the incumbent would definitely win so there’s no point in even voting - someone could ask the CFTC to investigate.\n\nI don’t know if I like the idea of federal agencies banning things because, if they were allowed, it would create more work for the federal agency. Imagine if the medical regulators banned surgery, because otherwise some surgeons might be accused of malpractice, but the malpractice lawyers want to go home early on Fridays.\n\nOtherwise, I’ll just reiterate the same points everyone made last time they tried this:\n\n* The UK has election betting and none of these negative outcomes have come to pass.\n \n* There are already hundreds of groups that care deeply about the outcome of elections. Some have billions of dollars on the line, like defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, real estate developers, and investment banks. Others care for non-financial reasons: transgender people, Christians, gun owners, the population of Ukraine, people who think we’ll all die from climate change, people who think the country will become a dictatorship, all Democrats, all Republicans, etc. The idea that adding one more group - “people who have a few thousand dollars staked on Kalshi” - will be the difference between a safe and secure election, and one that’s hacked by motivated parties, is pretty crazy.\n \n* Although most election bettors right now are degenerate gamblers, that’s a _result_ of the CFTC making it hard, not an excuse for them to make it harder. If the CFTC got out of the way and let people bet 7-digit-sums on this legally, most election bettors would probably be the groups mentioned above (defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, etc) trying to hedge their risk. These groups have billions of dollars in risk, which is probably enough to overwhelm however much money the degenerates can gather.\n \n\nAnd a few extra points:\n\n* Trying to weasel out of this by classifying elections as a sport is pathetic. Are you going to let colleges count anybody who runs for student government against their Title IX requirements? No? Seems like you’re not really serious about this “elections are a sport” thing.\n \n* If someone tries to manipulate nickel futures by blowing up a nickel mine, I think (I’m not an expert) this the the FBI’s problem, not the CFTC’s. In the same way, I would hope a regulatory framework could be developed that would investigate election fraud without making it the CFTC’s problem. Given that there’s already a big incentive for all the groups named above to manipulate elections in various ways, I would hope that some framework like this already exists.\n \n\nAnyway, although this is dumb, I don’t think it changes facts on the ground very much. Some possible exceptions:\n\n* RIP Kalshi, who are the main group negatively affected by this. This takes away a lot (though not all) of their value proposition, leaving them the option of contracts on some economic indicators, weather, and whatever else they can slip through the cracks.\n \n* Polymarket and Insight already IP ban US users and claim not to be operating in the US, so they shouldn’t be directly affected. But it might alter some case tangentially involving them one way or another.\n \n* This will probably have some effect on PredictIt’s legal case, but I can’t predict exactly what.\n \n* Probably no effect on Manifold’s pivot, see below.\n \n\nSee also:\n\n* [Maxim Lott’s article on this for more information](https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/government-to-ban-all-us-election?triedRedirect=true), including the chances that this gets tied up in the courts.\n \n* [Statement by the CFTC chairman](https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/behnamstatement051024) on why he supports this.\n \n* Statements by two dissenting CFTC commissioners ([1](https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/mersingerstatement051024), [2](https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/SpeechesTestimony/phamstatement051024b)) on why they oppose.\n \n\nPivotal Act\n\n\n-------------\n\n[Manifold Markets says](https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/A-New-Deal-for-Manifold-c6e9de8f08b549859c64afb3af1dd393) they’re pivoting to a new model combining play money points and real-money gambling.\n\nManifold may be a beloved local fixture, but their growth and revenue aren’t too impressive:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://manifold.markets/stats)\n\nIn the interests of continuing to exist and push prediction markets forward, they will switch to a “sweepstakes” model.\n\nAlthough gambling is illegal in most US states and requires complicated licensing in others, there’s a “sweepstakes loophole”; companies are allowed to offer “prize sweepstakes”, and you can use this to sort of reconstruct the concept of gambling in a legal way. You don’t give the company money and get back money. You pay for “points”, get “sweepstakes tokens” as a bonus, gamble the “sweepstakes tokens”, and then cash in the sweepstakes tokens for money. This is a pretty surprising loophole, but it’s already used by sites like [Chumba Casino](https://www.chumbacasino.com/) and [Fliff](https://www.getfliff.com/).\n\n(and apparently it creates weird incentives! In order to maintain the fiction of being a “sweepstakes”, these casinos have to give you “tokens” if you request them by mail. If you send a postcard to Chumba Casino asking for free money, they’ll give it to you, $5 per postcard. Is this an infinite free money pump? My impression is in theory yes, but the postcards [have to be handwritten in a very specific way](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChumbaSweepstakes/comments/ws0utr/how_to_write_postal_requests_for_free_sweeps_coins/), the company sometimes [rejects them](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChumbaCasino/comments/z90uxb/chumba_casino_refusing_to_credit_sweeps_requests/) for weird reasons, the cost of materials and mailing lowers your profit to more like $4, and so you’d have to hand-write 250 postcards to make $1,000. I’m still surprised [more people](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChumbaSweepstakes/comments/wv7bqp/why_writing_requests_for_free_sweeps_coins_can_be/) don’t do this.)\n\nBecause real money is involved, Manifold will have to tighten the rules on markets, including banning N/A resolutions. You can see a full list of changes [here](https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/A-New-Deal-for-Manifold-c6e9de8f08b549859c64afb3af1dd393). Manifold users are split between acknowledging that the for-profit company they love needs some way to make money, being salty about the changes, and being worried that creating more of a casino atmosphere will be bad for users / the world / ability to function as a good prediction market.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://manifold.markets/Joshua/good-pivot-bad-pivot-which-opinions)\n\n(I understand most of the NO vote here is based on the theory that there will be legal intervention - maybe because the government is willing to tolerate sweepstakes casinos but not sweepstakes prediction markets).\n\nManifold co-founder Austin Chen won’t be involved. He’s [leaving the site](https://manifold.markets/Austin/will-i-regret-leaving-manifold) - not explicitly because of the pivot, he just said it seems to be “trapped in local optima”. He plans to focus on other parts of the Manifold empire, especially [Manifund](https://manifund.com/), which tests impact markets, regranting, and other “experimental” charity models.\n\nManifold will continue in the hands of the other two co-founders, James and Stephen Grugett.\n\nSuperhindcasting\n\n\n------------------\n\nI mentioned this in my lab leak post, but it deserves more attention here: Good Judgment Project’s [report on Superforecasting The Origins Of The COVID-19 Pandemic.](https://goodjudgment.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Superforecasters-Covid-Origin-240312.pdf)\n\nGood Judgment Project employs superforecasters who will predict things for clients. Some people interested in COVID origins asked them to judge whether lab leak was plausible. Their headline result was 74% zoonosis, 25% lab leak, 1% something else.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F679c34d2-766f-41bd-ae75-b036bcdb06f9_1456x849.webp)\n\nPart of GJP’s method is getting their forecasters to share sources and talk to each other. Here’s the graph for how that went:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9c315554-fca5-4dc5-ac9a-d531b4ce7534_883x519.png)\n\nPeople changed their minds a little over time, but not in a very consistent way that mattered much in the end.\n\nWhat was the “client feedback”? The report says:\n\n> Client feedback was provided to the Superforecasters on December 21. The client posed questions to the Superforecasters about their assessments up to that date and asked for their reactions to several studies and articles. In the days following the client engagement, the Superforecasters lowered their confidence in the natural zoonosis hypothesis from 73% to 67%, although zoonosis remained the most likely potential cause in their assessment. But following an active engagement with recent genomic studies and historical base rates of zoonotic spillovers, those numbers began to return to earlier levels. January also saw increased attention to the geopolitical context and transparency issues, particularly related to research activities in Wuhan\n\nIs this bad? I’m imagining a pro-lab-leak client saying “But what about \\[this list of pro-lab-leak arguments\\]?” and then the superforecasters read them and adjust. In one sense, it’s good that they got to see more arguments; on the other, it seems like a potential route by which clients could bias the results - probabilities never quite got back to where they were before the feedback, though they got pretty close. The last-minute spike for zoonosis might be the Rootclaim debate results, which were released on 2/18.\n\nSo maybe the client feedback and the Rootclaim results both slightly affected the numbers, but mostly the superforecasters started out pro-zoonosis and stuck to their guns.\n\nDan Schwarz and the FutureSearch team say that [forecasting has a “rationale-shaped hole”](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qMP7LcCBFBEtuA3kL/the-rationale-shaped-hole-at-the-heart-of-forecasting). Despite the report making this sound like a pretty intense process, we don’t get much information about details:\n\n> In their extensive discussions , Good Judgment’s Superforecasters assessed base rates and historical patterns, existing evidence and scientific analysis, geopolitical context and transparency concerns, trust in intelligence communities, and methodological constraints.\n> \n> 1\\. Base Rates and Historical Patterns: The Superforecasters frequently referenced base rates, i.e., the history of pandemics emerging from natural zoonosis versus the history of laboratory leaks, to anchor their probabilities. For the former, they discussed how the base rates are changing as the climate warms and as expanding human populations push farther into natural environments that previously saw little human presence. For the latter, they acknowledged that it has only been 12 years since the advent of CRISPR gene- editing tools, and the base rate of lab leaks in the short synthetic biology era is not yet well established.\n> \n> 2\\. New Evidence and Scientific Analysis: Throughout the period, the Superforecasters adapted their forecasts in light of new scientific evidence, including genomic analyses of SARS-CoV-2 and its relation to bat viruses, and the debate over potential laboratory manipulation.\n> \n> 3\\. Geopolitical Context and Transparency Concerns: The geopolitical implications of the virus’s origins, particularly in relation to China’s transparency and the involvement of international research institutions, played a significant role in the analysis. Concerns over data veracity, and over the political ramifications of determining that the pandemic’s origins were other than zoonosis, were extensively debated.\n> \n> 4\\. Trust in Intelligence: Commentary on trust in intelligence communities and discussions about the impact of geopolitical biases on the interpretation of evidence illustrated the complex interplay between science, politics, and human behavior in assessing the pandemic’s origins.\n> \n> 5\\. Methodological Critiques and the Evaluation of Evidence: The Superforecasters engaged in methodological critiques of the evidence base, including the scrutiny of laboratory practices and biocontainment levels \\[...\\]\n> \n> In the end, most Superforecasters were in rough agreement on issues like the base rates of zoonotic spillover. Where they most often disagreed was on the interpretation of actions by Chinese officials and whether their actions reflected how an authoritarian government would react in any crisis over which it did not have full control, or whether those actions were indicative of attempts to cover up a biomedical research-related accident that allowed the SARS-CoV-2 virus to enter circulation in China and, ultimately, the entire globe.\n\nProbably it would be too much to ask for to get a transcript of all their discussions - then they’d be nervous saying things that might make them look bad to an audience. What would be a good balance between getting more information and not imposing on their time?\n\nForecasting is an unusually legible and easy-to-judge domain. One of the theories of change for forecasting was to use it to identify smart people with good reasoning, then turn them loose on less well-behaved problems. This is one of the first big attempts to do this at scale. How did it work? We can’t tell, because it’s inherently an illegible and hard-to-judge domain. Darn. I don’t know what I expected.\n\nNotes From A Local Optimum\n\n\n----------------------------\n\nAustin’s concern - that forecasting has reached a local optimum - is widely shared. We have some good sites: Manifold, Metaculus, Polymarket, GJO, etc - all doing good work. We have good-ish probabilities for a few important questions. Every so often a news source cites them. Sometimes a decision-maker looks at them behind the scenes, maybe. Is this all there is?\n\n[The FutureSearch team](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qMP7LcCBFBEtuA3kL/the-rationale-shaped-hole-at-the-heart-of-forecasting) says the next step is to focus on “rationale”. We need to use forecasting not just to get a raw probability, but to explain what’s going on and why we think something. Then instead of just convincing policy-makers to trust forecasts, we can tell them _why_ something is true, or inform their discussions even if they’re not willing to blindly trust a number. Is this a betrayal of the forecasting ethos? The original dream was that instead of a bunch of people giving arguments, we could just _test_ who was right. Now we’re going back to the arguments? People have argued forever; what does forecasting add to that? Well, they add the knowledge that the arguments are from people who have been right a lot before and are incentivized to be right again. Still, it’s not a natural fit. Probably it’s relevant here that FutureSearch’s forecasting AI does a really good job of this by default, in a way humans can’t match.\n\n[Nuno’s yearly forecasting roundup](https://forecasting.substack.com/p/the-state-of-forecasting-dynamics) doesn’t have a single thesis, but the first part is a well-supported complaint that most forecasting sites aren’t good business. They either burn VC money, burn EA donations, or converge towards casinos to support themselves. He gives an honorable exception to [Cultivate Labs](https://www.cultivatelabs.com/), which sells prediction market software rather than the results themselves.\n\nOpen Philanthropy (billionaire Dustin Moskovitz’s EA-aligned charitable foundation) has at least given forecasting a vote of confidence, recently [choosing to promote it to one of their main donation areas](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting). Still, they got a lot of pushback on the decision, for example SuperDuperForecasting [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting?commentId=oHW4CboRpKoC4oxL5):\n\n> This will be a total waste of time and money unless OpenPhil actually pushes the people it funds towards achieving real-world impact. The typical pattern in the past has been to launch yet another forecasting tournament to try to find better forecasts and forecasters. No one cares, we already know how to do this since at least 2012! \n> \n> The unsolved problem is translating the research into real-world impact. Does the Forecasting Research Institute have any actual commercial paying clients? What is Metaculus's revenue from actual clients rather than grants? Who are they working with and where is the evidence that they are helping high-stakes decision makers improve their thought processes?\n> \n> Incidentally, I note that forecasting is not actually successful even within EA at changing anything: [superforecasters are generally far more relaxed about Xrisk](https://forecastingresearch.org/xpt) than the median EA, but has this made any kind of difference to how EA spends its money? It seems very unlikely. \n\nAnd Marcus Abramovich [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting?commentId=RCoAmgaEJqrtC4u9B):\n\n> I'm in the process of writing up my thoughts on forecasting in general and particularly EA's reverence for forecasting but I feel, similar to [@Grayden](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/grayden?mention=user) that forecasting is a game that is nearly perfectly designed to distract EAs from useful things. It's a combination of winning, being right when others are wrong and seemingly useful, all wrapped into a fun game.\n> \n> I'd like to see tangible benefits to more broad funding of forecasting that seems to be done in t he millions and tens of millions of dollars.\n> \n> I would also be the type of person you would think would be a greater fan of forecasting. I'm the number one forecaster on Manifold and I've made tens of thousands of dollars on Polymarket. But I think we should start to think of forecasting as more of a game that EAs like to play, something like Magic the Gathering that is fun and has some relations to useful things but isn't really useful by itself.\n\nEli Lifland has a long and hard-to-summarize comment [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting?commentId=7cDWRrv57kivL5sCQ), response from Ozzie Gooen [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ziSEnEg4j8nFvhcni/new-open-philanthropy-grantmaking-program-forecasting?commentId=7JjsumavXqzLz2482), podcast between them on [“Is Forecasting A Promising EA Cause Area?” here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fsnMDpLHr78XgfWE8/podcast-is-forecasting-a-promising-ea-cause-area).\n\nI’m split on this. My previous hope was that the field would gradually grow, without any qualitative changes or discontinuities, until it became big enough that journalists and policy-makers were aware of it and took it seriously (compare eg the growth of the Internet as a scholarly resource). I think the strongest argument against this is Manifold’s relatively flat user numbers.\n\nIs there a new hope? I think if nothing else, forecasting might be useful as a testing ground:\n\n* First, to create forecasting AIs (like FutureSearch) which can then get consulted on a variety of questions, eg by policy-makers. The biggest holdup has always been the need to gather 20 or 50 or however many hard-to-find superforecasters for whatever question you’re asking, and then trust their advice even though they’re fallible fleshbag humans. If you can use the 20 to 50 superforecasters to inspire an AI, and then test the AI and prove it’s good, people might be more interested. This is especially true if the AI can branch out beyond traditional forecasting questions. Once we have a few of these, we can start comparing the next generation of AIs to the previous generation, and skip the superforecasters.\n \n* Second, to identify smart people, who can then be asked to solve problems outside of traditional forecasting domains (eg “Tell me all the ways this could go wrong, and which are the most likely”).\n \n\nBut this is a pretty limited vision, and a time-limited one (once we’ve done these things, why keep putting the millions of dollars in?)\n\nI still maintain some hope that someone will find the killer app that makes forecasting explode, but I don’t know what it would be.\n\nOne bright spot: both [DeepMind](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.13793) (see 8) and [OpenAI](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774) (see 2.12) recently hired forecasters (Swift Centre for DeepMind, OpenAI still keeping details secret) to predict some features of their AI models. I think this is cool, but it probably owes more to there being a bunch of rationalists at those companies (and rationalists loving forecasting) than to any sign of broader commercial adoption.\n\nThis Month In The Markets\n\n\n---------------------------\n\n[Nate Silver](https://www.natesilver.net/p/sonia-sotomayors-retirement-is-a), [Josh Barro](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/sonia-sotomayor-should-retire/677764/), and others have been banging this drum recently: the most important thing Democrats can do this year is get Sonia Sotomayor to retire. Sotomayor is an older liberal-leaning Supreme Court justice. She might get sick or die in the next four years, and if Republicans win the 2024 election, then they get to choose her replacement and the Court shifts even further right. If she retired today, Biden and the Democratic Senate would choose her replacement and the Court wouldn’t shift. She doesn’t want to resign, but Silver (remembering the similar case of RBG) thinks Democrats should pressure her as best they can. The markets have been shifting between 20% and 40%, but don’t seem to expect this to happen.\n\nKind of feel like I should be hearing more about this.\n\nBibi must have sold his soul to the Devil or something, I cannot believe he’s going to make it through this.\n\nThis is a response to the predictions I made in [my update on the Lumina probiotic](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic). You can click “see three more answers” for the question on side effects (separate from this question on efficacy). My numbers were 5/35/10/50 for the first question and 30/5/<1 for the second.\n\nHuh?\n\nOkay, so there are at least three cases. There’s paying Stormy Daniels hush money, currently going on in New York. There’s a Georgia election interference case. And there’s a federal election interference / January 6th case.\n\nThe Supreme Court recently said there were so many presidential immunity issues that it’s going to take forever to start trying the federal case, which is why that one is at 20%.\n\nThe New York case is going on now, and it seems like there’s an 80% chance he’ll be found guilty. The part I don’t understand is the last one (73% found guilty of felony in New York) vs. the second one (56% of any felony at all). This might just be a failure of arbitrage. It looks like nobody expects jail time in any case.\n\nHere’s an embarrassing screwup from Metaculus. This question was about when there would be a “Great Power war”, with Great Powers defined as any country in the top ten of military spending. But surprise surprise, Ukraine getting invaded made them spend a lot of money on their military that year, so they rose to #8 in the world in military spending in 2023. Since Russia is also in the top ten, this qualifies as a “Great Power war” by the technical definition, and the question resolves positive. Moral of the story: resolution criteria are hard!\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://polymarket.com/event/balance-of-power-2024-election?tid=1714738805877)\n\nPolymarket on 2024 election results. In the past they’ve had a Republican bias, but now their Presidential markets are in tune with everyone else in the polls, so maybe this is accurate.\n\nForecasting Links\n\n\n-------------------\n\n**1:** [Swift Centre forecasts that global coal consumption will stay high](https://www.swiftcentre.org/publicforecasts/global-coal-consumption-will-defy-expectations), despite the standard line that it will decline as cleaner energy comes on line. This is a rare case where superforecasters take a clear position opposed to a mainstream consensus, so I look forward to grading it later.\n\n**2:** [TimeGPT](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.03589) is supposedly a revolution in “time series forecasting”. I don’t know enough about this field to have an opinion.\n\n**3:** Kiko Llaneras of Spanish media EL PAIS is hosting [an elections forecasting tournament on Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/project/InternationalHub/?order_by=close_time&type=forecast&status=open).\n\n**4:** [Limitless](https://limitless.exchange/) is the latest attempt at a crypto prediction market. I don’t know why they expect to succeed when the last n has failed, but [people are betting](https://limitless.exchange/markets/0x4585482A258d66b16a95734E86DCA1Ea338AC100) 51% odds of $10 million volume in their first year.\n\n**5:** Manifest, the prediction market conference, is still in Berkeley this June, [see here for more information](https://www.manifest.is/)."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 329\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** More meetups this week, including Athens, Chicago, Brooklyn, Grass Valley, and Houston. See [the meetups post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more info.\n\n**2:** The European branch of the conspiracy is hosting two camps for young people this year. There’s the traditional [European Summer Program on Rationality](https://espr.camp/), for 16-19 year olds from anywhere in the world, held August 15 - 25 in Oxford. And a new AI-focused camp, [Program on AI And Reasoning](https://pair.camp/), for 16-21 year olds, held July 29 - August 8 in Oxford. Everything is free by default except travel, and travel scholarships are available for those who need them. Application deadline May 19, warning that the application form involves some potentially time-consuming tasks.\n\n**3:** Or, if you are unlucky enough to be an adult, the Center for AI Safety is running a virtual course on [AI Ethics, Safety, and Society](https://www.aisafetybook.com/virtual-course). Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by the “virtual course” title, this has group sessions and graded projects. Apply by May 31.\n\n**4:** And Lighthaven is still hosting two back-to-back conferences in Berkeley in late May early June, of which you are invited to both. First, [Less Online,](https://less.online/) a conference for rationalists and rationalist-blog-readers, May 31 - June 2. I might have announced this before, but new guests since I last mentioned it include Patrick McKenzie, Agnes Callard, Kevin Simler, Cremieux, and Aella. Second, [Manifest](https://www.manifest.is/), a conference on prediction markets, June 7 - 9. I’ll be at both. Ticket prices go up midnight on Monday. If you want to meet the guests but can’t pay, there should be an ACX meetup at Lightcone around that time, which many guests will be attending and which will be free admission."} | |
| {"text":"# Highlights From The Comments On Hanson And Health Care\n\nMost recent post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care).\n\n**Table Of Contents:**\n\n**1:** Comments From Robin \n**2:** Comments About/From Goldin et al \n**3:** Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels\n\n1: Comments From Robin\n\n\n------------------------\n\nIn response to my most recent post, [Robin](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/second-response-to-alexander-on-medicine) quoted more of his CATO Unbound article, then wrote:\n\n> While I feel this quote is pretty clear, I also agree with Scott that he isn’t the only person to misunderstand me. So let me try again.\n> \n> Every study on the marginal effect of medicine has some way it operationalizes “marginal medicine” for the purpose of that study. In geographic variation studies, it is the medicine done in places that spend more on medicine, but not in places that spend less. For studies that compare large to small hospitals, it is the treatments done in large but not small hospitals. For experiments that vary the price of medicine or insurance, it is the medicine chosen by subjects who faced lower prices, but not chosen by those who faced higher prices. I remember at some point also suggesting using treatments with a lower _[Cochrane Review](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/reviews/)_ rating. \n> \n> My key point was and is that each of these operationalized definitions of “marginal medicine” offers a concrete way to avoid marginal medicine. As an individual considering various possible treatments, here are five ways:\n> \n> 1. Ask about a treatment’s _Cochrane Review_ rating,\n> \n> 2. Ask if a treatment is done in low spending geographic regions,\n> \n> 3. Ask if treatments are done in small hospitals,\n> \n> 4. Ask your doctor how strongly they recommend a particular treatment; decline if recommendation is weak. (I’ve done this.)\n> \n> 5. Ask yourself and associates if you would be willing to pay for them out of your own pocket, if insurance did not cover them.\n> \n> \n> Maybe even better to ask several of these questions, and average their answers. \n> \n> As a wonk considering various possible policies, you can also consider regulating or subsidizing/taxing based on these indicators. Or consider policies that make more patients face higher personal prices for treatment. When I said “most any way to implement such a cut” I had in mind these sort of options; most any should help. Though my favorite option is [still](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/buy-health-update) creating agents who face strong direct incentives. \n> \n> Re Scott’s offered trilemma, I pick #3, though the consensus med position doesn’t identify enough marginal med to cut med in half, and I don’t claim non-marginal med works “well”. “Monkey trap” is not letting go of marginal med, as some of it must help.\n\nI basically agree with this, and apologize to Robin for being suspicious of his position. I think this is a pretty reasonable position, not too far away from mine (although I still disagree on the insurance studies).\n\n2: Comments About/From Goldin Et Al\n\n\n-------------------------------------\n\nRemember, this was the study where the IRS sent out reminders for certain taxpayers to get health insurance, those taxpayers did get more health insurance, and this was found to decrease mortality rates vs. control taxpayers. I cited this as evidence that insurance could be helpful; Robin was more skeptical and [listed some concerns here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical). Dr. Jacob Goldin, a co-author of al study, kindly sent me an email explaining his work further:\n\n> Dear Scott (and Robin, cc'ed),\n> \n> A friend referred me to your discussion about the effect of health insurance on health -- thanks for discussing my paper on taxpayer outreach with Lurie and McCubbin! I looked at the [response](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical?sort=community) by Hanson to your post and wanted to flag some things he wrote about our paper that I think are off base.\n> \n> 1: We had a principled reason for focusing on 45-64 year-olds to maximize statistical power to detect an effect. This balances the fact that on the one hand you want a larger age range to have a big sample, but on the other hand mortality is even rarer among younger individuals and our experiment caused fewer younger individuals to buy health insurance. The details of our analysis to choose this age range are in footnote 24 of the paper. We would expect smaller and less precise effects as you include more younger adults in the sample, so it is not surprising that our finding gets less statistically precise as you look at those other age ranges.\n> \n> 2: Projecting the results to longer durations of insurance. There is extensive discussion of this in the paper so I won't rehash it here, but the main point is that we wouldn't expect the effect of the first few months of insurance on health to be the same as the effect of subsequent months of insurance on health. You can't just project outward like he does and expect to get sensible results.\n> \n> 3: Comparing OLS and IV results. I really didn't understand what point Hanson was trying to make here. In this context, OLS means comparing mortality among people who enroll in more months of health insurance to people who enroll in less. Differences in health insurance enrollment are non-random though, so we don't put much weight on the OLS estimate. Why would we be concerned that our 95% confidence intervals for the IV and OLS estimates don't overlap? Note also that the OLS standard errors are much smaller not because of a type-o in the table but because they are estimated from a different source of variation.\n> \n> 4: Effect size. Our view (as we wrote in the paper) is that the results of the experiment provide strong evidence on the sign of the effect of health insurance on mortality, but weak evidence as to the magnitude of that effect. The 95% confidence interval for our IV estimates encompasses both very large effects of health insurance on health as well as much smaller effects. Based on my prior, I think the lower portion of the 95% confidence interval is most likely, but there is undeniably uncertainty here.\n> \n> 5: Finally, in my view, some of the most convincing evidence in the paper that health insurance affects health comes not from simply looking at the main IV estimate and p-value, but rather from other aspects of the results. As Figure III (copied below) shows, there is no difference in mortality rates between the treatment and control groups in the pre-period, and the gap between the groups gets bigger over time. Conversely, when we compare mortality for two groups of taxpayers who received the letters but didn't purchase much new insurance (because they were already insured by the time of the intervention), we don't see a difference in mortality (Figure A.VIII in the appendix, also copied below). You wouldn't expect to see these patterns if the results were simply noise.\n> \n> [\n> \n> \n> \n> \n> \n> ](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8b8875ae-eb49-4f02-8d0a-b02b193ad365_517x345.png)\n> \n> [\n> \n> \n> \n> \n> \n> ](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F53d63cba-1df5-40a8-902f-ad45e50feb02_986x669.png)\n> \n> Last point, which is not about my paper, but I'll weigh in to say that it is not defensible to dismiss the body of very high quality quasi-experimental research finding an effect of health insurance on mortality, such as the [Miller et al. paper](https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/136/3/1783/6124639) that studies Medicaid expansion or the [Goodman-Bacon paper](https://www.nber.org/papers/w22899) on childhood Medicaid coverage. Those are a solid part of our evidence base on this question. These very authors have put out other prominent papers finding null results on other policies-- you can't simply point to publication bias and dismiss this entire body of research!\n> \n> Thanks again for engaging.\n\nCremieux brought up a concern about [Lindley’s Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley%27s_paradox):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa9516f17-4450-4929-8747-64133925f47a_680x1239.png)\n\nIIUC, this is something like - if the effect was real, at this high a power, there are many p-values we might get - anything from 0.001 to 0.00001 and so on. So it’s actually quite a coincidence that we only get 0.01, pretty close to our significance bar. And in fact the level of coincidence required to produce this under the null (1%) is less unlikely than the level of coincidence required to produce such a precisely-calibrated real effect.\n\nI asked Dr. Goldin about this argument. He answered:\n\n> I don't think it's a good general rule to say that just because you have a very large sample and a moderate p-value, you shouldn't reject the null hypothesis. On Lindley's Paradox, I'm not an expert but my understanding is that there's not really a paradox, it's just that a bayesian and frequentist approach are asking different questions, and whether you prefer the null hypothesis vs the alternative hypothesis can depend on your prior. More generally, even with millions of observations, it is very difficult to find statistically precise differences in mortality because mortality is such a rare event, and because the letters we sent didn't convince everyone in our treatment group to buy health insurance, and some of the people in the control group who did not receive a letter still chose to buy health insurance on their own. So it's not like one should automatically assume that any large sample size would generate a miniscule p-value if the null hypothesis was incorrect.\n> \n> Here's one last way to understand the statistical significance of the results, which might be more intuitive. Suppose you were to take the individuals in our treatment and control groups and randomly re-shuffle them into (fake) treatment and control groups, and compare the difference in the mortality rates between the fake groups. You wouldn't expect to find an effect, but there might some differences just due to random noise. In Appendix Figure A.VII (below) we do this 1000 times, and compare the difference between the real treatment and control groups (our estimated effect from the study) to the distribution of the differences between these fake-groups. This tells us whether the difference between the treatment and control groups that we observe in the study (shown by the red line) is likely due to chance -- the figure below suggests that the answer is no, because it is more extreme than almost all of the fake comparisons.\n> \n> [\n> \n> \n> \n> \n> \n> ](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F608696b3-f359-41ea-88e5-0c0d5f492e4e_672x463.png)\n\nI have to admit I’m out of my statistical depth here, but this looks convincing.\n\nDr. Goldin also brought up one “new, seemingly very credible study showing beneficial health effects from insurance-induced medicine”, [The Health Costs Of Cost Sharing](https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/qje/qjae015/7664375?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false) (Twitter summary [here](https://twitter.com/oziadias/status/1786883312126247339?s=46&t=knytzoclSbru76U2aTt1Fg)), abstract:\n\n> What happens when patients suddenly stop their medications? We study the health consequences of drug interruptions caused by large, abrupt, and arbitrary changes in price. Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a function of their birth month, beyond which out-of-pocket costs suddenly increase. Those facing smaller budgets consume fewer drugs and die more: mortality increases 0.0164 percentage points per month (13.9%) for each 100 per month budget decrease (24.4%). This estimate is robust to a range of falsification checks, and lies in the 97.8th percentile of 544 placebo estimates from similar populations that lack the same idiosyncratic budget policy.\n> \n> Several facts help make sense of this large effect. First, patients stop taking drugs that are both ‘high-value,’ and suspected to cause life-threatening withdrawal syndromes when stopped. Second, using machine learning, we identify patients at the highest risk of drug-preventable adverse events. Contrary to the predictions of standard economic models, high-risk patients (e.g., those most likely to have a heart attack) cut back _more_ than low-risk patients on exactly those drugs that would benefit them the most (e.g., statins). Finally, patients appear unaware of these risks. In a survey of 65-year-olds, only one-third believe that stopping their drugs for up to a month could have any serious consequences. We conclude that, far from curbing waste, cost-sharing is itself highly inefficient, resulting in missed opportunities to buy health at very low cost ($11,321 per life-year).\n\nI bet I can already predict Robin’s response (“establishing that drug withdrawal is bad is a weaker result than proving that starting drugs is good”), but I appreciate this result, especially the finding that patients aren’t actually any good at triaging important vs. unimportant medicine.\n\n3: Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels\n\n\n-----------------------------------------\n\n**[Nathan El](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness/comment/54674979) writes:**\n\n> Agreed with this, and I particularly like seeing the improvement in mortality for specific conditions over time like this, it strikes me as a really strong argument for the effectiveness of medicine.\n> \n> What I do think remains a valid sort-of anti-medicine point is that treatment is vastly less cost-effective than prevention, I recall hearing it being about 50 times less so, and so clearly vast savings could be made through government disease-prevention programs such as dissuasion campaigns against and fees on the externalities of risk factors for disease and especially the broad category of \"ingested substances\" whether food or recreational drugs and even air pollution; the feeing of externalities (\"pigovian taxation\") is of course the least econonomically burdensome and indeed in theory if we could properly calculate the value of the externalities it would be economically optimal, since it doesn't require making any government expenditure and to the contrary actually constitutes a source of income for the government and can substitute for an equal amount of economically harmful taxation, so that's what seems to me the most obvious major policy to help reduce healthcare costs, though frustratingly it's foolishly opposed by many and ironically generally the most so by the \"taxation is theft\" crowd.\n\nRobin’s argument is strongest against prevention, least strong against treatment. There probably aren’t enough cancer patients in the RAND or Oregon studies to say anything about the effect of cancer treatment. But there are plenty of hypertensives, diabetics, smokers, etc. This is why most of the effects we’re debating are secondary endpoints like blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. So while you might or might not be right about prevention being better than cure, it’s not a response to Robin in particular.\n\nAlso, I don’t think it’s fair to call most of these “externalities” - you taking marijuana isn’t an externality, it’s you inflicting both the costs and benefits of marijuana on yourself. While I suppose it’s an externality if the government helps fund your marijuana-related-disease health care, I get nervous about this argument, because it implies that if the government helps you in any way then they ought to have power over you. All the government has to do is offer to pay for free STI treatment, and then if you have sex too much it’s an “externality” and you’re “robbing the government” so the government should be allowed to step in and stop you.\n\n**Kristian [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness/comment/54722336):**\n\n> A lot of money in medicine is spent doing stuff \"just in case\" (like unnecessary tests, MRI's, check ups) as well as making the experience more pleasant for the patient. You could design a maximally cheap health care system from the top down where patients can't choose their physician, can't see a specialist without fulfilling specific guidelines, don't get access to any examinations that aren't evidence based, where there are long waiting periods for everything that isn't urgent, -- and this would save a lot of money probably without statistical detriment to outcomes. Patients would hate it though. (This is what public health care is like in some countries.) A lot of people with enough money or private insurance would still spend a lot of money to get more \"luxurious\" care (like going to a specialist right away or getting an MRI even when there is no strict medical need.) The point is that only part of the money in medicine goes to medical outcomes, per se.\n\nThis is an important point; even if much of medicine is wasteful, it doesn’t imply that any given treatment doesn’t work.\n\nOne big area of waste is over-testing. It’s kind of philosophical exactly how much testing we should do - it depends how you balance money, time, and patient inconvenience vs. very small chances of making a positive health difference - but most people think we’ve gone too far, and the economic incentives probably reinforce that. Regardless of what you think of the philosophy here, this throws off insurance experiments. The insurance experiment might find that the higher-insurance group gets tested more (meaning more doctors visits and higher costs, which show up as negatives) and the benefit is 1/1000 extra cancer cases caught early (which doesn’t show up, because most of these experiments don’t have anything like that as an endpoint, and it’s just 1/1000 anyway). So regardless of whether testing at a certain level is good or bad, it will always show up as bad on insurance experiments.\n\nYou can think of excessive doctors visits as a special kind of overtesting. I see some of my patients more often than I think is medically indicated because they feel more comfortable if they see a doctor more often (I don’t know why). I see others more often than I’d like because they’re somehow unable to send me an email saying “I am sick and we need to meet sooner than scheduled”, so I either have to see them monthly, or see them after three months when they’re on death’s door after having been sick for two months. I don’t understand why patients are like this, but it offers another degree of freedom in “amount of healthcare received” that probably doesn’t look great in insurance experiments.\n\n**MrP [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55170857):**\n\n> Cut all antibiotic use for ear infection in children or cut it in half. To paraphrase Robin Hanson \"Ear infection treatment is not about curing ear infections\".\n> \n> One type of ear infection in children accounts for 10% of all antibiotic use in Iceland (From the paper 20% of antibiotic use in Iceland is consumed by children under 7 of which 50% is used to treat a type of ear infection.) Relative to other Nords Iceland has a larger problem with antibiotic resistance. - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3442319/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3442319/).\n> \n> Instead ear infection treatment is about -\n> \n> ...“the lack of stable doctor–patient relationships due to lack of continuity in medical care. Pressure from patients in a stressful society, the physician's work pressure, the physician's own personality, particularly the earnings incentive and service mentality and, last but not least, the physician's lack of confidence and uncertainty, resulting in use of antibiotic prescriptions as a coping strategy in an uncomfortable situation” Petursson P. GPs’ reasons for “non-pharmacological” prescribing of antibiotics: A phenomenological study. Scand J Prim Health Care. 2005;23:120–5.\n\nTo which 1123581321 [responds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55197257):\n\n> Have you ever had an ear infection? I'm not trolling, it's a serious question.\n> \n> The pain is.... I don't know what to compare it to, I've never experienced anything even close. And it was a bacterial infection, and maybe you're telling me it would have just cleared by itself, or maybe I'd go with what the doctor told me, that it was quite dangerous because of its proximity to brain, here's a prescription, you should notice an improvement withing 24-48 hrs., and I did. Take the pills and noticed an improvement.\n\nI think this is a good and important point about medical waste!\n\nIIUC “This treatment saved the patient 24 hours of excruciating pain” wouldn’t have shown up as a positive outcome on any of the insurance studies, even in the subjective self-report questionnaires (which were mostly about current health). It’s very easy for a bureaucrat measuring “outcomes” to think of this kind of spending as “waste”.\n\nThere’s an ongoing debate in medicine about whether doctors who respond to patients’ demands to throw the maximum level of treatment at their excruciatingly-painful but temporarily and non-dangerous conditions are good doctors (because they’re listening to their patients perspective) or bad doctors (because they’re letting their patients’ demands overcome good medical practice). Sometimes it’s obviously the latter, like when they give patients medications which don’t work at all, even as painkillers, to shut them up. And I remember that during residency I worked with a doctor whose answer to all painful-but-not-otherwise-dangerous conditions was “nobody ever died of pain”. This guy probably had the lowest medical spending in the hospital, and maybe the lowest side effect rate in the hospital, and probably many other valuable records, but I would not have wanted to be his patient.\n\nThis is another thing that just doesn’t show up at all in the insurance experiments.\n\n**[Michael Bacarella](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness/comment/54722526) writes:**\n\n> Don't statins pretty neatly bust Hanson's claim?\n> \n> Heart disease is a top killer. The NNT\\_5 for the absolute lowest risk group on statins is 400.\n> \n> NNT\\_5 is too short even, because statin benefits compound over decades.\n> \n> Statins are also cheap and well tolerated\n> \n> Given higher risk groups have a lower NNT, and people will be on them for decades, aren't we likely saving millions of lives?\n\nThe insurance studies had cholesterol as an endpoint, and the good-insurance group never had noticeably better cholesterol than the bad-insurance group. But there was no record of how many extra people got statins, whether statins were having an effect but the studies were underpowered to pick up on them, and I think the latest research suggests statins might have some effect independent of cholesterol. So yeah, I think we don’t know whether insurance causes people to be more likely to get statin treatment, and that’s another plausible route to health/mortality improvements that the insurance studies potentially couldn’t pick up on.\n\n**JSelinger [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness/comment/54727872):**\n\n> I'm dying from recurrent / metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (R / M HNSCC\\_frustrating), so the sections about cancer in particular stand out to me. Regardless of the current state-of-the-art for cancer treatment, personalized and mRNA vaccines are likely on the verge of revolutionizing cancer treatment.\n> \n> Take the HNSCC that's killing me: I got a partial glossectomy in Oct. 2022. Mine had some high-risk features, but I was assured that, with radiation therapy, it wouldn't recur In retrospect, I obviously should've done chemo and radiation, but at the time I was pleased to not need chemo, and I foolishly didn't look deeply into the data on recurrence, which is common for HNSCC, and I didn't seek second opinions.\n> \n> Docs are reluctant to impose systemic chemo because of the side effects. But Transgene has a personalized vaccine that is supposed to prevent HNSCC recurrence: [https://www.nec.com/en/press/202304/global\\_20230418\\_01.html](https://www.nec.com/en/press/202304/global_20230418_01.html): \"In the head and neck cancer trial to date, all patients treated with TG4050 have remained disease-free, despite unfavorable systemic immunity and tumor micro-environment before treatment,\" And most of these personalized vaccines have essentially no side effects.\n> \n> Moderna's mRNA-4157 platform also looks good: [https://jakeseliger.com/2024/04/12/moderna-mrna-4157-v90-news-for-head-and-neck-cancer-patients-like-me/](https://jakeseliger.com/2024/04/12/moderna-mrna-4157-v90-news-for-head-and-neck-cancer-patients-like-me/), not only in R / M HNSCC, but in melanoma and lung, too. Right now mRNA-4157 is only being tested in the recurrent / metastatic setting, as far as I know, but the logical time to use it is probably when initial surgeries are done: cut the cancer, sequence it, and then vaccine against it to prevent recurrence.\n> \n> Right now, from a society-wide perspective, the healthcare I've been getting probably fails the cost-benefit test (apart from the fact that the data I'm generating for clinical trials helps move the state-of-the-art forward). My quality of life is low, and while treatment has been extending my life, it almost certainly won't lead to remission. And even if a clinical-trial drug somehow leads to complete remission, I'll never be able to sleep or speak normally again ([https://jakeseliger.com/2023/08/27/on-being-ready-to-die-and-yet-also-now-being-able-to-swallow-slurries-including-ice-cream/](https://jakeseliger.com/2023/08/27/on-being-ready-to-die-and-yet-also-now-being-able-to-swallow-slurries-including-ice-cream/)). A few months ago my brother casually referred to me being disabled, and I was momentarily confused: Who was he talking about? But he was in fact right: I'm disabled and unlikely to ever be able to think or work in the way I did before losing my tongue.\n> \n> But that should change! Part of the reason I'm so frustrated by the FDA is that mRNA-4157 and TG4050 should already be available for HNSCC. Instead, they're stuck in trial hell, while HNSCC patients like me suffer recurrences and then die.\n\nI appreciate this perspective. We act like “the value of health care” is an objective thing, but people have pretty different values and health care is more important for some than others. Jake seems very dedicated to surviving as long as possible; as he points out, in a cost-benefit analysis, throwing lots of high-tech stuff at a severe cancer patient in order to buy them another year or two seems excessive, but when it’s your life, it . . . might or might not be, depending on what you want.\n\nI’ve seen patients with terminal illnesses who are very happy they chose to just let it progress and not spend their last few years in medical trials, and other patients who are very happy that medical trials gave them another year or two with their family and whatever else they were trying to accomplish. Although Robin’s heuristics at the beginning of the post are good for the median person, you’ve got to decide what you value.\n\n**Vitor [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55160981):**\n\n> Let me try to steelman the anti-healthcare position here.\n> \n> I have chronic heart disease. Based on some early symptoms and family history, I was put on several medications (beta blockers, ACE inhibitors). Sounds great, right? However, I have developed chronic fatigue in the years since, which is 10x worse than my (mild) heart problems.\n> \n> Years into this, I find out that the heart medications I've been taking have extremely strong system-wide effects: reduced activation of the sympathetic nervous system (beta blockers), increased inflammatory response and lowered pain threshold (ACE inhibitors), and even reduction in the efficiency of respiration (apparently, lowered heart function, which my meds induce, can lead to slight respiratory alkalosis even as oxygen saturation read as \"healthy\"). My cardiologists never mentioned any of these effects to me. These don't correspond to the typical image we have of side effects (rare, acute complications, e.g. \"rashes in less than 5% of patients\"). Rather, this is cumulative damage to half a dozen vital subsystems, throwing homeostasis way out of whack.\n> \n> My point is that some outcomes are relatively easy to measure and correlate (early start with heart medications reduces incidence of heart failure), while diffuse downstream effects that sap your vitality and make your life worse are extremely easy to miss, in all but the most egregious cases. If we assume that such things are systematically happening in the treatment of many diseases that aren't immediately life-threatening, we can end up with a picture where lots of people walk around saying that modern medicine has saved their lives many times over (I used to say such things in my younger days), while simultaneously the health of the population gets mysteriously worse, in ways that are easy to dismiss with a \"better screening\" pseudo-explanation.\n\nI agree that medicine is bad at detecting “I feel vaguely worse on these drugs”. I try to make sure my patients know that any drug can make you feel vaguely worse (especially psychiatric drugs) and it’s their job to let me know if this is happening to them so we can try to prevent it.\n\nIf you take a medication and feel much worse, then unless this is part of the plan (eg everyone knows they'll feel worse on chemo, but it's worth it), tell your doctor and unless they have some great counterargument, consider stopping the medication.\n\n**In a sub-discussion on US maternal mortality, [WindUponWaves writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55234509):**\n\n> _» “Well, the CIA factbook figures on maternal mortality rank the US second-to-last out of the selected countries...”_\n> \n> Funnily enough, even _that_ is more complicated than it first appears: \\[From\\] [The U.S. Maternal Mortality Crisis Is a Statistical Illusion -- Accurate counting has produced a seemingly dire death rate](https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/31/united-states-maternal-mortality-crisis-statistics-health/):\n> \n> _» \"However, these figures are completely wrong, and they have been known to be wrong for many years now. The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, the branch of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) charged with collating health and vital statistics, has published three separate reports elaborating in excruciating detail on one crucial fact about U.S. maternal mortality: It is measured in a vastly more expansive way than anywhere else in the world._\n> \n> _» As a result, U.S. maternal mortality is overestimated by two to three times. Properly measured, the real U.S. maternal mortality rate in 2019 was 9.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 births, which would put it at 36th place—still not impressive by comparison, but somewhat better than Canada and a bit worse than Finland or the United Kingdom \\[…\\]_\n> \n> _» Historically, the United States and most countries have tracked maternal mortality using data based on the cause of death listed on death certificates. When a person dies and the cause is assessed by an examiner of some kind, certain “maternal” causes, such as “eclampsia” or “obstetric trauma,” are commonly tracked. If a woman has died due to one of these pregnancy-related causes, she is listed as a maternal death. This process is fairly straightforward and has been widely adopted across many countries._\n> \n> _» But in 2003, the U.S. CDC decided to launch an improved death certificate form. Among the various changes proposed was the addition of a checkbox, wherein whoever filled out the paperwork would identify if the deceased had been pregnant in the last 42 days or the last year. The reason for this checkbox was that the CDC believed (correctly, as it turns out) that in only measuring “maternal causes of death,” it might be underestimating the true health hazards of pregnancy. Pregnancy might alter the course of other diseases and conditions or interact with them in important ways._\n> \n> _» The CDC anticipated that the checkbox would increase measured maternal deaths; it did not anticipate just how much it would increase them. As it happens, the CDC’s own reporting, which I have confirmed elsewhere, shows that the addition of the checkbox approximately doubled maternal mortality rates._\n> \n> _» You might think a sudden doubling in maternal death rates would be obviously flagged as a data issue to correct, but this turns out not to be so. Because the United States has a federal system, individual states added the checkbox in different years. While individual state maternal deaths showed sharp level shifts, the national maternal death count drifted upward gradually as states added checkboxes to their death certificates: California in 2003, Florida in 2005, Texas in 2006, Ohio in 2007, Tennessee in 2012, etc._\n> \n> _» In 2018, further modifications were made to the data-processing protocols used by the National Center for Health Statistics for pregnancy-related checkbox deaths, leading to more thorough inclusion of them. The result was a massive but gradual artificial inflation of maternal mortality._\n> \n> _» This doesn’t mean that the American way of measuring death is wrong. It’s just quite different from the countries that it’s being compared to..._\n> \n> _» But the U.S. case is particularly beguiling, since the United States now tracks all deaths of women who were pregnant, not only women who gave birth. Women who miscarried early or had abortions—whether officially reported or not—are also counted in the checkbox method. As a result, the United States may be the only country in the world where central vital records systems track all pregnancy-related mortality, not just maternal mortality.\"_\n\nI didn’t know this, thanks!\n\n**Niklas Anzinger ([blog](https://www.strandedtechnologies.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care/comment/55162371):**\n\n> I've read Hanson's pieces on all of this for quite a bit and talked with him on my podcast here too:\n> \n> If you're concerned with the \"so what?\" question, his clear answer is: bundle healthcare with life insurance, to give providers the incentive to keep you alive. There are a couple of kinks with this idea that he's worked out, of course there are practical challenges that we don't know yet how they will play out. But the upshot of it is: this healthcare-insurance bundle provider would have the right incentives to figure out which half of medicine is bad, and which is good (i.e. efficacious).\n> \n> It seems there is a bigger question, one that Robin does not address at length, about the efficacy of clinical research. I'm not deep into the details, but the replication crisis may affect it. The incentive for pharma after a successful clinical study that leads to FDA approval is to not ever question the results and sell as much of the drug as they can. As far as I understand, they have no liability after approval. Doctors also don't seem to have the right incentives (which I can't describe from experience or with sufficient detail, but from what I understand it also has to do with liability / malpractice lawsuits).\n\nOkay, I was pretty on board with maybe I was just strawmanning Robin and he thinks most medicine works and it’s just that we overspend at the margin — but the podcast is called “Most Drugs Are Bad For You”! Someone who listens to podcasts - is this just mistitled? Part of my frustration here is that Robin is saying reasonable things, but summaries of his work keep getting titles like “Health Care Is About Signaling” or “Most Drugs Are Bad For You”. If nothing else, hopefully this exchange will get title-makers to ask Robin if that’s really what he means before calling summaries that!"} | |
| {"text":"# The Emotional Support Animal Racket\n\nIf you’re from a country that doesn’t have emotional support animals, here’s how it works.\n\nSometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you’re depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge.\n\nClinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.\n\nLegally, it’s a racket. In order to benefit from these rules, you need for a psychiatrist to write you an “emotional support animal letter”, saying that your pet is actually an emotional support animal. In theory, the psychiatrist should evaluate you carefully, using their vast expertise to distinguish between an emotional support animal and a normal pet. In practice, nobody has a rubric for this evaluation that makes sense. I’m not saying there aren’t long, scholarly-sounding papers with twenty-seven authors from the psychiatry departments of top medical schools called things like _A Rubric For The Emotional Support Animal Evaluation That Makes Sense_. I’m saying that when you take out all the legalese, the executive summary is “think really hard about whether this animal really helps this person, then think really hard about whether it will cause trouble, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble, sign the letter”.\n\nHere’s a typical case: you’ve been seeing a patient with depression for three years. You prescribe them medication, maybe they get a little better, maybe they go up and down randomly in the way of all depression patients. Then they say “My roommate is leaving, so I need to move to a new apartment. But almost nowhere allows dogs, and the only place that does allow them charges more than I can afford. Please write me an emotional support animal letter or else I’ll lose my beloved Fido, the light of my life.”\n\nSo you say, okay, I’ve got to do an evaluation to see if you’re really depressed. They say “You’ve been treating me for depression for three years, you’ve prescribed me six different antidepressants, come on.” You say okay, fine, I’ll skip that part, but I’ve got to do an evaluation to see if your animal really helps you. They say “I feel so much better whenever I’m with Fido, he really brightens up my day.” You ask the same question several times, in the manner of all psychiatrists, and your patient always gives the same answer. Then you say “I’ve got to evaluate whether your animal is safe,” and he says “Oh yeah, Fido is such a good boy, he would never hurt a fly.” Now what?\n\nYou could keep evaluating harder. You could make them bring Fido into your office (good luck!) and observe him. The observation would look like your patient petting a dog for a half-hour appointment, for which you charge them $200. You could get “collateral history” from friends and family: “Is Fido really a good boy? Does your cousin seem happier when Fido is around?” At some point this becomes insane and humiliating. Good luck figuring out which point that is.\n\nOr you could do the ultra-responsible thing and deny the letter. You could say “As your psychiatrist, I inherently have a conflict of interest; I know you, I like you, I can’t be objective in this determination.” Now your patient will hate you forever. Every other doctor gives _their_ patients emotional support animal letters. The only other psychiatrist in town charges $500 per appointment and demands at least ten appointments before they will write an ESA letter, they’ll never be able to make it work, they’ll lose Fido. They’ll lose Fido and it will be your fault and they’ll hate you forever and they will never take any of the medication you recommend ever again even if they’re suicidally depressed and you’re the last psychiatrist in the world.\n\nOr you could wash your hands of it. You could say “I’m going to be ultra-responsible and demand you see a third party. But just between you and me, that third party could be [Pettable - Get Your ESA Letter In 24 Hours](https://pettable.com/a/esa-letter?utm_campaign=15557580913&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=692827408782&utm_term=official%20esa%20letter&adgroupid=135570689422&targetid=kwd-394178271790&matchtype=e&device=c&adposition=&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw8J6wBhDXARIsAPo7QA8m_h5jy4qc7Al1ykgcoXIZDE7jjEqnQX076ntNvLUwRnJWPy0gE7QaAvU0EALw_wcB). Or maybe [CertaPet - Get Your ESA Letter In 3 Easy Steps](https://www.certapet.com/). Or even [ExpressPetCertify - Same Day ESA Approval, Guaranteed Landlord Acceptance](https://expresspetcertify.com). Or how about [ESADoctors - Get Your Legitimate ESA Letter](https://esadoctors.com/esa-letter/)? Or any of their one thousand competitors. You don’t have to feel conflict-of-interest-y. Your patient will only be out $100 or so, and only slightly pissed at you. And you get the warm glow of knowing this will definitely work, because these services have never, ever turned anyone down.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d6545df-5acc-4bd5-9f46-b910278ea2d8_1058x820.png)\n\nOr you could stop dithering and just write the damn emotional support animal letter. It doesn’t have to be more than a few sentences. If you Google “emotional support animal letter”, it autocompletes to “…template”. There are hundreds of them!\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F39c1cfa7-e5d3-4346-a0a8-b0aaee776946_791x1024.png)\n\nThis option has basically no downsides and is the one that most psychiatrists end up taking.\n\nAnd it’s harmless enough with Fido - he really is a good boy. But I’ve had patients with ADHD ask me to certify their snake. Sorry, I refuse to believe a snake can help you with ADHD, unless it’s one of those talking snakes from Harry Potter and it whispers “Concccccentrate . . . conccccccentrate” in your ears every time you start slacking off. Still, some patients argue very eloquently: “Taking care of the snake helps me keep to a routine, and makes me feel more confident, and she’s my only friend in the world, and I feel like I’d be stressed and lost without her.” It’s a little weird. But do you really want your patient to lose their beloved Nagini just because you refused to write a letter that has no legal requirements and no downsides?\n\nProbably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets. Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse.\n\nBut the _process_ runs into the same failure mode as [Adderall prescriptions](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/): it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of _that_ is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.\n\nI have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody’s ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever."} | |
| {"text":"# Asterisk/Zvi on California's AI Bill\n\nCalifornia’s state senate is considering [SB1047](https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB1047/2023), a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry.\n\nIf the California state senate passed a bill saying that the sky was blue, I would start considering whether it might be green, or colorless, or maybe not exist at all. And people on Twitter have been saying that this bill would ban open-source AI - no, all AI! - no, all technology more complicated than a toaster! So I started out skeptical.\n\nBut [Zvi Mowshowitz](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047) ([summary article in](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation) _[Asterisk](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation)_, [long FAQ on his blog](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047)) has looked at it more closely and found:\n\n* It’s actually a pretty good bill.\n \n* The reason it sounded like a bad bill before was that people were misrepresenting what it said.\n \n\nThe bill applies to “frontier models” trained on > 10^26 FLOPs - in other words, models a bit bigger than any that currently exist. GPT-4 doesn’t qualify, but GPT-5 probably will. It also covers any model equivalent to these, ie anything that uses clever new technology to be as intelligent as a current 10^26 FLOPs model without actually using that much compute. It places three[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-1-144429673) types of regulation on these models:\n\n**First**, companies have to train and run them in a secure environment where “advanced persistent threats” (eg China) can’t easily hack in and steal them[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-2-144429673).\n\n**Second,** as long as the model is on company computers, the company has to be able to shut it down quickly if something goes wrong.\n\n**Third,** companies need to test to see if the model can be used to do something really bad. Its three categories of really bad things are:\n\n1. Create nukes or other weapons of mass destruction. This can’t be something dumb like linking the user to the Wikipedia page for uranium. It has to help human terrorists “in a way that would be significantly more difficult . . . without access to a covered model”.\n \n2. Cause > $500 million in damage through “cyberattacks” on critical infrastructure\n \n3. Go rogue and commit some other crime that does > $500 million in damage[3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-3-144429673).\n \n\nIf the tests show that the model _can_ do these bad things, the company has to demonstrate that it _won’t_, presumably by safety-training the AI and showing that the training worked. The kind of training AIs already have - the kind that prevents them from saying naughty words or whatever - would count here, as long as “the safeguards . . . will be sufficient to prevent critical harms.”\n\nSo the bill isn’t about regulating deepfakes or misinformation or generative art. It’s just about nukes and hacking the power grid.\n\nThere are some good objections and some dumb objections to this bill. Let’s start with the dumb ones:\n\n_Some people think this would literally ban open source AI._ After all, doesn’t it say that companies have to be able to shut down their models? And isn’t that impossible if they’re open-source? No. The bill specifically says[4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-4-144429673) this only applies to the copies of the AI still in the company’s possession[5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-5-144429673). The company is still allowed to open-source it, and they don’t have to worry about shutting down other people’s copies.\n\n_Other people think this would make it prohibitively expensive for individuals and small startups to tinker with open-source AIs_. But the bill says that only companies training giant foundation models have to worry about any of this. So if Facebook trains a new LLaMA bigger than GPT-5, they’ll have to spend some trivial-in-comparison-to-training-costs amount to test it in-house and make sure it can’t make nukes before they release it. But after they do that, third-party developers can do whatever they want to it - re-training, fine-tuning, whatever - without doing any further tests.\n\n_Other people think all the testing and regulation would make AIs prohibitively expensive to train, full stop_. That’s not true either. All the big companies except Meta already do testing like this - here’s [Anthropic’s](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/de8ba9b01c9ab7cbabf5c33b80b7bbc618857627/Model_Card_Claude_3.pdf), [Google’s,](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13793) and [OpenAI’s](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774) - that already approximate the regulations. Training a new GPT-5 level AI is so expensive - hundreds of millions of dollars - that the safety testing probably adds less than 1% to the cost. No company rich enough to train a GPT-5 level AI is going to be turned off by the cost of asking it “hey can you create super-Ebola?”, and putting the answer into a nice legal-looking PDF. This isn’t the “create a moat for OpenAI” bill that everyone’s scared of[6](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-6-144429673).\n\n_Other people are freaking out over the “certification under penalty of perjury”_. In some cases, developers have to certify under penalty of perjury that they’re complying with the bill. Isn’t this crazy? Doesn’t it mean if you make a mistake about your AI, you could go to jail? This is deeply misunderstanding how law works. Perjury means you can’t deliberately lie, something which is hard to prove and so rarely prosecuted. More to the point, half of the stuff I do in an average day as a medical doctor is certified under penalty of perjury - filling out medical leave forms is the first one to come to mind. This doesn’t mean I go to jail if my diagnosis is wrong. It’s just the government’s way of saying “it’s on the honor system”.\n\nWhat are some of the reasonable objections to this bill?\n\n_Some people think the requirement to prove the AI safe is impossible or nearly so._ This is Jessica Taylor’s main point [here](https://unstablerontology.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-sb-1047), which is certainly correct for a literal meaning of “prove”. Zvi points out that it just says “reasonable assurance”, which is a legal term for “you jumped through the right number of hoops”. In this case probably the right number of hoops is doing the same kind of testing that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are currently doing, or that AI safety testing organization METR recommends. The bill gestures at the National Institute of Standards and Technology a few times here, and NIST just named one of METR’s founders as their AI safety czar, so I would be surprised if things didn’t end going this direction. METR’s tests are possible and many AI models have successfully passed earlier versions.\n\n_Other people worry there are weird edge cases around derivative models._ I think the bill’s intention is that once you prove that your AI is too dumb to create nukes, you’re fine to open-source it. Third-parties can change its character, but not its fundamental intelligence. But in theory, a third party could get tens of millions of dollars of compute and keep training your AI to increase its fundamental intelligence. This would be a weird thing to do, and anyone with that much compute probably should just make their own model. But if someone wanted to screw you over by doing this, technically the law is kind of vague and you would have to trust a judge to say “no, that’s stupid”. Probably the law should clarify that it doesn’t apply to this situation.\n\n_Other people are worried about a weird rule that you can’t train an AI if you think it’s going to be unsafe_. After some simple points about having a safety policy set up before training, the bill adds that you should:\n\n> Refrain from initiating training of a covered model if there remains an unreasonable risk that an individual, or the covered model itself, may be able to use the hazardous capabilities of the covered model, or a derivative model based on it, to cause a critical harm.\n\nThis makes less sense than all the other rules - you can test a model post-training to see if it’s harmful, but this seems to suggest you should know something before it’s trained. Is this a fully general “if something bad happens, we can get angry at you”? I agree this part should be clarified.\n\n_Other people think the benchmarking clause is too vague._ The law applies to models trained with > 10^26 FLOPs, or any model that uses advanced technology to be equally as good despite less compute. Equally as good how? According to benchmarks. Which benchmarks? The law doesn’t say. But it does say that the Technology Department will hire some bureaucrats to give guidance on this. I think this is probably the only way to do this; it’s too easy to fake any given benchmark. Every AI company already compares their models to every other AI company on a series of benchmarks anyway, so this isn’t demanding they create some new institution. It’s just “use common sense, ask the bureaucrats if you’re in a gray area, a judge will interpret it if it comes to trial”. This is how every law works.\n\n_Other people complain that any numbers in the bill that make sense now may one day stop making sense._ Right now 10^26 FLOPs is a lot. But in thirty years, it might be trivial - within the range that an academic consortium or scrappy startup might spend to train some cheap _ad hoc_ AI. Then this law will be unduly restrictive to academics and scrappy startups. Is this bad? Presumably we know now that AIs less than 10^26 FLOPs are safe. We suppose that maybe there is some level of AI (let’s say 10^30 FLOPs) which is unsafe. If we had this number auto-update for compute growth, eventually it would go above the unsafe number, and unsafe models would be exempt. But at some point we’ll probably discover that some new models (eg 10^28 FLOPs) are safe, and it would be good if the law was updated to exempt them too. Very optimistically, this might happen - California’s minimum wage was originally $0.15 per hour, but this got updated when inflation made that unreasonable. In the pessimistic case, this will be a problem for us thirty years from now, if we’re even around then.\n\n_Other people note that an AI committing a cyberattack is a fuzzy bar_. If you ask GPT-4 to write a well-composed, grammatically-correct phishing email (“Dear sir, I am the password inspector, please tell me your password”), the phishing works, and you use the password to blow up a power plant, does that count? I agree that it would be nice if the law were clearer on this. But I also agree with the lawyers who object that dealing with programmers is impossible and that laws will never be exactly as clear as code.\n\n_Other people note that this will \\*eventually\\* make open source impossible._ Someday AIs really _will_ be able to make nukes or pull off $500 million hacks. At that point, companies will have to certify that their model has been trained not to do this, and that it will stay trained. But if it were open-source, then anyone could easily untrain it. So after models become capable of making nukes or super-Ebola, companies won’t be able to open-source them anymore without some as-yet-undiscovered technology to prevent end users from using these capabilities. Sounds . . . good? I don’t know if even the most committed anti-AI-safetyist wants a provably-super-dangerous model out in the wild. Still, what happens after that? No cutting-edge open-source AIs ever again? I don’t know. In whatever future year foundation models can make nukes and hack the power grid, maybe the CIA will have better AIs capable of preventing nuclear terrorism, and the power company will have better AIs capable of protecting their grid. The law seems to leave open the possibility that in this situation, the AIs wouldn’t technically be capable of doing these things, and could be open-sourced.\n\n(or you could base your Build-A-Nuke-Kwik AI company in some state other than California.)\n\nFinally - last week we discussed Richard Hanania’s _[The Origin Of Woke](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke)_, which claimed that although the original Civil Rights Act was good and well-bounded and included nothing objectionable, courts gradually re-interpreted it to mean various things much stronger than anyone wanted at the time. This bill tells the Department of Technology to offer guidance on what kind of tests AI companies should use. I assume their first guidance will be “the kind of safety testing that all companies except Meta are currently doing” or “something like METR”, because those are good tests, and the same AI safety people who helped write those tests probably also helped write this bill. But Hanania’s book, and the process of reading this bill, highlight how vague and complicated all laws can be. The same bill could be excellent or terrible, depending on whether it’s interpreted effectively by well-intentioned people, or poorly by idiots. That’s true here too.\n\nThe best I can say against this objection is that this bill seems better-written than most. Many of the objections to its provisions seem to not understand how law works in general (cf. the perjury section) - the things they attack as impossible or insane or incomprehensibly vague are much easier and clearer than their counterparts in (let’s say) medicine or aerospace. Future AIs stronger than GPT-4 seem like the sorts of things which - like bad medicines or defective airplanes - could potentially cause damage. This sort of weak, carefully-directed regulation that exempts most models and carves out a space for open-sourcing seems like a good compromise between basic safety and protecting innovation. I join people like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton in supporting it.\n\nRegardless of your position, I urge you to pay attention to the conversation and especially to [read Zvi’s](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation) _[Asterisk](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation)_ [article](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/why-is-everyone-suddenly-furious-about-ai-regulation) or [his longer FAQ on his blog](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047). I think Zvi provides pretty good evidence that many people are just outright lying about - or at least heavily misrepresenting - the contents of the bill, in a way that you can easily confirm by [reading the bill itself](https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB1047/2023). There will be many more fights over AI, and some of them will be technical and complicated. Best to figure out who’s honest now, when it’s trivial to check!\n\nIf you disagree, I’m happy to make bets on various outcomes, for example:\n\n* If this passes, will any big AI companies leave California? (I think no)\n \n* If this passes, will Meta stop open-sourcing their AIs in the near term, ie before the AIs can make nukes or hack the power grid? (I think no)\n \n* If this passes, will AI companies report spending a large percent of their budgets on compliance, far beyond what they do now? (I think no)\n \n\n[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-anchor-1-144429673)\n\nIt also demands that compute clusters implement some Know Your Customer laws, and creates an official State Compute Cluster for California. I’m ignoring these because nobody has expressed much of an opinion on them. The State Compute Cluster for California isn’t on anyone’s AI safety list, and I assume it’s part of some bargaining with some other interest group.\n\n[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-anchor-2-144429673)\n\nAnd, incidentally, where the AI can’t break _out_.\n\n[3](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-anchor-3-144429673)\n\nThe difference between (2) and (3) is that (2) triggers if a malicious human tells the AI to do the hack, but (3) only triggers if the AI becomes sentient or something and commits the crime itself.\n\n[4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-anchor-4-144429673)\n\n“Full shutdown means the cessation of operation of a covered model, including all copies and derivative models, on all computers and storage devices within custody, control, or possession of a person”, where “person” is elsewhere defined to mean corporation. I agree this is a little ambiguous, but _Asterisk_ talked to the state senator’s office and they confirmed that they meant the less-restrictive, pro-open-source meaning.\n\n[5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-anchor-5-144429673)\n\nIs this a loophole that makes the law useless? I think no - as we’ll see later, companies won’t be able to open-source certain models that are proven to have very dangerous capabilities. This part is probably aimed at those.\n\n[6](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill#footnote-anchor-6-144429673)\n\nAFAICT OpenAI and other big labs haven’t expressed a position on this bill, and I can’t guess what their position is."} | |
| {"text":"# Highlights From The Comments On \"The Origin Of Woke\"\n\nOriginal post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke).\n\nTable Of Contents:\n\n\n--------------------\n\n**1:** Response From The Author \n**2:** Attempted Fact Checks \n**3:** People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace \n**4:** People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights \n**5:** The Origins Of Modern Wokeness \n**6:** Other Countries \n**7:** EEOC Lawsuits \n**8:** Other Good Comments \n**9:** Conclusions And Updates\n\n1: Response From The Author\n\n\n-----------------------------\n\nBook author Richard Hanania [kindly responded](https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1785756978670862735) to my review on Twitter:\n\n> I enjoyed reading Scott Alexander's review of my book, and he did a good job applying its lessons to some more recent events. Here’s my response to certain points and critiques:\n> \n> 1) Yes, civil rights law does not directly explain why things got so crazy in the 2010s. In the book, however, I take issue with the idea that this period of time was as much of a watershed as people think it was. The basic ideas – disparate impact, tests are racist, crime fighting is racist, etc. – were already woven into American life for decades. I argue that the 2010s was the culture catching up to law. This is why I called the book “The Origins of Woke,” as it was not meant to be an all-encompassing explanation for everything that happened as a result of civil rights law. Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth. It would of course be massively incomplete, inconsistent with some evidence, and not be an all-encompassing theory of everything. If someone was going to study a topic they’d ideally want to know more than one sentence about it, but to the extent to which we can put the blame on one thing in order to make the world legible, this is it.\n> \n> 2) I agree that the judges and bureaucrats took the law in the direction they did in the first place for reasons not having to do with civil rights law. I see guilt over the black issue as the cultural core of this, and civil rights law determined the path this instinct took, that is, what “caring about black people” meant in practice and which groups the same template got applied to.\n> \n> 3) I stick by the absurdity of the Di-az/Diaz story and using it as an example. In my universe there’s no way that any words used against an individual can justify the payout they got. Yet I could’ve provided a more balanced summary of the case, and I regret not doing so.\n> \n> 4) I left a comment about the alleged inaccuracies of the “walk-up” and “great view” controversy at the link, I don’t think that was misleading at all.\n> \n> 5) Yes I didn’t talk about the origins of inequality. That would have been a bad strategy. I prefer what Scott calls the “meta-honesty” approach, where you tell people exactly what you’re not going to talk about and why. This means that the pieces are all there for an intelligent reader to figure out what you think, while making things hard for the cancellers and political opponents. This is a political book, and I sometimes do politics, which I justify with the meta-honesty approach. Scott has a revulsion towards this, which I consider having the flaw of being too pure for this world. I, in contrast, have an appreciation for politics as an art, and this is maybe just an aesthetic thing. But I will never lie to or mislead you about what I think, and believe others should live up to the same standard, even if they sometimes practice selective silence.\n> \n> I’d also refer people to my piece that responded to some earlier reviews of the book here.\n> \n> [\n> \n> Richard Hanania's Newsletter\n> \n> Against Ideaism\n> \n> Among the reviews of my book, I have noticed two main lines of criticism. First of all, there’s the argument that I didn’t explain everything. Oliver Traldi in Quillette asks “does the federal government require corporations to make rainbow-colored versions of their logos, or tweet in support of black trans women?” No, it certainly does not, although I …\n> \n> Read more\n> \n> 8 months ago · 81 likes · 39 comments · Richard Hanania\n> \n> ](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/against-ideaism?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web)\n\n2: Attempted Fact Checks\n\n\n--------------------------\n\n**Sverlook [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55260319):**\n\n> When I first read the book, I had a hard time tracing Hanania's source for the \"great view\" and \"walk-up\" claims you quoted. As far as I can tell, it goes back to a 1995 memo by Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (pages 33 to 36, [https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf](https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2012/07/10/miamivalleybrief.pdf)) that specifically gives these phrases as examples of information that \"does not violate the Act\". Sine then, they have consistently been cited as examples of acceptable language in various sources. Hanania's description might not be strictly false — maybe Achtenberg was referring to some earlier example where somebody cited those phrases as exclusionary — but it is definitely misleading.\n> \n> EDIT: It looks like I goofed on this. There is a correct citation in the book. See Hanania's response below.\n> \n> Oliver Traldi's review ([https://quillette.com/2023/09/23/civil-rights-and-wrongs/](https://quillette.com/2023/09/23/civil-rights-and-wrongs/)) points some more misrepresented anecdotes . For example:\n> \n> \"But every now and then a claim goes by rather quickly that I wasn’t sure about. For instance, the book cites a statistic that Yale now has as many administrators as it does students; but this is because many employees at Yale’s hospital count as administrators for bookkeeping purposes.\"\n\n**Hanania [responds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55290295):**\n\n> The citation is right there. It's from David Bernstein, \"You Can't Say That.\" I even cited the chapter, which is in the introduction. Here's his quote:\n> \n> \"There are a number of other phrases that did not make the Oregon list, but that some realtors avoid nonetheless for fear of liability, including the following: master bedroom (either sexist or purportedly evocative of slavery and therefore insulting to African Americans), great view (allegedly expresses preference for the nonblind), and walk-up (supposedly discourages the disabled).\"\n> \n> I didn't say that they violated the law. My exact quote was \"even terms like 'great view' and 'walk-up' have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs.\" I didn't say that these terms were ever found to violate the law. It's in keeping with one of the main arguments from the book, which is that stuff that is technically legal might still be thought to be problematic, creating a chilling effect. So what realtors think you're allowed to say or not say is relevant to the discussion. And the fact that government has to cite them as ok tells you far the restrictions on speech go. If these are your border cases, the civil rights regime is a massive infringement on liberty.\n> \n> As for the Yale claim, Traldi doesn't provide a link, so I don't know how much the hospital staff affects things. But this article says that there's a 45% increase in administrators in less than two decades, and it doesn't appear to count hospital staff. It pegs number of administrators as about 80% of the number of students without counting the hospital.\n> \n> [https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-part-of-its-leadership-to-lead-yales-administration-increases-by-nearly-50-percent/](https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/11/10/reluctance-on-the-part-of-its-leadership-to-lead-yales-administration-increases-by-nearly-50-percent/)\n> \n> So the statement ends up technically true, and also not very misleading unless you think that hospital administrators shouldn't count (which is arguable) and you think there's some massive difference between a huge increase in administrators that leads to them being 80% as large as the student body or 101%. Hospital staff are also doing a lot of DEI stuff too, so I don't know why you should exclude them if they're part of a larger story of bureaucratic bloat.\n\n**Sverlook [responds](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55315958):**\n\n> Thanks for clarifying: I think I had looked at the US News article in the same footnote, but you are correct. My apologies, I shouldn't have commented without checking again.\n> \n> For the Yale issue, it looks like the article you cite does count hospital staff: See the quote from President Salovey (\"He reiterated that the growth in the Yale School of Medicine’s clinical practice has been a significant and worthwhile cause of the administration’s increased size\"). Since there's nowhere that they break it out by hospital vs. non-hospital, it's hard to say.\n\n**[DanL tries to learn more](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55297035) about the “company penalized for refusing to hire attempted murderer” example (to be clear, this was mine, not Hanania’s):**\n\n> Looks like this might be an appealate brief, at least:\n> \n> [https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/migrated\\_files/eeoc/litigation/briefs/freeman.html#\\_Toc120287278](https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_files/eeoc/litigation/briefs/freeman.html#_Toc120287278)\n> \n> At a quick skim, seems to be a standard case of the EEOC suing for the use of criminal and credit checks as it does - this particular case is allegedly built around an individual who was rejected on credit grounds that failed to match Freeman's explicit criteria.\n> \n> Was this a game of telephone where the defendant's attorney makes an inflammatory statement about the sought relief that gets included in poorly-sourced blurbs, which Scott repeated as the focus of the whole case? The chain of attribution is pretty shaky here\n> \n> \\[…\\]\n> \n> Okay, here's the appellate decision:\n> \n> [https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/published/132365.p.pdf](https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/published/132365.p.pdf)\n> \n> Story seems to be that as Step 1 in the suit is that the EEOC needs to establish a prima facie case of discrimination, and that it relied on an expert report to do so. Problem was, the expert report sucked really bad, was excluded by the trial court, and Freeman moved for a summary judgement that was ultimately granted. EEOC tried to submit an amended report but it sucked too. Case dies in the crib and any argument about the sympathetic Black applicant or the mis-aimed relief is irrelevant. EEOC appeals, appellate court narrowly holds that the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded the report, and that's whole ballgame.\n> \n> (And Judge Agee concurrs specifically to say that the EEOC fucked up this case \\*extra\\* hard.)\n\nThe review talks about a lot of bad cases, many of the cases do eventually get dismissed, but “the process is the punishment” and I don’t know how much power even dismissed cases have to exert chilling effects.\n\n**[John Mayne](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55275208):**\n\n> I have some expertise in harassment cases in California. The idea that one joke creates liability is untrue. See: California Civil Jury Instruction (abbreviated CACI for reasons not immediately clear to the casual observer) 2521A. Further different workplaces can have different standards; (see the Friends case - Lyle v. Warner Brothers (38 Cal.4th 264)). \"FEHA is not a civility code.\"\n> \n> For clarity, I am not talking about what the law should be. I am discussing what the law is. And isn't.\n\nI don’t think Hanania specifically claimed that one joke creates liability, but I appreciate the clarification. See also more skeptical notes from other commenters [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55275473), [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55276327), and [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55308936).\n\n**Max Morawski [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55354974):**\n\n> Spoke to an Spanish major about a paragraph I found interesting, this one:\n> \n> _» “Hanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway - the much-remarked upon rise in Hispanic white supremacists seems like a weird yet promising sign here.”_\n> \n> I think in a book that's being critical of civil right's laws as an institution should point out that the history of this is a little more nuanced when you remember that we never have had a true neutral point in terms of civil rights. Her response:\n> \n> _» \"In 1954, Hernández v Texas altered the classification of Mexican-Americans in order to give them protection against discrimination under the 14th amendment. As the population of Mexican-Americans grew, the United States classified them as white. However, when they brought forward their concerns regarding racist and discriminatory practices, the government ignored their claims since they were white and therefore not protected under the 14th amendment like black Americans. As a result, Mexican-Americans made the argument that they were a class apart from white Americans. Many Mexican-Americans feared that arguing for a change in classification would result in the mistreatment equal to what African-Americans were experiencing at the time. The “class apart” argument was formed to demonstrate that while they were classified as white they were still treated as “others” by white society. Stating that Mexican-American activists demanded to be classified as “white” ignores the complex history of racial classification in the United States and the subsequent challenges faced by Mexican-Americans in their fight against racial discrimination.\"_\n> \n> I think the original paragraph definitely hides the fact that white / non-white was a pretty bad binary to be on one side of socially, but you needed to be on the other side of it for legal protections to apply.\n\n3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace\n\n\n-------------------------------------------------------\n\n**REF (who later says he works in the semiconductor industry) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55255644):**\n\n> The idea that companies don't hire based on merit is ludicrous. Every person we hire spends 8 hours being interviewed and quizzed. This was true at my last five companies. Two of them had more than 20k employees and four were U.S. owned and based. Even before my post-college career, it was clear that hiring was based either on ability or potential. If you aren't being hired based on ability then you are applying for a job that requires none.\n\nI don’t think the claim was that merit plays no role in hiring, just that it can sometimes be over-ruled in favor of race. **Vaniver [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55295688),** continuing on semiconductors in particular:\n\n> I heard (at Samsung, from people fleeing Intel) that Samsung was still meritocratic in this way / the nepotism was all pro-Korean nationals in a way that totally ignored American racial categories, but that Intel had 'gone woke' in its hiring / promotion.\n\n**And Candide III ([blog](https://candide3.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://candide3.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata) about the wider tech industry:**\n\n> There definitely used to be a tech industry exception - or rather the tech industry was flagrantly violating CR hiring rules and getting away with it because it was so new and shiny and prestigious. Google's famous interview questions were thinly disguised IQ tests and other companies had similar practices. Of course the result was massive disparate impact. However, Griggs vs Duke Power Co does allow employers to use tests narrowly tailored for the job, and possibly EEOC bureaucrats could not figure out how to argue that coding-based tests like Google's are not legitimate or that hiring good software engineers is not a compelling enough business interest to set aside disparate impact requirements.\n\n**Pat The Wolf [on software](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55263832):**\n\n> Merit is important, but other factors are clearly taken into consideration. I used to interview candidates for software engineering roles. Usually I would do an interview with another colleague, and at the end we'd give our manager a thumbs up or thumbs down for a candidate.\n> \n> I recall one case where we interviewed a guy from an underrepresented group, and both of us gave a thumbs down. The next week I was surprised to see him sitting at a desk because he'd been hired. I approached the manager just to make sure there wasn't a miscommunication in our interview feedback, and he just sort of shrugged it off and said he thought the guy was a good fit. It wasn't a meritless hire--he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed.\n> \n> I can't really say I blame the manager. We were in a client-facing consultancy group, and some potential clients do like to see diversity on a team.\n\n**Golden\\_Feather [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55269300):**\n\n> My admittedly anedotical 0.05$ as a generic office drone. \\*Every\\* white collar job I've heard of uses patently IQ test-like screening. I'm not talking about Google or Jane Street, I'm talking about big4 consultancies, mid-sized accounting firms etc. Places where productivity is not nearly high enough to justify resisting the acrimonious persecution Hanania posits, and that yet are happy to ask their applicants to submit Raven matrices or quirky plane geometry problems (the joke is even that the only thing those working there got out of grad school/MBA was prepping for the GMAT/GRE, since once hired they'll end up filling excels anyway).\n> \n> As for wokeness driving the soulness of workplace, I worked under a boomer boss who openly made (admittedly funny) \"I hate my wife\" and \"women amiright\" jokes in front of the HR lady, confident that suing for harassment was something you see in media much more than in real life. The place was as soulless (or, I'd rather say, soulful in the modest and self contained way you can expect an office to be) bc people just wanted to do their work and then go live their lives.\n\n**Philo Vivero [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55283658):**\n\n> I'm seeing extremely obvious and not-at-all-veiled hints that females, blacks, and latinos should be prioritised for hiring.\n> \n> I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.\n\n**John [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55313929):**\n\n> I have read the same news stories as Hanania, but it is all so contrary to my professional experience that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. I've been working in business for 35 years have never, even once, seen an unqualified minority or female worker get hired or promoted. In my field (engineering consulting) you either produce, or you're out. My current company talks a really woke game and we have to take sensitivity training but the real story is that you had better work hard on profitable projects, or else. Plus, most of my clients are government agencies, and so far as I can tell it's the same with them. They have high standards, and people who don't meet them don't last long and certainly don't get promoted; I've never worked with a minority or female project manager or contracting officer who wasn't professional and hard-working. So far as I can tell, the wokeness in the air is just blaph and nobody pays it any real mind. Likewise, all of my employers have had bans on dating fellow employees, but I've witnessed three marriages among people who were both working for me.\n\nAfter this, the discussion shifted to government. **Occam’s Machete [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55259682):**\n\n> I used to work for a major DoD agency where the recruiters bragged about how many minority candidates they were able to attract … way beyond what would be proportionate.\n> \n> There were obvious pressure and incentives to do well at that, and merely having the proportionate minimum would make one less competitive for promotions and such. Gotta exceed the standard!\n> \n> There’s a whole little industry of recruiting companies that specialize in helping minority candidates land great tech jobs by finding and coaching them (veterans are also a legal minority here.) The companies really want qualified minorities for legal reasons if nothing else.\n> \n> There are both material incentives and ideological motivations in play here for both any given org’s leadership and HR types. But those aren’t entirely separate variables because they feed off each other.\n\n**[Mr Doolittle](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55270869):**\n\n> I can vouch for that happening at a small federal contractor. We were told to track race of applicants and present that information upon demand. The implications were clear, even if not spelled out, and we followed through on hiring racial minorities as much as we were able.\n\n**LV [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55256140):**\n\n> I work in civil service and the idea that hiring is not based on merit is laughable. In fact, I have never witnessed a racial preference occurring in action.\n\n**[Vorkosigan1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55256575):**\n\n> I’m in the federal civil service (US), and hiring is on merit. Ive never seen anyone hired who wasn’t deemed qualified at the point of hire. Not everyone works out, of course. Just like the private sector.\n\n**Martin Blank [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55307613):**\n\n> I loved this review. My contributions would be that:\n> \n> _» “Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result.”_\n> \n> This DEFINITELY happens with the parts of the federal bureaucracy that I am involved with. I have daily contact with federal bureaucrats, and the recent hires/promotions are wildly more \"diverse\" (out of all proportion with the population honestly), and of very poor quality. So you have a lot of 55-65 year old white male civil servants of very high ability and intelligence, being replaced by pretty low capacity 30-40 year old minority women of startlingly poor intelligence and ability. On paper they have similar credentials, but they are not similar caliber people. In general obviously, there are exceptions in both cases. The preference HR policies clearly have \\*something\\* to do with it.\n> \n> In the off chance some skilled white or Asian man finds his way into the civil service, you often find them leaving to go make more money as a consultant because their career is going nowhere and they are getting passed over for promotion by their idiot admin with the right diversity characteristics (I am only half exaggerating). So now you have this ineffectual federal staff who does little work, and is surrounded by a cloud of not very diverse consultants who are needed to get things done (due to procurement rules/preferences typically the owners of the consulting firms are also fairly diverse, but the consultants/SMEs themselves less so...after all somebody needs to know what they are doing).\n> \n> And on the \"disparate enforcement\" front I would have the following nonsense to report.\n> \n> One rule that is very common with federal awards is a rule requiring that all hiring on construction projects must \\*attempt\\* to first hire low income and disadvantaged people. I won't get too into the exact details, but we will leave it at that.\n> \n> You need to have a plan and a policy and records for how you attempted to achieve this goal and reach out to these groups in your hiring, even if you were unsuccessful.\n> \n> You might ask what about if I am hiring a lawyer or an engineer or an architect? Do I really want to hire a \"low-income\" engineer? YES! It includes all hiring. But wait I don't want to mess up my RFQ for a contract lawyer with a bunch of nonsense attempting to target \"low-income lawyers\"? Too bad!\n> \n> And as far as \"low-income construction workers\" aren't we also supposed to pay prevailing wage rates (basically union rates), if we are paying that much anyway, we aren't ever going to find the low-income workers the most qualified. Well you have to at least try! OK how hard do we have to try? Who knows?!?!?\"\n> \n> What is the response to this nonsense that is basically not implementable?\n> \n> Well there is little to no enforcement from the bureaucrats and almost no one takes the rules seriously, until the bureaucrats are mad at someone and want to nail them and then suddenly they act like of course everyone is expected to follow this rule that 98% of people aren't following.\n\n**Leah Libresco Sargeant [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55260985):**\n\n> Meanwhile, on the civil service hiring side, [here's a good example of the non-meritocracy](https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-actually-implement-a-policy):\n> \n> _» “Many hiring managers have told me— I’m not making this up — that people cut and paste from the job description into the resume and don't even reformat it. They don't change a single word, and they go to the top of the hiring list, even if it's completely obvious that it's a cut and paste._\n> \n> _» Jack Cable won the Hack the Pentagon contest several years ago, genius programmer. By definition, he’s one of the most qualified people possible to work on the Pentagon’s cybersecurity. He then submitted a resume for a job at the Defense Digital Service, but instead of cutting and pasting from the generic job description, he included a list of the programming languages he knows._\n> \n> _» And he was rejected something like five times. They told him, “If you want to get a job here, you could go work at Best Buy selling computers for a year and then reapply, and then you'll qualify.” So there's this insane down-select: whose resume most closely matches the job description?_\n> \n> _»The second down-select is a self assessment where they send those candidates a form to fill out that says, “Here are the characteristics we're looking for. How would you rate yourself?” The way to get through that down-select is to rate yourself as “master” on every single one._\n> \n> _» So you’ve down-selected twice. Let's say we now have 100 resumes. Then you can apply “veterans preference” to that candidate pool. And that's your slate. Technically you have done everything right, but you have not given the hiring manager anybody competent in anything but cutting and pasting – and lying.”_\n\n**Chase Hasbrouck [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55261590):**\n\n> The discussion about federal civil service hiring (not clear from context whether this is Richard or Scott) is pretty accurate to my experience, though I would characterize it as a focus on minimizing risk vs maximizing the correct selection. The primary affirmative action is for veterans, which arguably has had a greater impact on shaping the composition of the federal workforce than anything else (7% of US pop are vets; federal workforce is 30% vet).\n> \n> A brief sketch of the federal hiring process:\n> \n> 1\\. HR evaluates all candidates to see if they meet the minimum qualifications of the job. To minimize discrimination, this evaluation is generally limited to seeing if the candidate meets or exceeds the years of experience required.\n> \n> 2\\. If too many candidates remain after step 1, HR defines a \"Best Qualified\" pool. While many means of doing this are available, typically only years of experience and education are evaluated (sometimes occupational certificates/licenses). Veterans' preference (veterans affirmative action) is applied here.\n> \n> 3\\. Best Qualified candidates resumes' are forwarded to the HM. Resume reviews are required to follow a standardized rubric that must be approved by HR/Legal.\n> \n> 4\\. Interviews are done by a three-member panel. Interviews are done via a structured format; all candidates are asked the same questions, with no follow-up questions allowed. Interview questions must be approved by HR/Legal. Panel members rate the quality of each response on a numerical scale.\n> \n> 5\\. Top candidate is selected based on a combination of resume and interview scores. If a non-veteran is selected over a veteran in the BQ pool, HM must fill out additional paperwork justifying why.\n\n**Vaniver [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55296992):**\n\n> I think it is more likely that AA cases cause the \\_removal of qualification tests\\_ or the redefinition of 'qualified' or 'merit' or so on. (See all the people in the comments here insisting that federal hiring is on 'merit', which--sure, it's merit\\_2024 and that's different from merit\\_1954.) And then this loops back in to dishonesty and spiritual decay.\n\nI think people are getting hung up on “is there any aspect of merit left?” Definitely there is! The complaint isn’t that there is no qualification process at all, it’s that more-qualified whites often get passed over for less-qualified minorities (although the minorities will still have some qualifications and be above the minimum bar for the job).\n\n**John Schilling [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55285435):**\n\n> \"People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law?\"\n> \n> I saw that change happen in real time at my last job. Out in the far reaches of the Mojave desert, in the Land that Woke Forgot, we had a workplace culture where pretty much everyone seemed to enjoy their jobs. With rather less sex than the TV version, because A: real life rather than Hollywood and B: nerds rather than Advertising Bros. But where there was mutual desire, it happened, and where there wasn't, nobody really pushed.\n> \n> Until one woman filed a sexual harassment complaint(\\*), which everyone recognized was utterly baseless, and revenge for a social slight. But management decided they had to pretend to take it seriously, money quote, \"I'm sorry, \\[redacted\\], I have to take her side - she's the girl\". In a matter of months. Policies were changed, management became much more intrusive, and the job ceased being fun for anyone not long after that.\n> \n> I should have quit immediately; by the time I eventually left, my colleagues were only half joking when they suggested I could offer my next employer an entire spacecraft-propulsion R&D team, cheap.\n> \n> \\* Really, a series of escalating complaints of increasing bogosity when she wasn't satisfied with the social response to the earlier ones. By the end, management was officially 100% on her side, and she had no friends whatsoever of either gender.\n\nI’d like to know more about this. Did the changes just influence how much people could flirt at work? Was flirting at work so much fun that stopping it ruined the job? If not, what were the other negative changes that the harassment complaint caused?\n\n4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights\n\n\n----------------------------------------------------\n\n**gjm [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55363845):**\n\n> I’d like to correct a big misunderstanding (source: worked at the EEOC for a number of years):\n> \n> Scott says: “(here “the applicant pool” is an abstraction, often but not always the same as the general population, which is poorly defined and which bureaucracies can interpret however they want. It’s definitely not the same thing as the actual set of qualified applicants to the business!)”\n> \n> This is simply not true. Companies are required to track and maintain records of candidates. When the EEOC considers a hiring discrimination case, they obtain this data and can use it to see if there is a statistically significant difference in hiring rates between applicants who are in the protected class and applicants outside the protected class. Ideally, the expert the EEOC uses can account for job-related characteristics of applicants (previous experience) and the characteristics of the job applied to.\n> \n> (This is part of why there should not be hard quotas, job-relevant characteristics are sometimes correlated with protected class-status.)\n> \n> If the company does not have quality applicant records, the EEOC needs some benchmark to compare the share of protected class members to. Usually, this is the share of the protected class within the geographic vicinity of the firms locations who work in the firm’s specific industry. This is obviously imperfect, but here are a couple of relevant points:\n> \n> (1) In almost all the cases I was involved with, we heard directly from former employees or often HR personal from the company about specific issues, and there was substantive anecdotal evidence that discrimination of some form was happening. Usually, this anecdotal evidence is pretty serious, and I think it’s reasonable that this shifts your priors. If there are very large differences between the share of workers in the census and at the firm in the protected class, it seems reasonable to say the company should be able to explain this.\n> \n> (2) The company really should be keeping track of its applicants! If they aren’t, or they don’t give the data they have (illegal) the EEOC has to do something.\n> \n> (3) The shortfalls I saw were almost always pretty large. We aren’t in a situation where, oh, the Census shows 30% of men are servers, but in your restaurant its only 27%! It was more like: the Census shows 30% of men are servers, you have 3 male servers across all of your 20 locations. The court uses the same cut-off for statistical significance on proportions tests as most research papers (.05 p-value) anyway.\n> \n> Are there reasonable criticisms of these methods? Of course. But we had to try to reach the truth the best way we could, or at least to do a thorough job of analyzing the data and then let the judge/jury decide from there (Though most cases ended with mediation).\n> \n> The issues with using disparate impact are mitigated by the fact that the disparate impact measure has to be job-related. It would be inappropriate to have a test for whether a person could lift 50 .lb boxes for a computer engineer role, but you probably should have a pre-employment test for that if the job is a construction worker. Yes there are issues with this measure, and yes it comes down to argument and precedent, but it’s probably better to use this imperfect method than allow firms who want to discriminate an easy get out of jail free card with spurious requirements.\n> \n> There are always going to be tradeoffs in the way you set rules, (I personally don’t know how I feel about background checks, its seems reasonable for employers to screen on this, but then again, people deserve second chances), but I think this idea of the EEOC as incompetent/SJW crusaders just does not match my experience at all. It’s easy to make caricatures when you only focus on the extreme downsides of any tradeoff.\n\nThanks. Is there some protection in place if unqualified people apply? That is, if a job requires a PhD, and 100 blacks (all without PhD) and 100 whites (all with PhD) apply, is the applicant pool 50% black or 0% black?\n\n**Sam B [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55263144):**\n\n> As someone who actually works in civil rights law, this \\[review’s\\] description of disparate impact discrimination is just completely wrong and made up. As long as the employer can demonstrate a legitimate reason for the requirement it wins. Before that a company that, say employed ditch diggers, could insist that employees pass a math test. Given our longstanding inequities in education, particularly of low-income workers, this had the intended effect of excluding black workers. So hiring on \"merit\" is completely fine as long as \"merit\" has some connection to the job. Courts are generally hostile to disparate impact claims, to the point that civil rights lawyers are very reluctant to bring them.\n\nI [asked](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55264741) Sam:\n\n> Thanks for this. Some more questions, if you have time:\n> \n> * Is it true, as Hanania claims, that they have to prove a test is nondiscriminatory for each race and site individually?\n> \n> * How easy is it to prove legitimate reason? If I say \"I want my schoolteachers to do well on an IQ test, because schoolteachers should be smart\" does that pass?\n> \n> * Why can't Sheetz say \"We don't want people with histories of violent crime because we think they might be violent or criminal while working for us\"?\n> \n> * Why was Duke Power Co decided the way it was, since they asked people to take a mechanical aptitude test for a mechanical job?\n> \n\nSam [kindly answered](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55272742):\n\n> 1) He may be right about that (I don't know actually) but even if he is right, so what? If a test is relevant to a job, that evidence will apply to each worksite. It's not like there's some affirmative requirement that employers prove the test works before they can implement it--they can do whatever they want and the only check is a lawsuit. A plaintiffs' attorney is not going to bring that case if it doesn't have some evidence the\n> \n> 2) Very easy. You just have to show there is a “manifest relationship to the employment in question\" (a more lenient standard added by subsequent more conservative courts) then the burden shifts to the plaintiffs to prove its not legitimate or that the employer could achieve the same goal in a way that doesn't have a disparate impact. In Griggs, there was direct evidence from the employer's own experience that the test they were using was uncorrelated with job performance.\n> \n> 3) That is likely enough. But if, for example, their experience showed that people with a criminal history were no likelier to be violent and criminal than that argument would rightly fail. I think it is also unlikely the EEOC will win this case in the current legal environment.\n> \n> 4) As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.\n\nMore discussion of Duke v. Griggs - this is all coming from [one very long thread](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55270615), which you might prefer to read directly, **starting with [Mr. Doolittle](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55270615):**\n\n> I don't think the EEOC is being disingenuous when they think a company is discriminating. Their perspective is coming from the side that sees actual discrimination, often hidden behind convenient stories. Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.\n> \n> That said, I don't think the EEOC has an actual problem with merit tests like Google having someone write code for a coding job. They have a real problem with mission-creep tests (like requiring that coding test for lower level employees) or anything that might be a hidden way to discriminate.\n> \n> I think they also have some true-believer \"woke\" types that really think that any disparate impact is hidden discrimination, but for legal reasons this is significantly less prevalent than in other \"woke-adjacent\" contexts.\n\n**Bob Frank ([blog](https://robertfrank.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) writes:**\n\n> » _“Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.”_\n> \n> ...which was quite adequately remedied at the appeals court level. The plaintiffs got everything they could have reasonably wanted. But the EEOC didn't want to fix the problem they were ostensibly suing over; they wanted to use it as a premise to push their social agenda, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, and we ended up with one of the most damaging rulings in history.\n> \n> I wrote about this in some detail last year:\n> \n> [\n> \n> Forewarned Is Forearmed\n> \n> The Most Significant Case You've Never Heard Of\n> \n> People often think of the 1960s as a tumultuous time in our nation’s history, but in many ways the real damage was done in the 1970s. The 70s was a time when a lot of the chaos of the 60s settled down, but unfortunately it didn’t happen by conditions getting back to normal so much as by surrender, assimilating the chaos into a “new normal” that was sig…\n> \n> Read more\n> \n> a year ago · 5 likes · Bob Frank\n> \n> ](https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/the-most-significant-case-youve-never?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web)\n\n**gdanning [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55283575):**\n\n> Your article refers to what you call \"Duke Power’s use of industry-standard aptitude tests in employment decisions. \" But here are the actual facts:\n> \n> _» ”The Company added a further requirement for new employees on July 2, 1965, the date on which Title VII became effective. To qualify for placement in any but the Labor Department it became necessary to register satisfactory scores on two professionally prepared aptitude 428\\*428 tests, as well as to have a high school education. Completion of high school alone continued to render employees eligible for transfer to the four desirable departments from which Negroes had been excluded if the incumbent had been employed prior to the time of the new requirement. In September 1965 the Company began to permit incumbent employees who lacked a high school education to qualify for transfer from Labor or Coal Handling to an \"inside\" job by passing two tests— the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which purports to measure general intelligence, and the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test. Neither was directed or intended to measure the ability to learn to perform a particular job or category of jobs \\[…\\]_\n> \n> _» On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job-performance ability. Rather, a vice president of the Company testified, the requirements were instituted on the Company's judgment that they generally would improve the overall quality of the work force._\n> \n> _» The evidence, however, shows that employees who have not completed high school or taken the tests have continued to perform satisfactorily and make progress in departments for which the high school and test criteria are now used.”_\n\nThis leaves me with more questions than it answers. For example, if a company hasn’t explicitly measured how tests correlate with performance (which I assume is the case with most tests), are the tests okay or not? Also, could someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary?\n\n**Steve Sailer [describes his personal experience](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55277174):**\n\n> I worked for a marketing research startup firm from 1982-2000. In 1982, our hiring exam was the final exam given by one of our founders, a college professor, in his Quantitative Methods in Marketing Research course. It was a great test, and we hired a lot of good people in the 1980s.\n> \n> Our biggest client gave a similar exam and hired a lot of good people.\n> \n> When the EEOC went after our biggest, most prestigious client over their hiring exam, the firm then spent a lot of money on consulting firms to have it validated as related to work performance to the necessary legal standard. And they continued to hire good people.\n> \n> In contrast, when the EEOC finally noticed us in the 1990s, we found out how much it would cost to validate our exam and decided to save money by throwing it out. That turned out to penny wise and pound foolish.\n\nIf this is true, it sounds like the burden of proof is on the test-giver, and it’s a pretty high burden. I don’t know how this meshes with what Sam B is saying, unless Steve’s experience was before the change in the law that Sam mentions.\n\n**Hadi Khan ([blog](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55304108)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55304108):**\n\n> _» “As I said above, if you read the actual case, the facts were that the test did not predict success at the job. This turns out to be very common.”_\n> \n> This does not mean the test isn't a good test in the sense that it doesn't measure job performance. See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left.\n> \n> The test not predicting job performance could equivalently mean that Duke Power had a very well calibrated way to choose their employees where they were prefectly capturing the information from the apitutde test compared to all the other factors involved in hiring. Indeed the fact that this turns out to be very common suggests to me that this is going on here (and elsewhere).\n\nGood point! I don’t know when the correlation between test score and job performance was measured, and whether it should be expected to have this problem.\n\n5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness\n\n\n-----------------------------------\n\n(again, you might want to read [Hanania’s post answering objectors on this point](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/against-ideaism))\n\n**Carateca [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55255737):**\n\n> I hew more to the Tumblr theory of the origins of woke (Katherine Dee has written about this, although at infuriatingly short length.) All this was incubated on Tumblr by mentally ill teenagers in the mid-00s, expanded from there to various web forums/proto-social media of the era such as Something Awful and Livejournal where the mentally ill teenagers could gain cultural or moderation power, and then exploded onto Twitter where it cowed cultural leaders into compliance and suddenly people at your office were putting pronouns in their bios, doing land acknowledgments and sterilizing their kids. Civil rights law under this theory was a weapon for the woke to pick up, not the cause of the problem.\n> \n> (Edit: and not even that relevant of a weapon, regardless of its merit otherwise; wokeness's greatest damage is cultural, not legal.)\n\nI agree with the Tumblr theory too, though I think some blogs (eg Shakesville, Pandagon) might have been closer to Patient Zero. I continue to be a little confused how and why stuff that deranged teenagers were discussing on microblogs made it to the halls of power, and I would appreciate a more focused Origins Of Woke book discussing this process.\n\n**Desertopa [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55272505):**\n\n> So, I don't think I'm qualified to write that book, and if anything I'm less qualified now than I was twelve years or so ago, since it's been a long while since I've brushed up on the source material. But I think I'm better versed in what went into it than most people, and I'm prepared to at least take a stab at a substack comment on the subject.\n> \n> My impression, as of around 2009, before people identified \"woke\" as a thing, and before the social justice subculture that gave rise to the term had really solidified, but at a point when it was distinctly trending in that direction, is that the movement was essentially a result of academic ideas filtered through a specific, mostly online social context. While a lot of people, especially back then, would argue that the academic basis of the movement was sound, but often interpreted poorly by radical ideologues, my impression, as someone who read a lot more of the actual academic work than most, is that this was a mistaken interpretation, that the academic work actually \\*was\\* written largely by radical ideologues in the first place, and simply dressed up in language suited to an academic audience.\n> \n> I still identify as much more left wing than right wing, and this was even more the case at the time, since the far left end hadn't moved nearly as far away from me at that point. But, my impression is that at least as far back as the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, there was a balance between the left and right wings on issues of racial and gender justice etc. where both sides essentially held to the norms of trying to enact their desired changes via collective political action and measured civil disobedience, with the left wing making more or less continual progress against the right, until the left wing decided to defect first.\n> \n> This began in academia, with writers who framed the issue of racial justice essentially in terms of existential warfare. Basically \"we are opposed by a group of ideological enemies who are trying to destroy us and everything we represent. The mechanisms of gradual change collective political action and measured civil disobedience are fundamentally aligned against us in the favor of our ideological enemies, thus we have to break away from those and fight with tools which fundamentally favor our cause in order to be able to effectively defend ourselves.\" Because the writers in question were academics with cushy university positions, their actual mechanism of political action was writing books arguing people ought to do these things, which were mostly only read by other academics and ignored by the general populace. But when social justice started becoming a major component of the online subculture which was incubating in the mid to late 2000s, although only a minority of people actually read the work of actual academics on the subject, people who did were extremely influential in the movement, and ideas which originated in academia propagated to fixation through it.\n> \n> In the earlier days of the social justice movement, there were separate strains which cooperated on object-level goals, but disagreed over big-picture questions like \"should we frame social agendas in terms of Us vs. Them conflict drawn around identity groups, or in terms of alignment with philosophical goals?\" and \"should we attempt to move towards progressively more colorblind ideals of egalitarianism, or ones which consciously privilege minority groups?\" The identitarian strain eventually became more or less hegemonic over the movement, partly I think because it's an easier sell based on ordinary patterns of human thought (we've been engaged in identitarian tribal conflict for the entirety of human history,) and partly because almost all the academic underpinning behind the movement actually argued in support of the identitarian strain.\n> \n> I personally started to distance myself from the social justice movement around 2009, while remaining broadly aligned with its object-level goals, in large part because I started reading enough of the academic philosophy behind it to realize that the academics other people were treating as foundational figures (even if most of them didn't actually read their work) were essentially arguing that we needed to abandon the societal institution of liberalism because it was fundamentally aligned against the goals of social justice, while failing to acknowledge that the mechanisms of liberalism had been producing consistent incremental gains for social justice for the last several decades.\n\nThis is also how I remember things. The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before.\n\n**Neike Taika-Tessaro [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55257931):**\n\n> Interestingly, I was going to say Hanania's missing element could just be graphs like these:\n> \n> [\n> \n> \n> \n> \n> \n> ](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa774249b-b07c-4205-a3e4-68d95e763bfa_808x303.png)\n> \n> i.e. affirmative action laid the groundwork for this, then people connected, coordinated, and used it much more aggressively.\n> \n> I feel like that's basically what you're saying, except that what I'm (ignorantly) ascribing to Hanania here and what you're saying disagree on the cause. I guess in Hanania's framing, wokeness was inevitable once affirmative action existed in the legal framework; whereas in Dee's faming, wokeness was not inevitable once affirmative action existed, but is a separate phenomenon that then seized upon the tool. I'm probably doing both of them an injustice with that, mind.\n> \n> (To be clear, I'm not in the US and avoid most social media, so I don't particularly have opinions on this either way, I just immediately thought 'the internet' when Scott referred to the cultural turn between 2010 and 2015 and asked \"Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015?\".)\n\nYeah, something like this also has to be part of the picture, although I still don’t feel like I understand the mechanism well enough that I could have predicted this ahead of time.\n\n**More patient zero speculation, from [MarsDragon](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55496692):**\n\n> Historical nitpick: it's less that Tumblr infected LiveJournal so much as LJ users were forced to move to Tumblr as LJ got increasingly difficult to use starting around 2009-2010. The migration had more or less completed by 2012. Tumblr being so much more of a \"modern\" social media platform where it was easy to repost content and you got a random jumble of posts instead of a carefully-curated set of friends made it much easier for social justice thinking to spread.\n> \n> I think the whole shift to showing users a melange of content instead of a staid list of people the user chose to follow was a big driver of that sort of thinking. It allowed ideas to spread, upped controversy, and drives that sort of \"we must purge this!\" was of thinking.\n\nThe LiveJournal experts here say the key event to look at was [Racefail](https://fanlore.org/wiki/RaceFail_%2709), when, according to [Carateca](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55317149):\n\n> I had a front row seat and it was remarkable how the whole superstructure of a totalitarian state just congealed out of thin air in days and instantly took over a whole subculture. Sometimes I think that if Charlie Stross and the rest of them had just had some fucking balls and stood up to the bullies -- or, hell, just pushed the block button a few times -- none of this would ever have happened.\n\nI support any theory that lets us blame everything on Charlie Stross.\n\n**naraburns [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55256639):**\n\n> Anyway, I would argue that \"woke\" does not begin with civil rights law, but rather that both are the result of the same intellectual tradition. \"Woke\" attitudes are basically analogous to what was called \"cultural Marxism\" decades ago (see e.g. Weiner's (1981) \"Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology\"), but since \"Cultural Marxism\" has been retconned as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, people needed a different name for it. The linguistic treadmill is merciless, especially when dealing with political movements attempting to escape accountability for their past failures (or successes).\n\nI agree that there’s a crappy trick that goes:\n\n1. Take a thing that you don’t want people to be allowed to talk about. For example, maybe Coca-Cola doesn’t want people to talk about how soda makes you fat.\n \n2. Find some schizos saying a much stronger, extremely offensive thing. For example, “the Jews are adding obesity-promoting chemicals to Coca-Cola in order to destroy the white race”.\n \n3. Get a bunch of “disinformation researchers” to make a huge deal about the schizos and say things like “The MAGA phenomenon is largely fueled by white resentment over the Great Enfattening conspiracy theory”.\n \n4. Now nobody can talk about how Coca-Cola makes you fat, because people will say “That’s the discredited racist Great Enfattening conspiracy theory, shame on you for platforming that kind of stuff.”\n \n\n…and that all the current debate around “Cultural Marxism” is downstream of people pulling off this trick very successfully, so it’s become pretty hard to understand the history.\n\n**Candide III [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55258866):**\n\n> The previous incarnation of woke was called \"political correctness\" and it existed in late 80s-early 90s. That's when Alan Bloom's book came out. PC suffered a setback when Bill Clinton really wanted to win the election in 1992 and, needing the white vote, came down on Sister Souljah. A period of return to normalcy followed, until the recrudescence of PC as woke in late 00s.\n> \n> It stands to reason that it took about a generation after the original civil rights law/judicial decisions for the first effects to be felt, as new rules and most importantly new hires worked themselves through the system, gaining seniority and influence as their careers progressed. That works out to the mid-80s. The difference between PC/woke movement based on incentives created by civil rights law/judicial decisions and the heady atmosphere that led to \"woke judges\" in the first place is that the former is largely composed of the beneficiaries of civil rights law/judicial decisions (see: bioleninism), whereas the latter was an extremely white elite phenomenon. Some of those judges doubtless believed sincerely in the inherent equality of all human subgroups on all socially desirable characteristics (an easy extension of Christian spiritual equality), some wanted to finish the Solid South, etc. I'd love to read a good book about that.\n\n6: Other Countries\n\n\n--------------------\n\nMany people were annoyed that I didn’t bring in enough evidence from other countries, which have different civil rights law than the US.\n\nI did this on purpose: I didn’t consider these sufficiently independent cases. My impression is that wokeness originated in the United States, reached other countries piecemeal, and that the parts they got weren’t necessarily parts that applied to their own situation. For example, many countries held Black Lives Matter and Defund The Police protests even when they had approximately no black people. In a situation like this, I don’t know how to determine the relationship between any given country’s level of civil rights law and its level of wokeness.\n\nStill, some people described the situation in their countries, for example **[Citizen Penrose](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55258686) ([blog](https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)):**\n\n> The section about workplace personal relationships becoming more formal doesn't seem right to me, we've had the same trend in the UK without any civil rights law. Unless we do actually have the hidden de facto affirmative action mentioned at the beginning and I just don't know about it.\n\n**AH from the UK [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55272954):**\n\n> 100%. Technically \"positive discrimination\" is illegal in hiring in the UK. But \"positive action\" is perfectly legal.\n> \n> The typical example given is that you can't hire a black person \\*because\\* they are black (if say, they were worse qualified than a white candidate). But you absolutely can use \"positive action\" to hire someone to address a perceived imbalance (level the playing field) if two candidates are equally qualified.\n> \n> You can also legally have women only management hiring workshops if there is a perceived imbalance in senior leadership (i.e you'd like more women). But you can't then roll that out as a blanket policy at every level of an organisation.\n> \n> In reality, the line between these things are blurred- no two candidates are ever equally qualified, and there are always trade offs involved. The fiction that you can use race or gender as a tie breaker is useful for organisations to maintain. On the other hand, it definitely doesn't seem to be as bad as in the US- University admissions is still relatively meritocratic, with UK universities aiming to up the numbers of underrepresented groups via extensive outreach, coaching, mentoring etc. rather than workarounds like non-academic credentials. If a minority candidate doesn't get the grades/pass the entrance exam, they probably won't get in. Although, I do note that there are black only (financial) scholarships- not sure how those\n\nI think this is similar to the US. In school, I was always taught that affirmative action meant “you should never choose a less qualified minority, but if you happen to get exactly equal white and minority applicants, you should choose the minority”. I never thought too hard about how likely it was that a company would get two exactly-equally-qualified applicants, or how likely it was that the government could monitor whether a company was doing this. Of course, Hanania’s point is that this is the lies-to-children version of affirmative action, and the real version is that the government bullies businesses until their minority numbers are high enough, and the business uses underhanded techniques to get them high enough to satisfy the government. I don’t know if that’s how it works in the UK too.\n\n**Matheus from Brazil [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55268658):**\n\n> What Hanania doesn't seem to address is that 13% is still too low of a number for this stuff create substantial harm. I don't know how much time General Motors' Mary Barra spends thinking about this stuff. Maybe if you had 50% black population, this could be non-linearly more harmful.\n> \n> Here in Brazil we do have 50% black population (not black in the same sense as Americans). We didn't fight a civil war to end slavery and we didn't have segregation after ending slavery. We are cordial men (see: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pt&tl=en&hl=pt-BR&u=https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homem\\_cordial&client=webapp](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pt&tl=en&hl=pt-BR&u=https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homem_cordial&client=webapp) ). We had our first black president in 1909, but neither he nor the people made much of it.\n> \n> I am saying this because Brazil offers a nice comparison. We do have quotas. Quotas for public universities and quotas for public service. The federal law for public service quotas is 20% (much lower than the general population). There was some pushback when Congress approved these laws, but people mostly accepted it. Not even Bolsonaro pushes back on them. And I think quotas for university aren't the worst idea (you're educating people instead of putting them as traffic controllers) and the 20% number for public service isn't doing the same harm that the African National Congress quotas did on their country. Corporate life isn't harmed beyond that.\n> \n> It seems that \"just accept quotas\" is the much better status quo.\n> \n> The current status quo is how the Chinese communist state regulates corporate China. \"Common prosperity\" says the party leader and companies need to scramble to be seen as doing good. At least more than the next guy.\n> \n> On the other hand, it doesn't seem that these suits against companies are that widespread at 13%. I'd expect Richard to quote statistics like: last year there was 1040 suits like these or whatever. As said, it doesn't seem to me that it is that impactful as Richard paints.\n> \n> On yet another hand, just by following companies and their communication with investors, Europeans seem to worry about this thing way more than Americans. It's super common even in 2024 to find companies that don't report ESG policies and DEI goals. But every single European company does have this \"common prosperity\". I'd like to understand better how this compares with the European experiment. (I guess there it's even less than 13%, idk)\n\n**Argos from Germany [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55271946):**\n\n> We have laws prohibiting outright discrimination during hiring, but the (fairly high) onus is on applicants to prove that they have been discriminated, and certainly there are no government agencies going after companies publicly because of insufficient women or minorities. Yet almost nobody uses IQ tests during hiring, and work places are very very much some form old mad men style old boys club. Germany would, however, be a data point in favor of Hanania's theory since companies focus comparatively less on increasing representation of minorities and women during hiring (in case of women perhaps more in recent years, but I don't think this is downstream of new laws). A caveat is that this is from public perception, I have only ever worked at small no-name companies with very irrelevant HR departments.\n> \n> Oh, I just recalled: Our Eastern European branch office DID turn into a old boys club on Friday afternoons, to the degree that some of the women there just went home at 2pm because it became unbearable to work there.\n\nI don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.\n\n**Andrew Marshall from Canada ([blog](https://marshalla.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55307774):**\n\n> As someone who worked in HR for the Canadian gov't for 10 years, this book touched me deeply . . . Although thinking about it more, we do have explicit quotas (called targets) and that didn't save us from anything. Although so much of our culture is taken from America, maybe there was no escaping it\n\n**Related, from Tatu Ahponen ([blog](https://alakasa.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)):**\n\n> I wonder what the book says about what would seem to me to be a crucial \"why\" aspect: the international one.\n> \n> To me, it seems like the reason for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, has been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.\n> \n> The status of the African-Americans was closely followed by numerous anti-colonialist and other progressive movements abroad, after all, and the civil rights movement was genuinely aspirational to numerous such movements. This was recognized by many prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers, who all utilized this knowledge in their own ways.\n> \n> Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but America is still getting the dividends for this policy; however much anti-Americanism might exist abroad, there could still be vastly more, and, for instance, America (at least in 2015) was viewed very favorably particularly in Africa, doubtless aided by that implicit group of American cultural ambassadors - African-American celebrities showing that the American model can offer fabulous opportunities for wealth and influence for black people, too.\n> \n> The one group of conservatives who seem to see this connection are the isolationists, but I'm not quite sure even they would be fully prepared for what would happen if America, implicitly or explicitly, just went \"Okay, all that is over now, our policy is now based on the idea that blacks are morons and will never, as a group, reach the status of the whites (or Asians)\", and then seeing that message percolate out abroad.\n> \n> It would have just effortlessly handled out a huge trump card both to China, always looking for opportunities to expand its influence, and whatever radical anti-American movements there are. Once those movements start taking over their countries with no effective American counter apart from war (which the isolationists would presumably also oppose), and once that starts effecting the global trade, the American economy will take in the lumps, too - and there might be even more direct effects of the terrorist kind that one might surely imagine.\n> \n> Is it worth all that to just abolish affirmative action? Perhaps to some, surely not to many others.\n\n7: EEOC Lawsuits\n\n\n------------------\n\n**REF [objects](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55262430):**\n\n> This \\[claim that insufficiently diverse companies\\] \"will get sued\" is obviously not true. The EEOC filed exactly 143 discrimination lawsuits last year. Only 25 of them are systemic. Are you contending that there are only 25 (or 143) companies in the U.S. without population-equal racial distributions? I find it puzzling that your usual skepticism seems so diminished on some topics.\n\nI think the claim continues to make sense.\n\nThe company we discussed in the article was Sheetz ($7 billion yearly revenue), suggesting EEOC is targeting big companies. There are [about 700 companies](https://askwonder.com/research/companies-united-states-fall-following-revenue-categories-less-than-26m-26m-100m-1thcjkkqw) in the US with yearly revenue > $1 billion. Suppose that 20 of the EEOC’s yearly lawsuits are in this category. That means a CEO of a $1B+ company who expects to serve ten years has a ~1/3 chance of the EEOC suing his company. Seems like a big deal!\n\nBut doesn’t this imply that the risk for smaller companies is pretty low? **[Moral Particle fills out the rest of the argument](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55306304):**\n\n> Your point about \"getting sued by the EEOC\" is very well taken and has important implications not recognized in many of these comments.\n> \n> First, the vast, vast majority of federal anti-discrimination lawsuits are brought by individuals, not the EEOC. Typically, employment defense lawyers will handle a handful of EEOC-plaintiff cases in their careers but hundreds of single- and multi-plaintiff cases.\n> \n> Second, almost all states have anti-discrimination laws modeled on Title VII, and most cover much smaller companies. In some states (California, for example), the state laws and state court system are so much more favorable to plaintiffs that plaintiff-side employment lawyers will actively \\*avoid\" pleading claims under Title VII (or other federal laws) and do what they can to avoid litigating in federal court.\n> \n> Between the two categories - federal lawsuits brought by individuals (not the EEOC) and state lawsuits not involving the EEOC at all - we're talking thousands upon thousands of lawsuits. That is where the \"systemic\" effects of these laws are, not in the minuscule fraction of cases actually brought by the EEOC.\n\n**And TGGP [points out](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55264606)** that a small number of lawsuits can have a big effect:\n\n> Rather than \"largely random\", the idea seems to be it's against the least woke big target. Something like truncation selection [https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/truncation-selection/](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/truncation-selection/)\n\n8: Other Good Comments\n\n\n------------------------\n\n**Leah Libresco Sargeant ([blog](https://www.otherfeminisms.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) writes:**\n\n> Helen Andrews is also pretty strongly against civil rights law, and has an interesting piece about union-flavored workplaces vs HR-flavored ones: [https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-21/against-human-resources](https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-21/against-human-resources)\n> \n> _» “There is a masculine alternative to H.R. It is called a union. In any given workplace, H.R. ladies and union reps perform many of the same functions. If you have a conflict that needs adjudicating, you want to make sure the company gives you all the vacation days you’re entitled to, or you have a complaint about workplace conditions, you go to them. Underneath this functional similarity, however, the two models of workplace relations rest on very different assumptions._\n> \n> _» The idea behind unions is that workers and bosses are fundamentally in conflict. They don’t have to hate each other, by any means, but their interests diverge, and the best way for them to reach agreement is to have a fair fight by clearly defined rules. This is the opposite of H.R.’s ethos, which is all about denying that conflict exists and finding win–win solutions—or at least solutions that everyone will pretend are win–win after they have been badgered into accepting the consensus.”_\n> \n> I am more in favor than she is of pursuing some of the goods of civil rights law, but I agree strongly with her about the benefits of openly acknowledging that workers and bosses have conflicting interests and need to negotiate the middle ground. I really really dislike the \"only fight obliquely\"/doublethinky mode that she and Hannania identify. I think it does create a culture against truthspeaking.\n\nThanks, I had never thought about HR as an “alternative” to unions before, so this was an interesting comparison.\n\nAlso, I find it interesting that everyone, even in this politically correct age, agrees to call human resources staffers “HR ladies”. I haven’t worked at enough corporations to have much personal experience of this - why should it be such a universal phenomenon?\n\n**Rob L ([blog](https://roblh.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) writes:**\n\n> If those laws go away, would it really change anything? Given the existence of social media, pervasive canceling of companies and people, and broad social sympathies for perceived victimized groups, I would imagine “that company doesn’t hire minorities” to be much more damaging from a customer and relationship perspective in 2024 than the 60s and 70s when those laws were passed. If that’s true (which I’m unsure of), in a sense the civil rights advocates have already won.\n\nI unfairly forgot to mention one of Hanania’s strongest arguments, which was how naturally we _avoid_ thinking about some categories of inequality when we’re not forced to think about them by the government. Nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?) etc. Hanania thinks the reason racial discrimination has become so much more talked about than these other superficially-equally-interesting questions is that the government makes all companies keep racial statistics and talk about things in those terms. If there were no AA, companies wouldn't keep the statistics and people might forget about it, the same way they've forgotten about everything else.\n\nHanania has [an article about France](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/french-anti-wokeness-as-a-second), which forbids the collection of any government statistics on any of this. I found this interesting, because I’d always heard claims this was a left-wing plot to avoid having statistics on the racial balance of (eg) crime. But actually France just takes a principled stance against any race statistics! Wild!\n\n**Richard Gadsden [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55263102):**\n\n> The thing about Title IX in sports is that the basic problem is football.\n> \n> The general requirement of Title IX is that sports should be separate but equal (obviously, I'm quoting Plessy v Ferguson maliciously here). That generally means that the number of scholarships given to male student-athletes and the number given to female student-athletes should be the same.\n> \n> If it weren't for football, this would be easy - for instance, each (top-level) college can have 13 basketball scholarships per team, so that's 13 men and 13 women. Compliance with Title IX is absolutely trivial. Even with baseball, they just have 12 men playing baseball and 12 women playing softball.\n> \n> But football is 85 scholarships and they are all men. This creates a problem where a college has to have 85 additional scholarships that are all women. But all (or virtually all) the other sports are played by both sexes. So they end up with every other sport having more scholarships for women than for men, and men's sports getting dropped, so that the women's version of that sport can be used to balance out the many men's scholarships in football. So many colleges now have women-only track and field, for instance.\n> \n> It really would have been a far simpler solution to just require any college that has a men's football team to create a women's football team with equal numbers of scholarships. Most of the other distortions would drop out of the system if the requirement was equal numbers on a sport-by-sport basis, rather than a college-by-college basis with the single largest sport being the only major single-sex sport.\n\nI asked why colleges can’t have women’s football teams; the two main answers were “women aren’t that interested” and “high schools, not bound by Title IX, don’t have women’s football teams, and it’s hard to take totally untrained women and form a football team from them at the college level”. I bet the latter would be self-resolving: a year after colleges say they need woman footballers, all the women currently plodding through years of crew or fencing to get a leg up in college admissions will plod through years of football instead.\n\n**Deadpan Troglodytes [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55266413):**\n\n> This review offers a good account of the common answers people give to the question \"why do racial disparities exist?\":\n> \n> 1\\. Contemporary racism. \n> 2\\. The historical legacy of racism. \n> 3\\. Bad culture. \n> 4\\. Not smart enough.\n> \n> But that list is missing a very important reason that doesn't get enough attention (because it isn't toxoplasmic enough?): preferential clustering. Demographic minorities often cluster in specific industries and institutions, for mostly obvious reasons:\n> \n> \\- To exploit social networks. \n> \\- As an outgrowth of cultural norms. \n> \\- Due to accidents of geography related to initial immigration patterns.\n> \n> Therefore it should not be surprising that Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University all have lower percentages of black students than Atlanta (~47%), Georgia (~31%), or the USA (~14%), given that Georgia (and Atlanta specifically) has eight popular historically black colleges and universities (more, depending on how you count them).\n> \n> Clearly these preferences can be a consequence of past discrimination, but they also have a life of their own and deserve separate consideration. Absent discrimination, we'd still see significant demographic clustering, though it would likely be less negatively biased.\n\nI agree there’s something to this - I’ve seen it used, for example, to explain why certain Indian castes are overrepresented in certain industries (eg the [Patel Motel Cartel](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/magazine/a-patel-motel-cartel.html)), Jews in other industries, etc.\n\nBut all the immigrant groups who have managed to do this kind of thing after just a few decades in the country make me skeptical that it can explain a pattern for black people lasting 100+ years.\n\n**Rothwed [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55383560):**\n\n> Behold, [USDA Form CCC-860](https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Assets/USDA-FSA-Public/usdafiles/emergency-relief-program/pdfs/ccc860_20230111.pdf):\n> \n> This a form to file for emergency relief funds from the USDA. Applicants must certify that they are part of a socially disadvantaged group to qualify (there are other qualifying groups but this one is relevant to civil rights law.)\n> \n> \"A socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher is a farmer or rancher who is a member of a group whose members have been subject to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities. Groups include: American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian Americans, Blacks or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and women (for those selecting a group that includes gender). Note that if applicant only checks \"women\" without also selecting the other category the selection does not make applicant socially disadvantaged for conservation programs.\"\n> \n> Note being a woman doesn't count unless the applicant also specifies that they aren't white. So here we have a program for giving aid money to farmers with a big No Whites Allowed sign. You might come to the conclusion that this is race based discrimination. Don't worry though, the USDA isn't allowed to do that kind of thing and even tells you so on the form:\n> \n> \"In accordance with Federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, the USDA, its Agencies, offices, and employees, and institutions participating or administering USDA programs are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity (including gender expression), sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, family/parental status. income derived from a public assistance program, political beliefs, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity, in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA (not all bases apply to all programs). Remedies and complaint filing deadlines vary by program or incident.\"\n> \n> Get it? Just specify that you are part of a certain race/color/national origin and/or sex to qualify for this program, but also the USDA is legally forbidden from discriminating on the basis of those very things in its programs.\n\n**Peter [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55341757):**\n\n> A friend of mine in construction attended a \"women owned business\" social meetup. Not a single woman attended. All the businesses were 51% owned by the wife.\n\n(followed by Martin Blank commenting that “My wife owns 51% of my business. It is frankly stupid not to, you lose so much work over it without that step.”)\n\n**And [The Veil](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55476558):**\n\n> Allow me to address the least important point: Di-az. In English it's almost always written as Diaz, but in Spanish it's almost always written with a diacritic over the i: Díaz. So imagine that the immigrant dad, trying to fit in, spells his name the American way, Diaz. Now the son, realizing that you can fit in just fine in America with an unusual name, spells his name Díaz. All good, except that some newspaper somewhere along the line doesn't properly capture the diacritic symbol, and instead of í, that paper writes i-. Boom: Di-az.\n\nFinally, someone thinking about the important stuff!\n\n9: Conclusions And Updates\n\n\n----------------------------\n\nThis one was fascinating.\n\nLots of people wrote in to say that there was definitely unfair affirmative-action-style discrimination going on at their workplaces, and lots of other people wrote in to say there definitely wasn’t and they’d never seen anything like that in their whole career. Sometimes these people worked in the same industry, or even the same employer (eg the US civil service)!\n\nA civil rights attorney said _Griggs_ didn’t ban tests unless they were obviously discriminatory, and then some people wrote in saying they’d been sued or scared out of using good, non-discriminatory tests. I think the most likely way to reconcile all the differing perspectives is that you can probably get away with using most tests if you argue in court that they’re justified, but people don’t want to be sued so they don’t try it. I still don’t feel like I know important facts like how often test-users get sued, or who the burden of proof is on, or how strong it is, or what happens if there’s not enough data to be sure, or whether the courts are aware of / rule out collider bias. But I’m still not sure of any of this.\n\nI will update towards the “applicant pool” process being fairer than I thought based on gjm, although I’ve heard the opposite from tech recruiters desperate to hire lots of women even though there aren’t that many in the “applicant pool”. Maybe this was for other reasons, like PR, or to satisfy other laws (like state laws).\n\nI appreciated John’s story of his workplace culture becoming much worse after harassment complaints, but I still want to know more about how it happened."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 328\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** More meetups this week in Helsinki, Waterloo, Sao Paulo, Raleigh-Durham, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Munich, Oslo, Barcelona, Montreal, Ottawa, Singapore, San Antonio, Denver, Warsaw. See [the meetups post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more info. And note addition of Kaduna, Nigeria.\n\n**2:** [Robin Hanson](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/second-response-to-alexander-on-medicine) and [Richard Hanania](https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1785756978670862735) have both responded to my posts on their work; I’ll probably have Highlights From The Comments threads where I discuss their responses further at some point.\n\n**3:** Jason Crawford is sponsoring another [progress studies blog-building fellowship](https://fellowship.rootsofprogress.org/programs/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8t6j2eKlHg5QRLYXW2wRNavQFPDMohPcyBGsamT-pyLIjp51tDnD0VyiHX9Z-9hIdrvW_fwQtnAwo4B-SZOvN6EoUbLA&_hsmi=305040193&utm_content=305040193&utm_source=hs_email), with advisors including Tyler Cowen and Andrej Karpathy.\n\n**4:** I’ve gone through comment moderation backlog and banned seven more people. Remember, if someone makes a very bad comment, you can click the “. . .“ to the right of the comment and select Report from the drop-down menu. The wheels of justice may turn slowly (I check the moderation queue once every few months), but they grind exceeding small."} | |
| {"text":"# Hidden Open Thread 327.5\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# Book Review: The Origins Of Woke\n\nThe Origins Of . . . Civil Rights Law\n\n\n---------------------------------------\n\n_[The Origins Of Woke](https://amzn.to/3xRooxr)_, by [Richard Hanania](https://www.richardhanania.com/), has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.\n\nThe claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, _The Origins Of Woke._ Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F37716871-6157-4afc-8cb8-b7de03286503_1484x485.png)\n\nThe other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is “US civil rights law is bad”. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called _Civil Rights Law Is Bad_ would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days. We’ll never know, because Richard chose to wrap his argument in a few pages on how maybe this is the origin of woke or something. Still, the book is on why civil rights law is bad.\n\nModern civil rights law is bad (he begins) for reasons baked into its history. The original Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supposed to be an _ad hoc_ response to the outrageous level of anti-black racism going on in the South, which protests and TV news had finally brought to the attention of the white majority. There was broad support for a bill which was basically “don’t be the KKK”.\n\nSex discrimination got tacked on half as a joke, half as a poison pill by its enemies to make the bill unpalatable (fact check: [true - but there’s a deeper story, see this Slate article for more details](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/title-vii-because-of-sex-howard-smith-history.html)). Ideas about “affirmative action” and “disparate impact” weren’t tacked on at all; the bill’s proponents denied that it could be used to justify anything of the sort, and even agreed to include language in the bill saying it was against that. Still, after the bill was passed, a series of executive orders, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic power grabs put all those things in place.\n\nThe key point here is that “quotas”, or any kind of “positive discrimination” where minorities got favored over more-qualified whites, were anathema to lawmakers and the American people. But civil rights activists, the courts, and the bureaucracy really wanted those things. So civil rights law became a giant kludge that _effectively_ created quotas and positive discrimination while maintaining plausible deniability. This ended up as the worst of both worlds. Hanania specifically complains about[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke#footnote-1-144030929):\n\n**Affirmative Action**\n\nHanania’s take on affirmative action involves the government sending companies a message like this:\n\n1. We notice your workforce has fewer minorities than the applicant pool.\n \n2. If this remains true, we’ll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better have exactly many minorities as the applicant pool.\n \n3. But you’re not allowed to explicitly favor minority applicants over whites. You certainly can’t do anything flagrant, like set a quota of minority employees equal to their level in the applicant pool.\n \n4. Have fun!\n \n\nThis satisfied the not-really-paying attention white electorate, because politicians could tell them that “quotas are illegal, we’re sure not doing anything like that”. And it satisfied civil rights activists, because inevitably businesses/departments came up with secret ways to favor minorities until representation reached the level where they wouldn’t get sued.\n\n[A recent case illustrates the results of this double-bind](https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview). The FAA hires air traffic controllers. They used to judge applicants based on a test which measured their skills at air traffic control. This resulted in comparatively few black air traffic controllers. Various civil rights groups put pressure on them, and they replaced the test with a “biographical questionnaire”. The questionnaire asked weird unrelated questions about your life, and you got points if you gave the answer that the FAA thought black people might give (for example, if you said your worst subject was science). This still didn’t get them enough black employees, so they secretly told black communities exactly what answers to put on the questionnaire to go through.\n\nIt’s easy to blame the FAA here, but (Hanania says) civil rights law almost forces you to do something like this. People tried simpler things, like keeping a test but giving minority applicants extra points. The courts and civil rights bureaucracy struck these down as illegal. The almost-explicit policy was that you had to get more minority employees, but you had to hide it carefully enough that the American people (who were still against racial preferences) wouldn’t catch on.\n\n**Disparate Impact**\n\nNot only can you not explicitly discriminate, you can’t use hiring criteria that “accidentally” discriminate by favoring one race over another. To give a stupid example, if someone refused to hire anyone from Detroit, this would have “disparate impact” since Detroit is a majority black city. If you allowed stuff like this, racists could covertly discriminate by using these sorts of rules.\n\nBut Hanania challenges us to think of _any_ criterion that isn’t potentially racially biased. For example, we know universities discriminate against Asians, so only hiring people with college degrees is a “disparate impact”. We know that more men than women have experience as miners, so a mining company only hiring employees with experience is a “disparate impact”. Since whites typically do better on IQ tests than blacks, and all cognitive skills are correlated with IQ, the Supreme Court decided in _Duke vs. Griggs_ that _all_ tests of _any_ ability were potentially disparate impact, and you opened yourself to lawsuits if you used any of them.\n\n(in theory, companies are allowed to use tests and similar criteria if they prove them nondiscriminatory. But the standards for this - they have to prove it for each race and each job site individually - are so high that, in practice, few companies take this route.)\n\nSince this technically banned all possible criteria, companies couldn’t follow the letter of the law. Instead they hired fancy lawyers to tell them which way the winds were blowing. The lawyers told them that college degrees were okay, resumes with biographies and experience were maybe okay, and interviews were okay. Tests were out. Anything more creative was out.\n\nA disparate impact case made the news recently. The Biden EEOC [sued convenience store chain Sheetz](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-and-environment/2974064/sheetz-sued-by-eeoc-criminal-background-checks/) for running criminal background checks on their employees. They didn’t allege any intentional discrimination. They just said that more minorities fail criminal background checks than whites, therefore it’s disparate impact, therefore Sheetz has to drop the criminal background check.\n\n(the article links to [another case](https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/local/2015/12/25/texas-fires-back-feds-criminal-hiring-efforts/14940357007/) where the Obama EEOC sued a corporate events planner, demanding they give monetary compensation to an employee who they had refused to hire simply because he had committed attempted murder and lied about it on their job application)\n\nIs Sheetz the only company that does criminal background checks on its employees? Do they do the background checks differently than any other company? My understanding is that the technical answer is that to do background checks without being sued, you have to prove in some very formal way that the specific crimes you’re looking for would be bad for your specific industry, and maybe Sheetz didn’t prove that a general history of violence was bad for convenience stores. But if this sounds kind of fake to you, and you’re wondering whether the real rule is “the government has wide discretion to prosecute whoever it feels like”, Hanania’s answer is “definitely yes”.\n\nHis position is that all of these rules are so broad that every company is always violating them in some sense. No company has exactly the same distribution of minorities as “the applicant pool”, whatever that is. No company has some magical hiring rule that has literally zero correlation with race, especially since black people are on average poorer, less educated, and less likely to have any given achievement (so any attempt to choose better employees over worse will necessarily disadvantage them). In real life, the bureaucracy’s rules are something like “don’t do anything different from other companies in your industry, and _especially_ don’t be caught seeming less woke”. Hanania argues this creates an arms race / ratchet. Every company wants to be at least 50th percentile wokeness or above. But not every company can be above average. So everybody gets more and more woke, with no end in sight.\n\nContinuing with Sheetz: according to the article on the lawsuit, in 2020 they “introduced the IDEA initiative”, ie Inclusion Diversity Equality & Accessibility. [Their website](https://jobs.sheetz.com/belonging) has a big picture of a black woman saying “We’re Building A Great Place To Work For All”, and boasts that they’ve created a special forum for black employees. They’ve made 60% of managers women, started a Woman’s Leadership Program, offered generous maternity leave, and written [letters](https://www.pachamber.org/media/the_current/sheetz_stephanie_doliveira_blog/) to the Chamber of Commerce on how the George Floyd murder made them realize “we quickly needed to learn, listen, be vulnerable and humbly approach . . . culture-shifting work”. Companies hope that if they do enough of this stuff, the EEOC will agree they’re an ally in the civil rights project and not sue them under their wide discretion to sue basically anyone. Too bad they’re getting sued anyway; some other convenience store must have done more of this stuff. Surely some executive is wishing they had just tried having one more mandatory diversity training…\n\n**Harassment Law**\n\nHarassment law might win the award for most complicated chain of reasoning from real legislation to enforcement:\n\n* Legislation says you can’t discriminate against minorities\n \n* If you bully minorities out of your company, that would be a way to discriminate against them.\n \n* So you can’t have an environment that’s so hostile to minorities that they inevitably leave.\n \n* In some sense, anything that offends a minority is part of this environment.\n \n* Any joke, political comment, flirtation, etc, could potentially offend a minority.\n \n* Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offenses.\n \n\nHanania has several complaints here. First and most legibly, it (say it with me) gets taken too far.\n\n> Volokh lists a large number of \\[examples of things that have been found to be\\] evidence of a hostile work environment: signs with the phrase “men working”; “draftsman” and “foreman” as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle; an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki, and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition; jokes of a sexual nature not targeted at any particular person; misogynistic rap music \\[…\\] even terms like “great view” and “walk-up” have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs.\n\nAnd\n\n> In a 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Di-az[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke#footnote-2-144030929) \\[sic\\] worked at a Tesla plant. They sued the company for racial discrimination, with the father’s claims alone making it to trial….racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz \\[…\\] a jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American employees, and without hostile intent.\n\n(fact check: [this article](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/15/tesla-settles-racial-discrimination-lawsuit.html) says the racism also included demands to “go back to Africa” people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee’s desk, threats, and claims that black employees were \"given the most menial and physically demanding work\" - and that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cellphone video showing people telling a black employee that they are going to “cut you up, n—-r”. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I’d like to know whether Hanania still stands by his version)\n\nOther parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double-binds. For example, you can’t be seen to “retaliate” against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as “harassment”. Maybe there’s even a full trial, everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can’t fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don’t want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can’t move the bully, because that would be viewed as “retaliation” for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars. So you have to punish the victim.\n\nBut Hanania doesn’t _just_ say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like _Office Space_.\n\nIs this true? People talk about _Mad Men_ (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law? Or because neoliberalism replaced the work-for-thirty-years-and-get-a-golden-watch corporation with the work-for-three-years-and-then-seek-a-better-job-elsewhere corporation?\n\nStill, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation - he calls the current regime, “a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace” which is “contrary to human nature \\[and\\] miserable”. Without civil rights law, we could have “organizations that combined the aspects of a church, a social club, a matchmaking service, and a traditional business.”\n\nIn such a world:\n\n> Some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more “professional” or “classic” work experience . . . we will see a period of wild experimentation, with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they will become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults.\n\nI appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here.\n\n**…And More**\n\nRichard Hanania hates all this stuff.\n\nPartly he hates it because he thinks it’s unfair and anti-business and anti-merit. But also, Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act _enthusiastic_ about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves.\n\nThis is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with.\n\nLike in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars.\n\nBecause there’s no legible law except “be the same as everyone else so you don’t stand out as sue-able”, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HR-ocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and _definitely not_ any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so they can get into the best college so they can take the best internships so they get the best jobs.\n\n(unless they do something stupid like let themselves get the dreaded “resume gap”).\n\nBut also:\n\nDuring the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the “spoils system”, basically “does the party in power like you personally?” In the 1880s, after President Garfield was assassinated by a guy who didn’t get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service, based on test performance and merit. The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually (and somewhat deniably) ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result.\n\nHanania doesn’t mention this, but I’ve heard an additional argument elsewhere. It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you _really really_ want high-merit employees, ie if the best employee is much more _financially_ valuable to you than the second-best. This is mostly true in Wall Street (where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy’s trader by half a millisecond or whatever) and Silicon Valley (where ten employees can write a program used by millions of people). So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities. Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use, and the old American tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into public service died out.\n\n**What To Do?**\n\nHanania stresses that most Americans hate affirmative action (and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they’ve probably never heard of disparate impact). Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times, and failed eight of those. Most recently, it failed in California, a deep-blue, 66% minority state where the pro-AA side outspent opponents 17-to-1.\n\nAlso, Republicans have controlled all the branches of government many times in the past fifty years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn’t even need a Congressional vote to overturn it. Just an executive order, from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with the stroke of a pen, if he’d wanted. So how has it survived this long?\n\nHis answer: because until about 2010, Republicans were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans (like Bob Dole) begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everyone has already been calling Republicans racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reined in Reagan are gone. So why haven’t Republicans (eg Trump) acted? Hanania thinks everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar.\n\nAnd so, this book. I would have summarized the case as “Hey, Republicans! Do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad, it’s a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one?”\n\nBut maybe this didn’t seem optimistic enough for Hanania, so he framed it as “the legal wokeness is the _source_ of the cultural wokeness” instead. More on this later.\n\nThe Origins Of . . . Inequality\n\n\n---------------------------------\n\nA progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?”\n\nUnless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground.\n\n“Cool theoretical result,” objects the hypothetical opponent. “But white households earn an average of $80K and black households an average of $50K, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on.”\n\nMy tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania’s summary of civil rights law went:\n\n> 1. We notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool.\n> \n> 2. If this remains true, we’ll sue you for millions of dollars and destroy your company. So by the next time we check, your workforce had better be exactly as black as the general population.\n> \n> 3. But you’re not allowed to explicitly favor black applicants over whites. You certainly can’t do anything flagrant, like set a quota of black employees equal to their level in the applicant pool.\n> \n> 4. Have fun!\n> \n\nOur hypothetical opponent could argue there’s nothing necessarily contradictory or Orwellian about this. If your company is whiter than its applicant pool (eg the general population), then you must be discriminating. If you stop discriminating, you can get racial balance without any of that nasty quota stuff. So what’s the problem?\n\nEveryone is so circumspect when talking about race that I can never figure out what anyone actually knows or believes. Still, I think most people would at least be aware of the following counterargument: suppose you’re the math department at a college. You might like to have the same percent black as the general population (13%). But far fewer than 13% (let’s say 2%) of good math PhDs are black. So it’s impossible for every math department to hire 13% black math professors unless they lower their standards or take some other drastic measure.\n\nOkay, says our hypothetical opponent. Then that means _math grad programs_ are discriminating against blacks. Fine, _they’re_ the ones we should be investigating for civil rights violations.\n\nNo, say the math grad programs, fewer than 13% of _our_ applicants are black too.\n\nFine, then the undergrad programs are the racists. Or if they can prove they’re not, then the high schools are racist and we should do busing. The point is, somebody somewhere along the line has to be racist, right?\n\nI know of four common, non-exclusive answers to this question.\n\n1. Yes, the high schools (or whatever) are racist. And if you can present a study proving that high schools aren’t racist, then it’s the elementary schools. And if you have a study there too, it’s the obstetricians, giving black mothers worse pregnancy care. If you have a study disproving that too, why are you collecting all these studies? Hey, maybe _you’re_ the racist!\n \n2. Maybe institutions aren’t too racist today, but there’s a lot of legacy of past racism, and that means black people are poor. And poor people have fewer opportunities and do worse in school. If you have a study showing that black people do worse even when controlled for income, then maybe it’s some other kind of capital, like educational capital or social capital. If you have studies about those too, see above.\n \n3. Black people have a bad culture. Something something shoes and rap music, trying hard at school gets condemned as “acting white”. They should hold out for a better culture. I hear nobody’s using ancient Sumerian culture these days, maybe they can use that one.\n \n4. White people have average IQ 100, black people have average IQ 85, this IQ difference accurately predicts the different proportions of whites and blacks in most areas, most IQ differences within race are genetic, maybe across-race ones are genetic too. I love Hitler and want to marry him.\n \n\nNone of these are great options, and I think most people work off some vague cloud of all of these and squirm if you try to make them get too specific. I don’t exactly blame Hanania for not taking a strong stand here. It’s just strange to assume civil rights law is bad and unnecessary without having any opinion on whether any of this is true, whether civil rights law is supposed to counterbalance it, and whether it counterbalances it a fair amount.\n\nA cynic might notice that in February of this year, Hanania wrote [Shut Up About Race And IQ](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq). He says that the people who talk about option 4 are “wrong about fundamental questions regarding things like how people form their political opinions, what makes for successful movements, and even their own motivations.” A careful reader might notice what he _doesn’t_ describe them as being wrong about. The rest of the piece almost-but-not-quite-explicitly clarifies his position: I read him as saying that race realism is most likely true, but you shouldn’t talk about it, because it scares people.\n\n(I’m generally against “calling people out” for believing in race realism. I think people should be allowed to hide beliefs that they’d get punished for not hiding. I sympathize with some of these positions and place medium probability on some weak forms of them. I think Hanania is open enough about where he’s coming from that this review doesn’t count as a callout.)\n\nHis foil here is race realist Nathan Cofnas, who says you _have to_ discuss these things. Otherwise progressives can win every argument by using the line of reasoning above - “Just look how much inequality there still is, this shows there’s still lots of racism or at least the lingering effects of past racism, obviously our job isn’t done yet and we need lots more civil rights law to combat it.”\n\nHanania’s answer to Cofnas is that this isn’t a debate club. “Ah, but Glaucon, your claim that affirmative action is unnecessary must imply the corollary that there must be no inequality, thus proving a contradiction.” LOL no. Realistically this will get fought on the level of “You oppose affirmative action, which makes you a gross Nazi” vs. “You support affirmative action, which makes you an annoying wokescold.” Just say the wokescold thing louder than your enemies say the Nazi thing, and you win. Talking about racial differences scares people off and doesn’t help.\n\nI find it hard not to feel contempt for this level of contempt for reason, but Hanania is no doubt right about the strategic considerations. And in his book, he follows his own principle. There’s no discussion of why civil rights law might be necessary, or why it might be impossible for companies to hire enough minorities without reverse discrimination. As he predicts on his blog, it’s not fatal. You wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it.\n\nI’m not really sure what to do here. How do you review a book that has a glaring omission, but also its author has written an essay called _Here’s Why I Like Glaring Omissions And Think Everyone Should Have Them_? Is it dishonest? Some sort of special super-meta-honesty? How many stars do you take off? Nothing in my previous history of book-reviewing has prepared me for this question.\n\nThe Origins Of . . . Racial Categories\n\n\n----------------------------------------\n\nHanania presents a few scattered arguments that civil rights law is the origin of woke, of which the section on racial categories was most interesting.\n\nHaving instituted affirmative action, the government had to decide what categories it was going to inspect businesses for. Like the rest of civil rights law, the resulting system was a bunch of political kludges. There is no “true” set of races that “falls out naturally” from genetic or cultural data, but the US government’s system was especially fake and embarrassing.\n\n* They created the concept of “Asian-American” by combining the old category “Oriental” together with Indians, Pakistanis, Thais, etc. Then, under pressure from the Hawaiian delegation, they added Pacific Islanders to create a even more heterogenous and meaningless category of “AAPI” (Asian American or Pacific Islander). Then, under more pressure from Hawaii later, they separated out “Native Hawaiian” again. The result is that Pakistanis, Koreans, and Tongans are the “same race”, but Hawaiians and Samoans are “different races”.\n \n* They combined Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans - previously three different groups that had been viewed as “white lite” along the same lines as Italians - into the new race “Hispanic”, adding in all of South and Central America for good measure. Then, under pressure from black activists who were worried that some blacks would reclassify as Hispanics and they’d lose constituents, they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race. So a white Spaniard from Spain and a white Spaniard from Mexico got treated as different ethnicities, but a white Spaniard from Mexico and a Mayan from Mexico got the same ethnicity.\n \n* Even though Arabs and Muslims are one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country, especially after 9-11, they didn’t have good lobbyists, so they got classified as white. According to Hanania, the government’s dividing line for white vs. PoC is at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and nobody knows what to do about eg Uzbeks. Hanania himself is Palestinian-American and seems salty about this.\n \n\nAll of this means that (for example) a company that had 10 Pakistanis and 10 Afghans might get classified as “too white” and get sued for failing to hire enough Asian-Americans. But a company that had 20 Pakistanis, or 10 Pakistanis + 10 Koreans, would be fine.\n\nHanania argues that this has gone beyond corporations and seeped into the culture, helping create modern wokeness. For example, after some Chinese people got beaten up a few years ago, there was [a campaign to #StopAAPIHate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_AAPI_Hate), as if AAPI were a natural category, or there were some racists targeting AAPIs in particular. Does this mean government-mandated racial categories are invading our deepest thoughts?\n\nThat one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian. When _Everything Everywhere All At Once_ came out, people said it was a movie about the “Asian” experience. The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen. With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.\n\nThe point about “Hispanics” is better taken, and [you can read more about the case here](https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/the-invention-hispanics-what-it-says-about-the-politics-race). But since 1964, when Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were the three equally-sized and equally-interesting groups, the Hispanic community has become dominated by Mexican (and Central American) immigrants, who do form a pretty natural grouping. People are just as happy to talk about Latinos (and Latinx) as Hispanics. I’m not sure we can attribute this one to the government either.\n\nAs for Arabs, they seem to have plenty of organization and activism, eg CAIR; if this is less prominent than eg Asians or Latinos, it’s probably because Arabs are about 0.5% of the US population, compared to Asians’ 5% and Latinos’ 20%.\n\nHanania’s strongest point here, more suggested at than asserted, is that maybe civil rights law prevented Hispanics from assimilating into “white” the same way Italians and Irish did before them. Hanania claims that Mexican-American activists originally demanded to be classified as white, then turned 180 degrees after affirmative action proponents promised them better jobs for being non-white. This seems like one of the bigger what-ifs of American racial history, although people say that [maybe Hispanics are assimilating somewhat anyway](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/05/hispanics-opting-to-identify-as-white-how-are-hispanics-assimilating.html) - the much-remarked upon [rise in Hispanic white supremacists](https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-rise-of-latino-white-supremacy) seems like a weird yet promising sign here.\n\nThe Origins Of . . . Woke\n\n\n---------------------------\n\nAside from this, Hanania doesn’t have much to support his claimed thesis - that civil rights laws are upstream of the cultural package of wokeness. He mostly goes with vague, zoomed-out arguments. Civil rights law sets people against one another. It accustoms them to lying. It forces them to focus on people’s race instead of being color-blind. It denies merit. It saps people’s hope for the future, and their ability to trust the political system.\n\nThe few exceptions where he gave more specific stories were helpful. For example:\n\n> Civil rights acts as a sort of force multiplier for disgruntled employees . . . allowing them to change institutions from the inside. The same company that might not think twice about disciplining workers for making unfounded or exaggerated claims about other aspects of its business can have its hands tied if the allegations being made contain even a hint of a charge of racism or sexism. As mentioned before, civil rights law bans “retaliation” against an employee even if the underlying complaint is ultimately without merit. When Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an article in the _New York Times_ in the summer of 2020 calling for the military to be sent to deal with rioters in major American cities, the opinion editor of the paper eventually resigned after employees waged a campaign against him that included sending out identical tweets saying that the piece put black staff in danger. Had they claimed a grievance based on some other, “non-protected” identity, there would not have been the specter of legal liability for the article, nor would the controversy have invoked the grievance procedures and norms already established to deal with racial issues.\n> \n> If a major newspaper being influenced in its staffing and editorial choices by civil rights law seems too absurd to contemplate, consider that Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for the _Washington Post,_ sued her employer on the grounds that it was discriminatory to take her off #MeToo stories after she talked about her own alleged sexual assault. Although her suit was dismissed in 2022, newspapers are no different than other employers in responding to incentives. Sonmez was eventually fired by the _Washington Post_ in 2022 for weeks of publicly attacking coworkers on Twitter. It is reasonable to wonder whether the employer’s hesitancy to part ways with her was based on the incentives created by civil rights law and their downstream cultural effects.\n\nSo maybe the causal pathway is civil rights law → woker workforce at newspapers/universities/etc → cultural wokeness? But there’s not a lot here beyond this NYT example.\n\nWhen I think of wokeness, I think of [the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture), when everybody started talking about privilege and white supremacy, Black Lives Matter burst onto the cultural scene, all your friends suddenly had rainbow and trans flags in their social media profiles, and people coined terms like “SJW” and “woke” to describe this phenomenon.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbce77f14-9a85-453f-83af-bef0056e5fe8_544x600.webp)\n\nSource: [David Rozado](https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/new-york-times-word-usage-frequency)\n\nHanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but [The Closing Of The American Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind), generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.\n\nEven the book’s own history of the civil rights movement seems to undermine its thesis. This history, remember, is that Congress tried to pass reasonable and limited laws, and then woke activist judges and bureaucrats kept expanding them into unreasonable power grabs. And that (he says) was the origin of wokeness. But if a movement has captured the judicial branch and the civil service, it seems like it must have already originated. Grant that this was an older form of wokeness more clearly grounded in the anti-segregation struggles of the 1960s. But that just brings us back to the question of where the new 2010s version of wokeness came from, which the book also doesn’t answer.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15911351-73ea-407c-becb-49d0e327ad6d_672x668.png)\n\nHow did civil rights law cause the Ferguson riots? The George Floyd protests? Joe Biden’s promise to appoint a black female Supreme Court Justice (and his black female vice president)? Drag queen story hours? Gay pride parades? If it doesn’t explain any of those things, what’s left of it explaining “wokeness”?\n\nHow did gay, lesbian, and transgender people win their rights, normalize their identity, and win victories in representation, medical care, and even the language? When these groups were still unpopular, civil rights law didn’t apply to them. They fought their way up from zero, with little legal help, until they were powerful enough that they could lobby for civil rights protection. Transgender people in particular weren’t covered under civil rights law until 2020, and they still don’t get some of the most-sought benefits like affirmative action. But they’re a central example of wokeness. Isn’t this evidence that wokeness can thrive without support from civil rights law?\n\nI don’t read Hanania’s blog religiously. Maybe he has an article somewhere about Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument. But I can’t predict what it would say.\n\nThe Origins Of . . . The Next Trump Administration’s Civil Rights Policy\n\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nLike I said with _[What We Owe The Future](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future)_, it’s probably unfair to review this book _qua_ book.\n\nI appreciated the readable and thoughtful overview of civil rights law and its history. I was already skeptical of affirmative action; this book further confirms that skepticism. I was less convinced by the attempt to connect it to cultural wokeness, but that’s fine - it seems to have caused enough direct damage to corporations, universities, employees, government departments, etc, to judge it negatively on those terms.\n\n(although I’m suspending final judgment here based on my spot-check of the Tesla story turning up a different enough sequence of events that I’m not sure how much else was presented in a one-sided way - let me know if you find other parts that seem wrong.)\n\nBut my impression of Hanania’s place in the ecosystem is that he’s not writing this for you or me. He’s writing this for a group of conservative heavyweights who will set policy if Trump wins in November. He’s reminding them that civil rights law exists, that it’s against conservative principles, and that it’s pretty easy for a president to repeal large parts of it. All the rest of the book is just a booster stage to help it reach those people.\n\nIt doesn’t matter if Hanania has a coherent theory of discrimination, or a coherent theory of how civil rights law causes woke culture. His instincts here are really good. He’s written a book that’s become popular and talked about, which has attracted exactly the sorts of policy wonks he wanted, and that’s well-designed to make them to pay attention to this issue. In this sense, the book is perfect. Complaining that it doesn’t satisfy my intellectual curiosity is like complaining that the operating manual for a missile system lacks convincing characterization or plot.\n\nRead this book if you want a well-written expose of the past fifty years of civil rights decisions. Or read it in order to feel like you were ahead of the curve if Executive Order 11246 gets repealed on January 21, 2025.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://amzn.to/3xRooxr)\n\n[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke#footnote-anchor-1-144030929)\n\nI’ve included three of Hanania’s four civil rights law subtopics. The book covers a fourth, Title IX (mostly focusing on women’s sports in college). Although the book provides lots of examples about how the laws here are unfair and outrageous, I can’t bring myself to care about college sports enough to give it the same subtopic status, as, say, the hiring process for all the corporations in America.\n\n[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke#footnote-anchor-2-144030929)\n\nThe book offers no explanation of why a father with the last name Diaz would have a son with the last name Di-az, but it includes the \\[sic\\] that makes me think it is on purpose. Other news articles covering the story are split about 50-50 about whether they use the hyphen in the son’s name. None of them explain what’s going on here."} | |
| {"text":"# Response to Hanson On Health Care\n\nRobin Hanson [replied here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical) to my original post [challenging him on health care here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness).\n\n### On Straw-Manning\n\nRobin thinks I’m straw-manning him. He says:\n\n> Scott then quotes 500 words from a 2022 [post](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/medical-doubts-opedhtml) of mine, none of which have me saying all medicine is useless on all margins. Even so, he repeats this claim several times in his post. If Scott had doubts, he could have asked me. Or, consulted our 2016 book [The Elephant in the Brain](https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/) (52K copies sold; I’m sure he knows of it):\n> \n> _» “Our ancestors had reasons to value medicine apart from its therapeutic benefits. But medicine today is different in one crucial regard: it’s often very effective. Vaccines prevent dozens of deadly diseases. Emergency medicine routinely saves people from situations that would have killed them in the past. Obstetricians and advanced neonatal care save countless infants and mothers from the otherwise dangerous activity of childbirth. The list goes on. …_\n> \n> _» “We will now look to see if people today consume too much medicine. … we’re going to step back and examine the aggregate relationship between medicine and health. … We’re also going to restrict our investigation to marginal medical spending. It’s not a question of whether some medicine is better than no medicine—it almost certainly is—but whether, say, $7,000 per year of medicine is better for our health than $5,000 per year, given the treatment options available to us in developed countries.…_\n> \n> _» \\[Re\\] the medicine consumed in high-spending regions but not consumed in low-spending regions, … the research is fairly consistent in showing that the extra medicine doesn’t help. … Still, these are just correlational studies, leaving open the possibility that some hidden factors are influencing the outcomes. … To really make a strong case, then, we need to turn to the scientific gold standard: the randomized controlled study.”_\n> \n> We seem pretty clear to me there. There’s also my 2007 article _[Cut Medicine in Half](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-half/)_ where I say:\n> \n> _» “In the aggregate, variations in medical spending usually show no statistically significant medical effect on health. … the tiny effect of medicine found in large studies is in striking contrast to the large apparent effects we find even in small studies of other influences.“_\n> \n> Obviously, if I thought medicine was useless at all margins, I’d have said to cut it all, not just cut it in half. \n\nI acknowledge he’s the expert on his own opinion, so I guess I must be misrepresenting him, and I apologize. But I can’t figure out how these claims fit together coherently with what he’s said in the past. So I’ll lay out my thoughts on why that is, and he can decide if this is worth another post where he clarifies his position.\n\nThe marginal unit of health care doesn’t come clearly marked. If we want to cut the marginal unit of health care (for example, following Robin’s recommendation to cut health care in half) we need to cut specific things. If you would otherwise get ten treatments in a year, you need to cut out five if you want to halve health care like Robin suggests. Which five? You could make the decision centrally (the medical establishment decides some interventions are less valuable than others, and insurance stops covering those) or in a decentralized free-market way (customers get less insurance, increasing the cost of medical care and causing them to make harder trade-offs about when to get it), but somebody has to make this decision at some point. On what basis do they make it?\n\nOne possible reasonable position might be “obviously the cancer stuff and the antibiotics are important, so definitely keep those. Find stuff which seems frivolous, and then cut that.”\n\nMy impression is that Robin has very clearly rejected this position. For example, from [here:](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf)\n\n> It is clearly not the case that marginal care contains mostly treatments that doctors know to be less useful and more frivolous, while the serious situations where doctors know medicine is very valuable are usually in common care. In fact, doctors do not seem to see a difference between common and marginal care. So, if common care is much more useful on average than the useless-on-average marginal care, it must be because each patient somehow knows something that doctors cannot see about when he really needs to see a doctor. Now how likely is that?\n\nWe just _don’t know_ which treatments are useful vs. bad? But don’t we know, for example, that antibiotics are good? [Robin again](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf):\n\n> But what about those miracles of modern medicine we have all heard so much about? Did not the introduction of antibiotics, for example, dramatically reduce death rates for key diseases? Well, not much actually.\n\nPublic health measures? Sanitation? Clean water? [Robin again](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf):\n\n> If medicine for treating individuals is not quite the miracle we have heard, does public health make up the difference? Have not we all heard how the introduction of modern water and sewer systems greatly improved our ancestors’ health? Well, a century ago the U.S. cities with the most advanced water and sewer systems had higher death rates than the other cities. Also, we can look today at how the death rates of individual households correlates with the water sources and sewer mechanisms used by those households. Even in poor countries with high death rates, once we control for a few other variables like social status we usually find that water and sewer parameters are unrelated to death rates. Well we must live longer now for some reason, right? Yes . . . but the fact is that we just do not know why we now live so much longer.\n\n(Robin seems more bullish on sanitation elsewhere, so maybe he’s changed his mind? Like I said, I have trouble fitting all his statements into a coherent model.)\n\nOkay, then how _do_ we halve medical care? In [his CATO Unbound article](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-half/), I interpret him as saying it didn’t matter how you did it, because “most any way to implement such a cut would likely give big gains.”\n\nAm I straw-manning him again here? Doesn’t he obviously think we should spend some time figuring out which medical treatments are good and effective (cancer care? vaccines?) so we don’t accidentally cut those?\n\nIn [a podcast](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robin-hanson-on-lying-to-ourselves/), he mocked other economists who said that you needed to be really careful and work hard to figure out which parts of medicine were good, so you could make sure to cut only the useless parts:\n\n> I did a Cato Unbound forum about 10 years ago where my starting essay was cut medicine in half, and a number of prominent health economists responded there. None of them disagreed with my basic factual claims about the correlation of health and medicine and other things, but, still, many of them were reluctant to give up on many medicine. They said, “Well, yes, on average, it doesn’t help, but some of it must be useful and, uh, we shouldn’t cut anything until we figure out what the useful parts are,” and I make the analogy of that with a monkey trap.\n> \n> In many parts of the world, there are monkeys that run around, and you might want to eat one. To do that, you need to trap one, and a common way to trap a monkey is you take a gourd, that is, a big container that’s empty, and you put a nut on the inside of that gourd, and the monkey will reach into the gourd and put his fist around the nut and try to pull his hand out because then mouth is too small to get his hand up, and he will not let go of that nut.\n\nRobin thinks it’s a “monkey trap” to try to cut the bad parts of medicine but not the good. This seems consistent with his claim that you can’t distinguish good from marginal care, and with his claim that he’s not sure antibiotics or public sanitation are good.\n\nIt seems to me that if we were to cut medicine in half, figuring out which half to cut would be among the most consequential decisions in history. For example, if we foolishly tried to cut out all treatments that start with letters A - M, then we would lose antibiotics, appendectomies, AIDS medications, etc. I would expect even small mistakes in this process to cause more deaths than 9-11, the Iraq War, or other things we think of as greatly consequential.\n\nBut Robin doesn’t seem to think this matters very much, and his antibiotics and public health comments make it sound like this is because he’s not particularly sure that even the most respected forms of medicine work. This is the context in which I cited his casino quote ([source](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/10/robin_hanson_on_1.html)) in the original article:\n\n> Imagine someone claimed that casinos produce, not just entertainment, but also money. I would reply that while some people have indeed walked away from casinos with more money than they arrived with, it is very rare for anyone to be able to reasonably expect this result. There may well be a few such people, but there are severe barriers to creating regular social practices wherein large groups of people can reasonably expect to make money from casinos. We have data suggesting such barriers exist, and we have reasonable theories of what could cause such barriers. Regarding medicine (the stuff doctors do), my claims are similar.\n\nIn the context of everything else, I can’t help but interpret this as suggesting that medical care is net neutral, or even (like casinos) net negative, and that just as there is no specific slot machine that you know will work at a casino, and you would do best avoiding all of them, so there’s no one medical treatment that we know is positive in expectation, and cutting any of it would be fine.\n\nMaybe this is all straw-manning, all of this is taken out of context, and the only place that Robin says his true opinion is in his book. But in that case I feel like this is a pretty extreme failure of communication that’s not entirely my fault. Also, other people seem to interpret it the same way I do:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff762fb5f-beb3-4a20-b4b4-44ef408e5a45_574x161.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd17217b3-03cd-4108-a7b0-a0a9a558e400_622x244.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F779b2534-15d5-4af0-8a99-18f8bba8d194_590x190.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd09265d-210a-4fbb-a949-237947e662ac_582x153.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ec74ba6-8338-4860-b40a-ada2a7f6c980_584x207.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09a98df0-42cb-42de-965c-19c9c318d933_588x172.png)\n\nIf I thought medical care was mostly effective and just needed to be trimmed around the margin, and my readers were posting that I thought medical care was “useless”, or that “ALL health spending is wasteful”, or that “medicine is net neutral for health” - I would be horrified and try to clear it up as quickly as possible. Somehow in fifteen years this hasn’t happened. I guess if I can get Robin to make this clarification - even if it turns out I’m totally wrong and misunderstanding everything he says - then maybe this post will have been worthwhile.\n\nSo in the interests of getting a clearer understanding, I’ll pose Robin a trilemma:\n\n1. Either we can’t distinguish between good and bad medical interventions, but the average intervention is net positive in expectation (in which case it seems like we should keep the amount of medicine we have now, since we assess each treatment equally and they’re all net positive)\n \n2. Or we still can’t distinguish between good and bad medical interventions, but the average intervention is, after you count the monetary cost, net neutral or negative in expectation (in which case one should be equally skeptical of everything, including antibiotics and cancer treatment, and I don’t understand how saying this is a straw man)\n \n3. Or we _can_ distinguish between good and bad medical interventions, and we should throw out the bad ones and keep the good ones (in which case why does Robin keep saying the opposite, why does he call this a “monkey trap”, etc? And wouldn’t it be better for Robin to frame his position as “medicine generally works well, but there are some interventions that aren’t evidence-based enough”, which is the consensus medical position?)\n \n\nIf this is a false trichotomy, Robin should tell me how!\n\n### Let’s Do Near Mode!\n\nDespite (maybe?) disagreeing about health care, I have a huge amount of respect for Robin. He’s developed or popularized many of the ideas that still shape my thinking. One of them is “near mode vs. far mode”, his take on [construal level theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construal_level_theory). I find it helpful at times like this to try to go as Near Mode as possible.\n\nFor example, in one of the papers I linked above, Robin writes:\n\n> Unfortunately, even if you believe everything that I have said, your behavior will probably not change much as a result. You will still spend nearly as much on medicine for yourself and your family, and spend much less effort on the more effective ways to increase lifespan. After all, your sick family would consider it the worst kind of betrayal if you did not “do something,” and give them all the medicine that your doctor recommends (Hanson, 2002). Alas, the problem of the fear of death muddling our thinking is so much worse than we imagined.\n\nI interpret this as him saying that if you were smart, had the courage of your convictions, and weren’t so obsessed with signaling, then you, the literal reader, would cut your individual health care expenses right now after learning about his theory.\n\nI, like many people, would like to spend less money on health care without my health being negatively affected in any way. The Nearest way possible to approach this is to think about how Robin’s theory suggests that I act. Here are some categories of health problem that I might one day have to think about:\n\n1. A heart attack or stroke (going to the hospital)\n \n2. Cancer (going to an oncologist, complying with their recommendations)\n \n3. A bacterial infection, eg pneumonia, sinusitis, meningitis, etc (going to a doctor / urgent care / ER, taking antibiotics if recommended)\n \n4. A chronic disease like Type II diabetes (going to the doctor, following their recommendations about glycemic control, taking medicine if recommended)\n \n5. New-onset unexplained but serious-seeming symptoms, eg sudden intense abdominal pain, or suddenly feeling very dizzy (getting checked out by a doctor or hospital).\n \n6. New-onset unexplained but mild-seeming symptoms, eg mild abdominal pain or suddenly feeling slightly dizzy (getting checked out by a doctor or hospital).\n \n7. Acting erratically, hallucinating, saying things that don’t make sense (going to a psychiatrist or mental hospital).\n \n8. Feeling very depressed or anxious, so much so that it’s hard to get through the day or do your usual work (going to a psychiatrist)\n \n9. A middle-aged person with a family history of cardiovascular problems who hasn’t gotten a checkup in a while (going to a doctor, taking statins/ACEIs/etc if recommended)\n \n10. Just sort of feeling blah all the time, eg tired, joints ache, etc (going to the doctor and getting checked out).\n \n\nSo my second question for Robin is: how do you recommend I proceed? Do I avoid going to the doctor for some specific subset of these categories, like 5-10? Are all the categories equal, such that I should flip a coin each time I get an illness, and only go to the doctors if the coin comes up heads? Get certain care in some categories, flip the coin for others? This isn’t intended to be a rhetorical question. I’m hoping it clarifies what it means to “cut the marginal unit of health care”, what a reader who didn’t have “the fear of death muddling \\[their\\] thinking” would do, and how much Robin believes we can distinguish between good and bad treatments.\n\nActually, we can get even Nearer. My wife and I recently took my four-month-old son to the pediatrician. The pediatrician said he had a mis-shapen head, and referred him to a head specialist for a second opinion. The specialist said yup, looks pretty mis-shapen, and referred us to a helmet-maker. The helmet-maker said yeah, definitely mis-shapen, and wants us to pay $300 for a helmet to correct it so my son doesn’t get stuck permanently looking like Frankenstein when he grows up.\n\n(there are [some studies](https://thejns.org/focus/view/journals/neurosurg-focus/35/4/article-pE2.xml?tab_body=fulltext) of this intervention, which are neither obviously wrong nor obviously unimpeachable. They say the helmet works, but not necessarily better than “repositioning therapy”. Our son refuses repositioning therapy, so for us it’s the helmet or nothing.)\n\nThat helmet is probably our “marginal” health care expense, in the sense that it’s less obviously important than the other two things we’ve used healthcare for this year (childbirth, a scare with our son’s breathing). So, if we’re trying to cut the marginal health care expense, should we skip the helmet? Maybe we _should_ skip it - I never see any adults with obviously mis-shapen heads out there, and surely they didn’t _all_ get $300 helmets as kids. Maybe it’s all a racket.\n\n(for pictures of people with mis-shapen heads, [see here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiocephaly), dead dove, do not eat)\n\nHow would Robin recommend I make this decision, if not by consulting the studies? Should I just base it off the RAND experiment? Are we sure that there were any babies with mis-shapen heads in RAND at all? Did RAND even use “has non-Frankenstein head shape” as an endpoint? Should I still go off RAND? Or should I trust [Johns Hopkins](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/helmet-therapy-for-your-baby) and all the specialists when they say this is good?\n\nThis is as Near as I can get. What now? Is Robin’s advice just aimed at some hypothetical dumb person who constantly gets healthcare for stupid reasons and never considered stopping? Or should I personally try not to get health care in situations like this one? If I value my son looking like a normal human being when he grows up at (let’s say) $30,000, then it seems like I should only need a 1% credence that this therapy works before I spend $300 on it (and surely my credence of something backed up by all available studies is higher than that). Is this Pascal’s Wager? But doesn’t all medicine have those kinds of odds? What do I do?\n\n### On Cancer, Heart Attack, Etc Survival Rates\n\nMoving through more specific sections of his post.\n\nHanson:\n\n> First, my claim of a near zero marginal health gain from more medicine on average is consistent with some particular kinds of medicine having a positive marginal gains. We name some plausible candidates in our book. Cancer and heart attacks could also be among them. Or maybe just childhood cancer.\n\nI don’t understand how this isn’t the CATO economist position. “Keep the good stuff that we know works, and look for likely-not-to-work forms of treatment around the edges that we can cut”. I certainly have some guesses about forms of medicine that don’t work - most surgeries for back pain are in this category. Do they add up to half of all medicine? I’m not sure, but if Robin agrees that this is the discussion, we can compare our lists and try to figure it out.\n\n> Second, to be relevant to my claim these treatments need to be of the sort that many people get but many others do not. I’m willing to presume that cancer and heart attack treatment fall into this category, but Scott doesn’t show this.\n\nAgain, if Robin’s claim is that medicine is only useless on the margins, we’re much closer to agreement. But I don’t know how that meshes with saying that maybe antibiotics don’t help, or that we can’t possibly distinguish marginal from core, or that health spending is mostly signaling (as opposed to a mix of people correctly spending money on health because they know it’s great and will help them, plus some extra from people not being scientists and not knowing which treatments are good or bad).\n\n> Third, Scott is well aware that many others attribute much of these changes to the population getting generally healthier over time, and thus better able at each age to deal with all disease, and also to earlier screening, which catches cases that would never get very bad. He judges:\n> \n> _» Although some of this is confounded by improved screening, this is unlikely to explain more than about 20-50% of the effect. The remainder is probably a real improvement in treatment._\n> \n> But he seems [well](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/) [aware](https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/sorry-but-so-far-war-on-cancer-has-been-a-bust/) that many other specialists judge differently here. \n\nBut the link is to a blog post where I examine this and find many studies showing, I think very clearly, that it really is medicine and not screening! Yes, other people think differently, but the link you’re using is a post about why they’re wrong!\n\nBut also, why is Robin objecting to this! I thought he was admitting that cancer treatment is maybe potentially good! This is why I find this conversation so frustrating. Mention a medical treatment to Robin, even one of the “good ones” like cancer or antibiotics, and he’ll try to argue that maybe the evidence it works is being misinterpreted, and in fact it’s unclear how well it works. Then I say he thinks this stuff might not work, and he accuses me of straw-manning him.\n\nI would have no objection if there were, in fact, some evidence that cancer treatment was useless, and he was trying to bring it to my attention. But all he’s doing is linking my post showing that it’s not true, plus the article I started my post with as an example of the false narrative I’m trying to correct.\n\n### On Insurance Experiments\n\nI don’t see Hanson responding to my main point, which is that the insurance experiments show signs of having their power fail at random points in the causal chain, rather than showing anything about medicine. Just to rehash this for people who forgot:\n\n* The Karnataka experiment couldn’t show that insurance made people more likely to give birth in hospitals, or more likely to have a doctor tell them that their blood pressure was too high, or basically any outcome related to how much care they were getting, let alone whether that care worked.\n \n* The Oregon experiment found people got more diabetes drugs, but not that they had less diabetes. However, if you do a power calculation based on the increase in diabetes drugs and the known effect of diabetes drugs, we find that the experiment wouldn’t have detected it even if it was there.\n \n* …and the same is true of hypertension and most of the other things they measured.\n \n* The RAND outcomes I found were mostly things that doctors had no medicine for in the 1970s when the study was conducted. For example, they measured the effect of health care on obesity, but there were no good obesity drugs in the 1970s.\n \n\nInstead, he discusses small quibbles with how I describe certain results. I’ll go through these quibbles, but I want to make it clear I don’t think they matter very much, and I would much rather talk about the main point. Going through the quibbles:\n\n> Scott sees the first three as too underpowered to find interesting results. He found the results of RAND “moderately surprising”, but thinks “it’s a stretch to attribute \\[p = 0.03 blood pressure result\\] to random noise”, even if its the only result out of 30 at p<0.05. \n\nI find it unfair to present this claim without presenting my reasoning, which is that there’s a whole other paper, [How Free Care Reduced Hypertension In The RAND Health Insurance Experiment](https://sci-hub.st/10.1001/jama.1985.03360140084030), which does various sanity checks to this result, finds that it holds up, and finds related claims with lower p-values.\n\n> Scott calls Karnataka a “study where the intervention didn’t affect the amount of medical care people got very much” as “they were unable to find a direct effect of giving people free insurance on those people using insurance, at all, in the 3.5 year study period!” But I see the study as reporting big utilization effects: \n> \n> _» The average annual insurance utilization rate at 18 months (3.5 years) is 13.46% (2.56%) in the free-insurance arms versus 7.72% (0.64%) in the control arm. On average this effect amounts to a 74.35% (400%) increase in insurance utilization at 18 months (3.5 years)._\n\nI said in my original post that utilization rates increased when spillovers were taken into account, but did not directly increase for the insured individuals. He is quoting the first half of a section that then goes on to say “Spillovers play an important role in boosting utilization. At 18 months and 3.5 years, ITT estimates of the direct effects of insurance access are not significant.”\n\nSo this was exactly what I said in my post, except that Robin takes out my explanation and quotes only half of the section, so that I look like a moron who didn’t read the paper.\n\n> This seems to me a non-trivial constraint on medical effectiveness:\n> \n> _» We cannot rule out clinically-significant health effects, on average equal to 11% (8.8%) of the standard deviation for each health outcome in ITT (CATE) analyses._ \n> \n> (They _can_ rule out larger effects.)\n\nAgain, this isn’t just about the effects of medicine. The outcomes Hanson is talking about include many things like giving birth in a hospital, or having surgery, or being told you have arthritis. If insurance can’t improve the likelihood of these things, it’s failing to connect with the medical system at all, not some kind of evidence that medicine doesn’t work.\n\nOn the Goldin paper:\n\n> Now while their OLS estimate of the effect of treatment on mortality is only significant at the 1% level (and that exaggerated by selection bias), their OLS estimate of the effect of more insurance on mortality looks much stronger. At least if we could believe their Table IV which gives an estimate there of -0.026 and a standard error 0.001, for a ratio of 26! But as they never even discuss this crazy huge significance in the text, I have to suspect that this is just a table typo. \n\nOther people have pointed this out and I’m not sure what’s going on here. Cremieux thinks all of Goldin might be a [Lindley’s paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley%27s_paradox) situation (suggesting it isn’t a real effect), and I’m trying to clear this up with him and figure out if he’s right. I think my case is still strong if we stick with the lower treatment effect or ignore Goldin entirely.\n\n> As Scott knows, we [have](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124) a huge problem of selective publication and specification search (“p-hacking”), especially in medicine, which is why I’m suspicious of the few “quasi-experimental studies” that find big health gains from medicine.\n\nIn 2004, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors [released a statement saying they would no longer accept non-pre-registered studies](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe048225) that started after July 1, 2005. Since then, all studies have had to pre-specify their protocol, making p-hacking much harder. You can see the results on trial composition [here](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.22.23290326v1.full.pdf):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8eaaad36-fe88-4b62-90fa-e48d1569bf9a_729x584.png)\n\n…and on p-hacking levels [here](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.22.23290326v1.full.pdf):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F335be964-bb96-4cb2-9dd1-fa0572f4e4cb_765x446.png)\n\nObviously this doesn’t mean that there’s no possible way medical studies could ever be biased. But I worry that people act like “studies can be p-hacked” is some sort of secret knowledge that elevates them above domain experts. Medical evidence is processed by groups like NICE and the Cochrane Collaboration that have been worrying about p-hacking since 2004, trying to factor its existence into their recommendations, and organizing pretty successful campaigns among journals and other stakeholders to minimize it. This doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but I think we’re beyond the level where you can say “what about p-hacking” and use it to throw out every clinical study in favor of three social science experiments that explicitly admit they don’t have enough power to test these kinds of questions.\n\n> I know that typical regressions of health on medicine find no effect, and also that [medical errors](https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l4185) and [prescription drugs](https://brownstone.org/articles/prescription-drugs-are-the-leading-cause-of-death/) cause huge numbers of deaths. Thus I focus on our few best studies: randomized experiments.\n\nThe first link goes to a study that does not try to quantify the number of deaths from medical error. The second goes to a claim that that prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death. For the latter, I would recommend reading [Medical Error Is Not The Third Leading Cause Of Death](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health/medical-error-not-third-leading-cause-death) and [”Medical errors are the third leading cause of death” and other statistics you should question](https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2023/07/medical-errors-are-the-third-leading-cause-of-death-and-other-statistics-you-should-question/). These numbers usually come from massively overcounting medical errors from studies not intended to quantify them, from calling any death that happens after a medical error a result of a medical error, and from ignoring the many more sober estimates of medical error fatality rate that have been published. This isn’t to say that medical errors aren’t real and serious, just that I don’t think many people now continue to defend that particular claim.\n\n> While many studies claim to show otherwise for specific treatments, those tend to be quite biased, pushing me to focus on our best studies: randomized trials of aggregate medicine. I say that they still consistently fail to find clear effects. \n\nI’ve tried to explain how thoroughly I disagree with this claim, but let me try one more time.\n\nSuppose we want to know something simple, like whether being shot with a gun can kill someone.\n\nOne option is that we get trials where we shoot a thousand people with guns, shoot another thousand people with placebo guns (blanks), and see how many in each group die. Maybe we could do this a hundred times, for every different type of gun. Maybe we’d even find that some guns (eg BB guns) don’t kill people, and we could replicate that a dozen times. I believe this method would be very decisive.\n\nBut maybe this would be “biased”. Maybe the only unbiased way to test this, for some reason, is to give a thousand people a special voucher that they can use to buy guns, and leave another thousand people as a control. Then we wait two years, and see whether the voucher group gets convicted of murder more often than the control group.\n\nAnd maybe in fact we do this, and we find that there are three more convicted murderers in the voucher group, but this isn’t statistically significant.\n\nDo we conclude that “being shot with a gun can’t kill you”? Or “the marginal gun can’t kill you?”\n\nNo. Among many other possible ways this could go wrong, we might find that only three extra people in the voucher group tried shooting someone. This exactly corresponds to our three extra deaths, consistent with a 100% death rate from being shot. But if you don’t ask this question, and you just stop at “well, there were only three extra murders, which isn’t statistically significant”, then it looks like getting shot with a gun can’t kill you.\n\nI don’t understand why you would prefer the second form of study over the first, _especially_ if you are going to summarize its results as “guns aren’t dangerous”.\n\n(…the marginal gun isn’t dangerous? Some guns are dangerous, but we can’t tell which ones? Some guns are dangerous, we _can_ tell which ones, and we should just focus on those?)\n\nMaybe I’m still misunderstanding Robin. I look forward to him clarifying his position further.\n\nIn case _my own_ position isn’t clear: I think lots of medicine is useless, and that most doctors would agree with this. We over-order tests when we don’t need them, we do a lot of ineffective stuff to please patients (starting with antibiotics for viral illnesses, but sometimes going up to surgeries that have only placebo value), and we do lots of treatments that we know fail >90% of the time, like certain kinds of rehab for drug addiction (we tell ourselves we’re doing it because the tiny number of people who do benefit deserve a chance, but a rational health bureaucrat who wants to save money might not see it that way). Does all this add up to half? I’m not sure. But I think we can work on cutting back on this stuff without saying things like “maybe medicine is just about signaling” or “how do we know if any of it works?” or “you can’t trust clinical trials because they’re all biased”, and that it very very much matters which parts of medicine we cut.\n\n(something like this has to be true, because eg Britain spends only half as much per person as the US on healthcare, and Brits have _approximately_ as good health outcomes. This isn’t because medicine, in the sense of specific treatments for specific diseases, works any better or worse in Britain - it’s for the same reasons that colleges have ballooned in cost without educating people much better.)\n\nIt wouldn’t surprise me if expensive insurance doesn’t have much marginal mortality benefit over cheap insurance, although it might still be worth it on a personal level (because it gets you faster care, kinder doctors, fancier hospital rooms, etc).\n\nI don’t think the insurance studies tell us anything one way or the other here, and I have no confidence that the things that skeptics think they cast doubt upon are the things we should really be doubting."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 327\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** More meetups this week, in Istanbul, Edinburgh, Manchester, Phoenix, Fort Meade, Brooklyn, Hanoi, and New Orleans. And Sao Paulo has been added to the list. More information, including times and dates, [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024).\n\n**2:** Reminder that the due date for [this year’s Book Review Contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2024) is May 5, ie next Sunday. You can find where to submit at the link.\n\n**3:** I’ve said good things about the Prospera charter city and their libertarian approach to medical regulation. Supporting a libertarian approach to medical regulation doesn’t mean everything will work and there won’t be any scams, it just posits that the benefits will be worth these downsides. Still, I feel an obligation to let people know when one of them probably doesn’t work, so here’s [a convincing-seeming takedown of the Prospera-based Minicircle clinic](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT7_6kWkIqrvzFZvs88O_NqVzmn-NPINvHOLM-A6r_ieZyvnJsNVk4FSU7EYrePnQg9gT_3kwahJESZ/pub) (see also [SarahC’s writeup](https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/bad-news-for-minicircle)).\n\n**4:** Manifold Markets [wants to pivot](https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/A-New-Deal-for-Manifold-c6e9de8f08b549859c64afb3af1dd393) from play-money prediction markets to real-ish money via a loophole that allows certain kinds of gambling-like activity. In the process, they’re devaluing mana (as available for charitable donations) by a factor of ten as of May 1. If you want to donate your mana to charity, do it before then. \\[EDIT: Delayed until 5/15, and [with other considerations](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-327/comment/54998970))\n\n**5:** Philosophy Bear was interested in some responses to the ACX survey and doing a follow-up survey to explore them further. He’s offering a $50 - $150 prize for a lucky survey respondent. Go here to take [his follow-up survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdcK6c_rUWUedS75ajDqGTr2wbSY-uT4gRyHCZHkLfdzPs_cQ/viewform). I’m deliberately not starting with a link his blog because it might give away the point of the survey, but after you’ve taken it, you can read it [here](https://philosophybear.substack.com/).\n\n**6:** Robin Hanson [wrote a response](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical) to my piece arguing against his healthcare views. I’ll probably have a response up sometime in the next week or two if I don’t get distracted."} | |
| {"text":"# Survey Results: PMS Symptoms\n\nIn November 2022, Aella posted [this Twitter poll](https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1589509446837075970):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85a9655a-513e-4f8e-b352-4f7e568bdb24_591x325.png)\n\n19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird!\n\n[Here’s another one](https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1631139468043513858):\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F57d208ae-76ef-4bb3-80fb-071bdec8cc0b_583x363.png)\n\nNow 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this [here](https://aella.substack.com/p/neuroticism-correlates-with-pms), and sebjenseb confirms [here](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/pms-and-neuroticism). I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neurotic _because of_ PMS symptoms, but it’s still a surprisingly strong effect.\n\nI tried to replicate this on [this year’s ACX survey](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024), using these questions:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa966e936-1160-4750-b7ae-8e96edde0b84_652x247.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F607d914d-e874-4bd7-9a93-bc6fa69a182a_670x206.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc55e1254-6fa5-479f-9d40-e96f22088153_663x224.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03425287-a915-4aad-85de-e587eadf9535_656x230.png)\n\nThese are a numerical scale, compared to Aella’s Y/N, so to start I dichotomized them: “have PMS” was defined as a score of 3+, and “believe in supernatural” was 2+. I freely admit these were post hoc choices intended to capture as much variation as possible. I selected for cis women only, to avoid any confounds with hormones and whatever trans people’s menstruation situation is:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63e44865-6705-4400-abed-efc987329eb6_414x204.png)\n\n30% of those without PMS believed in the supernatural, compared to 48% of those with symptoms. Chi-square was significant at the < 0.001 level.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F41d8c814-81a9-4207-88fe-7f2e08e44428_458x209.png)\n\n55% vs. 61% anxious, chi-square was 0.046.\n\nGoing back and disaggregating the data, we find:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdec69880-2234-42a0-bcd3-eb3367cc67d5_466x258.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F07f5acbc-0045-448a-8c6b-5083a5fd9609_440x247.png)\n\nT-tests find both of these are significant:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7b4858e2-70d0-4227-b036-b2ddc8efc16d_1161x439.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa3f8af74-7d36-4d61-90bc-1ccb8113995a_1039x217.png)\n\nWeird!\n\nI asked Aella why she even thought to do a poll on this. She said:\n\n> I read [the penis thieves boo](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness)k and figured if PMS is psychosomatic, this must be something around culture telling women they should feel bad around their periods, and women who are more susceptible to internalizing this to the degree they feel something real, might also be susceptible to internalizing other beliefs to the degree that they have a legitimately altered experience. \n\nSebastian proposes the alternative possibility that it’s [something about hormones](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/pms-and-neuroticism).\n\nI tried correlating PMS symptoms with lots of other things I had to see what turned up. This is bad practice and for exploratory purposes only, but here’s what I found:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5697f2e3-45b8-40a9-a045-2546d92febc7_844x724.png)\n\nNo correlation with any political opinion (there was a slight, likely random correlation with YIMBYism, not included on this table). Correlations with feeling negatively affected by various scary things, potentially related to neuroticism. Some correlations with what appears in their dreams (???). I didn’t have a big enough sample to do much work with psychiatric conditions.\n\nThis maybe slightly contradicts a suggestibility hypothesis (lots of people say Donald Trump is bad; wouldn’t that convince more suggestible people that Donald Trump is bad?). But also, on many questions where men and women differ (for example, on wokeness, not pictured on the table), there was no PMS effect. Maybe that argues against hormones?\n\nI had two other questions about conditions which sometimes get classified as psychosomatic:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc1bfede2-ce35-49e6-9ce6-dfe83f216ddb_756x313.png)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6e5b013c-4201-4cbc-94c0-093ff5d82f77_604x223.png)\n\n…but neither of them are correlated with PMS.\n\nI’m pretty confused by this whole area.\n\nAs always, you can try to replicate my work using the publicly available [ACX Survey Results](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024). If you get slightly different answers than I did, it’s because I’m using the full dataset which includes a few people who didn’t want their answers publicly released. If you get very different answers than I did, it’s because I made a mistake, and you should tell me."} | |
| {"text":"# Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument\n\nOne of the most common arguments against AI safety is:\n\n> Here’s an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won’t happen.\n\nI always give the obvious answer: “Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it _did_ happen, right? How do we know AI isn’t more like those?” The people I’m arguing with always seem so surprised by this response, as if I’m committing some sort of betrayal by destroying their beautiful argument.\n\nThe first hundred times this happened, I thought I must be misunderstanding something. Surely “I can think of one thing that didn’t happen, therefore nothing happens” is such a dramatic logical fallacy that no human is dumb enough to fall for it. But people keep bringing it up, again and again. Very smart people, people who I otherwise respect, make this argument and genuinely expect it to convince people!\n\nUsually the thing that didn’t happen is overpopulation, global cooling, etc. But most recently it was some kind of coffeepocalypse:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8657feb4-30c4-4410-a364-785f5c87fea7_590x828.png)\n\nYou can [read the full thread here](https://twitter.com/Dan_Jeffries1/status/1741445839053025450), but I’m warning you, it’s just going to be “once people were worried about coffee, but now we know coffee is safe. Therefore AI will also be safe.”[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/desperately-trying-to-fathom-the#footnote-1-140348944)\n\nI keep trying to steelman this argument, and it keeps resisting my steelmanning. For example:\n\n* Maybe the argument is a failed attempt to gesture at a principle of “most technologies don’t go wrong”? But people make the same argument with things that aren’t technologies, like global cooling or overpopulation.\n \n* Maybe the argument is a failed attempt to gesture at a principle of “the world is never destroyed, so doomsday prophecies have an abysmal track record”? But overpopulation and global cooling don’t claim that everyone will die - just that a lot of people will. And plenty of prophecies about mass death events have come true (eg Black Plague, WWII, AIDS). And none of this explains coffee!\n \n\nSo my literal, non-rhetorical question, is “how can anyone be stupid enough to think this makes sense?” I’m not (just) trying to insult the people who say this; I consider their existence a genuine philosophical mystery. Isn’t this, in some sense, no different from saying (for example):\n\n> I once heard about a dumb person who thought halibut weren’t a kind of fish - but boy, that person sure was wrong. Therefore, AI is also a kind of fish.\n\nThe coffee version is:\n\n> I once heard about a dumb person who thought coffee would cause lots of problems - but boy, that person sure was wrong. Therefore, AI also won’t cause lots of problems.\n\nNobody would ever take it seriously in its halibut form. So what part of reskinning it as about coffee makes it more credible?\n\nWhenever I wonder how anyone can be so stupid, I start by asking if I myself am exactly this stupid in some other situation. This time, I remembered an argument from one of Stuart Russell’s pro-AI-risk arguments. [He pointed out](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26157) that physicist Ernest Rutherford declared nuclear chain reactions impossible _less than twenty-four hours_ before Szilard discovered the secret of the nuclear chain reaction. At the time, I thought this was a cute and helpful warning against being too sure that superintelligence was impossible.\n\nBut isn’t this the same argument as the coffeepocalypse? A hostile rephrasing might be:\n\n> There is at least one thing that was possible. Therefore, superintelligent AI is also possible.\n\nAnd an only slightly less hostile rephrasing:\n\n> People were wrong when they said nuclear reactions were impossible. Therefore, they might also be wrong when they say superintelligent AI is possible.\n\nHow is this better than the coffeepocalypse argument? In fact, how is it even better than the halibut argument? What are we doing when we make arguments like these?\n\nSome thoughts:\n\n**As An Existence Proof?**\n\nWhen I think of why I appreciated Prof. Russell’s argument, it wasn’t because it was a complete proof that superintelligence was possible. It was more like an argument for humility. “You may think it’s impossible. But given that there’s at least one case where people thought that and were proven wrong, you should believe it’s at least possible.”\n\nBut first of all, one case shouldn’t prove anything. If you doubt you will win the lottery, I can’t prove you wrong - even in a weak, probabilistic way - by bringing up a case of someone who did. I can’t even prove you should be humble - you are definitely allowed to be arrogant and very confident in your belief you won’t win!\n\nAnd second of all, existence proofs can only make you _slightly_ more humble. They can refute the claim “I am absolutely, 100% certain that AI is/isn’t dangerous”. But not many people make this claim, and it’s [uncharitable](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/13/arguments-from-my-opponent-believes-something/) to suspect your opponent of doing so.\n\nMaybe this debate collapses into the debate around the [Safe Uncertainty Fallacy](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy), where some people think if there’s any uncertainty at all about something, you have to assume it will be totally safe and fine (no, I don’t get it either), and other people think if there’s even a 1% chance of disaster, you have to multiply out by the size of the disaster and end up very concerned (at the tails, this becomes Pascalian reasoning, but nobody has a good theory of where the tails begin).\n\nI still don’t think an existence proof that it’s theoretically possible for your opponent to be wrong goes very far. Still, this is sort of what I was trying to do [with the diphyllic dam example here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ye-olde-bay-area-house-party) - show that a line of argument can sometimes be wrong, in a way that forces people to try something more sophisticated.\n\n**As An Attempt To Trigger A Heuristic?**\n\nMaybe Prof. Russell’s argument implicitly assumes that everyone has a large store of knowledge about failed predictions - no heavier-than-air flying machine is possible, there is a world market for maybe five computers. You could think of this particular example of a prediction being false as trying to trigger people’s existing stock of memories that _very often_ people’s predictions are false.\n\nYou could make the same argument about the coffeepocalypse. “People worried about coffee but it was fine” is intended to activate a long list of stored moral panics in your mind - the one around marijuana, the one around violent video games - enough to remind you that _very often_ people worry about something and it’s nothing.\n\nBut - even granting that there are many cases of both - are these useful? There are many cases of moral panics turning out to be nothing. But there are many other cases of moral panics proving true, or of people not worrying about things they should worry about. People didn’t worry enough about tobacco, and then it killed lots of people. People didn’t worry enough about lead in gasoline, and then it poisoned lots of children. People didn’t worry enough about global warming, OxyContin, al-Qaeda, growing international tension in the pre-WWI European system, etc, until after those things had already gotten out of control and hurt lots of people. We even have words and idioms for this kind of failure to listen to warnings - like the ostrich burying its head in the sand.\n\n(and there are many examples of people predicting that things were impossible, and they really were impossible, eg perpetual motion).\n\nIt would seem like in order to usefully invoke a heuristic (“remember all these cases of moral panic we all agree were bad? Then you should assume this is probably also a moral panic”), you need to establish that moral panics are more common than ostrich-head-burying. And in order to usefully invoke a heuristic against predicting something is impossible, you need to establish that failed impossibility proofs are more common than accurate ones.\n\nThis seems somewhere between “nobody has done it” and “impossible in principle”. Insisting on it would eliminate 90%+ of discourse.\n\nSee also [Caution On Bias Arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/), where I try to make the same point. I think you can rewrite this section to be about proposed bias arguments (“People have a known bias to worry about things excessively, so we should correct for it”). But as always, you can posit an opposite bias (“People have a known bias to put their heads in the sand and ignore problems that it would be scary to think about or expensive to fix”), and figuring out which of these dueling biases you need to correct for, is the same problem as figuring out which of the dueling heuristics you need to invoke.\n\n**What Is Evidence, Anyway?**\n\nSuppose someone’s trying to argue for some specific point, like “Russia will win the war with Ukraine”. They bring up some evidence, like “Russia has some very good tanks.”\n\nObviously this on its own proves nothing. Russia could have good tanks, but Ukraine could be better at other things.\n\nBut then how does _any_ amount of evidence prove an argument? You could make a hundred similar statements: “Russia has good tanks”, “Russia has good troop transport ships”, “the Russian general in the 4th District of the Western Theater is very skilled” \\[…\\], and run into exactly the same problem. But an argument that Russia will win the war has to be made up of some number of pieces of evidence. So how can it ever work?\n\nI think it has to carry an implicit assumption of “…and you’re pretty good at weighing how much evidence it would take to prove something, and everything else is pretty equal, so this is enough evidence to push you over the edge into believing my point.”\n\nFor example, if someone said “Russia will win because they outnumber Ukraine 3 to 1 and have better generals” (and then proved this was true), that at least seems like a plausible argument that shouldn’t be immediately ignored. Everyone knows that having a 3:1 advantage, and having good generals, are both big advantages in war. It carries an implied “and surely Ukraine doesn’t have some other advantage that counterbalances both of those”. But this could be so plausible that we accept it (it’s hard to counterbalance a 3:1 manpower advantage). Or it could be a challenge to pro-Ukraine people (if you can’t name some advantage of your side that sounds as convincing as these, then we win).\n\nAnd it’s legitimate for someone who believes Russia will win, and has talked about it at length, to write one article about the good tanks, without explicitly saying “Obviously this is only one part of my case that Russia will win, and won’t convince anyone on its own; still, please update a little on this one, and maybe as you keep going and run into other things, you’ll update more.”\n\nIs this what the people talking about coffee are doing?\n\nAn argument against: you should at least update a _little_ on the good tanks, right? But the coffee thing proves _literally_ nothing. It proves that there was _one time_ when people worried about a bad thing, and then it didn’t happen. Surely you already knew this must have happened at least once!\n\nAn argument in favor: suppose there are a hundred different facets of war as important as “has good tanks”. It would be very implausible if, of two relatively evenly-matched competitors, one of them was better at all 100, and the other at 0. So all that “Russia has good tanks” is telling you is that Russia is better on at least one axis, which you could have already predicted. Is this more of an update than the coffee situation?\n\nMy proposed answer: if you knew the person making the argument was deliberately looking for pro-Russia arguments, then “has good tanks” updates you almost zero - it would only convince you that Russia was better in at least 1 of 100 domains. If you thought they were relatively unbiased and just happened to stumble across this information, it would update you slightly (we have chosen a randomly selected facet, and Russia is better).\n\nIf you thought the person making the coffee argument was doing an unbiased survey of all times people had been worried, then the coffee fact (in this particular time people worried, it was unnecessary) might feel like sampling a random point. But we have so much more evidence about whether things are dangerous or safe that I don’t think sampling a random point (even if we could do so fairly) would mean much.\n\n**Conclusion: I Genuinely Don’t Know What These People Are Thinking**\n\nI would like to understand the mindset of people who make arguments like this, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded. The best I can say is that sometimes people on my side make similar arguments (the nuclear chain reaction one) which I don’t immediately flag as dumb, and maybe I can follow this thread to figure out why they seem tempting sometimes.\n\nIf you see me making an argument that you think is like coffeepocalypse, please let me know, so I can think about what factors led me to think it was a reasonable thing to do, and see if they also apply to the coffee case.\n\n. . . although I have to admit, I’m a little nervous asking for this, though. Douglas Adams once said that if anyone ever understood the Universe, it would immediately disappear and be replaced by something even more incomprehensible. I worry that if I ever understand why anti-AI-safety people think the things they say count as good arguments, the same thing might happen.\n\n[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/desperately-trying-to-fathom-the#footnote-anchor-1-140348944)\n\nAnd as some people on Twitter point out, it’s wrong even in the case of coffee! The claimed danger of coffee was that “Kings and queens saw coffee houses as breeding grounds for revolution”. But this absolutely happened - coffeehouse organizing contributed to the [Glorious Revolution](https://www.history.com/news/coffee-houses-revolutions) and the [French Revolution](https://journals.troy.edu/index.php/test/article/view/444/360), among others. So not only is the argument “Fears about coffee were dumb, therefore fears about AI are dumb”, but _the fears about coffee weren’t even dumb._"} | |
| {"text":"# Contra Hanson On Medical Effectiveness\n\n### I. Introduction\n\nRobin Hanson of [Overcoming Bias](https://www.overcomingbias.com/) more or less believes medicine doesn’t work \\[EDIT: see his response [here,](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical) where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care) and [here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/second-response-to-alexander-on-medicine)\\]\n\nThis is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work. For example, [he writes](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/medical-doubts-opedhtml):\n\n> Europeans in 1600 likely prided themselves on the ways in which their “modern” medicine was superior to what “primitives” had to accept. But we today aren’t so sure: seventeenth century medical theory was based on the four humors, and bloodletting was a common treatment. When we look back at those doctors, we think they may well have done more harm than good.\n> \n> When we look at our own medical practices, however, we tend to be confident we are in good hands, and that the money that goes to buying medical care–in 2020, it was 19.7% of our G.D.P. –is well spent. Most of us know of a family member who credits their life to modern medicine. My own dad said this about his pacemaker, and I, too, am a regular customer: I’m vaccinated, boosted, and recently had surgery to fix a broken arm.\n> \n> We believe in medicine, and this faith has comforted us during the pandemic. But likewise the patients of the seventeenth century; they could probably also have named a relative cured by bloodletting. Yet health outcomes are typically too random for the experience of one family to justify medical confidence. How do we know our belief is justified?\n> \n> This might seem like a silly question: in Europe of the seventeenth century, the average lifespan was in the low 30s. Now it’s the low 80s. Isn’t that difference due to medicine? In fact, the consensus is now that historical lifespan gains are better explained by nutrition, sanitation, and wealth.\n> \n> So let’s turn to medical research. Every year, there are a million new medical journal articles suggesting positive benefits of specific medical treatments. That’s something they didn’t have in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, we now know the medical literature to be plagued by serious biases, such as data-dredging, p-hacking, selection, attrition, and publication biases. For example, in a recent attempt to replicate 53 findings from top cancer labs, 30 papers could not be replicated due to issues like vague protocols and uncooperative authors, and less than half of the others yielded results like the original findings.\n> \n> But surely modern science must have some reliable way to study the aggregate value of medicine? Yes, we do. The key is to keep a study so simple, pre-announced, and well-examined that there isn’t much room for authors to “cheat” by data-dredging, p-hacking, etc. Large trials where we randomly induce some people to consume more medicine overall, and then track how their health differs from a control population–those are the key to reliable estimates. If trials are big and expensive enough, with lots of patients over many years, no one can possibly hide their results in a file drawer.\n\nAfter listing bigger studies that he interprets as showing no effects from medicine, he concludes:\n\n> We spend 20% of G.D.P. on medicine, most people credit it for their long lives, and millions of medical journal articles seem to confirm its enormous value. Yet our lives are long for other reasons, those articles often show huge biases, and when we look to our few best aggregate studies to assuage our doubts, they do no such thing.\n\nOr, [even more clearly](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/10/robin_hanson_on_1.html):\n\n> Imagine someone claimed that casinos produce, not just entertainment, but also money. I would reply that while some people have indeed walked away from casinos with more money than they arrived with, it is very rare for anyone to be able to reasonably expect this result. There may well be a few such people, but there are severe barriers to creating regular social practices wherein large groups of people can reasonably expect to make money from casinos. We have data suggesting such barriers exist, and we have reasonable theories of what could cause such barriers. Regarding medicine (the stuff doctors do), my claims are similar.\n\nHis argument: there have been three big experimental studies of what happens when people get free (or cut-price) health care: RAND, Oregon, and Karnataka. All three (according to him) find that people use more medicine, but don’t get any healthier. Therefore, medicine doesn’t work. If it looks like medicine works, it’s a combination of anecdotal reasoning, biased studies, and giving medicine credit for the positive effects of other good things (better nutrition, sanitation, etc).\n\nI’ve spent fifteen years not responding to this argument, because I worry it would be harsh and annoying to use my platform to beat up on one contrarian who nobody else listens to. But I recently learned Bryan Caplan [also takes this seriously](https://betonit.substack.com/p/reflections-on-goff-and-the-cost). Beating up on _two_ contrarians who nobody else listens to is a _great_ use of a platform!\n\nSo I want to argue:\n\n* Medicine obviously has to work\n \n* Examined more closely, the three experiments Robin cites don’t really support his thesis\n \n* There are other experiments which provide clearer evidence that medicine works\n \n\nI’ll follow Robin’s lead in dismissing the entire medical literature - every RCT of every medication or treatment ever published - because it might have “huge biases,” and try to rely on other sources.\n\n### II. Modern Medicine Improves Survival Rate\n\nWhat do I mean by “medicine obviously has to work”?\n\nAge-adjusted mortality rate from most diseases has declined significantly over the past few decades. Robin doesn’t want to credit medicine, arguing that this might be due to “nutrition, sanitation, and wealth”.\n\nBut we can more clearly distinguish the effects of medicine by looking at the effects of secondary prevention, ie how someone does after they get a specific disease. For example, what percent of cancer patients die in five years? What percent of heart attack patients die within the first month after their heart attack? This is the kind of thing that depends a lot on how much medical care you get, and is less affected by things like nutrition or sanitation.\n\n(I’m more confident saying this about sanitation and wealth. You can imagine nutrition improving this - maybe better-nourished cancer patients are better able to fight their disease - but nutrition hasn’t really improved over the past few decades in First World countries anyway.)\n\nHere are 5-year survival rates for various cancers, 1970s vs. 2000s:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F40ee70df-5ea3-48be-ba39-b94ca89f12b2_1200x696.jpeg)\n\n([source](https://www.publichealthpost.org/databyte/cancer-survival-is-mostly-improving/))\n\nPeople with cancer are more likely to survive than fifty years ago.\n\nThis is after you’ve already gotten the cancer, so it’s hard to see how nutrition, sanitation, etc could explain this. Some of these changes (especially prostate) are a result of earlier diagnosis. But [others reflect genuinely better treatment](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/). For example, studies have shown great results from the anti-leukemia drug imatinib and the anti-lymphoma drug rituximab. In Robin’s model, these extraordinary studies would have to be bias or chance, and _totally coincidentally_ at the same time somehow better nutrition made leukemia patients (but not uterine cancer patients) twice as likely to survive.\n\nMight this be because people are getting cancer younger (and therefore are better able to deal with it?) I can’t find great data on this; there’s increasing cancer among younger people, but (since people are living longer) we should also expect increasing cancer among older people (since there are more older people). Rather than try to figure out how to balance these effects, here’s a graph showing similar survival improvements among childhood cancers in particular, where we wouldn’t expect this to be a problem:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bda22c3-12a2-42bd-982c-8e7e9558c5d6_448x257.png)\n\n([source](https://www.acco.org/us-childhood-cancer-statistics/))\n\nLikewise, here is post-heart attack 30-day mortality rate over time:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2d227a8-698a-48a0-833f-d885a1e5c3bc_810x364.png)\n\n[Source here](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2728009?resultClick=1).\n\nThe odds of death within 30 days of a heart attack have fallen from 20% in 1995 to 12.4% in 2015 ([source](https://www.clearvuehealth.com/b/heart-attack-mortality-data/)). This is also no mystery; the improvement comes from increased use of basic drugs like ACEIs, aspirin, and beta-blockers, plus more advanced interventions like thrombolytics and angioplasties, plus logistical improvements like more heart attack patients being placed on specialized cardiac wards.\n\nAgain, can we dismiss this because maybe heart attack victims are younger? The study this particular graph comes from says their patients were on average 2.7 years older at the end than the beginning, so here age effects seem to point in the opposite direction. [Here’s a graph](https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/surviving-a-heart-attack-a-success-story) showing the same decline if you break it up by under- and over-65s, though I wish I could find something with smaller bins.\n\nSame data for stroke:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8ec36199-04b3-493c-b15b-825a1ebef5be_800x1033.jpeg)\n\nSource [here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4768867/). Note that these are age-adjusted data!\n\nIn 2000, a stroke victim is only half as likely to die in the first two years after their illness as they were in 1980. Here we don’t have to worry about age effects at all; the graph is already adjusted for age.\n\nYou can see similar survival rate increases for other conditions like [congestive heart failure](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31523902/) (5-year survival rate went from 29% to 60% since 1970), [multiple sclerosis](https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/88/8/621) (standardized mortality rate went from 3.1 to 0.7 since 1950), [type 1 diabetes](https://practicaldiabetic.com/2020/10/22/easd-2020-life-expectancy-of-diabetics/) (survival rate at 50 from about 40% to 80% since 1950) and nearly any other condition you look up.\n\nI’m harping on this because it’s in some sense the central example of medicine: you get some deadly disease like cancer, and you want to know if doctors can help you survive or not. All the evidence suggests medicine has gotten much better at this in the past fifty years. Robin’s going to have a lot of hard-to-interpret studies about what happens to your cholesterol score or whatever after you change insurance, and we’ll pick these apart, but to me this seems like a much less central example of “does medicine work?” than the fact that we’re curing cancer and increasing heart attack survival rates.\n\n### III. RAND Health Insurance Experiment\n\n[This](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R3055.pdf) is considered the canonical study on the effect of health insurance. In the 1970s, RAND gave thousands of people one of five types of insurance, ranging from very bad (barely any coverage until a family reached a deductible of $1000, ie $5000 in today’s dollars) to very good (all care was free). Then they waited eight years. Then they checked whether the people on the good insurance ended up any healthier than the people on the bad insurance.\n\nThe paper I found measured five questionnaire-based outcomes plus five objective physiological measures, for a total of ten outcomes (Robin says he has [a book](https://www.amazon.com/Free-All-Lessons-Insurance-Experiment/dp/0674318463/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Z6F1UI4KZY1I&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tGKJKNcQOn0MyTPZGvqvqDJICj_ciqq0bs6gsrircflZo1Ri0puAzQWJlJ6Yby-5bQcXTtSX7gcnmU6LiOceBmNEgTbNb4z9gufpkS9JZP8FNqelncw-urKAc-VIdG_pQEfghFWZcxszwX45hbJTyT1AM32SbwWtdXE4m_pK4FTAacp53QsRH3AScIX80eIeKGBW5LQ6Gga1fXJ7fVwWmDG2oesHbjaBwp2tp_kGM5f-orZfbZA95NM-g87ZR7jEPUIkuTNFwA_NWPNsrZm7gg.91-ATi9C5ioOCNW7vUH8VD5DLwuqlT-sexz4SoPlppg&dib_tag=se&keywords=free+for+all+rand+health&qid=1713931881&sprefix=free+for+all+rand+health%2Caps%2C137&sr=8-1) where they discuss 23 to 30 outcomes, but I don’t have that book, so I’m sticking with the paper). The ten in the paper I read were:\n\n1. Physical functioning questionnaire\n \n2. Role functioning questionnaire\n \n3. Mental health questionnaire\n \n4. Social life questionnaire\n \n5. Health perceptions questionnaire\n \n6. Smoking\n \n7. Weight\n \n8. Cholesterol\n \n9. Vision\n \n10. Blood pressure\n \n\nThey found no effect of insurance on any of the questionnaires, and modest positive effects on vision and blood pressure.\n\nHow surprising is this?\n\nIt seems moderately surprising that nobody improved on any of the questionnaires. These seem to measure overall health. Maybe they were bad measures? Maybe 10,000 mostly-healthy people over 8 years doesn’t provide enough power to detect health improvements on questionnaires? I’m not sure.\n\nIt doesn’t seem surprising to me that nobody improved on smoking, weight, or cholesterol. The 1970s didn’t have any good anti-smoking medication - even the nicotine patch wasn’t invented until after this study was finished. Likewise for weight loss - the 1970s were in the unfortunate interregnum between the fall of methamphetamine and the rise of Ozempic. There were some weak cholesterol medications back then - eg nicotinic acid - but they were rarely used, and doctors weren’t even entirely convinced that cholesterol was bad. For all three of these things, the 1970s state of the art was doctors saying “You should try to stop smoking and eat better.” RAND found that the better insurances led to 1-2 more doctor visits per year. I don’t think that 3 visits to a doctor saying “You should try to stop smoking and eat better” vs. 4 visits to that doctor is going to affect very much.\n\nIt’s also not surprising that vision improved; the good insurances were more likely to cover glasses, and everyone knows that glasses help your vision. Even Robin admits this is a real effect; he just classifies it as more physics than medicine.\n\nBlood pressure is more debatable. The 1970s had some okay blood pressure medications, like the beta-blockers, and doctors weren’t afraid to use them. So it seems possible in theory that better medical care could lead to decreased blood pressure. Still, Robin is skeptical. He says that the improvement in blood pressure found during the study was p = 0.03. In a study with 30 measures, one will be positive at 0.03 by coincidence. The version of the study he’s reading has 30 measures (mine has 5 - 10, depending on how you count the questionnaire).\n\nOn the other hand, [this paper](https://sci-hub.st/10.1001/jama.1985.03360140084030) looks into the blood pressure result in more detail. It finds that “plan effects on blood pressure” were three times higher for hypertensives for non-hypertensives; that is, unlike statistical flukes (which we would expect to affect everyone equally), the effect was concentrated in the people we would expect doctors to treat. It also finds that plan effects are higher for poor people; unlike statistical flukes (which would affect everyone equally), the effect was concentrated in the people we would expect insurance to help. And it finds pretty convincing intermediating factors: people with good insurance were 20 percentage points more likely to get hypertension treatment, p < 0.001). So I think it’s a stretch to attribute this one to random noise.\n\nThis is the study authors’ conclusion as well. They calculate the benefit from this blood pressure improvement and find that:\n\n> If 1,000 fifty-year-old men at elevated risk were enrolled on a free rather than a cost-sharing plan, then we would anticipate that about 11 of them, who would otherwise have died, would be alive five years later.\n\nStill, they describe their study as having a negative result, because:\n\n> ...these mortality reductions, in and of themselves, are not sufficient to justify free care for all adults.\n\nI assume they’re working off of some kind of reasonable cost-effectiveness model for government spending here. Still, if I were a fifty year old adult, I might be willing to personally spend a few hundred extra dollars a year to increase my 5-year-survival-rate by 1%. Certainly I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as “RAND proves medicine doesn’t work.”\n\nRobin has a book with more information than I could get from the papers, so I feel bad contradicting him on this one. I’m more confident in my discussion of the next two experiments, which I think are clear enough that we can go back to this one later and apply what we’ve learned.\n\n### IV. Oregon Health Insurance Experiment\n\nIn 2008, Oregon had extra money and decided to expand Medicaid, a free insurance program for poor people. Many people applied for the free insurance, the state ran out of money, and they distributed the available Medicaid slots by lottery. This made the expansion a perfect setup for a randomized controlled trial on whether government-provided free insurance helps the poor.\n\nScientists monitored the recipients for two years (why not longer? I think at some point the insurance coverage stopped) [and found](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535298/) that the people with Medicaid did in fact use more medical care than the control group. For example, only 69% of the control group described themselves as getting all the medical care they needed, but 93% of the group with insurance did. People with the insurance [used more](https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0925) of almost all categories of medication:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff05b13be-6994-4161-ac81-bed0eac10b4f_1697x790.jpeg)\n\n[People who got the free insurance](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535298/) had less medical debt at the end of the study period. They described themselves on questionnaires as having better health (55% vs. 68% at least “good”, p < 0.0001), and were more likely to say their health had improved over the past few months (71% vs. 83%, p < 0.001). They described having better mental health and less depression (25% vs. 33% depressed, p = 0.001).\n\nHowever, Robin notes that many of these subjective changes happened immediately, ie before they even had a chance to use their new insurance. This means they’re more likely to represent mood affiliation (eg “I have insurance now, so I’m optimistic about my health!”). [There was no difference on objective health measures](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3701298/), including blood pressure, cholesterol, and HbA1c (a measure of blood sugar / diabetes control).\n\nWhy not? The authors do the math on diabetes. If you look at the graph above, you see that about 12.5% of controls vs. 17.5% of experimentals took diabetes medications, p < 0.05. Studies find that diabetes medications decrease HbA1c by about one percentage point (normal HbA1c is about 5%, so this is a lot). If 5% of the insurance group took diabetes medications and decreased their HbA1c by 1 pp each, then the HbA1c of the experimental group would decline by 0.05 pp compared to the control group. Their 95% confidence interval of the difference was (-0.1, +0.1 pp), which includes the predicted value. So when they say “insurance didn’t significantly change HbA1c”, what they mean is “the change in HbA1c is completely consistent with the consensus effect of antidiabetic medications”.\n\nCould the same be true of the other results, like hypertension? We find that the experimental group was 1.8 percentage points more likely to get a hypertension diagnosis, 0.7 percentage points more likely to get hypertension medications, and had 0.8 points lower blood pressure - but that all of these numbers were nonsignificant. If we take the nonsignificant numbers seriously, 0.7 pp taking antihypertensives caused an 0.8 point blood pressure drop in the full sample, meaning that antihypertensives caused a 100 point blood pressure drop in each user. This definitely isn’t true - a 100 point blood pressure drop kills you - but it means that a plausible pro-medicine result like antihypertensives lowering blood pressure 10 point is well within the study’s confidence interval.\n\nMaybe the anti-medicine position is that, for some reason, good insurance doesn’t lead to hypertension diagnosis or antihypertensive medication use? If I understand [these numbers](https://www.cdc.gov/bloodpressure/facts.htm) right, about 22% of Americans have blood pressure > 140/90, the level at which doctors recommend medication. I expect the marginally-insured poor people in this experiment to be less healthy than average, so let’s say 25 - 30%. In the experiment, about 13.9% of the control group and 14.6% of the experimental group got antihypertension medication. Why so low? [This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962263/) found that only about 60% of participants in the Oregon study who got the insurance even went to the doctor for non-emergency reasons! Subtract out the ones who refused to take antihypertensives, or who have too many side effects, or whose doctors let this fall through the cracks, and I think the 13 - 15% numbers make sense.\n\nThis study found that insurance increased hypertension medication use by a central estimate of 0.7 pp, not significant, confidence interval -4.5 to 5.8. Let’s take a convenient central estimate of our likely hypertension rate and say that 28% of our population should have gotten hypertension meds. That means the central estimate increased the percent of people who got recommended hypertension meds from 50% to 53%, and the 95% confidence interval includes up to 71%.\n\nSo my assessment of the blood pressure results from this study is:\n\n* At the beginning of the study, about 50% of people who should have been on hypertension meds were. The study had too low power to really figure out how this changed, but the central estimate is +3%, and the 95% CI rules out improvements beyond +21%\n \n* The study had too low power to figure out if hypertension meds worked, and basically could not rule out _any_ level of effectiveness, even effectiveness so high that the meds would instantly kill you by lowering your blood pressure to 0.\n \n\nI don’t think we can summarize this study as “we’ve proven medication doesn’t work”.\n\n### V. Karnataka Health Insurance Experiment\n\nSame story, different scenery. [This one](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29576/w29576.pdf) happened in India. 10,000 families. End result is:\n\n> Having measured (a) 3 parameters (direct/indirect/total) for (b) 3 ITT and one TOT effect for (c) 82 specified outcomes over 2 surveys, only 3 (0.46% of all estimated coefficients concerning health outcomes) were significant after multiple-testing adjustments. (As Table A8 shows, 55 parameters (8.38%) are significant if we do not adjust for multiple-testing.) We cannot reject the hypothesis that the distribution of p-values from these estimates is consistent with no differences (P=0.31). We also find no effect of access on our summary index of health outcomes (Table A6 and Table A7).\n\nIn other words:\n\n* They tested a lot of stuff\n \n* If you don’t adjust for multiple comparisons, they got 55 significant results\n \n* Once you adjust, they got 3 significant results\n \n* They can’t prove that getting 3 significant results is itself a significant result\n \n* Their study was only powered to detect effects of size 0.1 or greater.\n \n\nIt’s helpful to look at their table of measured outcomes (A7). This has some of the usual ones like blood pressure. But it also has things like:\n\n* Doctor or nurse assisted with childbirth\n \n* Gave birth in a hospital\n \n* Had surgery\n \n* Takes medicine for hypertension\n \n* Told that they have diabetes\n \n* Told that they have cancer\n \n\n…and these were among the majority of their outcomes where the study found no effect.\n\nThese don’t cast doubt on the effectiveness of medical treatment. They just look like a study where the intervention didn’t affect the amount of medical care people got very much. This was the authors’ conclusion too. In fact, they were unable to find a direct effect of giving people free insurance on those people using insurance, at all, in the 3.5 year study period! They had to rescue this with “spillover effects”, ie the effect of one person getting insurance in a village on other people, in order to even claim that the insurance increased healthcare utilization.\n\nWhy couldn’t they find an effect of giving people insurance on those people using insurance? Insurance is very new in India. These people weren’t really familiar with it, and in many cases their doctors and hospitals weren’t very familiar with it. In a few cases it didn’t even seem like the insurance companies fully understood their product:\n\n> Many households had difficulty using insurance to pay for healthcare. On average across treatment arms, access to insurance increased by 3.34 pp annually the number of households who tried to use their insurance card by 18 months but were unable to do so (from a base of 2.68% in the control group12). (Our TOT estimates suggest that insurance enrollment increased failed use by 4.02 pp off a base of 3% annually.) This excess failure rate is 50.50% of the successful utilization ITT effect.\n> \n> Lack of knowledge about the purpose of insurance and how to use insurance seem likely explanations for the failure rate. Because insurance is a relatively new product, hospitals and beneficiaries may not know how to use it (Rajasekhar, Berg et al. 2011, Nandi, Dasgupta et al. 2016). In our midline and endline surveys, we asked why households did not try to use their insurance card to pay for care and why they were unable to use the card even when they tried (Table A5). Frequent reasons given for not using the card were not knowing that the card could be used for insurance (15% at 18 months, 20% at 3.5 years), forgetting the card at home (13% at 18 months), not knowing how or where to use the card (29% and 30% at 3.5 years). Besides these beneficiary-side problems, there were also supply-side problems. Of people that tried to use the card, 55% and 69% said that the doctor did not accept the card at 18 months and 3.5 years, and 12% said that the insurance company did not accept the card (i.e., did not approve use) at 3.5 years. (These should be interpreted with caution because we do not know if doctors correctly did not approve the card because a service was truly not covered, or incorrectly did so.) This finding suggests that demand-side education and supply-side logistics may be important for raising utilization of (and thus demand for) insurance in India and similarly situated countries.\n\nI don’t want to over-update on this. They did eventually manage to find a medium effect of free insurance on insurance use when counting the spillover effects. I think the main problem with this study is the same as all the other studies - its confidence intervals are wide enough to include medicine working amazingly well, better than anyone claims it works in real life.\n\nThis is what the authors think too:\n\n> Care should be taken in interpreting the insignificant health effects observed. Perhaps the effect of hospital care on measured outcomes is too small to translate into health improvements that we have power to detect despite our substantial sample size (Das, Hammer et al. 2008). Moreover, confidence intervals reported in Table A6 and Table A7 suggest that medically significant effects for many outcomes cannot be ruled out.\n\n### VI. Summary Of Robin’s Three Insurance Studies\n\nIf it helps, think of these insurance studies as a sort of funnel:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8025e794-879e-4a35-aaeb-a4e2e6471666_252x530.png)\n\nIn order for more insurance to result in better health on some measurable parameter (eg lower blood pressure), you need a chain of four things.\n\n* First, you need the better insurance to result in more doctors visits.\n \n* Second, you need the doctors visits to result in more diagnoses (eg of high blood pressure).\n \n* Third, you need the diagnoses to result in more treatment (eg blood pressure medication).\n \n* Fourth, you need the treatment to work (actually lower blood pressure).\n \n\nEach step lowers our ability to detect a signal. That is, going to the doctor doesn’t, with 100% efficacy, result in more diagnoses. Some doctors will miss some diagnoses; that will introduce noise and lower our power / statistical significance. You can imagine doing a whole paper on whether increasing doctors’ visits increases hypertension diagnoses; that paper would have a p-value greater than zero / Bayes factor of less than infinity. So even assuming that better insurance really does improve health, each step we go down the chain decreases our ability to detect that.\n\nIn fact, in these three studies, we find dropoffs below statistical significance scattered basically randomly throughout this chain:\n\n* In some parts of the Karnataka study, we lose statistical significance at step 1. The better insurance didn’t necessarily result in more medical utilization. For example, it didn’t cause people to be (significantly) more likely to give birth in a hospital or get surgery.\n \n* In the hypertension outcomes of the Oregon study, we lose statistical significance at step 2. The better insurance led to significantly more doctors’ visits. But this didn’t result in significantly more hypertension diagnoses (it only resulted in non-significantly more).\n \n* I don’t think we see any clear examples of losing significance at step 3, but you could sort of think of the smoking outcomes of the RAND study this way. The RAND participants with better insurance saw the doctor more. Probably the doctor noticed they were smoking and diagnosed them with this, insofar as “tobacco use” was a formal diagnosis at all in 1974. But there were no good anti-smoking treatments in the 1970s, so the doctor didn’t prescribe anything.\n \n* In the diabetes outcome of the Oregon study, we lose statistical significance at step 4. Diabetics with better health insurance were significantly more likely to see the doctor, significantly more likely to get diagnosed, and significantly more likely to get placed on medication, but only had nonsignificantly better health. Why? Probably because, as mentioned before, if diabetes medication worked as well as studies say it does, the study wouldn’t have enough power to detect its effects.\n \n\nRobin’s argument (that medicine doesn’t work) assumes that the only possible failure is at step 4, and that the failure must be a true failure rather than one of statistical significance. But in fact there are failures at every step (although I kind of have to stretch it for step 3), and the authors of the papers tell us explicitly that these are most likely failures of statistical power.\n\nThis helps us think about a remaining question: why did these three studies get such different results?\n\n* In the Oregon study, better insurance caused higher ratings of self-reported health. But in the RAND and Karnataka studies, it didn’t.\n \n* In the Oregon study, better insurance caused less depression. But in the RAND and Karnataka studies, it didn’t.\n \n* In the RAND study, better insurance caused increased use of antihypertensive medication. But in the Oregon and Karnataka studies, it didn’t.\n \n* In the RAND study, better insurance caused lower blood pressure. But in the Oregon and Karnataka studies, it didn’t.\n \n* In the Oregon study, better insurance caused more use of antidiabetic drugs. But in the Karnataka study, it didn’t (AFAICT RAND didn’t measure this).\n \n\nI think Robin attributes these differences to noise, ie the results being fake in the first place. He writes:\n\n> A muddled appearance of differing studies showing differing effects is to be expected. After all, even if medicine has little effect, random statistical error and biases toward presenting and publishing expected results will ensure that many published studies suggest positive medical benefits.\n\nI think this is implausible. Many of these effects are large and replicable. For example, the Oregon self-rating effects are p <0.0001 on each of four different assessment methods, yet these are absolutely null in the other two studies. The RAND blood pressure results are p < 0.03, but match our expectations about subgroups (highest in the poor and sick) and accompanied by a p < 0.01 finding that insurance results in more hypertension medication (which was absent in the Oregon study). The antidiabetic drug result in Oregon was p = 0.008.\n\nCan we explain these through differences in the studies? I think [Robin’s analysis here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-oregon-health-insurance-experimenthtml) is actually pretty good. Expanding it slightly:\n\n* RAND was a normal cross-section of Americans\n \n* Oregon was poor and unhealthy Americans\n \n* Karnataka was poor Indians who didn’t know how to use insurance, and they only got hospital care (whereas the other two studies included primary care)\n \n\nWe find that Karnataka didn’t result in as many utilization increases as the other two studies because it was only hospital care (which is unlikely to be involved in managing chronic problems like hypertension) and the recipients barely used the improved insurance.\n\nWe find that Oregon had increased self-reported health because these were poor and unhealthy people who were very excited to get the new insurance. Robin points out that 2/3 of the improvement came immediately after getting the insurance, before they had time to use it, so this suggests a placebo effect. Maybe these poor unhealthy people were more excited about getting free insurance than the comparatively well-off people in RAND or the insurance-naive people in Karnataka?\n\nBut we can’t dismiss the Oregon mental health findings as easily. Many of them came from depression screening questionnaires that ask pretty specific questions about eg sleep and suicidal thoughts over the past few weeks. I think these findings are plausibly real, especially given the strong effects of insurance on mental health medication use (see first graph in section IV above). If so, differences from RAND and Karnataka would be easy to explain: 1970s Americans and rural Indians mostly don’t have mental health problems (or at least don’t think of them in those terms), whereas 2008 Americans do. In 2008 America, depression is common and easy to measure. Also, antidepressants have very large effect sizes (you may have heard they have small effect sizes, but that’s _after you subtract the placebo effect_; before you subtract placebo effect, they’re extremely effective, and this study isn’t controlling for placebo). So this is exactly the sort of area where you’d expect to see an effect. I won’t say for sure it’s real, but nothing about the studies makes me think it isn’t.\n\nThat just leaves the diastolic blood pressure effect in RAND. Remember our funnel again: the difference between RAND and Oregon doesn’t start in Step 4 (does the drug work?) It starts in Steps 2-3 (did more medical visits result in more medication?)\n\nIn RAND, we found that better insurance increased the percent of hypertensives on appropriate medication by 20 percentage points.\n\nIn Oregon, we found that it increased it by about 2 percentage points, but with the confidence interval including 20.\n\nSo my guess is that the middle-class people in RAND were a bit more likely to go for preventative medicine than the poorer people in Oregon, and that if we ran both experiments a million times, we would get something like 5-10 pp out of Oregon and 15-20 pp out of RAND, and that’s enough to give us the statistical power to detect an effect in RAND but not Oregon. I can’t prove this is true because of the statistical power issues, it just seems like a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy.\n\nOne more point: because of statistical power issues and multiple hypothesis testing, there are a lot of cases here where we can’t say anything either way. These might be places where an effect seems plausible but we can’t prove it, or where we find an effect but can’t prove that it isn’t a result of multiple hypothesis testing. Here we should go back to the statistical basics and remember that this means more or less nothing. We shouldn’t update our priors.\n\nPart of how Robin makes his counterintuitive argument against healthcare is to say that all of these studies found “null effects”, so now we _have to_ believe medicine is fake. I think instead we should look at the arguments in Section II above, start with a strong prior on medicine being real, and then - confronted with studies that sometimes can’t find anything for sure either way - continue having that prior.\n\n### VII. Other, More Positive Studies\n\nSince Robin posted the early versions of his argument, there’s been a newer, bigger, RCT-like study on the effects of medicine.\n\nObamacare originally mandated that everyone get health insurance, and punished noncompliance with a fine. In 2017, the IRS fined 4.5 million people for not having insurance. It originally planned to send these people a letter, saying “Obamacare mandates you to have insurance, you’re getting fined for failing to comply, please buy insurance through such-and-such a website.” But it ran out of budget after sending 3.9 million letters to a randomly selected subset of the insuranceless. The letter must have been at least a little convincing, because the 3.9 million recipients were 1.3 percentage points more likely to get insurance compared to the 0.6 million non-recipients. So the whole event turned out as a sort of randomized trial of telling people to get insurance.\n\n[Goldin, Lurie, and McCubbin](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26533/w26533.pdf) followed up on the results. Because this “study” was so big compared to the others (4.5 million participants compared to a five-digit number for RAND, Oregon, and Karnataka), they were able to measure mortality directly. They found that:\n\n> The rate of mortality among previously uninsured 45-64 year-olds was lower in the treatment group than in the control by approximately 0.06 percentage points, or one fewer death for every 1,648 individuals in this population who were sent a letter. We fou\u001cnd no evidence that the intervention reduced mortality among children or younger adults over our sample period.\n> \n> Using treatment group assignment as an instrument for coverage, we estimate that the average per-month e\u001bffect of the coverage induced by the intervention on two-year mortality was approximately -0.17 percentage points. We caution, however, that the magnitude of the mortality e\u001bect is imprecisely estimated; our con\u001cdence interval is consistent with both moderate and large e\u001bects of coverage on mortality. At the same time, our estimated con\u001cdence interval is su\u001eciently precise to rule out per-month e\u001bects smaller in magnitude than -0.03 percentage points, including the estimate from the OLS regression of mortality on coverage across individuals.\n\nThis result was p = 0.01 and robust to various checks.\n\n[Robin’s response](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/medical-doubts-opedhtml):\n\n> A 2019 U.S. tax notification experiment did, maybe, see an effect. When 0.6 of 4.5 million eligible households were randomly not sent a letter warning of tax penalties, the households warned were 1.1% more likely to buy insurance, and 0.06% less likely to die, over the next two years. Now that last death result was only significant at the 1% level, which is marginal. So there’s a decent chance this study is just noise.\n\nCome on! Thousands of clinical RCTs show that medicine has an effect. Robin wants to ignore these in favor of insurance experiments that are underpowered to find effects even when they’re there. Then when someone finally does an insurance experiment big and powerful enough to find effects, and it finds the same thing as all the thousands of clinical RCTs, p = 0.01, Robin says maybe we should dismiss it, because p = 0.01 findings are sometimes just “noise”. Aaargh!\n\nHere are some other quasi-experimental studies (h/t [@agoodmanbacon](https://twitter.com/agoodmanbacon/status/878813851361452032)):\n\n[Sommers, Baicker, and Epstein](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1202099#figures): finds that when some states expanded Medicaid after Obamacare, mortality rate in those states (but not comparison states) went down, p = 0.001. Note that Baicker was one of the main people behind the Oregon experiment.\n\n[Sommers, Long, and Baicker](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24798521/): same story: after Romneycare, mortality in Massachusetts went down compared to comparison states (p = 0.003).\n\n[Currie and Gruber](https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA18422964&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00335533&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Ee9bf5f49&aty=open-web-entry): increased Medicaid availability for children was associated with lower child mortality (they don’t give p-values, but some of the effects noted seem large).\n\nSee more discussion on [this thread](https://twitter.com/agoodmanbacon/status/878813851361452032).\n\n### VIII: Final Thoughts\n\nThe insurance literature doesn’t do a great job in establishing one way or the other whether extra health insurance has detectable health effects on a population. Gun to my head, I’d say it leans towards showing positive effects. But if Robin wants to fight me on this, I can’t 100% prove him wrong.\n\nBut it’s far less tenable to say - as Robin does - that these studies show _medicine doesn’t work_. These studies are many steps away from showing that!\n\n**First,** as discussed above, it’s unclear whether insurance studies themselves should be described as having positive or negative results. The best and biggest, like Lurie and Goldin, show detectable and robust effects on mortality.\n\n**Second**, when insurance studies fail to show certain effects, they’re practically always underpowered to say anything about the effects of _medication_. Often they can’t even find that the better-insured subjects use more medication than the less-insured subjects (eg all negative RAND outcomes, all Oregon outcomes except diabetes, everything in Karnataka). When they _can_ detect that better-insured subjects use more medication, they can often precisely quantify whether their study has enough power to test the effect of medication, and explicitly find that it cannot. I can’t think of a single one of the experiments Robin cites that finds an increased amount of medication in the experimental group, a power high enough to find medication effects, and a lack of medication effects. So these studies shouldn’t be used to make any claims about medication effectiveness.\n\n**Third,** even if we were to unwisely try to use these studies to assess medication effectiveness, they only measure marginal cases. For example, in the Oregon study, the insured group used about 33% more health care than the insured group - eg the uninsured people had a hospital admission rate per six months of 20%, compared to the insured group’s 27%; the uninsured group took about 1.8 medications daily, compared to the insured group’s 2.4. Presumably everyone is going to the hospital for very serious cases (eg heart attack), and the better-insured people are just going for some marginal extra less serious things. Even if we could prove with certainty that the insured group’s extra medication wasn’t benefiting them at all, this doesn’t say anything about the core 2/3 of medical care that people would get even if they weren’t insured.\n\n(Robin sometimes talks about how it’s hard to distinguish core vs. extra care, and I’m not sure how this works on paper, but in practice the poorer patients I talk to seem to be able to distinguish it very well - lots of them will go to the hospital for “real emergencies” but start worrying about money for anything less)\n\n**Fourth,** we have strong direct evidence that medicine works, both in the form of randomized controlled trials, and in the form of increasing survival rates after the diagnoses of many severe diseases (and this isn’t just the diseases being diagnosed better and earlier, see for example [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/01/cancer-progress-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/), or the patients getting the diseases younger, see the age-adjusted rates above). Even in the counterfactual where we had _unambiguous_, _well-powered, non-marginal_ insurance studies suggesting that medication didn’t work, we should at most be confused by these conflicting sources. Most likely that confusion would end in us setting the insurance studies aside as suffering from the usual set of inexplicable social science confounders, given that they contradict stronger and more direct clinical evidence.\n\nI think if Robin wants to do something with these insurance study results, he should follow other economists, including the study authors, and argue about whether the marginal unit of insurance is cost-effective - not about whether medication works at all.\n\n**EDITED TO ADD:** Hanson’s response [here](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/response-to-scott-alexander-on-medical), my response to his response [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care)."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 326\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** More meetups this week: NYC, DC, Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego, Salt Lake, Madrid, Zurich, Hyderabad, Rio, Taipei. And a new meetup has been added for Zwolle. See [the list](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more information.\n\n**2:** Possible correction by Natalia to my Lumina post: [there might not have been three different trials](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic/comment/54107727), my objections [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic/comment/54133007), Natalia’s response [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic/comment/54167671). I am still confused by this situation, for the reasons discussed.\n\n**3:** Some good third-party analyses of the survey, including [Philosophy Bear on political orientation and altruism](https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/altruistic-kidney-donation-initiators) and [sebjenseb on a bunch of things including joint hypermobility](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/analysis-of-ssc-survey)."} | |
| {"text":"# ACX Survey Results 2024\n\nThanks to the 5,981 people who took the 2024 Astral Codex Ten survey.\n\n**[See the questions for the ACX survey](https://forms.gle/TxkHyN4nMVebuCHi6)**\n\n**[See the results from the ACX Survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdTw4xhkP5Awgn0xhL4ScjvZp8ieaojGrnSPgDTM-lSH8m--g/closedform)** (click “see previous responses” on that page[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024#footnote-1-143600454))\n\nI’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024#footnote-2-143600454). If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I’ll probably send it to you.\n\nDownload the public data (**[.xlsx](https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2024_public.xlsx)**, **[.csv](https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2024_public.csv)**)\n\nIf you’re interested in tracking how some of these answers have changed over time, you might also enjoy reading the [2022](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022) or [2020](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/) survey results.\n\n[1](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024#footnote-anchor-1-143600454)\n\nI can’t make Google Forms only present data from people who agreed to make their responses public, so I’ve deleted everything identifiable on the individual level, eg your written long response answers. Everything left is just things like “X% of users are Canadian” or “Y% of users have ADHD”. There’s no way to put these together and identify an ADHD Canadian, so I don’t think they’re privacy relevant. If you think you’ve found something identifiable on the public results page, please let me know.\n\n[2](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2024#footnote-anchor-2-143600454)\n\nI deleted email address, some written long answers, some political questions that people might get in trouble for answering honestly, and some sex-related questions. I binned age to the nearest 10 years and deleted the finer-grained ethnicity question. I binned all incomes above $1,000,000 into “high”, and removed all countries that had fewer than ten respondents (eg if you said you were from Madagascar, it would have made you identifiable, so I deleted that). If you need this information for some reason, email me."} | |
| {"text":"# Ye Olde Bay Area House Party\n\n_\\[previously in series: [1](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party), [2](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party), [3](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party), [4](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party), [5](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party)\\]_\n\nWhen that April with his sunlight fierce \nThe rainy winter of the coast doth pierce \nAnd filleth every spirit with such hale \nAs horniness engenders in the male \nThen folk go out in crop tops and in shorts \nTheir bodies firm from exercise and sports \nAnd men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties \nAnd San Franciscans long to go to parties.\n\n\"Hey!\" says the hostess. \"Great to see you again! You keepin' it real?\" You were actually composing faux-Chaucer poems in your head, which seems like a marginal-at-best level of connection to reality. In desperation, you remember a piece of social skills advice you saw on r/greentexts, where you imagine what a hypothetical cooler version of yourself would say, then say that. You simulate the hypothetical cooler version of yourself. It says: \"Real as an eel, sister!\", then saunters off cockily. You decide to ignore all social skills advice from now on. Instead, you mumble something incomprehensible and desperately try to change the topic.\n\n\"How is your ... \" You strain your memory, then it comes to you. \"...automated land acknowledger?\" That's right, [last time you talked to her](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party) she was working on an Amazon-Echo-like device that you could leave in your home and workplace. At programmable intervals, it would read a canned message acknowledging you were on Native land.\n\nShe laughs. \"It's funny! I met this Native American guy at a conference, and he said it was an offensive piece of tokenist crap that made no material difference in the lives of the oppressed!\"\n\nYou nod glumly. \"Yeah, none of us wanted to be the one to tell you.\"\n\n\"...but it's fine! Cause I started thinking, how can we make a material difference in the lives of the oppressed, and now we've got an even better product. Landulgences! We've partnered with local Indian tribes to let you pay them rent. You pay them about $0.10 per square foot per year, they give you a certificate saying you're welcome to use their land during that time.\"\n\n\"I thought the whole idea was that we had stolen the land, so it's not theirs anymore.\"\n\n\"Yes, but if we hadn't stolen the land, you would pay them rent. So if you're against stealing the land, you can make it as if you didn't steal it, by paying them the rent you believe they're due. Isn't it great? We're especially working on advertising to corporations. Imagine. Your top customer goes to your competitor's meeting, and hear 'We acknowledge that this office building stands on the unceded ancestral land of the Ohlone tribe, which we have stolen because we are evil colonizers.' Then they go to your meeting, and hear 'This building stands on the land of the Ohlone, who we've come to a mutually beneficial agreement with. Their chief sent us a thank-you letter for being such good tenants, you can see it in the break room.' Which one of you seems more trustworthy?\"\n\n“This is the unceded ancestral land of the Ohlone people! Buy a landulgence for as low as $4.99 your first month\" chirps the Land Acknowledger, behind her.\n\n\"I thought you said that was offensive and tokenist\", you say.\n\n\"I said it _would have been_, without the landuldgences! Now it's a part of our horizontally integrated product strategy!\"\n\nYou feel like you should say something, but it _is_ an improvement. And you want to stay on her good side, because maybe next time you see her she’ll be a billionaire. So you wish her good luck and take your leave.\n\nYou see a familiar t-shirt and recognize [The Burrowing Company guy](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party). Now _that_ was a cool, ambitious plan. You make a beeline for him. “Hey, how are the giant ground sloths?”\n\n“Lazy,” he sighs. “I guess we should have predicted that. But they hate digging tunnels. They just want to hang around all day. We’ve got to pivot or die.”\n\n“So what are you thinking?”\n\n“I worry this is kind of offensive,” he says, furtively looking around to make sure nobody else can hear. “But I was reading [this article](https://www.timesofisrael.com/gaza-tunnels-stretch-at-least-350-miles-far-longer-than-past-estimate-report/) about how Hamas dug 350 miles of tunnels under Gaza. Meanwhile, Elon’s Boring Company has only dug about 3 miles of tunnel in its whole corporate existence. So I’m thinking, maybe we forget about the ground sloths and try to poach Hamas’ people. It should be pretty easy; the smart ones have _got to_ be looking for new jobs around now. We change the name to something more culturally appropriate like The Buraj Company. Then we’re back in business!”\n\n“Won’t there be visa issues with trying to get lots of terrorists into the US?”\n\n“People make the whole visa thing sound harder than it is. You’ve just got to prove there’s no American worker who can do the job you’re hiring the foreigner for. Looking at the history of US tunneling in the past thirty years, I’d say that’s a no-brainer.”\n\n“What happens to the giant ground sloths?”\n\n“We’re still trying to figure something out. Do you know if sloths are halal?”\n\nYou elect not to answer that question, and move on. There’s a circle of people all sitting and talking. After you join, you notice something wrong about the atmosphere. Did you accidentally stumble into an AI Circle or Urbanist Coven again? No. You realize with sinking heart that this is one of those conversations where everybody compares their jobs to see who is the coolest.\n\n“I work for _Stop Talking About Taylor Swift Magazine,”_ says a man in his mid-twenties. “It’s the #1 publication for people who want to stop hearing about Taylor Swift all the time. We carry monthly features on why Taylor’s music, schedule, personal life, and wardrobe are all less important than other things and don’t deserve the level of attention they’ve been getting.”\n\nYou don’t want to interrupt, but you can’t help asking: “Would the kind of person who wants to stop hearing about Taylor Swift really be into a magazine like that?”\n\n“Oh yeah,” he says. “We’re the third-best-selling women’s magazine in the United States at this point. Our only regret is that we’re not as popular with the male demographic. That’s why we’re working on launching a new spinoff, _Stop Paying Attention To The Marvel Cinematic Universe_. We just signed our first big contract; Freddie de Boer will be writing 600 articles for us over the next three years.”\n\nEveryone silently evaluates his worth as a human being - he writes for a magazine! pretty cool! - and the metaphorical conch shell passes to the next person in the circle, a young woman in round-rimmed glasses and a bright red t-shirt saying WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY - SCIENCE THAT REPLICATES.\n\n“I run QRiosity, a browser with native QR code support. Just click on a QR image, and it will take you to the website!”\n\n“So, like links, but worse?” someone asks.\n\n“Like links, but _not deboosted on social media_. X and the rest are pulling every trick they know to prevent you from leaving their walled garden. Now the customer is getting some tricks of their own to fight back. Next we’re working on implanting QR codes in videos, so your links can get maximal algorithmic boosting.”\n\nEveryone silently evaluates her worth as a human being - it’s a good product idea! - and moves on to the next person, a clean-cut blond man in a black polo shirt.\n\n“I work for the Threads Of Life Foundation,” he said. “You know, every so often billionaires and journalists condemn effective altruists because, like, what if they give poor people malaria nets, and then those poor people use them for fishing, and it hurts the fish. And people like to say “oh, those billionaires and journalists never care about fish in any other context” and “obviously this is just incredibly blatant cope so they can feel morally superior for _not_ donating to charity” and “it’s pretty crazy that our obsession with ‘harm’ and ‘the precautionary principle’ has gone so far that if you save millions of people but also kill a few fish, the establishment unites in painting you as a villain for not considering the fish deaths.’ But that didn’t seem charitable to me. I thought ‘No, I bet these are actually good people, who have a little trouble empathizing with human suffering, or with any-animal-except-fish suffering, or with fish suffering in 99.9% of contexts - but for some reason, they feel absolutely devastated at the thought of a fish getting caught in a bednet given to a poor person by a charity for the express purpose of saving their lives. That poor fish, stuck in those tiny little insecticide-laced threads, writhing around! These people don’t need our mockery - they need to unite and stand up for the suspiciously-specific thing they believe in!\n\n“That’s why I started Threads Of Life. We’re a charity dedicated to preventing fish from getting caught in repurposed malaria nets. We send hundreds of monitors to rivers all across Africa. They seek out locations where net fishing is going on, take samples of discarded nets, use chemical testing to match them to brands of malaria net given out by charities. Then if they find a match, they find the offending fisherman, cut his remaining nets, and free the fish. It’s tough work, but the outpouring of support we’ve gotten has made it all worth it. A bigshot AI venture capitalist recently donated half his fortune to us. A Stanford professor, when he heard about our work, pledged to give us 10% of his paltry academic income every year from then on, just because he believed in our cause.\n\n“It’s really inspiring. But there’s so much work still to be done! I’ve surveyed our donors and found that there are lots of other causes they care about too, like birds getting caught in wind turbines built to provide renewable energy, or people’s views being ruined by solar plants. I’m meeting an ethologist next week to see if we can breed strains of birds with genetically-implanted windmill avoidance patterns. Is this an effective use of resources? No. Does it address one of the tiny number of extremely specific concerns which, if we were to treat our donors’ engagement with the concept of ‘charity’ as an honest expression of their revealed preferences, receive overwhelming multipliers in their utility functions? Absolutely!”\n\nEveryone silently evaluates his worth as a human being, and he is found acceptable - he works with venture capitalists! We move on to the next person, a middle-aged woman in a loose dress.\n\n“I work on meta-planning-applications for the city of London,” she says. “If you’re trying to repair a bridge or something, you can’t just send out engineers like you’re in the Wild West or something. You have to do an environmental impact report, to make sure that the repair won’t harm the environment, or threaten communities, or take place in an inequitable way. These applications have grown bigger and bigger over the past few decades, so that the most recent one, [for the Lower Thames Crossing](https://www.cityam.com/lower-thames-crossing-planning-application-becomes-uks-longest-ever-at-more-than-350000-pages-and-costing-almost-300m/), took fifteen years, involved 2,383 separate documents, and ran to 359,000 pages. Imagine how many harms a planning application that big could cause! That’s why the government instituted the meta-planning-application. Now if you want to make a planning application like the Thames one, you start by applying for a meta-planning-application. Our department makes sure that the paper for your hundreds of thousands of pages will come from sustainably sourced timber, and that the dozens of planning bureaucrats you hire will be sufficiently diverse.\n\n“Now, I know what you’re going to say - don’t you need a meta-meta-planning application to start the meta-planning application? Isn’t it an infinite regress? Ha ha. Like we haven’t heard that one a thousand times. But no, the meta-planning application is a much simpler affair than the planning application. We’ve set a goal that it shouldn’t take a team of ten people more than a year, and it shouldn’t run to more than 10,000 pages. So we let you meta-apply for an application without any previous layers of permission.”\n\nEveryone silently evaluates her worth as a human being - she does, in some sense, contribute to the building of infrastructure - and moves on to the next person. He looks to be in his mid-twenties, dressed in a finely-tailored suit. He wears a watch with enough diamonds on it that it has to cost low-six-figures, at least. He leans on his date, who appears to be some kind of supermodel.\n\n“I’m a retired photographer,” he says.\n\nThe Threads of Life guy asks the question all of you are thinking: “How do you make enough money, as a photographer, to retire to a life of luxury in your mid-20s?”\n\n“I took that one picture of Elon Musk where he’s scowling and steepling his fingers in a sinister, manipulative-looking way. Since then it’s been the headline image for every story on Elon Musk, and I’ve gotten royalties for all of them.”\n\nEveryone silently evaluates his worth as a human being, realizes he is the most successful person in the room, and slinks off. As the circle disperses, you head to the kitchen. There’s still a few slices of cold pizza. One other guy is eating at the counter. You pull up a chair beside him. “Can I sit here?”\n\n“Oh, sorry,” he says. “I’d rather you didn’t.”\n\nYou’re kind of taken aback. “Is it something I said earlier?”\n\n“No,” he says. “But you know that saying that’s become popular recently? ‘If there’s a Nazi at the table, and ten people sitting and willingly eating alongside him, then you have 11 Nazis.’”\n\n“Okaaaaay,” you say. “But I’m not a Nazi.”\n\n“You don’t _think_ you’re a Nazi,” he corrected. “But if you take the saying literally, then anybody who’s ever sat down at a table with a Nazi is a Nazi. And anyone who’s ever sat down at a table with _them_ is a Nazi, and anyone who’s ever sat down at a table with _them_ is a Nazi too, and so on. It’s a six degrees of separation problem. When you actually calculate it out, then as long as the average person sits and eats with at least two people during their lifetime, there’s a 99.9998% chance everyone is a Nazi. The only way out is to refuse to ever sit and eat with anyone. Which is what I’m doing.”\n\nYou see his face from a different angle, and something snaps into place. “Hey, aren’t you @DanielC35801 from Twitter?”\n\n“Yeah,” he says. “So what?”\n\n“Didn’t you tweet a couple of days ago that the Jews should be driven into the sea?”\n\n“That was part of the fight against settler colonialism, so it’s different,” he said. “Also, I said you couldn’t sit here. Go away.”\n\nYou take your slice of cold pizza and walk into the living room. You take a seat at the little coffee table, opposite a shaven-headed man with the Generic Circle-y Startup Logo tshirt. “Hey,” you say. “I saw you a couple minutes ago when everyone was talking about their jobs. I guess you didn’t get a chance to go.”\n\n“Yeah,” he said. “It sucks, because I think I have the best job of anyone here. I started a company that uses diphyllic polymers for dam construction. Diphyllic polymer is a new material that strengthens when it encounters water. You can just pour a truck full into a river, and get a dam in a fraction of the time for half the price.”\n\nYou took a course that touched on diphyllic polymer once, so for once you’re not a total rube. “Hey, I know a little about that! I thought it turned brittle and fractured below about 36 degrees F. Aren’t you concerned that your dams might break during a cold spell?”\n\nThe dam guy looks at you blankly for a second. Then it’s as if a light goes on in his eyes: “Oh, I see! You’re one of those people who thinks technology makes the world worse! You should read this great essay - it’s called The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. You’ll see that actually, throughout human history, technology has made the world _better_!”\n\n“I agree that technology is good in general,” you say. “I just thought I heard that this particular technology might shatter once the temperature reaches 36 degrees F, and then it would flood anywhere downstream of the dam.”\n\n“I wish you could hear yourself,” said the dam guy. “It’s like - a hundred years ago people said we shouldn’t use antibiotics, because only God should be allowed to heal people. And then fifty years ago, people said we shouldn’t use nuclear power, because it might have meltdowns and kill us all. And now you’re saying we can’t make diphyllic dams. Doesn’t it worry you to be part of this long line of people trying to hold back the Promethean spirit of the human race?”\n\n“I’m totally for Promethean spirit!” you say. “It’s just - yes or no, does diphyllite shatter at 36 degrees F?”\n\nDam guy starts to look really frustrated. “You know, Tyler Cowen [has a saying](https://sun.pjh.is/tyler-cowen-on-builders-vs-nervous-nellies): ‘Either you’re a Builder, or you’re a Nervous Nellie: take your pick.’ Well, I’m going to create monuments that advance the glory of civilization and generate hydroelectricity and push humanity into a beautiful future. I think that makes me a Builder. And you might think you’re so profound, being a Nervous Nellie over there, but Tyler Cowen says that Nervous Nellies are just overindulging in their own neuroticism and don’t have any profound wisdom at all. Like, what have _you_ ever built, _Nellie_?”\n\nYou are pretty sure you have irreparably offended Dam Guy. Also, people are starting to stare at you. What if you get a reputation as a someone who hates progress, and never get invited to any more cool Bay Area house parties? What was that social advice you vowed never to take a few minutes ago? Oh, right. Imagine what a much cooler person would do, then do that thing.\n\nYou hand Dam Guy a business card from your wallet - it’s your dentist’s, but he doesn’t know that. “Congratulations,” you say. “I’m actually a bigshot VC. I was just testing you to make sure you weren’t a Nervous Nellie. You’ve passed with flying colors. I’d like to invest in your company at an absurdly high valuation.”\n\nHis face fills with sudden delight. “Holy s\\*\\*\\*! This is what I’ve always dreamed of! Are you for real?”\n\n“Real as an eel, brother!” you say, and saunter off cockily. Or maybe not. You can’t remember whether a saunter is supposed to be more like a walk, a jog, or a run. Mostly you just want to be out of there.\n\nThus having cleverly escaped a fight \nOur Pilgrim saunters out into the night \nAbandoning the bustle of the square \nTo drink a draught of cool and foggy air \nThen, having filled his head with wild schemes \nHe seeks his bed, for warm and pleasant dreams"} | |
| {"text":"# Updates on Lumina Probiotic\n\nLumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that [I wrote about in December](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-bioworks-faq), is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to [$250](https://www.luminaprobiotic.com/preorder) and getting endorsements from [Yishan Wong](https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1777925961927082426), [Cremieux](https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-rise-and-impending-fall-of-the), and [Richard Hanania](https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1778480964903256377) (as well as anti-endorsements from [Saloni](https://twitter.com/salonium/status/1778393370383065350) and [Stuart Ritchie](https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/1778794180187238628)). A few points that have come up:\n\n**1: What happened with the FDA testing?**\n\nIn the original FAQ, I wrote:\n\n> Professor Hillman started a company “Oragenics” and applied for FDA approval. The FDA demanded a study of 100 subjects, all of whom had to be “age 18-30, with removable dentures, living alone and far from school zones”. Hillman wasn’t sure there even _were_ 100 young people with dentures, but the FDA wouldn’t budge from requiring this impossible trial. Hillman gave up and switched to other projects.\n\nI got this information from (company CEO) Aaron, who says he got it from (original inventor) Jeffrey Hillman.\n\n[Commenters](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/18d84sa/defying_cavity_lantern_bioworks_faq/kd896ig/) ([and Kevin Drum](https://jabberwocking.com/did-the-fda-kill-a-promising-new-way-of-preventing-cavities/)) searched publicly-available archives and found a slightly different story, with three trials:\n\n1. A Phase 1 trial, scheduled April 2005, on 26 people, age <55, with dentures. The company couldn’t find enough people who met enrollment criteria, so they renegotiated with the FDA and switched to (2).\n \n2. A second attempt at Phase 1 trial, scheduled October 2007, on 10 people, age 18-30, no dentures necessary, done in a hospital setting. This trial succeeded, escalating the process to (3)\n \n3. A Phase 1b trial, scheduled January 2011. Nobody can find any details on this one, but Oragenics says it never took place because of “the very restrictive study enrollment criteria required by the FDA”.\n \n\nSome people have tried to argue that someone must be lying, because I wrote about a 100 person trial age 18-30 with dentures, and this doesn’t match either of the two trials we know about.\n\nI think two more likely explanations are:\n\n* This is Trial 3, the one we know nothing about\n \n* _Or_ someone in the Dr. Hillman → Aaron → me chain mixed up details of the three trials into a mishmash with some characteristics of each.\n \n\n**2: What happened in the rat trials?**\n\nSeveral people including Natalia Coelho [found an old rat study](https://twitter.com/natalia__coelho/status/1778537436446117985) that Dr. Hillman had done.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2771649a-9b3f-42a4-912f-da737a7342a9_771x539.png)\n\nThe rats with the new strain (BCS3-L1) got only 1/3 the normal rats’ “caries score”. But they didn’t get a score of zero. So maybe claims like “BCS3 represents a complete cure for cavities” are overblown.\n\nWhy didn’t rats with the new strain get zero dental caries? [Bacteria other than](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2292933/) _[S. mutans](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2292933/)_ can also cause cavities, so maybe it’s one of those.\n\nRat trials are famous for results that don’t replicate in human trials, so take these with a grain of salt.\n\n**3: What did the latest colonization studies show?**\n\nAaron was able to retest six people who got free samples in December. Four of those people still have the bacterium. The other two don’t.\n\nOf the two failures, one had an active cavity at the time the strain was applied (which interferes with the oral microbiome), and the other had his wisdom teeth removed (which involves rinsing the mouth with strong antiseptics).\n\nAaron hopes this shows the strain will stick around in most normal situations (though the failure in the presence of active cavities is disappointing).\n\n**4: Any new concerns about side effects?**\n\nIn my original post, I mentioned the possibility that this would set off Breathalyzers. Lantern was able to test this, and proved that it wasn’t a problem.\n\nYesterday, [Lao Mein suggested on Less Wrong that it might raise oral cancer risk](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jGu4nLgQYwfsoxddu/reconsider-the-anti-cavity-bacteria-if-you-are-asian) - their post focused on people with ALDH deficiency (most common in Asians) but the calculations are too vague to be sure exactly which groups should and shouldn’t worry. This is less than 24 hours old, the company hasn’t replied yet, and is still developing. I’ll try to update people if anyone gets more clarity on this.\n\nSomeone on the post mentioned that they’ve gotten worse hangovers since using the product, maybe because the constant trickle of alcohol changed the way gut flora metabolize it.\n\n**5: Any other meaningful results since the samples?**\n\nCremieux [says his breath smells better](https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1777854752635691247).\n\nSome people have objected to this claim on the grounds that it takes ~12 months before the bacterium has colonized your mouth. One of the figures in my earlier post suggested that the bacterium might start strong, retreat for a while, and then take 12 months to fully colonize, so that might potentially explain his findings. But also, is it biologically plausible that this prevents bad breath? My impression was that bad breath came from other bacterial byproducts besides lactic acid. It might be possible in theory that the same metabolic changes that switch lactic acid to alcohol disrupt these other byproducts, but it seems kind of unlikely.\n\nAn alternate explanation is that, in order to apply this product at all, you need to do a dentist-style teeth cleaning that kills your previous mouth bacteria. Maybe that improves the bad breath regardless of whether you add the Lumina afterwards?\n\nSome other people have said their mouth feels fresher or something, but realistically all of this is overwhelmingly likely to be placebo.\n\n**6: Do I “endorse” Lumina?**\n\nRichard Hanania [has a post about how he trusts Lumina because I’ve endorsed them](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/if-scott-alexander-told-me-to-jump). It’s extremely kind and I appreciate his respect.\n\nBut also, the most I said in the original post was that I was still debating whether or not to get the treatment.\n\nMy real opinion, as precisely as I can express it, is:\n\n* Advance of approximately the same magnitude as fluoride: 5%\n \n* Good on balance, comparable to other beneficial dental treatments: 35%\n \n* Doesn’t work in its current form, but could easily be modified into something that does: 10%\n \n* Doesn’t work at all and never will: 50%\n \n* Causes minor side effects for some people, same scale as Tylenol: 30%\n \n* Causes medium side effects, same scale as tricyclics: 5%\n \n* Causes disastrous side effects, same scale as thalidomide: <1%\n \n\nLots of people are going to round this off to “So you’re saying it hasn’t yet been proven to work? Doesn’t that mean it’s Not Real Science which means it’s a scam which means anyone who likes it is exactly as bad as LK-99 believers or ivermectin proponents?”\n\nI will never get tired of posting this picture:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb8fed9a0-8b8b-4d11-853e-dad2145e2993_550x307.png)\n\nIf there’s really an intervention with a 5% chance of being as good as fluoride, languishing in a file drawer somewhere, that’s a big deal!\n\nObviously the best course is to study it carefully and not do anything until you know more. The FDA has already closed off that route. Aaron’s taking the only option left - getting it out there where it can be mass tested by users. Soon we’ll have good data on colonization rates, retention rates, and (hopefully) mouth lactic acid levels. After a while, we’ll have at least some anecdotal evidence on cavities. If we’re really lucky, that will provoke a second round of interest from pharma companies, dentists, and scientists.\n\nJust because testing things like this is +EV value for society, doesn’t mean it’s +EV value for every individual involved. The testing process has to pull together inventors, investors, manufacturers, and customers, using some mix of greed, delusion, altruism, technophilia, and goodwill. I think it’s fair to try to minimize the greed and delusion by reminding people that medical interventions which make biological sense and work in rats have a bad human track record. But having done that, I don’t think you also have to try to crush the goodwill and technophilia.\n\nIf you’re a poor person, spending your last $250 on this because you desperately want to cure your cavity problem, and you would be devastated if it didn’t work or if had any side effects - then you shouldn’t buy Lumina.\n\nBut if you have extra money, and you think biomedical innovation is cool, you want to be able to tell people you have genetically-modified bacteria in your mouth, and you want to contribute to the project of taking this out of the file drawer of discarded good ideas and back into the arena, and maybe get fewer cavities as a bonus - then yeah, I think it’s a prosocial thing to do, and probably won’t go too wrong - although this is not medical advice and really we have no way of knowing how wrong it will go (though maybe wait until people have had more time to look over the new oral cancer claims, especially if you’re Asian).\n\nI would prefer not to be quoted as “endorsing” Lumina in any way more simplistic than this, lest people who think endorsement = “it definitely works” over-update on my supposed opinion.\n\n**UPDATE:** [More thoughts and information from Yishan Wong](https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1780131552615420189)"} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 325\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** More meetups this week, including London, Oxford, SF, Cambridge (UK), Vienna, Portland, Jerusalem, Sydney, Ann Arbor, Capetown, Paris, Rome, Lisbon, Boulder, Dallas, **Leipzig**, and **Jakarta**; bolding these last two since they were later additions you might have missed the first time. Check [the list](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024) for more information.\n\n**2:** Thanks to everyone for continued good discussion on the [Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7). I want to avoid getting bogged down in this forever, so I’ll mostly try to resist responding and just highlight some of the pro-lab-leak comments I found most thought-provoking:\n\n* ACX commenter David Bahry has [published a paper on the lab leak case](https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23), especially relating to ascertainment bias.\n \n* Bahry was also able to find [the source of the George Gao quote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53563090) (though see also objection [here](https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1695484121789673942))\n \n* Saar [on the negative blood samples](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53592553).\n \n* Simon Stats [on early COVID doubling time arguments](https://arguablywrong.home.blog/2024/04/09/how-likely-is-it-for-covid-to-establish-itself/) (but cf my response [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53962488))\n \n* A figure I took from Peter’s blog post [was edited from its original context](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53608334), further explanation [here](https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1778080286934233370).\n \n* Michael Weissman’s [probabilities](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53645411).\n \n* [Long discussion of new data about DEFUSE proposal](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53646726).\n \n\nFeel free to discuss your thoughts on these here, I won’t be participating. Also: [Phil H explains why one of the scientists in this debate is named “Lv”](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53522537) (it’s a romanization issue)\n\n**3:** Sorry for low post volume recently, combination of kids, illness, and trying to get all the lab leak stuff tied up. Hopefully will improve in 18 years shortly."} | |
| {"text":"# ACX Classifieds 4/24\n\nThis is the irregular classifieds thread. Advertise whatever you want in the comments.\n\nTo keep things organized, please respond to the appropriate top-level comment: **Employment, Dating, Read My Blog** (also includes podcasts, books, etc)**, Consume My Product/Service, Meetup,** or **Other.** I’ll delete anything that’s not in the appropriate category.\n\nRemember that posting dating ads is hard and scary. Please refrain from commenting too negatively on anyone’s value as a human being. I’ll be less strict about employers, bloggers, etc.\n\nPotentially related links:\n\n— [EA job board](https://jobs.80000hours.org/) \n— [EA internships](https://ea-internships.pory.app/) \n— [Dating docs](https://dateme.directory/) / [Manifold.love](https://manifold.love/) \n— [Find a Less Wrong/ACX meetup](https://www.lesswrong.com/community)"} | |
| {"text":"# Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate\n\nOriginal post [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim). Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.\n\nFirst, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post [on the Rootclaim blog](https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-scott-alexander/).\n\nSecond, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were _sort of_ trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter, so I want to make it clear that’s my fault for mis-presenting it. See 3.1 for more details.\n\nThird, in my original post, I failed to mention that Peter also has [a blog](https://medium.com/@tgof137), including [a post summing up his COVID origins argument](https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-case-against-the-lab-leak-theory-f640ae1c3704).\n\nThanks to some people who want to remain anonymous for helping me with this post. Any remaining errors are my own.\n\n**1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis** \n— 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses? \n— 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught? \n— 1.3: 92 early cases \n— 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater \n— 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments \n— 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments \n— 1.7: How much should coverup worry us? \n— 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked? \n— 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases \n— 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats \n— 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post\n\n**2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak** \n— 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?\n\n**3: Other Points That Came Up** \n— 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds \n— 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis \n— 3.3: Closing thoughts on Rootclaim\n\n**4: Summary And Updates**\n\n1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis\n\n\n======================================\n\n* * *\n\n### 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses?\n\n**Simon stats wrote:**\n\n> It is important to consider how different SARS-CoV-2 is to other zoonoses. I have a challenge for zoonosis proponents to find me a zoonosis with all of the following features\n> \n> \\- Spillover occurred after 2000 when sequencing became much cheaper\n> \n> \\- There were more than a hundred human cases\n> \n> \\- There are zero infected animals.\n> \n> This characterises SARS-CoV-2, but no other zoonosis meets these criteria. Why?\n\n[hmm](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52671277) answers the challenge:\n\n> 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak; almost 30k cases, no animal intermediate.\n> \n> This is probably the most notable zoonotic episode of the last 20 years apart from SARS-2, I'm surprised you missed it.\n> \n> There are also 7 other Ebola outbreaks that match your criteria.\n> \n> We've been studying Ebola for over 40 years and have yet to determine the animal reservoir. It took 20 years to identify the reservoir for HIV-1's progenitor. Sometimes finding the reservoir is easy, sometimes it's hard. Typically it is easy when you have lots of cases and the virus is not very efficient at human-to-human transmission, because that necessitates lots of separate zoonotic events, which necessitates lots of infected animals. For something that spreads fast (i.e., the kind of virus likely to start a pandemic), you don't need a big reservoir, so you have a smaller target. For example, we _did_ find the reservoir for the 2009 flu pandemic, but it took 7 years: [https://elifesciences.org/articles/16777](https://elifesciences.org/articles/16777)\n\nHKU1 might also fit these criteria. It’s a coronavirus discovered in 2004 that seems to have spilled over in China and spread globally (it’s fine; it just causes yet another subtype of common cold). The exact animal reservoir has never been identified, although Wikipedia says it “likely originated from rodents”.\n\nThe classic case where we _did_ find infected animals was SARS (which came from civets). It took six months of careful research. Most of the civet farms and civet wet markets were negative. Even at farms with some positive civets, other civets were negative. Twenty years later, it’s still not obvious civets were the definitive intermediate host, rather than some other animal that got caught in the crossfire.\n\nMeanwhile, a few weeks after COVID was discovered, China killed all the animals in the market without testing any raccoon-dogs for COVID. Then they told all nearby raccoon-dog farms to kill all their raccoon-dogs too. Then they banned Chinese scientists from researching the origins of COVID. Probably this is part of why we eventually found an intermediate host for SARS1 and not COVID.\n\n[Simon objects](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52742842) that although it was hard to find the exact civets responsible for SARS, we did later find that lots of civet handlers had SARS antibodies (even though they didn’t remember getting sick).\n\n> There's different types of evidence for infected civets, some of which comes from higher seroprevalence among civet traders.\n> \n> In May 2003, Guan et al (2003) identified SARS-CoV-like virus in animals in a live-animal market in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. Guan et al (2003) also tested for antibodies among workers in the market. They note that “8 out of 20 (40%) of the wild-animal traders and 3 of 15 (20%) of those who slaughter these animals had evidence of antibody, only 1 (5%) of 20 vegetable traders was seropositive.” This suggests that the majority of the infections of the 11 people with close contact with animals were zoonotic. Among 508 animal traders, 66 (13%) tested positive for IgG antibody to SARS associated coronavirus by ELISA, while the control groups including hospital workers, Guangdong CDC workers, and healthy adults at clinic had an antibody prevalence of 1–3%.\n\nI agree this is an important point. During the debate, Peter said that if we had tested lots of raccoon-dog handlers using the Guan et al methodology, we might have found they also had COVID antibodies. Unfortunately nobody did, and it’s too late, because by now the raccoon-dog handlers have probably gotten COVID the normal way.\n\n### 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught?\n\n**Simon stats [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52649865):**\n\n> What you say about raccoon dogs here is mistaken. Raccoon dogs are not a plausible intermediate host for sars-cov-2 on the basis of information that has been known since 2021. There are several considerations.\n> \n> 1\\. Xiao et al (2021) - [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B) , which includes a co-author of Worobey et al (2022), a leading zoonosis paper states in table 1 that the raccoon dogs were wild caught in Hubei, not farmed as you assert in the piece. This alone rules out raccoon dogs as plausible hosts for two independently sufficient reasons. Firstly, there is unanimity in the literature that the bat ancestral virus to SARS-CoV-2 is in southern Yunnan or South East Asia. Everyone agrees with this, including Shi Zhengli. If a species was wild caught in Hubei, then there would be no explanation of how it acquired the ancestral bat virus, given that Hubei is 1000 miles from southern Yunnan.\n> \n> Secondly, a mystery of sars-cov-2 is how it acquired the furin cleavage site that makes it so transmissible. There are 850 known sars-like coronaviruses, and only one with a furin cleavage site. According to private messages exchanged by proponents of zoonosis, the furin cleavage site could not have been acquired in the market because the density of animals was too low (only 3-4 per cage). When avian influenza acquires a furin cleavage site that occurs on farms with thousands of chickens densely packed, i.e. not in the wild and not when there are a handful of animals in cages in a market. [https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/visual-timeline-proximal-origin/](https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/visual-timeline-proximal-origin/)\n> \n> 2\\. Wang et al (2022) [https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/8/1/veac046/6601809](https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/8/1/veac046/6601809) also confirms that the raccoon dogs were wild caught in Hubei. What's more, Wang et al (2022) tested 15 wild raccoon dogs of suppliers of Wuhan markets, including the Huanan market, in January 2020 and found them to be negative for SARS-CoV-2. On average, 38 raccoon dogs were sold across the four markets in Wuhan from 2017 to 2019. So, the 15 raccoon dogs likely comprised nearly the whole inventory of raccoon dogs that would have been supplied to the Huanan market at the time \\[…\\]\n> \n> Xiao et al (2021) has a list of species sold at the Huanan market. I would encourage you to read that list and suggest which animals you think are plausible, and I will tell you why they are not actually plausible.\n\nXiao (2021) Table 1 only says that some raccoon dogs in Wuhan had wounds, suggesting they were wild-caught. It makes no claims that all raccoon-dogs were wild-caught. There are dozens of raccoon-dog farms in the same province as Wuhan.\n\nIIUC Wang (2022) says that 38 raccoon dogs were sold in Wuhan _per month_, not 38 during the whole two-year study period, so the claim that the traders in Wang represent the whole supply fails. \\[EDIT: Possibly I misunderstood this, see [here](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7/comment/53522877)\\]\n\nThe raccoon dogs were tested for active infection, not serology, so you would have had to catch a raccoon-dog in the act of having COVID to see anything. Remember, during SARS, scientists kept testing the farms that supplied the wet markets where it was spilling over, and most farms were negative.\n\nThe wildlife trade in China is complicated, and sometimes involves a permeable barrier between farm and wilderness. Farmed and wild animals are kept in the same pens, packed in the same crates, and sold at the same stalls.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F071ce683-8d5c-485c-a909-1bea370ee990_1200x800.jpeg)\n\nSuppose you know that one of the animals in the middle crate on the right was caught in some safe, disease-free way, 500 km away, three months ago. How confident does that make you feel?\n\nTo answer the question about which animals in the Xiao paper are plausible: at least civets and bamboo rats. SARS spread back and forth in some kind of weird net between civets, raccoon dogs, and a bunch of made-up-sounding animals like \"ferret-badgers\" and \"greater hog-badgers\". For all we know, COVID could have done likewise.\n\nIf all of this sounds desperate and wishy-washy, imagine an alien who comes to Earth, hangs out at Area 51, and catches COVID. She theorizes that she got it from humans. She’s heard that the humans at Area 51 came from schools, so she abducts fifteen humans from a nearby school and gives them COVID throat swabs. None of them are positive, so she announces that humans can’t be a COVID intermediate host. Other aliens suggest further testing, but she has already vaporized Earth, just in case, so the further testing never gets done.\n\n**Simon added:**\n\n> Even the strongest proponents of the raccoon dog hypothesis have walked back their bold claims that raccoon dogs are the host.\n\nI asked a scientist whose name is on some of the original raccoon-dog papers if this was true. He said:\n\n> I secretly root for other intermediate hosts. Bamboo rats or civets would be really fascinating and have flown under the radar. But it’s been really hard to bet against raccoon dogs. First we learn they can transmit and the virus didn’t change when transmitted between them (Freuling 2020)? Then turns out they’re sold in the market (Xiao 2021)? Then it turns out they’re freaking everywhere in the genetic data from the market, the most common mammal detected? Then it turns out the market animals aren’t from northern China fur farms? It’s been a tough road for those betting against them….\n\n### 1.3: 92 Early Cases\n\n**There was a long multi-branching thread of arguments centered around 92 early cases, for example [here](https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1773722754862239759):**\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F32718adb-32da-4b2f-8440-2fdfa71ec389_592x278.png)\n\nMy understanding of the situation: the first officially-confirmed case of COVID started December 11, 2019. Later in the pandemic, in 2021, the World Health Organization wanted to figure out if that was really the first, or whether there had been earlier ones. They scoured Chinese hospital records for illnesses that might be COVID during the two months before the official discovery (ie early October to early December) In particular, they asked Wuhan hospitals for records of any cases of fever, flu, respiratory illness, and pneumonia. The hospital gave them 76,253 cases, because China is big and flu is common. This was slightly more cases than usual, but there was a normal flu spreading too, so the researchers didn’t find this very compelling.\n\nThen they narrowed these cases down to those that were “clinically compatible” with COVID, and ended up with 92.\n\nThen they went over those 92 more carefully, including “review by the external multidisciplinary clinical team” and blood draws from the former patients. They were able to track down 67 of the 92. The clinical team decided none of those 92 cases really resembled COVID, and the blood draws were all negative. They published this as the results of their study:\n\n> The retrospective search for cases compatible with COVID-19 illness identified 76 253 episodes with one of four indicator conditions. A rise in one of these conditions, \\[acute respiratory illness\\] (as well as \\[flu-like illness\\] and fever), was seen in this group of individuals in the over-60-year age group in early December. The clinical assessment of the 76,253 individuals revealed 92 cases clinically compatible with COVID-19. It is possible that the application of stringent clinical criteria, resulting in the identification of only 92 clinically compatible cases, may have decreased the possibility of identifying a group or groups of cases with milder illness. All the 92 cases were rejected as cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection on further clinical review.\n> \n> None of these cases (where blood could be obtained) was positive on SARS-CoV-2 serological testing carried out more than 12 months later. The use of retrospective serological testing so long after the illness cannot be relied on to exclude the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 infection at the time of the presenting illness, given the possible drop in SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody over time and the associated reduced sensitivity of commercial assays. The possibility that earlier transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection was occurring in this community cannot be excluded on the basis of this evidence.\n\nIn other words “we looked for early COVID, we didn’t find any, but we can’t promise we didn’t miss anything”.\n\nOn Twitter, [Giles Demaneuf](https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1773853669764780426) makes an interesting point. The researchers took the samples in 2021, when China was in Zero COVID. When the Wuhan outbreak was finally contained in early 2020, 4.4% of Wuhanites had contracted COVID. So isn’t it surprising that 0/67 of the former patients who the researchers tested were had antibodies to COVID? The chance that 67 randomly-selected people in a population with 4.4% prevalence rate are all negative is only about 5%. Is this evidence of foul play?\n\nNo. See the conclusions section of the report, which said: “The use of retrospective serological testing so long after the illness cannot be relied on to exclude the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 infection at the time of the presenting illness, given the possible drop in SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody over time and the associated reduced sensitivity of commercial assays”.\n\nYou have a lot of COVID antibodies just after getting COVID. By a year or so afterwards, you might not have enough to detect. So it’s not surprising the WHO study didn’t detect any.\n\nWhy did they even try looking for antibodies? There seem to be two reasons not to: first, they should have known antibodies would decay after a year. Second, even if some of them did have antibodies, how would we know they weren’t just infected in spring 2020 like everyone else?\n\nThey don’t say. My guess: antibody decay is very variable. Some people’s antibodies might last more than a year. So if they found that way more than 4.4% of people had antibodies, that would be surprising and suggest that most of them had had COVID in autumn 2019. But instead they found that nobody had antibodies, which is consistent with one or two of them getting sick when everyone else got sick, and having their antibodies decay at the normal rate. But also, I think the antibodies were just intended to supplement the clinical review, and not be a very important part of their determination.\n\nI think this study is moderately strong evidence that there wasn’t much COVID going around before December 2019. Doctors looked for cases, they winnowed them down into the cases that looked most like COVID, but when they examined those cases closely, they didn’t look enough like COVID to be interesting. I don’t think the antibody tests add or subtract much from this assessment.\n\nI would be fine if someone else said they don’t think the WHO report provides much evidence either way. The main thing I want to insist on is that there’s no conspiracy to hide 92 previously-undiscovered cases. They searched really hard for potential cases, they subjected the most plausible candidates for further review, and then they decided those ones were not, in fact, COVID.\n\n(You can read all of this [here](https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/final-joint-report_origins-studies-6-april-201.pdf). It’s not a very good description and I’d be interested if someone has a more thorough writeup of the research.)\n\nThis was just one of many efforts that researchers made to try to identify pre-December-2020 COVID cases. For example, 30,000 people donated blood in autumn 2019, and the hospitals still had most of it. So they tested the blood samples for COVID antibodies and didn’t find any. I don’t think antibodies decay in stored blood samples (I might be wrong). There are 12 million people in Wuhan, so if even a few hundred people had COVID during that time, one of them should have turned up. None of them did.\n\nFinally, during COVID’s officially-recognized existence, its numbers doubled about once every 3.5 days. Again, if COVID existed a month earlier than previously believed, then it would be 256x more common than expected. This would be hard to miss! Nobody found evidence from excess mortality that COVID was 256x more common than expected.\n\nI’m using the version of the doubling time argument because it’s simple enough for me to understand, and I don’t have to worry about anyone trying to hide something in their complex model. It’s not exactly true, but it’s true enough to rule out COVID starting much before November 2019. If you want the fancy official version, it’s in [Pekar 2021](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8139421/?report=reader#!po=12.5000) and looks like this:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffcd7daff-43d3-416f-8896-173392bf3438_720x312.webp)\n\nThis alone isn’t fatal to lab leak. It’s perfectly possible for the lab to leak (let’s say) November 5th, the virus spreads a bit, and then a month later someone goes to the wet market, coughs on a vendor, and starts the officially recognized pandemic.\n\nBut if that were true, you’d expect (let’s say) 30 cases by early December. Let’s say the wet market vendor was exactly Case # 30. She infected the other wet market vendors, starting a pandemic with an obvious center at the wet market and lots of infected wet market vendors and patrons. What about Case # 29? If they were (let’s say) a barista, how come they didn’t infect people at their coffee shop? How come there wasn’t a second obvious cluster radiating out from a coffee shop, lots of coffee-shop-linked cases, etc? How come there weren’t 30 equally-sized clusters?\n\nIn order to avoid this, you either need to claim that the wet market was a perfect superspreader location, or that the pattern with lots of cases in the wet market and few-to-none anywhere else was a result of ascertainment bias. Saar made both those arguments during the debate, but I thought Peter rebutted them effectively.\n\n### 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater\n\n**Nicholas Halden ([blog](https://metroeating.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=comment_metadata)) [writes](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52701277):**\n\nWhat should we make of [this study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7938741/), which found the presence of covid in Brazilian wastewater in late 2019?\n\nConsider the doubling times.\n\nThe study says that scientists working in late 2020 found COVID in samples of Brazilian wastewater from November 27, 2019. This was long before the first detected case of transmission in Brazil on March 13, 2020.\n\nBetween November 27, 2019 and March 13, 2020 is about 16 weeks, so 32 COVID doubling times. 32 doubling times with no lockdown is enough time for COVID to infect every single person in Brazil. If COVID had infected everyone in Brazil before the first recognized case, we would have noticed.\n\n(again, COVID doubling time isn’t exactly invariably 3.5 days, but here we’re talking about numbers big enough that the exact details don’t matter very much)\n\nSo if COVID was in Brazil on November 27, it must have fizzled out instead of going pandemic. How likely is that? If one person had COVID, it’s not too unlikely - not all COVID cases transmit it forward. If (let’s say) twenty people had COVID, it’s very unlikely - at that point, the law of large numbers takes over; in a freak coincidence, every single patient would have to fail to infect anyone else. So almost certainly fewer than 20 people in Brazil had COVID in November 27.\n\nSo which is more likely - that somehow 20 people had COVID long before the virus was officially detected, and on a totally different continent, yet somehow a scientist looking through wastewater found the water from exactly those people and managed to detect the virus? Or that there was a sampling error, which happens all the time in these kinds of things?\n\nPeter [wrote a blog post on some of these issues](https://medium.com/@tgof137/when-did-covid-first-show-up-outside-of-china-e54c358736bb). He found that there were positive tests from wastewater samples as early as March 2019, which doesn’t fit anyone’s timeline, including lab leakers’. And most of these positives (including the Brazilian sample) contained later strains of the virus with mutations it picked up late in 2020. So these were almost certainly false positives from contamination.\n\n### 1.5: Biorealism’s 16 arguments\n\n**Biorealism has a list of sixteen arguments, which he liked so much that he posted it three times in the ACX comments, twice on Less Wrong, twice on Manifold, and about a dozen times on Twitter under multiple account names. Some posts were slightly different from others, but a typical version is:**\n\n> Importantly, Miller incorrectly claimed the N501Y mutation would result from passage in hACE2 mice (mixed them up with BALB/c mice). The major papers Miller relied on have been seriously challenged since the debate. See Stoyan and Chiu (2024), Weissman (2024), Bloom (2023) and Lv et al (2024). Overall the circumstantial evidence makes lab v plausible:\n\nPeter admitted getting this wrong during the debate. I think this very minor point about mice mutations was approximately his only mistake in 15 hours of debating, and he admitted it as soon as he noticed. Biorealism somehow heard about this (obviously not through watching the debate, as we’ll see in a moment), then left about 20-30 comments starting with it, under various accounts, on various platforms, as if it somehow discredited Peter. This is making me somewhat less charitable to him and his 16 arguments than I would be otherwise.\n\n> 1\\. Chinese researchers Botao & Lei Xiao observed lab origin was likely given the nearest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were far from Wuhan. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) sampled SARS-related bat coronaviruses where the nearest relatives are found in Yunnan, Laos and Vietnam ~1500km away. They refuse to share their records.\n\nThe ancestral viruses of SARS were found equally far from where SARS spilled over into humans, so we know it’s possible (and likely) for viruses to travel that far.\n\n> 2\\. Patrick Berche, DG at Institut Pasteur in Lille 2014-18, notes you would expect secondary outbreaks if it arose via the live animal trade. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234839/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10234839/)\n\nThere are constant outbreaks of weird coronaviruses in animal handlers. See eg [this paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31860-w), which estimates about 60,000 of these per year. None of these ever go anywhere, because the farmers are in rural areas that aren’t dense enough to sustain a high R0, and the epidemic fizzles out after a single digit number of cases. Any early outbreaks of COVID would have vanished into this long and mostly unnoticed list.\n\n> 3\\. Molecular data: Only sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site. Well adapted to human ACE2 cells. Low genetic diversity indicating a lack of prior circulation (Berche 2023).\n> \n> Restriction site SARS-CoV-2 BsaI/BsmBI restriction map falls neatly within the ideal range for a reverse genetics system and used previously at WIV and UNC. Ngram analysis of the codon usage per Professor Louis Nemzer\n> \n> [https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1667232580255490053?t=IJgitS5cw364ioclzVWxaA&s=19](https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1667232580255490053?t=IJgitS5cw364ioclzVWxaA&s=19)\n> \n> The SARS2 backbone is very low in CG and CpG. While the 12-nt insert that gives it the FCS is extremely high in both. Almost as if it was some kind of chimera of a consensus sequence and a codon-optimized polybasic cleavage site?\n> \n> [https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1752800486837678377?t=EpIRgyybJVaPgeMP5xdstA&s=19](https://twitter.com/BiophysicsFL/status/1752800486837678377?t=EpIRgyybJVaPgeMP5xdstA&s=19)\n> \n> [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1)\n> \n> [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0?fbclid=IwAR1HMUMtLIAFOFppVasQDeoIAYrVhP8j4YoPO4wnaTOUiKLsllZl\\_oKryOw](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0?fbclid=IwAR1HMUMtLIAFOFppVasQDeoIAYrVhP8j4YoPO4wnaTOUiKLsllZl_oKryOw)\n\nMost of this was discussed extensively in the second session of the debate, which I recommend.\n\n> The CGG-CGG arginine codon usage is particularly unusual but used in synthetic biology.\n\nI asked a synthetic biologist about this. He said:\n\n_» “Nope. I would literally never do this if I was designing a small insert (maybe I wouldn't notice if it happened by chance with ~1 in 25 odds in a naive codon optimization algorithm as part of a larger sequence). High GC% is bad. Tandem repeat is worse. Several other perfectly fine arginine codons. And I wouldn't engineer a **viral** genome using **human** codon usage. An engineer would not do it.”_\n\n> 4\\. DEFUSE full proposal: virus 20% different from SARS1, consensus seq assembled with 6 segments, without disrupting coding seq, BsmBI order, FCS. SARS2: 20% different than SARS1, 6 evenly spaced fragments w BsmBI and BsaI restriction sites, FCS.\n> \n> Jesse Bloom, Jack Nunberg, Robert Townley, Alexandre Hassanin have observed this workflow could have lead to SARS-CoV-2. Work often begins before funding sought or goes ahead anyway.\n\nRe: 4 - Also scattered across second section of debate, also not going to retread\n\n> 5\\. Market cases were all lineage B. Lv et al (2024) indicates there was a single point of emergence and A came before B. So market cases not the primary cases. See also Bloom (2021), Kumar et al (2022). Peter Ben Embarek said there were likely already thousands of cases in Wuhan in December 2019.[https://t.co/50kFV9zSb6](https://t.co/50kFV9zSb6)\n> \n> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/34398234/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/34398234/)\n> \n> [https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/38/10/2719/6553661](https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/38/10/2719/6553661)\n\nThere _was_ a Lineage A sample in the market, lab leak proponents just try to ignore/dismiss/conspiracize it away. The first two known Lineage A cases were very close to the market. Lv (is this even a real name? It sounds like Roman numeral? But I guess that’s what you expect in a country ruled by someone named Xi) found some weird COVID variants in Shanghai that might or might not mean anything; you can see some discussion of the implications [here](https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1765565049203253687), but I don’t think they’re strong evidence either way. If A was first, it means some really weird stuff coincidences have to happen to give us the spread rates and genetic clock data we get, but they’re not necessarily _weirder_ in the zoonosis hypothesis than the lab leak one.\n\nThe claim that there were “thousands of cases in Wuhan in December 2019” is very easy to disprove by doubling rate arguments like the one above, by the blood bank study mentioned above, by the WHO’s failed case search, and by many other lines of argument.\n\n> 6\\. Evidence for lineage A in the market is based on a low quality sample according to Liu et. al. (2023).\n\nI really think lab leakers need to decide whether they think China is a sinister actor trying to cover up the truth, or whether they should trust every offhand comment by Chinese government officials as gospel. Dr. Liu doesn’t explain in what sense he thinks the Lineage A sample is “low-quality”, and the Western scientists who I asked about this said they didn’t understand this complaint and that the sample was fine. A Western team re-analyzing the same sample [describes it as](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.13.557637v1) “conclusively contain\\[ing\\] Lineage A.” I think most lab leakers have switched from trying to deny the genetics to claiming that this was “contamination”, which also doesn’t make sense (the sample is genetically very early). Note that aside from this sample, the first two Lineage A cases discovered were both very close to the wet market.\n\n> 7\\. Bloom (2023) shows market samples do not support market origin. There is also no evidence of transmission in the claimed susceptible animals elsewhere. [https://academic.oup.com/ve/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ve/vead089/7504441](https://academic.oup.com/ve/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ve/vead089/7504441)\n\nDiscussed extensively in my article as well as the first section of the debate.\n\n> 8\\. Lineage A and B only two mutations apart. François Ballox, Bloom and Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo note this is unlikely to reflect two separate animal spillovers as opposed to incomplete case ascertainment of human to human transmission (Bloom 2021).\n\nDiscussed extensively in my article as well as the first section of the debate.\n\n> 9\\. Sampling bias. George Gao, Chinese CDC head at the time, acknowledged to the BBC stating they may have focused too much on and around the market and missed cases on the other side of the city. David Bahry outlines the documented bias. Michael Weissman has shown this mathematically.\n> \n> [https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23](https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23)\n> \n> [https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556)\n\nRe: Dr. Gao, see above comment about Chinese officials. See the section Ascertainment Bias below for why I disagree with this specific claim, which also addresses the Michael Weissman argument.\n\n> 10\\. Spatial statistics experts show the Worobey claim the market was the early epicentre was flawed.\n> \n> [https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954)\n\nRe: 10 - See [Confirmation Of The Centrality Of The Huanan Market Among Early COVID-19 Cases](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05859), a response to the paper you cite:\n\n> The centrality of Wuhan's Huanan market in maps of December 2019 COVID-19 case residential locations, established by Worobey et al. (2022a), has recently been challenged by Stoyan and Chiu (2024, SC2024). SC2024 proposed a statistical test based on the premise that the measure of central tendency (hereafter, \"centre\") of a sample of case locations must coincide with the exact point from which local transmission began. Here we show that this premise is erroneous. SC2024 put forward two alternative centres (centroid and mode) to the centre-point which was used by Worobey et al. for some analyses, and proposed a bootstrapping method, based on their premise, to test whether a particular location is consistent with it being the point source of transmission.\n> \n> We show that SC2024's concerns about the use of centre-points are inconsequential, and that use of centroids for these data is inadvisable. The mode is an appropriate, even optimal, choice as centre; however, contrary to SC2024's results, we demonstrate that with proper implementation of their methods, the mode falls at the entrance of a parking lot at the market itself, and the 95% confidence region around the mode includes the market. Thus, the market cannot be rejected as central even by SC2024's overly stringent statistical test.\n\nI think this response is pretty strong. In one analysis, they show that even though the other paper’s methodology is worse than theirs, if you apply it correctly (instead of inappropriately excluding various cases like the paper’s authors did), the center of all early cases in Hubei province lands on the wet market parking lot. In another analysis, they show that the other paper’s recommended tests wouldn’t have correctly pointed to the offending water pump in the famous John Snow cholera outbreak, but theirs would have.\n\nStill, I think it’s useful to supplement fancy statistics with normal common sense, so I recommend just looking at the map of early cases:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fffd4cddb-6e3e-41f5-8ef6-ec0b27bec600_626x426.webp)\n\n…and deciding whether you think the assumptions behind a specific statistical test are likely to debunk the idea that cases are centered around the wet market.\n\n> 11\\. Wuhan used as a control for a 2015 serological study on SARS-related bat coronaviruses due to its urban location.\n> \n> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/)\n\nI don’t know why this point is supposed to matter. If you mean that Wuhan isn’t directly exposed to bats, nobody ever said it was. The zoonotic theory is that wildlife carted in from other areas of China started the pandemic in the wet market.\n\n> 12\\. Superspreader events also seen at wet markets in Beijing and Singapore (Xinfadi and Jurong).\n\nThis was discussed very extensively in the debates, both in section 1 and section 3. Wet markets weren’t “superspreader locations” - in fact, the disease spread no more quickly there than anywhere else. They were the first place in those cities that the pandemic started, due to contaminated animal products. If anything, this supports zoonosis. See also my discussion with Saar on this point below.\n\n> 13\\. WIV refuse to share their records with NIH who terminated subaward in 2022. Wider suspension over biosafety concerns. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-18/us-suspends-wuhan-institute-funds-over-covid-stonewalling](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-18/us-suspends-wuhan-institute-funds-over-covid-stonewalling)\n\nAlthough WIV has not been especially forthcoming, some of their databases were leaked in various ways and showed that they did not have any viruses capable of transforming into COVID.\n\n> 14\\. PLA involvement at WIV and MERS research prior to SARS-COV-2. MERS features several similarities with SARS-CoV-2.\n> \n> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7022351/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7022351/)\n\nI can’t even tell what conspiracy theory you’re trying to propose with this one; if you spell it out I can try to explain why it might be false.\n\n> 15\\. SARS1 leaked several times and SARS-COV-2 has leaked from a BSL-3 lab in Taiwan.\n\nAgreed that SARS leaked several times. It also spilled over from animals several times. During the debate, a lab leak rate of once per lab per 500 years was proposed (everyone agreed to steelman this by 10x for WIV numbers); I would be interested to know whether anything about the study of SARS challenges that number.\n\n> 16\\. Unpublished infectious clone identified from Wuhan contradicting arguments such reverse genetics systems would be published.\n> \n> [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v1.full)\n\nI asked some scientists about this paper and here’s what they told me. Wuhan University sequenced some rice. In the middle of the sequence, there’s an unexpected sequence from a common coronavirus, HKU4. The most likely explanation is that someone else in Wuhan was working on the coronavirus and there was cross-contamination. Plausibly this is Wuhan Institute of Virology, who is known to work with coronaviruses. This is cool detective work, but it’s not clear what it’s supposed to prove. I think some lab leakers are using it to prove that WIV can do reverse genetics, but they admitted this already in [a published paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/) so that’s not too helpful. I think others are using it to prove WIV had “secret viruses” in their catalogue, but the rice virus wasn’t secret, it was HKU4, which is common and which WIV [has already published papers about](https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/11/1/56).\n\n### 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 Arguments\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F467dd304-190a-4437-8920-d498c433dffb_1600x960.jpeg)\n\nOnce again, I cannot stress enough how much better a take you might have on this debate if you watch it.\n\n* “The first known case predates the market outbreak by a month” - this is not the consensus position. I cannot say for sure what Dr. Chou means by this, but I suspect he’s referring to one of the many claims to this effect that Peter effectively debunked during the debate (Connor Reed, Mr. Chen, the 92 cases, Brazil, etc).\n \n* “Genetic analyses put the realistic start date around Sept/Oct” - see the section on Brazil above for the many reasons this is impossible. Pekar, the most-cited genetic analysis, puts the origin in November. Dr. Chou doesn’t cite his sources, so I don’t know what he’s referring to, but it certainly hasn’t entered the knowledge of the reality-based community.\n \n* “The wet market cases were concentrated around a mahjong room”. CTRL+F “mahjong room” in the original post. The mahjong room itself tested negative, and the “epicenter” mechanism isn’t fine-grained enough to be useful (CTRL+F “Central Park” in the original post for a discussion of why this is).\n \n* “No animals at the market (or in Wuhan) tested positive.” No raccoon-dogs were tested. In SARS1, which we know was zoonotic, they also never get positive animal tests at several wet markets where they knew spillovers had occurred. Again, imagine the alien, coming to Earth and taking a dozen randomly selected cats (not even humans this time!) and finding none of them had COVID.\n \n* “No raccoon-dogs anywhere on the planet have tested positive, beyond those being forcibly infected to do experiments”. False, [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9968901/) discusses an outbreak of COVID among raccoon-dogs on a farm in Poland.\n \n* “They aren’t capable of catching or spreading COVID”. False, [here’s a paper on the subject](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.19.256800v1.full) which says that “Raccoon dogs are susceptible to and efficiently transmit SARS-CoV2”.\n \n* “The clustering around the wet market in Wuhan . . . was just a product of oversmoothing”. Here is a map of December 2020 COVID cases. I recommend ignoring the contour lines and just looking at the dots. How could dots be oversmoothed?:\n \n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff4e22a77-72f7-4630-a17e-c30428629690_626x426.webp)\n\n* “At the time of the wet market outbreak, COVID was already spreading around the world”. Dr. Chou doesn’t give a source for this, but I think it’s referring to the Brazilian data already discussed earlier.\n \n\nI think he had more of these somewhere else on the subreddit, but I’m not feeling like this is extremely worth my time.\n\n### 1.7: How much should coverup worry us?\n\n**GStew writes:**\n\n> I personally agree it was not a lab leak but a pretty important was lost in the debate (or at least poorly factored in). Namely China was hiding evidence. While this may impact priors…the bigger impact is that, if it was a lab leak we only know what information was released (which almost certainly would be anything that boosted their preferred narrative) and do not have all the evidence that was presumably withheld (which would be all the evidence they could suppress that went against the preferred narrative).\n\nThis was discussed a bit, and Peter’s position is that China was a bad actor, but it wasn’t specifically trying to suppress lab leak / favor zoonosis. As often as not, it was trying to suppress zoonosis, or just swat anyone who spoke up about anything.\n\nDuring SARS, the international health community criticized China for having wet markets where zoonotic spillovers could happen. China promised to clean them up, then mostly didn’t (for example, the raccoon-dog vendor at Wuhan was fined a few times, but kept operating). China’s first priority was to prevent people from accusing them of failing to clean up wet markets. For example, here’s what happened to Li Wenliang, the first person to raise the alarm about a mysterious new epidemic centered around the wet market, ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang)):\n\n> On 3 January 2020, police from the Wuhan Public Security Bureau investigating the case interrogated Li, issued a formal written warning and censuring him for \"publishing untrue statements about seven confirmed SARS cases at the Huanan Seafood Market.\" He was made to sign a letter of admonition promising not to do it again. The police warned him that any recalcitrant behavior would result in a prosecution.\n\nBecause of that, a lot of what we know about the possible zoonotic origins of the epidemic is in spite of China, not because of them. For example:\n\n* China killed all the animals at the market after the pandemic started, without telling anybody which ones they were. We know more about them because [a Chinese researcher](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-17/where-did-covid-come-from-report-on-infected-wuhan-wild-animals-sheds-new-light?embedded-checkout=true) had been documenting them for an unrelated project about tick-borne diseases. He sent his work to Western journals, and after a mysterious delay they eventually published them.\n \n* China denied that there were raccoon-dogs the market. In addition to the researcher’s data, we know they were lying because we had virologist Eddie Holmes’ travel photos of them.\n \n* We have WIV’s catalog of viruses because they tried to publish it in a Western journal just before the pandemic, the journal rejected it, and then years later they realized what they had.\n \n\nMy impression is that China (realistically Wuhan City Government, I don’t think Xi would have been involved at this early stage) made a vague attempt to cover up the wet market early on - but that it wasn’t their Department Of Covering-Up’s finest work. For example, when the WHO asked for files on early cases, China gave them what they wanted, and then Western scientists were able to plot their addresses and find that they centered on the wet market.\n\nIs it possible that China was trying to cover up a lab leak, and, in order to fool outsiders, _pretended_ to be covering up the wet market, while actually feeding international observers datasets massaged to make the wet market look more likely? Anything is possible. But as a sign of the Chinese government’s level of competence, remember that they didn’t put a travel ban on Wuhan until January 23, ie _after_ many Wuhanites had left to visit family for the Lunar New Year holiday. So they would have to be executing their brilliant fake-cover-up-to-detract-from-the-real-coverup scheme while also being too stupid to prevent Wuhanites from taking the train to Beijing.\n\nTwo more short points:\n\n_First_, when the debate came to the question of China’s cover-up competence, Peter presented this photo:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff51bae23-5302-4d15-9582-5aac3a85fb6b_720x480.webp)\n\nThis is the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus research group, out for a team dinner at a local restaurant on January 15th 2020 (ie a month after the pandemic started). This isn’t the most rational probabilistic evidence in the world. But we’ve already seen people take the rational probabilistic evidence twenty different directions. So let’s ask the same question Peter did - do these look like people who secretly know they just started the worst pandemic in modern history?\n\nIf they secretly knew they’d just started the worst pandemic in modern history, wouldn’t they at least be wearing masks?\n\nI think China, WIV, etc, were as clueless as the rest of us, at least at the beginning of the pandemic when a lot of this origins evidence was being collected. They tried to shove the raccoon-dogs under the bed, to prevent anyone from accusing them of bungling their SARS commitments. But they weren’t really up to anything else.\n\nA more thorough argument would go over specific pieces of evidence, examine when they were collected (ie whether it was before or after China started caring enough about COVID to get their competent people involved), and how China could have rigged each.\n\n_Second_, Peter (privately) discussed a Chinese conspiracy theory of his own with me by email.\n\n[Here’s an article from a random Chinese blog](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ldOjZEhri5JmMCLHo6NW6g) (you’ll have to Google Translate it). It describes China’s preferred theory of COVID origins: it was started by imported lobster from Maine (really!) The lobster arrived in the wet market, the wet market got sick, and diabolical Americans trying to hide their own complicity blamed it on raccoon-dogs and lab leaks and what-have-you.\n\nThe article includes this graphic:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6d870903-e4ba-4080-b543-6d1b6dcb5a70_1080x516.webp)\n\nIt’s a map of which vendors at the wet market got COVID and where their stalls are. In many ways, it matches the maps that China gave to Western scientists. In other ways, it’s better - it includes information that Western scientists only inferred months after this article came out. But also, unlike the maps provided to Western scientists, it says the raccoon-dog vendors got COVID - something China has previously denied, and which would significantly raise the odds of a natural origin.\n\nIs this China’s internal record of what _really_ happened at the wet market? Did they fail some kind of critical communication about how classified it should be, so that a guy in their propaganda department accidentally released it publicly in a stupid article about lobsters? That would be so embarrassingly weird that Peter didn’t even try bringing it up in the debate. But in a response to a question about coverups, sure, let’s get conspiratorial.\n\n### 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked?\n\nWorobey and Pekar are the two most prolific pro-zoonosis scientists, and many of the points in Peter’s argument were based on them. Several people criticized my writeup for not mentioning that these were “debunked”, for example:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffa11b0b0-b9d5-45b9-93e5-ec97b7fc69b0_597x207.png)\n\nWorobey and Pekar have about a million papers, each of which makes many different points, so I don’t know for sure what these are referring to. But a few other people make more specific claims, and I’ll respond to them here:\n\n* Pekar’s paper on the two lineages originally estimated 99-1 odds of double spillover. Someone found a coding error that reduced it to 6-1 odds, Pekar admitted the error, and the paper has been updated. Other people have made other criticisms which I haven’t investigated in depth and am agnostic on. I don’t think my argument depends too much on the details of this paper. The argument for B earlier than A is that it infected twice as many people and has more genetic diversity. It’s possible these things happened by chance and A preceded (and mutated to) B. In that case, I still think the most likely scenario is that A was released at the wet market, infected a customer or two, mutated to B, and infected a vendor. A then spread among the neighborhoods near the market, and B spread among market vendors.\n \n* Worobey’s paper includes an erratum saying he messed up the names of some of the supplementary data files. One of the data files also had the wrong number of samples somehow, but giving it the right number of samples didn’t affect results in any way. Lots of lab leak proponents have been tweeting that “Worobey finally admitted his paper was wrong!”, but I think they just mean this erratum.\n \n* Several people accused Pekar of ignoring intermediate lineages. Peter addressed this by finding these were mostly sequencing errors. There’s a very new paper about potential intermediate lineages which might change this debate; my provisional assessment is that it’s boring but I’m waiting to see if other people have more thoughts on it.\n \n* Several people linked to Biorealism’s 16 arguments as examples of Pekar/Worobey being “debunked”. I tried to address these above.\n \n* Several people claimed there was ascertainment bias in their papers. I try to address this below.\n \n* If there are other claims about Pekar and Worobey being “debunked”, I don’t know them.\n \n\nIn general, I find [claims about “debunking”](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refuted/) annoying even when they’re made by Important People who theoretically have the authority to make pronouncements. I think they’re even more annoying when they’re made by self-styled rebels who admittedly disagree with the scientific consensus.\n\n### 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases?\n\n**observeralt [writes](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bpu8gf/practicallyabook_review_rootclaim_100000_lab_leak/kxbwhou/):**\n\n> The judges put huge weight on early cases being near the market. Michael Weissman's recent paper showing ascertainment bias in early case data is also significant as Miller relies on the sampling being random. Chinese CDC head at the time George Gao acknowledged this to the BBC last too. They focused too much on and around the market and missed cases on the other side of the city.\n\nHere’s the Worobey map everyone is debating:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1356d8dc-92cd-4f35-abd3-9b5706c1ed32_720x656.webp)\n\nBefore going further, I recommend reading page 8 of the supplementary text of Worobey’s paper, titled “Robustness Of Statistical Test Results To Ascertainment Bias”, or pages 14-17, “Additional Data Related To Case Ascertainment Biases”, which explain all the reasons he thinks this isn’t true. I promise you aren’t the first person to think that maybe Worobey could be contaminated by ascertainment bias.\n\nIf that still doesn’t help, Worobey talks more about his strategy for avoiding ascertainment bias [here](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454). Most important, he counted only cases from December; the market connection was discovered December 30 and added to diagnostic criteria January 3. This doesn’t mean bias is impossible - some of these points are people who caught COVID on December 31, but only got diagnosed January 4 after the new diagnostic criteria were added. But most cases are pre-criteria. And Worobey looked at various subsets of pre-criteria cases and found they were all at least as market-focused as the overall set. For example, he looked at the earliest COVID records in one Wuhan hospital system:\n\n> 10 of these hospitals’ 19 earliest COVID-19 cases were linked to Huanan Market (∼53%), comparable both to Jinyintan’s 66% (of 41 cases) (_[4](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454#core-R4)_) and to the WHO-China report’s 33% of 168 retrospectively identified cases within Wuhan across December 2019 (_[1](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454#core-R1)_). Regarding cases at the Wuhan Central Hospital and HPHICWM, patients with a history of exposure at Huanan Market could not have been “cherry picked” before anyone had identified the market as an epidemiologic risk factor. Hence, there was a genuine preponderance of early COVID-19 cases associated with Huanan Market.\n\nLikewise, [a study](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\\(20\\)30183-5/fulltext) _[conducted](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\\(20\\)30183-5/fulltext)_ [January 2](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\\(20\\)30183-5/fulltext) (so not impacted at all by the January 3 criteria) found that 27 of 41 known patients had market links.\n\nLikewise, the first five cases were all detected in the market, and it doesn’t even make sense to talk about ascertainment bias for these.\n\nWhat is [the Weissman paper](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2401/2401.08680.pdf) that observeralt is talking about? It argues: if the pandemic started at the market, each seemingly non-market-linked case must ultimately derive from a market-linked case. Therefore, we should expect non-market-linked cases to require more steps than market-linked cases. Therefore, they should be further away. But if we look at the map above, we see that not-market-linked cases are closer to the market than market-linked cases. So something must be wrong, and that something might be ascertainment bias.\n\n(at least this is my interpretation of Weissman’s argument, which is more mathematical; read the paper to make sure I’m getting it right).\n\nThis is a weirdly spherical-cow view of an epidemic, worthy of a physicist. It’s easy to think of reasons the linked-cases-should-be-closer rule might not hold. For example, suppose that on their lunch break, market vendors go have lunch at restaurants surrounding the market. They infect people in these restaurants, who then infect their friends and family. But these people never went to the market themselves. Now there are a bunch of non-market-linked cases immediately surrounding the wet market.\n\nBut also - of all markets in Wuhan, Huanan sold the most weird wildlife. Suppose someone in the boonies gets a craving for raccoon-dog one day, their local convenience store doesn’t have it, so they hop on a bus and go downtown to the city’s main wet market. Then they get infected with COVID. Now there’s a wet-market-linked case in the boonies.\n\nIn other words, we should expect two modes of spread: general geographic diffusion from the epicenter, and people from far away who made specific trips.\n\nIf this still doesn’t seem obvious to you, consider - usually when COVID first arrived in America or Brazil or wherever, they were able to trace it back to a specific person from Wuhan who visited the country. If I was the first person in America to get COVID, I could usually say “Oh, it must have been my business meeting with Mr. Chin from Wuhan”. At the same time, if someone from the next town over from Wuhan got COVID, they probably couldn’t trace it back to a specific Wuhanite - everyone from Wuhan is coming and going so often that my town is just full of COVID in general.\n\nSo I don’t think Weissman’s paper proves anything, and I think the general pattern of blue and orange dots suggests ascertainment bias _wasn’t_ playing a role.\n\nSo why does George Gao say that there was ascertainment bias? I looked for the direct source of the Gao quote and couldn’t find it; if someone else is able to, please let me know, since I’d be interested in exactly what he thinks about this.\n\n### 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats\n\n**Gwern wrote:**\n\n> Yes, I don't understand this (paraphrased) claim by Peter:\n> \n> _\\> He also told the Mail that his cat got the coronavirus too, which is impossible._\n> \n> 'Impossible', thus implying the man was lying? I was under the impression that, quite aside from cats having tons of coronaviruses in general (FCoV being a particularly serious threat to young cats, which also seems to be a remarkable case study of the harms of the FDA), that it was not just not 'impossible' for domestic pet cats to get the coronavirus too, it was routine for them to get COVID-19, and even other cat species in \\*zoos\\* have tested positive and this was true very early in the COVID-19 pandemic and quite well publicized and well known (eg April 2020 [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/tiger-coronavirus-covid19-positive-test-bronx-zoo](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/tiger-coronavirus-covid19-positive-test-bronx-zoo) ). This was a topic of interest to me at the time because I like cats and have a cat and was wondering what the implications of me being inevitably infected might be for my cat, and so I remember this quite well despite my general attempt to remain ignorant of as many COVID-19 matters as possible... And double-checking now to see if all of these reports were somehow false positives or faked, I continue to see everyone like the CDC stating that it is still totally possible and routine for cats in close contact with infected humans (you know, like a \\*pet\\* cat) to be infected with COVID-19: [https://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/covid-19/pets.html](https://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/covid-19/pets.html)\n> \n> Given that Peter has supposedly spent years autistically researching every last detail and this detail in particular in order to discredit that British dude, I'm experiencing sudden Gell-Man Amnesia here about the rest of his claims, as well as the supposed experts evaluating Peter's claims if they didn't flag that (I have not checked).\n\nThis is in the context of Connor Reed, a British man who claimed to have gotten COVID on November 25 - which, if true, would be surprisingly (though not impossibly) early according to the zoonosis narrative. Peter argued his story didn’t hold up, and one of his points centered around his claim that his cat might have caught COVID from him and died.\n\nUnfortunately, I mis-quoted Peter. I said Peter argued it was impossible for his cat to get COVID-19 (false). His actual statement was that it’s extremely rare for a cat to _die_ of COVID-19.\n\nPeter, Gwern, and I then proceeded to get very confused about the exact claims and timeline, which I think is because Connor said totally different things in different interviews:\n\n* In [an interview with Wales Online](https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/welshman-thought-first-brit-catch-17684127) on 2/4/2020, he said that \"my kitten caught the feline coronavirus and developed pneumonia and died, but I don't think I caught it from her. I think that was just coincidence.”\n \n* In [an interview with the Daily Mail](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8075633/First-British-victim-25-describes-coronavirus.html) on 3/4/20, he said that his kitten died, after a two-day illness, on the ninth day of him (Connor) having COVID. He said “I don’t know whether it had what I’ve got, or whether cats can even get human flu” (speaking as if it was him in the past, who thought he had flu because he hadn’t heard of COVID yet).\n \n\nThis is a weird inconsistency! In the Wales interview, the cat got it before him (at least that’s how I interpret “I don’t think I caught it from her”). In the Mail interview, he got it nine days before the cat.\n\nIn The Wales interview, it’s “the feline coronavirus”. In the Mail interview, he doesn’t know what the cat got and speculates that it might have been COVID. But also, if it was “the feline coronavirus”, how would he know? Wouldn’t you need a vet to diagnose that? But in the Mail interview, he said he didn’t leave the house for a week around the time his cat was sick. So how did he go to the vet?\n\nIt gets worse. In the Mail interview, he gave a day-by-day account of his sickness. On Day 12, he goes to Zhongnan University Hospital. He says:\n\n> As soon as I get there, a doctor diagnoses pneumonia. So that’s why my lungs are making that noise. I am sent for a battery of tests lasting six hours.\n\nAnd then says that he went home either that day, or the next.\n\n> Day 13: I arrived back at my apartment late yesterday evening. The doctor prescribed antibiotics for the pneumonia but I’m reluctant to take them\n\nBut in an interview with FOX News said:\n\n> He said he went to the hospital after he struggled to breathe and experienced a bad cough, both of which are signs of the pneumonia-like illness.\n> \n> \"I was stunned when the doctors told me I was suffering from the virus. I thought I was going to die but I managed to beat it,” he told the outlet, adding he was hospitalized at Zhongnan University Hospital for two weeks following his diagnosis.\n\nIn his earlier story, he was at the hospital for less than a day. Now it’s two weeks.\n\nBut also, the doctors “told \\[him he\\] was suffering from the virus”, but this is impossible - the virus hadn’t been discovered yet. The whole point of Saar bringing him up is that he’s a supposed anomalous case before the official pandemic. So how did the doctors tell him this?\n\nIn the Mail interview, he tells a different story of how he learned he’d had COVID:\n\n> Day 52: A notification from the hospital informs me that I was infected with the Wuhan coronavirus. I suppose I should be pleased that I can’t catch it again — I’m immune now.\n\nDay 52 would be January 11th. So I think he’s saying that, a month after he recovered, the hospital “informs” him it was coronavirus. Charitably, maybe they kept his samples (really?), then re-tested them after COVID was discovered, found he had it, and told him. But, at a time when the eyes of the world medical establishment were fixated on Wuhan and its new pandemic, didn’t they think to tell anybody that they’d confirmed a case two weeks before any other known cases? Just called Connor and said “Hey, you’re the first ever COVID patient, congrats” and did absolutely nothing else? And then he didn’t show up in any of those WHO searches for early cases?\n\nThere’s one more weird inconsistency. Connor said in his interview that he thinks he might have gotten COVID at “the fish market”:\n\n> Maybe I caught the coronavirus at the fish market. It’s a great place to get food on a budget, a part of the real Wuhan that ordinary Chinese people use every day, and I regularly do my shopping there. Since the outbreak became international news, I’ve seen hysterical reports (especially in the U.S. media) that exotic meats such as bat and even koala are on sale at the fish market. I’ve never seen that.\n\nThis sounds to me like a reference to the Huanan Seafood Central Market, ie the wet market with the raccoon-dogs where the first confirmed cases were found. He says “the fish market” like he expects us to know which one he means, and adds that “since the outbreak became international news”, he’d seen “hysterical reports” in US media about it. US media was covering the Huanan Market because that’s where the pandemic was first found; it didn’t cover any other fish market in Wuhan.\n\nDuring the debate, Saar objected that Connor lived on the opposite side of Wuhan from the wet market; it would have taken him about an hour to get there. It would be weird to “regularly” do your shopping somewhere an hour away. Saar speculated that Connor meant somewhere closer to his home.\n\nI can’t deny that it’s weird to do your regular shopping at a market an hour away, but it really sounds like he’s referring to the wet market where all the cases started here.\n\nBut also, isn’t it weird that the first ever coronavirus case is a white person? And that he’s 25 years old, yet was hospitalized with COVID (about 1% of people in their 20s with COVID require hospitalization)?\n\nI think the best explanation for all of this is that Connor was making this all up. He told whatever story sounded cool at the time, and all of his stories ended up contradicting each other or making no sense. This would also explain why he said he had COVID at a time when, by the standard narrative, it either didn’t exist yet or was confined to a single-digit number of people.\n\n### 1.11: Rootclaim Response\n\nSaar and Rootclaim wrote a response to my earlier post. You can read it at [COVID origins debate: response to Scott Alexander.](https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-scott-alexander/) I’ll post the introduction and first summary, you can go to the link for the rest of the case, and I’ll respond to parts I disagree with below.\n\n> We were initially excited to have Scott cover the story, hoping that someone with an affinity to probabilities would like to dig into our analysis and fully understand it. Sadly, Scott seemingly hadn’t enough time to do so and our exchange focused on fixing factual mistakes in earlier drafts of his post and explaining why rules-of-thumb in probabilistic thinking that he proposed do not work in practice. We did not get to discuss the details of our analysis, resulting in a post that is essentially a repeat of the judges’ reports with extra steps.\n> \n> His post has two main messages:\n> \n> 1. **It’s hard to get probabilistic inference right** – we fully agree with this and ironically his post is a great example, containing many probabilistic inference mistakes, some of which are listed below. While we agree it’s hard, our experience taught us that it is far from impossible.\n> \n> 2. **Zoonosis is a more likely hypothesis due to being better supported by the evidence** – This is completely untrue, but to fully understand it one has to commit to learning how to do probabilistic inference correctly, which Scott could not free enough time to do.\n> \n> \n> Instead of explaining the whole methodology and how it applies to Covid origins, which will take too long, we will focus on the main mistake in all the analyses in Scott’s post – believing that the early cluster of cases in the Huanan Seafood Market (HSM) is strong evidence for zoonosis. Scott prepared a very useful table comparing the probabilities various people gave to the evidence about Covid origins (discussed later in more details). It nicely shows how the zoonosis conclusion stands on this single leg, and once it is removed, lab-leak becomes the winning hypothesis (Scott specifically will flip to 94% lab-leak).\n> \n> Having explained this many times in many ways, we realize by now that it is not easy to understand, but we promise that those who make the effort will be rewarded with a glimpse of how much better we can all be at reasoning about the world, and will be able to reach high confidence that Covid originated from a lab.\n> \n> Given this point’s importance, we will explain why HSM is negligible as evidence, using three levels of detail: a simple version, a summarized version and a detailed version.\n> \n> Simple Version\n> --------------\n> \n> 1. The zoonosis hypothesis fully depends on the claim that it is an extreme coincidence that the early Covid patients were in HSM – a market with wildlife – unless a zoonotic spillover occurred there. \n> \n> 2. The rest of the evidence strongly supports the lab-leak hypothesis, so if this claim is mistaken, lab-leak becomes the most likely hypothesis.\n> \n> 3. There are multiple cases where a country has had zero Covid cases for a while, and then a cluster of cases appears in a seafood market. In all these outbreaks, there is no contention that the source is not zoonotic, as it is genetically descended from the Wuhan outbreak.\n> \n> 4. Since zero Covid periods are fairly rare, it is impossible to have so many market outbreaks unless there is something special about these locations. We discuss below what that may be, but whatever it is, it likely also applies to HSM, which is the largest seafood market in central China.\n> \n> 5. This collapses the ‘extreme coincidence’ claim, which as explained above, turns lab-leak into the leading hypothesis.\n> \n\nMy strongest disagreement is with his Point 3 - the inference from other seafood-market-based COVID spread events. Saar writes:\n\n> A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to. Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread. Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%. \n\nMost of these outbreaks have been traced back to either a migrant worker (eg a fisherman from a country with COVID sells fish at the market of a country with Zero COVID) or a cold chain product. For example, here’s [Dai et al](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/) on the Xinfadi outbreak, the most important event of this type:\n\n> According to a joint publication by the Beijing CDC and 13 research institutions, the outbreak at Xinfadi Market was likely to be initiated by fomite transmission from contaminated foods imported via cold-chain logistics ([Pang et al., 2020](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/#bb0305); [Beijing Daily, 2020b](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/#bb0020)). Based on the epidemiological investigations at the Xinfadi Market, the researchers preliminarily concluded that booth #S14 in the aquaculture product selling area on the basement floor of the primary trading hall was the source of the initial transmission. Specifically, five customers were tested positive for IgG/IgM antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in serological screenings, all of whom visited booth #S14 on May 30 and 31, 2020. On May 30, 2020, the owner of booth #S14 procured imported and fully packaged salmon from a company's cold storage warehouse, then cut and processed the salmon for sale at the Xinfadi Market. Laboratory tests showed that sample swabs from five salmon fish from this supplier were tested positive by examining all salmon in the original sealed packages (_n_ = 3582) in the cold storage facility. Viral genome sequencing showed that the viral strain isolated from one of the positive salmon swabs was homologous to that isolated from the infected persons and environmental samples at the Xinfadi Market ([Beijing Daily, 2020b](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/#bb0020)). The joint study reported that an ancestral strain isolated from the Xinfadi Market in Beijing was markedly different from the strains identified in two preceding outbreaks in China and the sequences obtained in March 2020 in Beijing. Phylogenetic analysis assigned the ancestral Xinfadi strain to clade B.1.1. Given the fact that the ancestral sequences were mainly identified in Europe, the strain was more likely to be imported to Beijing rather than derived from strains previously circulating in China ([Pang et al., 2020](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9814272/#bb0305)).\n\nI know China has a bias towards believing frozen food COVID explanations, but this all sounds pretty convincing to me.\n\nWhy is it more often markets than other places with cold chain products? Partly it’s the migrant workers - a lot of seafood markets are right next to seaports, and the contact tracing eventually traces back to a fisherman who came in through the seaport - I don’t think this is any more mysterious than epidemics often starting via airport or any other transportation hub. But even just keeping the focus on cold chain products, - there have also been outbreaks in [seafood distribution warehouses](https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/covid-outbreak-at-sydney-seafood-distributor-great-ocean-foods-sparks-urgent-isolation-orders-c-3229873), [on docks](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202010/19/WS5f8d597da31024ad0ba7f9fa.html), and in [a seafood processing work area](https://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/doi/10.46234/ccdcw2021.114). Markets have many more people than any of those locations, and maybe (total speculation) cutting on cutting boards could aerosolize bits of fish.\n\nThe strongest evidence that the Wuhan / Huanan Seafood Market epidemic wasn’t caused by migrant workers or imported seafood products is that there was no previous COVID-infected source of workers or seafood. If there had been, we would have noticed when the outbreak there spread (see Section 1.4 on Brazil).\n\nResponses to a few of Saar’s other points below:\n\n> How many locations other than markets provide an interface with wildlife? Were markets actually identified in advance to be high-risk spillover locations or only in retrospect?\n\nI think scientists had called wet markets as an especially dangerous potential transmission location in advance. See for example [Infectious Diseases Emerging From Chinese Wet Markets](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7141584/), published in 2006, which says:\n\n_» “In Chinese wet-markets, unique epicenters for transmission of potential viral pathogens, new genes may be acquired or existing genes modified through various mechanisms such as genetic reassortment, recombination and mutation. The wet-markets, at closer proximity to humans, with high viral burden or strains of higher transmission efficiency, facilitate transmission of the viruses to humans.”_\n\nIn 2004, [a paper on an emerging bird flu](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC324441/) expressed hope that it would not spread too widely, but concluded that:\n\n» _“Even in the event of yet another lucky escape, more measures must be taken to limit the amplification of viruses with pandemic potential in the wet markets around the world.”_\n\nIn 2007, Reuters published an investigation: [Chinese Markets May Be Breeding Ground For Deadly Viruses](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket/china-market-may-be-breeding-ground-for-deadly-viruses-idUSHKG27143120071210/), which said things like:\n\n_» “We face similar threats from other viruses and such epidemics can happen because we continue to have very crowded markets in China,\" said Lo Wing-lok, an infectious disease expert in Hong Kong. \"Even though official measures are in place, they are not faithfully followed. We are not talking about just civet cats, but all animals,\" he added.”_\n\n[Wet Markets, A Continuing Source Of SARS And Influenza](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7112390/), published 2004, is admittedly focusing on the next SARS1 outbreak instead of on SARS2, but gets bonus points for mentioning _both_ wet markets _and_ labs as likely causes of the next pandemic:\n\n_» “Will SARS reappear? This question confronts public-health officials worldwide, particularly infectious disease personnel in those regions of the world most affected by the disease and the economic burden of SARS, including China, Taiwan, and Canada. Will the virus re-emerge from wet markets or from laboratories working with SARS CoV, or are asymptomatic infections ongoing in human beings? Similar questions can be asked about a pandemic of influenza that is probably imminent. Knowledge of the ecology of influenza in wet markets can be used as an early-warning system to detect the reappearance of SARS or pandemic influenza.”_\n\nSaar mentions that there are several other possible sources like restaurants or farms. I think Peter demonstrated during the debate that pandemics are unlikely to start in rural areas, so farms aren’t that important. Restaurants mostly source their products from wet markets. During SARS1, some pandemics started in restaurants because they kept the civets in cages next to the diners (like how some Western restaurants keep lobsters). After SARS1, restaurants stopped doing that and became a less likely spillover location.\n\nSaar again:\n\n> Scott quotes Peter, who implies that under the lab-leak hypothesis, we would expect the confirmed early cases to be centered around the WIV. However, cases are not expected to center on the lab. The lab is not spraying viruses into the air or hosting thousands of locals daily. If a worker gets infected, they spread the virus to their friends and family at completely different locations.\n\nIn most places with an outbreak of known origin, epidemics show some geographic clustering. This has been true ever since the very beginning of epidemiology, when John Snow successfully traced a cholera outbreak back to its origin at a contaminated water pump by taking the center of the map of cholera cases.\n\nThis isn’t a 100% law of nature; an infected lab worker might get lucky and not pass it to any of his lab co-workers. Still, we might expect him to infect his family, the stores he went to, or the restaurants he went to.\n\nIf he lived near his workplace, these might also be near the lab. If he didn’t - let’s say he lived on the other side of town and had a long commute - he would start a cluster near his house, or his favorite store, or his favorite restaurant. Then the people there would infect their families/co-workers/stores/restaurants. The cluster would start somewhere! Sure, some people would infect nobody close to their work or home, and instead just infect one person a hundred miles away who they breathed on during a trip - but this is the exception, not the rule.\n\nSo you wouldn’_t_ expect a totally random distribution of cases all around Wuhan. There would be one center, or maybe several centers.\n\nBut none of the claims that COVID was quietly spreading for months before the wet market have pointed to some alternate center of cases. If COVID was spreading for months before the lab, it somehow spread in a completely diffuse geographical pattern, with people exactly as likely to infect people far away from them as close to them - until it reached the wet market in December, and then spread in the normal center-radiating-outward way that every other infection spreads.\n\n> All the evidence trying to support a spillover at the market is based on complex models with many single points of failure, built from unreliable and biased data. Therefore, it is difficult to give this evidence significant weight as there is always a possibility of errors in the data or its interpretation. More on this in the UFO comment below.\n\nDisagree. “First known case was at a wet market” is as simple as it comes. Certainly it’s less complex than “the virus has a 12 nucleotide insertion at the furin cleavage site, and even though those sometimes happen by natural recombination probably this one didn’t, and even though it looks out of frame maybe there was some weird thing going on with serine that made it in frame this one time only”, which is Saar’s star piece of evidence.\n\nI understand Saar thinks he can come up with lots of objections to “seen near wet market is suspicious for wet market origin”, then claim that getting over those objections requires “complexity”. But if Peter had no dignity, he could also come up with lots of objections to “seen in same city as Wuhan Institute of Virology is suspicious\". He could say that maybe the civet farms of Hubei province were uniquely blah blah blah, and then Saar would have to prove that the civet farms weren’t uniquely blah blah blah, and then he could say “Oh, sure seems like you have a complex model with lots of unique points of failure, it all depends on fifty facts about the regulation of civet farms.”\n\n> To illustrate what a market looks like in a real zoonotic pandemic, consider [this study from SARS1](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92471/). The researchers went to a random market and sampled the wildlife sold there. 4 of 6 civets sampled were positive, and 3 of them were phylogenetically distinct (i.e. infected in completely different places). \n\nA scientist I talked to says the 3 phylogenetically distinct lineages were most likely sampling errors. Still, this seems irrelevant to me since, again, no raccoon-dogs were tested.\n\n> Scott explains that Covid’s closest known relative, BANAL-52, is rare and so it’s highly unlikely the WIV would’ve had it available as the starting point to engineer Covid . . . This is a basic mistake. SARS2 is not based on BANAL-52 but a relative of it. There is nothing unlikely here.\n\nNo BANAL-52 relative close enough to create COVID from has ever been discovered.\n\nBy mentioning BANAL-52, I was trying to be maximally charitable to the lab leak side. In order to create COVID, they would need a virus very close to COVID. But in years and years of searching, nobody has ever discovered a virus like this. Therefore it must be rare. As a way of bounding how rare, let’s see how rare the closest virus ever discovered is. That’s BANAL-52. It is very rare. Therefore, the COVID ancestor must be rarer than that.\n\nI don’t know how strong this argument is, because maybe there are millions of rare viruses capable of becoming pandemics, such that getting any one of them is very easy, even though each one individually is rare. The version of this I find convincing is that it should be a probabilistic cost to say that WIV did gain-of-function on a seemingly undiscovered and so-far-very-hard-to-discover rare virus instead of on any of the usual SARS-like viruses that people do their gain-of-function research on.\n\n> Overall, all attempts to portray \\[Connor Reed\\] as an unstable, delusional person were unsuccessful. He is an ordinary person who very accurately described Covid-19 symptoms in real-time and claims to have received a positive test result. The timing and location matches the lab leak hypothesis and is impossible for the HSM claim. Therefore, they must discredit him.\n> \n> It is worth noting here the biased evidentiary standards used by zoonotic proponents. Reed’s testimony about his sickness, given on camera to multiple outlets, is deceitful and should be ignored. Yet, an anonymous voice testimony in one Chinese publication is definitely identified as Mr. Chen (another possible pre-HSM case) and should be considered reliable. \n\nSee above for why I don’t trust Connor Reed.\n\nI’m not sure why Saar attributes Mr. Chen to “an anonymous voice testimony in one Chinese publication”. When I looked for Chen information, I got [this thread](https://twitter.com/franciscodeasis/status/1397227238764990469), where it’s attributed to two Chinese hospital doctors, cross-checked with the Chinese COVID data repository, and double-cross-checked with the supplementary table in a peer-reviewed paper published by a team of Wuhan doctors.\n\n> To understand how ridiculous the claim is that the HKU1 insertion looks just as engineered as SARS2’s, here are their alignments. Hopefully that should be enough.\n> \n> COVID:\n> \n> [\n> \n> \n> \n> \n> \n> ](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc5aabd26-d70b-4f35-97cb-96d351bb52fd_552x920.png)\n> \n> HKU1:\n> \n> [\n> \n> \n> \n> \n> \n> ](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2411167c-1405-4fde-914b-6388ee498523_935x851.jpeg)\n\nI’m not a virologist, but I question how this comparison works.\n\nSurely HKU1 got its insert on some specific day. If you take the virus the day before, and then the other virus the day after, there will be no differences except the insert, and it will look just like COVID (ie an insert without many other mutations).\n\nThe fact that the COVID comparison has few mutations, and the HKU1 insert has many mutations, just shows that whatever older virus we chose to compare HKU1 to is more distant from HKU1 than BANAL-52 (or whatever) is from COVID.\n\nOr am I missing something here?\n\n> \\[The evidence that China tried to cover up zoonosis from the start\\] is untrue. They clearly said from the start this is a zoonotic spillover at HSM, and at least part of the government went to immense efforts to identify the animal, close farms, etc. (and of course couldn’t find any infected animal).\n> \n> Only in late 2020 did they start suspecting an import from cold-chain products after having multiple outbreaks that seem related to cold-chain products. \n\nFrom [a Vox article](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/3/18/23644776/covid-origin-raccoon-dog-beijing-wuhan-coronavirus-zoonotic-lab-leak-sars) from March 2023:\n\n> From the start, the Chinese government interfered with efforts by both Chinese and international experts to study the pandemic, including its origins. Reporting by the AP found that even as WHO officials were publicly praising China’s cooperation, behind the scenes they were complaining about lack of access and a refusal to share data.\n> \n> Within months of the beginning of the pandemic, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on academic research into the origins of the novel coronavirus … China’s intransigence wasn’t unusual — countries are rarely eager to confirm that they’re the source of a deadly disease — but it went beyond the norm. International investigators weren’t permitted to see the market until more than a year after the pandemic began and a WHO-affiliated team was allowed a highly choreographed and controlled visit.\n> \n> The resulting report that came out of the Wuhan visit, which dismissed the possibility of a lab origin, pointed the finger at some kind of zoonotic spillover while concluding that it was unlikely that the spread started at the market, which surprised many experts.\n> \n> It also found that it was “possible” that the virus had been introduced via contaminated frozen food products from abroad. While few experts took that possibility seriously, it fit a narrative the Chinese government had been pushing, against nearly all evidence, that the pandemic had in fact not originated in China.\n> \n> “China just doesn’t want to look bad,” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, told Science last August. “They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do.”\n> \n> \\[…\\] it seems clear that with more cooperation, scientists could have been looking at raccoon dogs a year or more ago.\n> \n> “The big issue right now is that this data exists and that it is not readily available to the international community,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, told reporters on Friday. “This is first and foremost absolutely critical, not to mention that it should have been made available years earlier, but that data needs to be made accessible to individuals who can access it, who can analyze it and who can discuss it with each other.”\n> \n> The irony is that by making it so difficult to properly investigate a zoonotic origin of Covid, the Chinese government has created a vacuum that has been filled by claims on all sides, including the much more damning accusation that the pandemic was the result of a lab error at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.\n\nFor what it’s worth, my timeline of Chinese denials and coverups looks like this:\n\n**December:** COVID doesn't exist, it's all lies \n**Early January:** Fine, it exists, but it’s just some wet market thing that can't spread from person to person \n**Late January:** Fine, it can spread from person to person, but we’ve got it under control now. \n**February:** Fine, it’s out of control, but you would not believe how great our response was. We're basically heroes. \n**March:** COVID was a US bioweapon, or possibly came from Italy. \n**April:** Chinese people are banned from researching the origins of COVID without government permission.\n\n2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak\n\n\n======================================\n\n* * *\n\n### 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?\n\n**randomstringofcharacters [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52651041):**\n\n> Isn't \\[the pandemic starting near the lab\\] a reverse correlation issue? The lab is situated there because it's an area where coronaviruses were found in the past.\n\nMany people had this question, but Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in 1956, didn’t originally focus on coronaviruses, and isn’t in a coronavirus hot spot. Most of WIV’s coronavirus samples come from Yunnan, about a thousand miles away. COVID’s closest relatives were found in Laos, almost two thousand miles away.\n\nDuring the debate, both Saar and Peter calculated the odds of a natural pandemic arising in Wuhan by dividing the population of Wuhan by the total urban population of East Asia (Saar) or South China (Peter). Saar got 1.5%, Peter got 3% (he later said this could be as high as 10% because it was a central hub in the wildlife trade).\n\nThis isn’t an Official Position and I don’t think anyone else shares it, but during the debate Peter pointed out a few times that there are plenty of disease-ridden bats in Hubei (the province Wuhan is in), and that it’s not impossible that a bat virus currently known only in Laos could be active in Hubei. Still, this is the minority viewpoint and most scientists just think it involved something about the wildlife trade.\n\n3: Other Points That Came Up\n\n\n==============================\n\n* * *\n\n### 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds\n\n**quiet\\_NaN [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52659235):**\n\n> Hot take: Peter clearly failed to convince anyone.\n> \n> The lab leak odds, in log10 (i.e. orders of magnitude are):\n> \n> Peter -20.7 \n> Saar 2.7 \n> Eric -3.1 \n> Will -2.5 \n> Scott -1.2 \n> Daniel -1.4\n> \n> One of these numbers is clearly an outlier. Scott mentions it and calls it \"trolling\", I would argue that it is debating in bad faith. 2e-21 is a ratio which is just silly. For one thing, the gain of function at WiV pathway is not the only pathway towards a lab leak. The WIV could also have released a naturally occurring coronavirus at the wet market. At 2e-21 odds, we would probably have to consider the possibility that the WIV built a time machine and went back in time to infect the wet market.\n\nI might have screwed up here - or at least I should have emphasized the “trolling” part. Peter complained about my presentation of his extreme-odds slide, saying:\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1773797640607850745)\n\nThis is basically accurate. During the debate, Saar gave lots of different numbers. I don’t want to say exactly what the different numbers meant, because in earlier drafts of my post, Saar said I misunderstood them. My impression were that some of his numbers were conservative, others were central, others were extreme, others were adjusted-for-out-of-model-error, others were not-adjusted, etc.\n\nIn an early draft of the post, I gave higher numbers for Saar. Saar asked me to replace them with the numbers I ended up using. I decided to agree, because I wanted to represent Saar fairly with the numbers he most centrally believed, but also because these were closest to the numbers on his Rootclaim site so it wasn’t like he was making them up just to fool me.\n\nPeter didn’t argue quite as hard, and also he didn’t have anything like the Rootclaim site, so I just took his first set of numbers.\n\nTrying to piece things together, I think a reasonable summary would be:\n\n* During the debate, Saar mentioned 700-million-to-one odds in favor of lab leak, not because he thought this was plausible, but just as a discussion of where the situation would end up if you didn’t adjust for human fallibility.\n \n* On his site, he properly adjusted for human fallibility.\n \n* Peter, very reasonably responding to the numbers Saar gave during the debate and not the numbers he had elsewhere, trolled him by giving a set of numbers that came out to 10^25-to-one against lab leak.\n \n* I put the numbers everyone had actually given into my spreadsheet.\n \n* Saar asked me to replace with his adjusted numbers, which he conveniently had in a canonical location. Peter had never bothered coming up with adjusted numbers (because he wasn’t as interested in probabilistic analysis) and didn’t ask me to change anything, so I didn’t.\n \n* The post made it look like Saar’s numbers were reasonable and Peter’s were crazy.\n \n* In the part about why Saar thought the debate was unfair, I repeated his argument against Peter’s crazy numbers. And because I thought it was an interesting and true rationality point, I went over it myself and endorsed it separately from “it’s a thing Saar said”.\n \n* This was unfair to Peter.\n \n\nOver the past few weeks, I exchanged ~100 emails with Peter and Saar, and made dozens of tiny changes like this in response to one side or the other thinking my portrayal of them was unfair. Eventually I decided I would go crazy if I spent one more second talking to either of them and hit PUBLISH. This was unfair to them, and let a couple of smaller or harder-to-untangle misrepresentations get through, which I regret. But not as much as I would have regretted continuing the discussion.\n\n### 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis\n\n**Tobias Schneider [wrote](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52650103):**\n\n> I have no horse in this particular race, but I do have a lot of expertise in some of the areas rootclaims \"investigates\" (especially the stuff related to Syria and chemical weapons) - where their analysis is so shoddy and laughable it's indistinguishable from Youtube conspiracies - and the biggest surprise to me here is that anybody really bothers with rootclaim in the first place? The more you learn...\n\nTobias is talking about [a Rootclaim analysis](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013) on who perpetrated a deadly chemical weapons attack in Syria (Rootclaim says it was rebels; Tobias presumably thinks it was the government).\n\nThis analysis is at the top of Rootclaim’s [Track Record page](https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-track-record), which says:\n\n> Rootclaim’s conclusion contradicted all Western intelligence agencies, but years later was shown to be correct. This demonstrates that superior inference methodologies are far more important than privileged access to information.\n\nApparently Tobias disagrees that it “later was shown to be correct”. Of note, a Tobias Scheider is listed as editor of [Syria in Context](https://twitter.com/SyriaContext), a set of “weekly briefs covering key humanitarian, stabilization, and security policy developments in and around Syria”. Wikipedia and all Western governments agree with Tobias and not Saar.\n\nAfter Saar repeated that his analysis turned out to be “spot on”, Joshua E [objected](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52686903):\n\n> If you are going to claim your analysis is spot on, please link to a credible independent source. Otherwise this comes across as we believe this unlikely thing and used our analysis you find shoddy to conclude we were right so you should not consider our analysis shoddy.\n\nAnd [Saar again](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52700709):\n\n> Follow the link \\[[to a discussion on Rootclaim](https://blog.rootclaim.com/new-evidence-2013-sarin-attack-in-ghouta-syria/)\\]. It describes external forensic work which you can verify yourself . . . \\[Media\\] outlets have no incentive to publish such findings. Sadly these are the kinds of things you need to verify yourself.\n\nThe Rootclaim analysis says:\n\n> The new findings are a result of what we believe to be the most impressive independent open-source investigation in history. It was initiated nearly a year ago by several volunteers who reviewed all the evidence from the attack and managed to uncover incontrovertible evidence implicating an opposition faction, confirming Rootclaim’s conclusion.\n\nWhich links to this report, somehow affiliated with Rootclaim and written by \"Michael Kobs, Chris Kabusk, Adam larson, and many helpful citizen investigators.\" It looks like Saar and some other people who didn’t believe the standard theory worked together to do some video forensics, which they published in a report. But governments, intelligence agencies, the media, Wikipedia, etc, haven’t noticed the report or updated on it.\n\nSo when Saar says that his method has a great track record, what he means is that when he looks into it further, he becomes even more convinced of his previous position. He doesn’t mean that any kind of external consensus has shifted towards his results over time.\n\nDuring my email discussions with Saar, he kept insisting his position was obviously right. He would send me emails like (not exact quotes) ‘Now that I’ve demolished all the evidence for zoonotic transmission, you have to agree with me, right?’ or ‘You must secretly agree I’m right, it’s just be hard for you to admit.’ I’m sympathetic to this way of thinking - my beliefs also intuitively feel so obvious that nobody could possibly disagree. But I eventually learned real life didn’t work this way; I think Rootclaim would benefit from a similar lesson.\n\n### 3.3: Closing Thoughts On Rootclaim\n\nIn my post, I suggested that if Saar wants to convince people that Rootclaim works, instead of sponsoring debates he should train more people to use it, then test whether there’s inter-rater reliability (eg five people, each doing an independent Rootclaim analysis, all get similar probabilities on COVID origins. Saar responded:\n\n> We don’t think this would be convincing to a wide audience outside people who think like Scott. However, we don’t really have any better ideas, and would love to hear ideas from readers. \n\nI don’t think you should do this for me or people who think like me. I think you should do it for yourself.\n\nHave you ever done a Rootclaim analysis on Rootclaim itself? Probability that Rootclaim works significantly better than a smart person using their normal intuitive reasoning methods? Why not?\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa721d2bc-0c23-4e53-935d-3521a816a67f_1276x316.png)\n\nMaybe this is wrong, but still. You’ve got to be curious if it works, right? And short of an oracle, proving inter-rater reliability is the best you’re going to get.\n\nEven if you don’t want to convince yourself, this is the correct next step. Again by analogy to Tetlock - if he had started with just one superforecaster, and his thesis was “this guy is really smart, but I refuse to prove it”, nothing would have changed. Instead, his theory of change goes through publishing in a bunch of papers, to identifying other superforecasters, to teaching general principles of superforecasting, to superforecasting as a service (either through specific superforecasters at GJO, or through projects that seek to emulate them like Metaculus, FutureSearch, etc). If Rootclaim doesn’t scale, it either dies with Saar, or at best Saar lives a long life and puts out a few more dozen Rootclaim analyses but nothing else comes of it. You’ve got to start training other people eventually, and part of that process involves demonstrating you did it right, and that’s going to involve inter-rater reliability.\n\n4: Conclusions And Updates\n\n\n============================\n\nI don’t like getting in fights, and boy was this a fight.\n\nAnd I don’t like making sweeping generalizations about The Nature Of Pseudoscience - it’s too likely to be incredibly embarrassing if it later turns out I was one in the wrong.\n\nBut I do feel like there’s a method going on here. It’s nothing sinister, just that the lab leak people have 100x more zealots and energy, and there are some strategies that make sense in that position, which no single individual necessarily chooses, but which are very noticeable from the other side.\n\nThe most glaring is the constant focus on “as of one minute ago, the case for the opposite side is in SHAMBLES”. The “as of one minute ago” makes it hard to trust institutional consensus or published papers - what if they just haven’t caught up to the new evidence? The “in SHAMBLES” is always a couple of papers that have “now debunked” the best papers of the other side. These come out on a regular schedule. They’re usually by people in unrelated fields - the ones I saw on COVID origins were by computer scientists, physicists, and agricultural scientists. They’re usually either preprints, or published in weird journals in unrelated fields. But they sure do look like Scientific Papers and have lots of equations in them, and they always end with “…and therefore this one peripheral argument in So-And-So Et Al 2020 is wrong.”\n\nOnce you collect, I don’t know, ten of these, you can spam a bunch of opposing discourse with “This didn’t even consider these ten new papers, all converging upon the fact that this case has now been debunked”. The very prestigious researchers who wrote the original paper probably won’t respond, because they don’t have time to respond to pre-prints by agricultural scientists. So it does kind of look, to an outsider, like all of the top papers of the side with more institutional support are debunked. Even if you spend hours and hours talking to the scientists involved and trying to figure out the flaws, it doesn’t matter, because there will be a new set of papers like that a few weeks later.\n\nSome of this is inevitable - and it’s also what correct people have to do when arguing against incorrect papers. When people were still treating eg stereotype threat as state-of-the-art, I would respond to people talking about it by listing some of the papers that had debunked it, and probably that was annoying to supporters who didn’t want to have to defend it. So I don’t want to claim it’s all inexcusable bad behavior. And one insulting person in the middle of ten thoughtful people with good responses still poisons the barrel and makes things feel hostile. Still, this is something I’m more sensitive to now.\n\nA lot of these problems center on a failure mode of hyperfocusing on little details. What if the exact set of cases Worobey et al uses is contaminated by ascertainment bias? Then we have to throw it out, right? Compare Worobey’s analysis in the supplementary text, where he shows robustness to up to half of the cases being totally false. Or consider his search for alternative uncontaminated datasets and then showing how those demonstrate the same pattern. Or consider that the first five cases ever detected were all from the market, and even that’s enough to prove at least a pared-down version of Worobey’s thesis. It’s fine to also want to make sure the official argument is exactly right and not biased. But _just_ doing that seems like a failure of focus.\n\nThis is also how I feel about “There was a Brazilian case in November!” or “There was a weird case that might have been something in Italy in October!” or whatever. Instead of focusing on the exact sentences in a paper with “PEER-REVIEWED!” on the header, think about the big picture. If there had been lots of COVID in Brazil in November 2019, why didn’t it spread? Why wasn’t Rio locking down at the same time Wuhan was? Why didn’t governments notice and start banning flights from Brazil? If there were a bunch of cases floating around Wuhan in autumn 2019, why didn’t any of them form noticeable case clusters, the same way COVID did everywhere else? Sure, the 30,000 negative blood tests already refute this, but you shouldn’t need those!\n\n(and this is _also_ how I feel about all the “A/B intermediate found in Malaysia! A/B intermediate found in Shanghai!” claims. Okay, so there were 1 billion cases of A, 2 billion cases of B, and . . . a single-digit number of cases of the intermediate, detected months later? Why? I’m not saying this is unanswerable, I’m saying that the fact that lab leak doesn’t even wonder about this or start making arguments for it is why I feel like they don’t have a story - just a stamp collection of anomalies that fade away under closer observation).\n\nI know this comments post won’t be the end of the story. I know that (just as with every other one of my posts, I’m not blaming origins debaters in particular here) someone’s going to go “Sure, Scott confronted 489 arguments. But hw failed to confront the strongest argument against his case - this one obscure article in a Nepalese journal that nobody except me has ever heard of. That means he’s a bad-faith actor strawmanning everyone he disagrees with!” I know that someone will find some detail I’m wrong about and spam it all over Twitter with “Scott didn’t realize that an 91Q mutation is different from a ZY6 mutation, how can you ever trust anything he says?” And I know that next month, someone will come up with another SMOKING GUN! - and if I don’t respond to it immediately they’ll say I’m scared and know I’ve lost and am refusing to admit I’m wrong out of sheer stubbornness, and twist some quote of mine to show I’ve admitted I’ve changed my mind.\n\n(The one argument I know about, haven’t responded to, and it really _is_ because I’m lazy and scared and bad is [Michael Weissman’s Bayesian analysis here](https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v50). It’s 25,000 words and uses a bunch of logits and calculus. Sorry, pass.)\n\nIf it helps, I’m currently working out terms for a 6-digit lab leak bet of my own (no guarantee this will come to fruition, most of these fall apart in the resolution criteria stage). I feel bad for not being willing to answer every possible lab leak argument going forward, but hopefully offering lab leakers a few hundred thousand dollars if I’m wrong will be a suitable consolation prize.\n\nFor now, I’m still at 90-10 zoonosis."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 324\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** This is your last chance to take [the 2024 ACX Survey](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/take-the-2024-acx-survey). I will close submissions Wednesday.\n\n**2:** ACX meetups this coming week in Haifa, St. Petersburg, LA, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, San Jose, Milwaukee, Hong Kong, Tallinn, Cambridge MA, Mumbai, Singapore, and many more. [See the Meetups List for details](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024).\n\n**3:** The Less Wrong team is hosting a conference/festival for the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent blogosphere, [Less Online](http://less.online/), the weekend before Manifest. Berkeley CA, 5/31 - 6/2, $400 per ticket, some housing and childcare available. I’ll be there.\n\n**4:** The hedge fund Bridgewater [is running a forecasting contest on Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/bridgewater/). US residents only, extra prizes for undergraduates. Prizes include $25,000 and potentially getting recruited by Bridgewater (in which case read the “Corporate Culture” section on their wiki page before accepting)."} | |
| {"text":"# Explicit Honesty\n\n"} | |
| {"text":"# Links For April 2024\n\n_\\[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.\\]_\n\n**1:** This blog has previously covered sinister-sounding British political titles like [Shadow Lord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Lord_Chancellor). But recently I learned there is also [a Night Czar](https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/arts-and-culture/24-hour-london/night-czar).\n\n**2:** In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen. So I was surprised to learn that [The US Tried Permanent Daylight Savings In The ‘70s, \\[But\\] People Hated It](https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-saving-time-in-the-70s-people-hated-it/). “While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42% three months later.” After less than a year, Congress bowed to popular opinion and re-instituted the time changes.\n\n**3:** A fundamentalist Christian theme park in Kentucky plans to [build a full-scale replica of the Tower of Babel](https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2022/03/09/tower-babel-coming-ark-encounter/). You might think “wait, this is the opposite of what the Bible wants you to do”, but they have [a blog post explaining why they disagree](https://answersingenesis.org/ministry-news/core-ministry/rebuilding-babel/):\n\n> Our culture has been inundated by false views of our origins, teaching that we evolved from ape-like ancestors. While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others. For example, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism . . . Our goal in building a Babel attraction at the Ark Encounter is to proclaim mankind’s true history as described in God’s Word. In doing so, we will boldly confront racist and ethnocentric philosophies and practices.\n\nWhen our descendants ask why they’re stuck speaking 4,900 fractal hyper-languages, we’re going to have the most embarrassing possible explanation.\n\n**4:** Current status of “missing heritability” claims: [being used as evidence for reincarnation](https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=130941).\n\n**5:** In honor of International Women’s Day, Binance [has launched](https://tokenpost.com/Binance-Perfume-Launched-to-Bring-Crypto-Closer-to-Women-11371) “Binance Perfume” to “bring crypto\\[currency\\] closer to women”.\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b10ab5b-2b2f-4334-b934-ecd5165b4d06_1024x600.jpeg)\n\nI was skeptical, but these sure are women.\n\n**6:** [Chatbot Arena Leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboard) - if I’m understanding this right, the crowd compares two LLMs, rates which one is better, and then they use an equivalent of chess’ Elo system to give each of them a score. Claude 3 and GPT-4 currently locked in a tight race for first.\n\n**7:** From the subreddit: [If people want community so much, why aren’t we creating it?](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1b7rtgf/if_people_want_community_so_much_why_arent_we/) Lots of comments from would-be community builders sharing their experiences with why it’s hard.\n\n**8:** Matt Bruenig: [The ACLU Is Trying To Destroy The Biden \\[Labor Relations Board\\]](https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/the-aclu-is-trying-to-destroy-the). Story as I understand it: an Asian ACLU employee said during a phone call that she was \"afraid to raise certain issues\" with her boss, plus a few other comments along those lines. The ACLU found out and fired her for racism, because her boss was black. She appealed to the government's labor relation board; in order to fight back, the ACLU's lawyers are trying to redefine labor law to force disgruntled employees into company-approved arbitration. The pro-labor wing of the left is understandably upset. For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from [ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters](https://www.theonion.com/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down-aclu-headquarters-1819567187) to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”.\n\n**9:** In [a Bay Area House Party post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party), I discussed the legality of bribing would-be politicians not to run. Turns out [someone tried this](https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/03/13/imperial-county-supervisor-candidate-offered-half-million-dollars-not-to-run/72761962007/) (with a $500K bribe, no less!) and it’s illegal and punishable by up to three years in prison.\n\n**10:** Did you know: [President Eisenhower’s grandson married President Nixon’s daughter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Eisenhower).\n\n**11:** MichaelMF lists [his favorite up-and-coming bloggers](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1bel00l/my_favorite_upandcoming_bloggers/).\n\n**12:** Related: [Peter Singer has a Substack](https://boldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com/) now. And so does [Slavoj Zizek](https://slavoj.substack.com/).\n\n**13:** For April Fools’ Day, the Less Wrong admin team pivoted to music and released an (AI-generated) album of some of their favorite Less Wrong and other rationalsphere posts. Here’s Basil Halperin’s [AGI And The Efficient Market Hypothesis: Markets Are Not Expecting AI In The Next 30 Years](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8c7LycgtkypkgYjZx/agi-and-the-emh-markets-are-not-expecting-aligned-or):\n\n…and a selection from my [Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/):\n\nFull album [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lkel_FaGMybMxi90HGWzruoAMzObRMzqc), background and links to songs in other media [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YMo5PuXnZDwRjhHhE/the-story-of-i-have-been-a-good-bing).\n\n**14:** Elsewhere in rationalsphere April Fools: Linch et al announce [Open Asteroid Impact](https://openasteroidimpact.org/): “When Krishna said ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds,’ I believe he was thinking about the impact on jobs.” Also: [Excerpts From The Effective Altruist Talmud](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/363kggkFJHz5ys5T7/excerpts-from-the-ea-talmud).\n\n**15:** [Invasion Literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_literature) was a type of proto-alternate-history, especially popular in the early 1900s, where the reader’s country was invaded by a superior foe. Popular sub-genres include \"Germany invades Britain\", \"Germany invades America\", \"China invades Australia\", and \"Communists invade everywhere\". Sometimes the attraction would be a story about how ordinary citizens banded together to protect their way of life; other times it would be biting social commentary on how the government was too weak to prevent invasion:\n\n> Several of the books were written by or ghostwritten for military officers and experts of the day who believed that the nation would be saved if the particular tactic that they favoured was or would be adopted.\n\nAlso: “Le Queux and his publisher changed the ending depending on the language, so in the German print edition the Fatherland wins, while in the English edition the Germans lose.”\n\n**16:** [New African company tries to do cellphone-based cash using crypto](https://www.observers.com/beyond-bitcoins-hype-real-use-cases-in-africa/). Kenya’s M-PESA cellphone cash really helped their economy; other African countries tried to replicate it but due to different governments and stakeholders weren’t able to make it work. I don’t know enough about the constraints to predict whether this avoids them, but I wish it well.\n\n**17:** [Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men](https://default.blog/p/lesbians-who-only-date-men). There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender: if gender is non-biological and about how you identify, why can’t transgender status also be non-biological and about how you identify? That is, why can’t I (always male, never transitioned) identify as a “trans man” if I feel like the label resonates better with my inner self? So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”. But according to Default Friend, now something like this is happening in real life.\n\n**18:** Amidst a rapidly-expanding YIMBY movement, continuing homelessness and rent affordability crises, and growing consensus that building more houses has to be part of the solution, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to . . . [make it harder to build houses in San Francisco](https://sfstandard.com/2024/03/26/san-franciso-mayor-breed-peskin-housing-density/), and overturned the pro-YIMBY mayor’s veto.\n\n(since there’s been some confusion - I like suburbs and am against YIMBYs’ obvious lust for destroying them. But if you want the suburban life, you shouldn’t be sitting on space in America’s second densest and most dynamic city. San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco - the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin, - from bothering everyone else. We don’t need to turn currently-habitable places into prisons, but it’s fine to say the prison is growing overcrowded and needs more cell blocks.)\n\n**19:** Related: [Andrew Sullivan speaks out against noise](https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-have-i-what-have-i-done-to-deserve-c5d) (eg people carrying around loud stereos with them in public places). I think this is a brave post - people are going to make fun of him as an “old man” or whatever. But he’s completely right - I rarely go out any more without earplugs and headphones on, and this is also a big part of why I rarely use public transit (though there are also [other reasons](https://twitter.com/SFBART/status/1773837127874162775)). Likely cause is de-policing making cities reluctant to enforce noise ordinances; I think the best option would be to reverse this. If the government refuses to enforce laws against criminals, then it’s a question of which law-abiding people should take the pain, and I think the least unfair option is banning portable stereos. I realize this sounds extreme, but there are plenty of other options for people who aren’t bad actors (eg headphones) and I don’t know how else to make public places livable for people with noise sensitivity.\n\n**20:** Amanda Askell (philosopher now working at Anthropic) [on what Hume can tell us about AGI:](https://twitter.com/AmandaAskell/status/1772010470456881172)\n\n[\n\n\n\n\n\n](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7553c454-883e-46e2-b689-51f900f34a0c_583x677.png)\n\n**21:** Updates from ACX grantees: [antiparasitic drug oxfendazole has been approved for Phase 2 trials (ie trials in humans) in Peru](https://oxfendazoledevelopmentgroup.org/). And Dr. Roy and his citizen drinking water surveillance project have [published a paper](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsestwater.4c00090) discussing some of their work over the past decade.\n\n**22:** George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that [Increasing IQ Is Trivial](https://morelucid.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-by-10-points-is-possible) and the scientific consensus that it’s impossible is just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things (see also his counter to Gwern’s “Algernon” argument [here](https://morelucid.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-is-trivial)). He says that he was able to increase his IQ 7-9 points (after controlling properly for learning effects) and that the first two people to try to replicate his method got 10 and 11 point increases). He’s being a little coy about what exactly the method is, because he doesn’t want too many people trying it half-assed and messing it up, but says it involves:\n\n> …targeted NIR interference therapy, short UV during the morning, a lot of inversion-based exercises where I focused on contracting/relaxing neck and face muscles, a few customized breathing exercises (think wim hof), figuring out the correct levels for a bunch of cholinergic vaso\\[dilators/modulators\\] (think noopept), massage therapies to reduce tension on the spine, some proprioception-heavy movement practices, a niche tibetan metta meditation series… and about 5 other things that are even harder to compress.\n> \n> The main point is that “the method” doesn’t matter so much, you can just google “intervention to increase IQ”, find 50 things, dig through the evidence, select 20, combine them, and assume 5 work I think the core point of \"how\" is really unimportant, since I didn't do something optimal... not even close, I did something \"silly\" that I could execute part time with pocket change. So I don't want to bias people towards this particular method.\n\nHe’s now trying to get other people to replicate his results more formally. He says a replication attempt will take $300 worth of tech, specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars, and “3-4 hours of effort a day for two weeks”. If you’re interested, email him and he’ll try to set something up with you via Zoom calls. He says he prefers to work with groups of 2-3 subjects who can provide a couple of controls each. You can reach him at george3d6@gmail.com . If you do, email me and let me know you’re doing it, as a sort of pre-registration and so I can follow up with you later. I have very high priors on these kinds of claims being false, and I think you should only do this if you think it would be a fun experiment even if it didn’t work. Related:\n\n**23:** Did you know: [the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring](https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/23/world/asteroid-dinosaur-extinction-spring-scn/index.html).\n\n**24:** [How The Alt-Right Won](https://newaltright.substack.com/p/how-the-alt-right-won), by a alt-right veteran and tactician. Useful as a look into what strategies the alt-right thought they were using. I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working. The only exception is that this guy thought progressives who conflated ordinary Trumpists with the alt-right were serving alt-right interests (ie it was counterproductive for the progressives doing it).\n\n**25:** Tech millionaire Yun-Fang Juan has [pledged $1 million to a \"Scientific Integrity Fund\"](https://www.science.org/content/article/science-integrity-sleuths-welcome-legal-aid-fund-whistleblowers) to defend science whistleblowers / \"data detectives\" against litigious authors (eg the Data Colada vs. Francesca Gino case).\n\n**26:** [Good New Yorker article on the “classical education” trend](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/have-the-liberal-arts-gone-conservative) \\[may be paywalled for some people\\], historically-inspired charter schools that teach classics, poetry, Latin, etc. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity . . . in classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.” My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, _does_ make you a better person, and there’s no way to make all of this happen without the Aristotle and Dante as rallying flags.\n\n**27:** [Elizabeth (AcesoUnderGlass) reviews nitric oxide nasal spray](https://acesounderglass.com/2024/02/04/nitric-oxide-for-covid-and-other-viral-infections/) / “Enovid”, a promising treatment for respiratory infections like colds and COVID (you spray the nitric oxide in your nasal passages, and it kills the viruses). I use this, but not enough to feel like I have an opinion on how well it works.\n\n**28:** [Psychiatry At The Margins criticizes Mad In America](https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/how-mad-in-america-misrepresents); I find MiA really deceptive and am happy to link people pushing back against them.\n\n**29:** Did you know: “Herodotus, Aristotle and other authors named Arabia as the source of cinnamon; they recounted that giant [cinnamon birds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon#History) collected the cinnamon sticks from an unknown land where the cinnamon trees grew and used them to construct their nests. Pliny the Elder wrote that . . . the tales of cinnamon being collected from the nests of cinnamon birds was a traders' fiction made up to charge more. However, the story remained current in Byzantium as late as 1310.”\n\n**30:** Remember how a few years ago people talked about a “short squeeze” on Gamestop stock, Gamestop became a “meme stock” and went up a lot, and then later it went back down? And you know how sociologists say that after a religion’s predicted apocalypse fails to materialize, some believers become even more committed? [r/superstonk](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/) (FAQ [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/qig65g/welcome_rall_looking_to_catch_up_on_the_gme_saga/)) is the subreddit for people who believe that the _true_ Gamestop short squeeze is still coming, that it will take down all of Wall Street, and that Gamestop will soon be worth “\\[from\\] $10,000 per share to $100 million per share - with evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to.”\n\n**31:** [List Of Long-Term Wikipedia Vandals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse). It’s most fun to read this as a grimoire of minor information demons, eg “Wikinger: Adds false information related to the Greek alphabet and to its related minor characters”, “Zhoban: Adds unreliable sources to Islamic terrorism articles, while acting in an uncivil manner”."} | |
| {"text":"# Open Thread 323\n\nThis is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial [subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/), [Discord](https://discord.gg/RTKtdut), and [bulletin board](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php), and [in-person meetups around the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/community?filters%5B0%5D=SSC). 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe **[here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe?)**. Also:\n\n**1:** Congratulations to Daniel M, aka SmallSingapore, who finally checked his email after a month and realized he’d won [the ACX Forecasting contest](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/2023-prediction-contest)! Daniel describes himself as:\n\n> A lowly data analyst with a background in economics, from Chicago IL. I placed bets on PredictIt during the 2016 election cycle and came out slightly behind after transaction fees, but otherwise have no formal forecasting experience. My \"strategy\" consisted of going with my gut (cue the Colbert clip) and skipping the questions where I had no prior information to go off of. I credit all success to luck and mindlessly absorbing copious amounts of information on Twitter (mostly TPOT accounts). If people want to contact me, they can do so at [smallsingapore\\[at\\]gmail\\[dot\\]com](mailto:smallsingapore@gmail.com) (I'll respond more promptly, I promise haha). \n\n**2:** There were some technical difficulties with the forecasting score hashes last time. Here are some improved versions, total score only, sorry.\n\n\n\nBlind Score Hash\n\n60.2KB ∙ XLSX file\n\n[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/14ee735f-71a2-4751-95b5-85b97e00a8af.xlsx)\n\n[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/14ee735f-71a2-4751-95b5-85b97e00a8af.xlsx)\n\n\n\nFull Score Hash\n\n12.9KB ∙ XLSX file\n\n[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/1f74c54d-4a2e-4a1e-bc95-9d28ecff8cf3.xlsx)\n\n[Download](https://www.astralcodexten.com/api/v1/file/1f74c54d-4a2e-4a1e-bc95-9d28ecff8cf3.xlsx)\n\nGo to [this site](https://emn178.github.io/online-tools/sha256.html) and enter the email address you used for the contest. Find the first five characters of the hash on the Excel file, and that’s you; your score is the next cell over. The highest score was 0.275, the lowest was -2.185, and you can compare to various averages [on this graphic](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F14b48344-51fa-4a5d-bb06-c0f52c5ebd9c_720x468.png) from [the post](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-predicted-2023). Thanks again to Leon for making this work.\n\n**3:** Several things I’ve been asked to recommend this Open Thread, including:\n\n* [Newspeak House](https://newspeak.house/) is a center of the London rationalist community. It describes itself as “an independent residential college since 2015” teaching “a one year course on Introduction To Political Technology” which is “designed to support mid-career technologists to develop a holistic understanding of the civic landscape in the UK, in order to found groundbreaking new projects or seek strategic positions in key institutions”. Given the name this all sounds slightly sinister, but next year’s course is open and [you can sign up here](https://newspeak.house/study-with-us).\n \n* The [Tract](https://buildwithtract.com/) team is in the Bay this month and looking to connect with “YIMBY angel investors who are interested in tech solutions to vetocracy” as well as YIMBY campaigners, urban planners, and zoning nerds. If that’s you, contact them at jamie\\[at\\]buildwithtract\\[dot\\]com\n \n* The Japanese AI safety community apparently exists and is holding a Technical AI Safety Conference in Tokyo in, uh, four days, so if you’re interested [sign up quickly](https://tais2024.cc/). Attendance is free, it looks like the talks are in English, and featured speakers include Dan Hendrycks and researchers from Anthropic and DeepMind.\n \n* GiveWell [is looking for a new Head of Philanthropy](https://www.givewell.org/about/jobs/head-of-philanthropy), which I think means mostly fundraising. $200K+ salary, office/remote optional, international candidates welcome.\n \n\n**4:** Several people have asked me to recommend their blog in the Substack Recommendations system. I have a blanket policy of always refusing, because otherwise I would worry about offending someone and stumble into recommending everybody. If your blog is good, I will hopefully come across it and recommend it without you asking me, sorry."} |
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