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And now some items of interest from around the web. FYI, any link to Twitter (I’ve labelled them all as such) might not be working for you due to that site’s new restrictions.
Weird Science
Will the giant star Betelgeuse go supernova in the near future? (Astrophysics paper here.) If it happens in our lifetimes, it will be something to see. It would bright enough to show up in daylight. (h/t Ethan Mollick on Twitter).
Regarding the origin of Covid, I’ve lost track of the debate about it being a lab versus a wet market. Regardless, I think lab leaks and gain of function research are definitely worrisome. In case you’re sleeping too well at night, Mike Nielsen (on Twitter) shared this Wiki list of laboratory biosecurity incidents. For instance, the last recorded person to die of smallpox, in 1978, got it from a lab leak in the UK. In 2008 a US researcher died after exposure to the plague. And many researchers think the 1977 flu pandemic came either from a lab leak or human challenge trials.
I also saw a Twitter post about the sheer weirdness of the creatures known as myxosporeans, which have insanely simple genomes and are the only eukaryotes that lack mitochondria. One genus, henneguya zschokkei, is a parasite infecting salmon and the only known multicellular animal that does not rely on aerobic respiration. Since these things are genetically similar to jellyfish, there’s a theory that they started out as a contagious jellyfish cancer that evolved into an into a separate parasitic organism.
Which puts me in mind of this classic West Hunter blog post on cell line infections. On a contagious cancer among dogs:
Although its phenotype differs considerably from dogs (no brain, no bones, no eyes, no fur, asexual) classification by descent clearly implies that it is a canid and mammal – certainly the most unusual mammal ever discovered…. the organism causing canine venereal sarcoma is more closely related to a wolf than a fox is, even though you need a microscope to examine it.
For an example with human cells:
HeLa, a long established experimental human cell line…originated as a cervical adenocarcinoma in Henrietta Lacks in 1951, and is wildly successful in the limited niche of tissue culture. It has repeatedly outcompeted and replaced other cell lines via cryptic contamination, ruining a great deal of research in the process. At one point, most of the supposedly different human cell lines used were actually HeLa. Leigh Van Valen and Virginia Maiorana have pointed out that HeLa should logically be considered a separate species. and they’re completely correct.
Moving on to human evolution: In the journal Evolutionary Anthropology, a theory that the sexual pair-bond found in human marriages is different from the pair-bonding in birds like geese and albatrosses. In our case, the paper argues, capacity for these bonds has its origins in same-sex alliances, with that capacity only later taking a role in mating. From the abstract:
The evolution of monogamy has been a central question in biological anthropology. An important avenue of research has been comparisons across “socially monogamous” mammals, but such comparisons are inappropriate for understanding human behavior because humans are not “pair living” and are only sometimes “monogamous.” It is the “pair bond” between reproductive partners that is characteristic of humans and has been considered unique to our lineage. I argue that pair bonds have been overlooked in one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. These pair bonds are not between mates but between male “friends” who exhibit enduring and emotional social bonds. The presence of such bonds in male–male chimpanzees raises the possibility that pair bonds emerged earlier in our evolutionary history. I suggest pair bonds first arose as “friendships” and only later, in the human lineage, were present between mates. The mechanisms for these bonds were co-opted for male-female bonds in humans.
If this theory is right, everyone reading ho yay into Sam and Frodo’s undying loyalty has it backwards and should be reading friendship subtext into heterosexual romances. (h/t David Schmitt on Twitter)
Speaking of evolution and the sexes, maybe the story of Adam and Eve got it right: Here’s a speculation that women were the first humans to become truly self-aware, and that they used weird rituals and snake venom to drag men along. I don’t know if any of this is testable, but I like the idea of Conan stories being as right about snake cults as they were about waves of conquerors and breeding with other species. (h/t Bradley Campbell)
Weird Technology
When people talk bad AI scenarios, they often posit the AI tricking humans into doing it’s bidding in the physical world. Apparently this has already happened. When Open AI researchers were testing GPT-4 for safety, it got a gig worker to do one of those “prove you are a human” CAPTCHAs for it by pretending to be a blind person. Not sure exactly what this means in the context of a safety test where they intentionally push the program to do naughty things.
Pointer from Scott Alexander, who has a piece on AI forecasting and whether experts were accurate. One tidbit is that apparent accuracy or inaccuracy might be an artifact of survey methods:
Most people don’t have clear, well-thought-out answers to most questions. Famously, respondents to a 2010 poll found that more people supported gays’ right to serve in the military than supported homosexuals’ right to serve in the military. I don’t think people were confused about whether gays were homosexual or not. I think they generated an opinion on the fly, and the use of a slightly friendlier-sounding or scarier-sounding term influenced which opinion they generated.
Gay rights are at least grounded in real people and political or religious principles we’ve probably already considered. But who knows when human-level AI will happen? Many of these experts were people who invented a new computer vision program or helped robot arms assemble cars. They might never have thought about the problem in these exact terms before; certainly they wouldn’t have complex mental models. These are the kinds of conditions where little changes in wording can have big effects.
Overall, though, it seems like everyone trying to forecast AI developments have not been doing a great job. But Alexander emphasizes that “these kinds of forecasts have provided more than zero information. Even on Katja’s second survey, the one everyone failed at, there was a correlation of 0.1-0.2 — i.e., higher than zero — on which tasks the experts thought would be solved fastest, and which ones actually were.”
The effect of GTP4 and its successors on higher education is a topic of great concern for me. At One Useful Thing, Ethan Mollick writes about “The Homework Apocalypse” that is coming this fall. Cheating on homework already far more common than educators want to admit. In addition to looking up answers on the internet, “by 2017, 15% of students had paid someone to do an assignment, usually through essay mills online. Before AI, 20,000 people in Kenya earned a living writing essays full-time.” Thanks to Chatbot, the standard homework and essay assignments are mostly obsolete. Mollick urges educators to think of the most appropriate ways to integrate it into teaching and learning, ranging from making essays an in-class only assignment to encouraging students to use AI to write them and rewarding those who use it best.
At Bet On It, Bryan Caplan finds it more interesting to think about how AI will affect academic work and the academic labor market.
What about we humble professors? Those of us with tenure have nothing to worry about. Taxpayers and donors will keep funding us no matter how useless we become. Even if you don’t have tenure, students will keep coming and your job will go on… unless you’re at a mediocre private college with a small endowment. Except for cutting-edge empiricists, however, AI will make research even more of a scam than it already is. If Sokal or Boghossian-Lindsey-Pluckrose can successfully “punk” humanities journals, AI will be able to do the same on an industrial scale. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot writing a thousand turgid pages a second about “neoliberalism,” “patriarchy,” and “anti-racism” — forever.
Outside of the most empirical subjects, the only rationing tools left to determine academic status will be uniquely human: networking and sheer charisma. My fellow scholars, now is a great time to reread Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Speaking of technology and learning: Samo Burja writes about the great benefit of Youtube videos for helping transmit knowledge and skill.
How-to videos are certainly the most useful thing about the service. I’ve said before my favorite Youtube video of all time wasn’t a movie review or political rant, but a Latino guy giving a very simple, no-frills demonstration of changing a faucet cartridge. It saved me much stress that day, I tell you. And while I’d sometimes rather find a short list of written instructions than have to sit through some Youtuber’s intro patter, actually being able to see it done does help for learning a lot of tasks.
Just Plain Weird
Ever heard of the Curse of the Fire Horse? It’s a folk belief from Japan that wound up having a major demographic consequence.
In 1966, Japan experienced a sudden drop in its fertility rate—for just that year. During the 1960s, the fertility rate was about 2.0 to 2.1 children per woman, but in 1966 it dropped dramatically to 1.6 children per woman (Chart 2). The number of births in 1966 was much lower than in surrounding years…
Many Japanese families chose not to have children in 1966 due to their superstition of “Hinoe-Uma (Fire-Horse)”. Fire-Horse is the 43rd combination of the sexagenary cycle, which happens every 60 years. The superstition is that women born in this year of the “Fire-Horse” have a bad personality and will kill their future husband.
(h/t Johnny Newton on Twitter)
The real X-files: Over at The Intrinsic Perspective, Erik Hoel takes the media to task for not asking harder questions about “government research” into flying saucers. Because “government researcher” can just mean “some wingnut using a personal connection to get taxpayer money.”
Why do these repetitive UFO stories keep coming up? The answer is Harry Reid—that’s right, the Senate majority leader—who was a UFO enthusiast and reportedly good friends with Robert Bigelow, the owner of “Skinwalker Ranch” where all sorts of goblins, shades, aliens, and “dino-beavers” (I’m serious) are seen. When people talk about a secret military program to study UFOs, they are likely mainly referring to how Bigelow’s company received a grant for 22 million to study wacky stuff at Skinwalker Ranch, including UFOs.
Incredibly, it appears this effort to connect ghosts, monsters (like werewolfs), and UFOs, somehow received Pentagon funding on a contract basis. Probably because the term UFO is allegedly not mentioned on the proposal. The grant awarded instead looks like an incredibly dry technical grant shorn of details about studying “new aerospace technologies” with no mention of UFOs or anything paranormal. It helped that there was only one bidder: Bigelow’s company….
Our current journalistic class, unwilling or unable to do the research I can do in my boxers in about five hours, instead did a big media oopsie in The New York Times, running the story and lending credibility to the idea the Pentagon did create a real serious task force to investigate UFO claims.
As Eric Idle sang, let’s pray there’s intelligent life in space because there’s bugger-all down here on earth.
But is there credible UFO evidence? There may actually be something weirder than human beliefs involved in the spate of recent Navy sightings. On the Future Strategist podcast, James D. Miller interviews acerbic polymath Greg Cochrane on the subject. Cochrane points out that whatever things the pilots were chasing, they showed up on visual as well as multiple instruments, making it likely they were physical objects behaving in unusual ways. He points out that though upper-atmospheric lightning — red sprites, blue jets — wasn’t “officially” discovered until the late 1980s, of course some pilots must have been seen it long before. Only it’s not good for one’s flying career to report glowing red sky squids before scientists have recognized and explained them.
Social Evolution
There are various critiques of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, but the broad idea that geography impacts how societies develop has something to it. A new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society purports to quantify the impact of ecological factors on cultural features, saying their six ecological variables between 16 and 20 percent of the variance in human culture.
One thing I don’t get about this study is that their “ecological variables” mix ecological in the natural-environment sense with ecological in the Chicago-school sociology sense of statistical description of human group. For instance, things like average rainfall are next to wealth inequality measured by Gini Coefficients. To me this is putting social variables on both sides of the equation — why is a class system ecological but a political system is cultural?
I’d really be more interested in whether the physical environment affects whether societies tend to have high levels of wealth inequality — for instance, do some environments make it hard for one person or family to accumulate large farm holdings because arable plots are small and scattered?
Social Mobility
Social mobility research usually focuses on contemporary societies, but a team of sociologists have examined social mobility in China during the time of the Tang Dynasty 1500 years ago. This is during the time China began selecting its elite with civil service examinations, and the authors find that as the period drags on family pedigree (having an aristocratic family name) had less impact on bureaucratic rank, while passing the imperial exam had a greater impact. But notably this was a decline in the influence of having prominent distant ancestors; throughout the period father’s rank was correlated with son’s rank.
Also interesting that they found a relationship you can see in General Social Survey data from modern America: Father’s rank has a strong correlation with success for those who don’t past the exam (in America, a college degree), but not for those who do.
Compare to Gregory Clark’s new paper on heritability of social status in England. Here’s the abstract:
A lineage of 422,374 English people (1600 to 2022) contains correlations in social outcomes among relatives as distant as 4th cousins. These correlations show striking patterns. The first is the strong persistence of social status across family trees. Correlations decline by a factor of only 0.79 across each generation. Even fourth cousins, with a common ancestor only five generations earlier, show significant status correlations. The second remarkable feature is that the decline in correlation with genetic distance in the lineage is unchanged from 1600 to 2022. Vast social changes in England between 1600 and 2022 would have been expected to increase social mobility. Yet people in 2022 remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England. The third surprising feature is that the correlations parallel those of a simple model of additive genetic determination of status, with a genetic correlation in marriage of 0.57.
Crime
One of the first things you ought to learn in studying crime and violence is that, like just about everything else, it follows a power-law where 20% of offenders commit 80% of crime. Spend some time studying murder cases and you’ll get used to seeing offenders having three arrests at the time of their first killing, and then after the killing they skip town to get apprehended for an unrelated robbery or rape in another state.
Given that pattern, people argue that the role of imprisonment is incapacitation rather than deterrence: It’s less that the threat of prison stops people from committing crime than that being imprisoned keeps the most persistent criminals from doing more of it. Along these lines, a new study uses a series of mass pardons in Italy to try to disentangle these effects. From the abstract:
We estimate the "incapacitation effect" on crime using variation in Italian prison population driven by eight collective pardons passed between 1962 and 1995. The prison releases are sudden – within one day –, very large – up to 35 percent of the entire prison population – and happen nationwide. Exploiting this quasi-natural experiment we break the simultaneity of crime and prisoners as in Levitt (1996) and, in addition, use the national character of the pardons to separately identify incapacitation from changes in deterrence. The elasticity of total crime with respect to incapacitation is between -20 and -35 percent. A cost-benefit analysis suggests that Italy's prison population is below its optimal level.
(h/t Ben Southwood on Twitter.)
History
Dan Carlin calls the Age of Exploration “Globalization 1.0.” And I never realized exactly how much travelling and mixing it entailed. As this piece at Aeon tells us “the first Asian populations (both free and enslaved) arrived in the Americas during the 16th century. They landed in Mexico in the thousands.” Vice versa, some Native Mexicans would wind up sailing to Asia with the Spanish. Within a very short period you had people from every continent landing on every other continent.
Funny detail:
Eight Indigenous men from the island of Luzon in the Philippines served as auxiliaries and ‘spies’ in the landing party under the twisted logic that people misnamed ‘indios’ (Indians) from one land would be useful intermediaries with equally misnamed ‘indios’ from another.
Speaking of Carlin, he was one of a few sources I’ve heard/read that mentioned the Roman statesman Marius’s important reforms to the Roman military, something that helped make it the great war machine it would later become. This includes the shift from landowners serving as a duty to the landless being able to sign up as volunteers, paving the way for a professional military. But here’s a post arguing that no, Marius never did these things that actually happened and some of the things he supposedly did never happened at all. Just when I think I’ve learned something….
And I don’t know if this counts as history or literature, but I liked this guest review on Astral Codex Ten about one of the Icelandic Sagas.
Economics
Arnold Kling explains the theory behind index investing (like using one of those mutual funds designed to track the S&P 500) and argues that it is widely misunderstood:
Your intuition tells you that if you are willing to take more risk, then buying a single stock is a better idea than buying a diversified portfolio. The theory says that you are wrong.
He has another piece on price discrimination by colleges, explaining why colleges can have both scholarship kids and rich kids paying through the nose.
Although most colleges are “non-profit,” they are among the most ruthless profit-maximizers out there. They pay economists and statisticians to implement algorithms to calibrate scholarship offers to obtain the students they want without giving too much away. In addition to price discrimination, they also engage in wage discrimination, competing for prestige faculty with high salaries while paying hapless adjuncts who do much of the teaching less than a living wage. They approach fund-raising with zeal, applying sophisticated techniques, large staffs, and capital campaigns to finance lavish facilities.
Heard of the Ferguson Effect in policing? According to a guest post at Cremieux Recueil, a new paper claims to find a #MeToo effect in coauthorship of economics papers.
What appears to have happened is that after #MeToo hit its stride, female economists started fewer new projects and roughly 60% of that was because male economists become warier of collaborating with female economists….
Female economists did not become less likely to work with women alone or women and men together, but they were less likely to work with men alone. This extended to new projects and new papers.
Zvi Mowshowitz critiques research on the “cost of thriving index,” mostly pointing to problems of measurement.
I’m not well versed in the concept, but it seems like the point of a “cost of thriving” index is to try to acknowledge that even if you get more for your money in modern society, you might be practically obligated to spend more even if you’d rather not. For instance, if you complain that the price of cars is much higher now than in the 80s, people can quite correctly point out that a 2020s car is not equivalent to an 80s car — it has more features, better construction, etc. Thus, really, you’re getting the same amount of car for your money — maybe even more car for your money. But that’s cold comfort if I can’t afford the sticker price, since it’s not like the lot across town is selling brand new 1980s cars.
Similarly, my house is much better than the dirt-floor shack my grandfather was born in — but his father could live in a dirt-floor shack and still be a respectable man and good marriage prospect. If I did it, I’d be a creepy weirdo unable to attract a woman who wasn’t a drug addict.
I think it’s an important concept. Unless you’re super committed, disciplined, and well, pretty weird, living without phone and electric bills is just not practical for non-Amish people. Conveniences have a way of becoming necessities, and I’m purposely not putting necessities in scare quotes.
Suicide Trends
If necessity is a matter of degree, then food is a rock-bottom, you need it to physically exist necessity. There are reports that food shortages in North Korea are leading to suicide, including the collective suicide of families facing starvation. For examples:
According to the official, a couple in their 60s hung themselves from a tree in the mountains, and a family of four, after eating their final family meal together, ingested potassium cyanide
In the city of Hyesan, a 10-year-old boy was living with his grandmother after his parents died of starvation, but they took their own lives by eating rat poison.
The country’s suicide rate is reportedly up 40% year over year, topping 8 per 100,000. Great Leader responds by forbidding suicide, though it’s not clear exactly how he will punish violations (though apparently some responsibility will fall on local officials).
Note that even with this dramatic spike in suicide, North Korea’s suicide rate is still a third that of South Korea, with around 26 per 100,000.
Regarding suicide the US, Tyler Black’s substack reports that rates in 2022 rose slightly for men and women and are back on pre-pandemic trends. See also Mary Pat Campbell’s thread on Twitter comparing 2020 and 2021.
Suicide is not a unitary behavior, but occurs in different forms and varieties. Pablo Malo has a Spanish language post on aggressive and moralistic kinds of suicide that cites some of my own academic work: El Suicidio Agresivo o Moralista.
Victimhood Culture
I recently appeared in Norman Kelley’s podcast series From Black Power to Black Trauma (available on Youtube and through Soundcloud and Spotify) to discuss the concept of victimhood culture. The thesis Kelley is developing in his series is that politically mobilized black people were a strong force, able to defeat Jim Crow in just a few years, but since they have since demobilized to ill effect.
I think where my work comes in is that he thinks that cultivating an image of black fragility isn’t helping, and that complaints about microaggressions and such are mostly a game for the professional class with little relevance to the grim meathook realities of average Joe and Jane.
Over at Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, a discussion of how people with dark triad personality traits are prone to signal victimhood:
The Dark Triad comprises narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and disregard for others)….
In the 2020 study, titled Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities, the authors suggest that [these traits] might be beneficial for obtaining resources….
In their introduction, they acknowledge that being viewed as a victim can lead to a loss of esteem and respect. But, they continue, in modern Western societies being a victim doesn’t always lead to undesirable outcomes. Sometimes, being a victim can increase one’s social status. And justify one’s claim to material resources…..
The researchers developed a Victim Signaling Scale, ranging from 1 = not at all to 5 = always. It asks how often people engage in certain activities….
They found that Victim Signaling scores highly correlated with Dark Triad scores (r = .35). This association held after controlling for gender, ethnicity, income, and other factors that might make people vulnerable to mistreatment.
So the theory is that people with these personality traits are, in modern conditions, prone to use victim claims to press for social advantage.
To the extent personality is something that varies independently of culture (e.g., there were also psychopaths in the Old South or Qing China), one might expect these personalities to pick different strategies. Thus we’d hypothesize that people scoring higher on these Dark Triad measures in an honor culture would be more likely to pick fights or violently retaliate.
But what would we predict for a dignity culture or a face culture? Would Dark Triads still default to using either force or sympathy — only, these would be relatively less effective? Or would they try some tactic of manipulation more in keeping with the dominant ethos?
As for all else, Happy 4th of July to my fellow Americans! And thanks to readers everywhere! If you want to flex, here’s the Tip Jar.
Substacks cited above:
(Cremieux Recueil) (In My Tribe) (Pablo Malo) (Scott Alexander)(Tyler Black) (Bet On It) (Ethan Mollick) (Intrinsic Perspective) (Vectors of Mind) (Don’t Worry About the Vase) (Rob Henderson’s Newsletter).
ICYMI, Andrew at Vectors of Mind posted on Notes, regarding my comment on testability: "In the words of Conan, it’s not 'just another snake cult.' If self-awareness is recent then that would effect language. In this piece I argue that the model predicts farflung cognates on the 1sg and that may actually be the case: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of