Links for February

Mass delusion, self-harm, Ukraine, AI, disasters.

Note: I don’t know this ought to be a regular series or not, but I needed a small break from all the crime cases I’ve been coding today. Feel free to comment on whether or not you’d like more “links” posts.

Ever heard of the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic? After some news reports of pitted windshields (possibly caused by vandals), over 3,000 people called the police to report mysterious pits on their own vehicles. People advanced various theories for the sudden outbreak of pitting, from cosmic rays to sand fleas. Police eventually concluded that media hype had just made people notice natural wear and tear they’d never noticed before.

I lean toward something like this as an explanation for a large chunk of Long Covid and even bigger chunk of Long Vaccine. Disease after-effects and vaccine side-effects really happen, but . . . I think a lot of people are just noticing their age.

One point I tried to make in my book on suicide was that effective suicide prevention must go beyond providing people with therapists and antidepressants. For instance, one of sociology’s few robust findings is that social ties and involvements generally reduces suicide risk. Along these lines, Korea’s Transport Institution claims that providing elderly Koreans with free subway access reduces their suicide rates by keeping them active and involved. Though, like many other things, demographic collapse may make the cost of this unsustainable.

If you want to increase your own social integration, Art of Manliness has tips on how to establish connections with your neighbors.

Connections aren’t always positive, though. At Psychology Today, Pamela Paresky complains that Twitter, despite having a heavy hand in political censorship, gave free reign to posts advertising and encouraging self-harm. It’s a phenomenon I only learned of recently, when I searched the Korean hashtag for “suicide” and found it was almost entirely people posting photos of their wounds.

On Twitter, Phillipe Lemoine has a thread on the unfortunate dynamic of escalation between NATO and Russia, noting that once initial intervention puts one side’s “credibility” on the line, they feel compelled to make further interventions to save face. The result is that:

“…even in the best case scenario we're looking at an outcome that such that, had it known before hand that it would come to that, neither side would have started on the slippery slope. The problem with slippery slopes is that they're slopes and they're slippery. Everyone is talking about nukes, and I definitely think it's a valid concern, but thank God it remains unlikely that it will come to that. But even short of that, things can get really bad.”

While I am mindful of my own pessimistic bias, I think Lemoine has a better understanding of the dynamics of conflict and escalation than the people who saying things like “Don’t be stupid, no one will use nukes over provocation X.” The problem is what happens several counter-provocations down the line. See also work on criminal homicide as the outcome of “character contests” between young men.

As long as we’re on the topic of disaster: Gwern has a short story on how AI based on current concepts and techniques could become a paperclip maximizer and destroy humanity. Somewhat dry and technical, but interesting.

And at Palladium, a reminder that people in disaster scenarios rarely panic like you see in the movies. The description of people’s behavior as temporarily utopian is exaggerated, and even a milder version might be limited very high-trust settings. But I have dipped my toes in the sociology of disaster and it’s a common theme that people don’t shriek and run about in the face of danger. Quite often the problem is people blindly following their routines and being unwilling to adjust their definition of the situation: Fire billows out of the restaurant kitchen and the diners just glance around nervously – “well, no one else is running, so I’d better not or I’ll look weird.” That risking death is preferable to looking weird says a lot about humanity.