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Now some items of interest from around the web:
Science Marches On
At Unsupervised Learning, Razib Khan reflects on how the rapid advance of genetics has forced many revisions to theory in a short span of time.
I have been wrong about big questions in this field so many times already in scarcely a quarter century of post-collegiate life….
Below are some key cases in the field where I can look back and say I stand corrected, sometimes even just a few productive years later.
Examples include complications to the “Out of Africa” story of human origins, the shift away from looking for single genes of large effect, and the discovery that modern humans do indeed have substantial Neanderthal ancestry.
Also regarding genetics: Criminologist/sociologist Callie H. Burt has a new piece out in Sociological Methodology to guide non-experts (re: most sociologists) in understanding polygenetic scores: “Polygenic Indices (aka Polygenic Scores) in Social Science: A Guide for Interpretation and Evaluation.” The link is to an ungated version available through her website.
As for being wrong: When I first starting teaching research methodology as a grad student, I used the “hot hand” example from Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Basketball players and fans think a player is more likely to make a shot after he has recently made another shot — when he has the “hot hand” that leads to a winning streak. Gilovich said this wasn’t true and held up the belief as an example of how people misperceive streaks in random sequences. Randomness doesn’t look random to human eyes — a person looking at the results of a coin flip can easily fool themselves into thinking heads and tails run in streaks or obey some other more complicated pattern.
Only statistician Andrew Gelman recently reviewed the theoretical reasons and empirical evidence that the hot hand actually does exist! He claims that its existence wouldn’t even be controversial except that Gilovich’s mistaken work on the subject came first.
Technology Marches On
Space-X continues to do amazing things to make space travel more affordable and routinized. At Ars Technica, Eric Berger talks about the significance of the latest test flight of Starship:
But even with those caveats, Starship is already the most revolutionary rocket ever built…. within a year or so, SpaceX will have a rocket that costs about $30 million and lifts 100 to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
Bluntly, this is absurd.
For fun, we could compare that to some existing rockets. NASA's Space Launch System, for example, can lift up to 95 tons to low-Earth orbit. That's nearly as much as Starship. But it costs $2.2 billion per launch, plus additional ground systems fees. So it's almost a factor of 100 times more expensive for less throw weight. Also, the SLS rocket can fly once per year at most….
But it's not just the cost or the payload. It's the cadence. SpaceX has four more Starships, essentially, ready to go. We have already seen SpaceX's proficiency with the Falcon 9 rocket. Does anyone doubt we'll see double-digit Starship launches in 2025 and many dozens per year during the second half of this decade? Access to space used to be a rare commodity. What happens to our species and its commerce in space when access is not rare or expensive?
In other news, Space-X CEO Elon Musk’s side-company Neuralink implanted a chip in a paralyzed man’s brain that allows him to play computer games or send tweets just by thinking about it. Next up is an implant that will cure blindness.
I’ve said before that Musk is a mixed bag as a role model, combining major achievements with major flaws. But any critic who dismisses him as some mediocrity or failure is simply delusional — call it Musk Derangement Syndrome. Which is probably in part tall poppy syndrome — a reaction to what sociologist Donald Black called “the crime of doing too well.”
Of course, new technology brings challenges. With the rise of large language models and chatbots, teachers and professors are scrambling to adjust to a world where students can generate an essay in minutes while largely avoiding engagement with the material. And academics themselves are increasingly turning to GPTs to save time and effort. Consider this paper in Computer Science reporting a sharp increase in adjectives favored by GPTs in the text of conference peer reviews. This suggests scholars are increasingly using GPTs to write reviews — and likely papers as well.
Pointer from sociologist of science Misha Teplitskiy.
A particularly sloppy example made its way into the journal Surfaces and Interfaces. Here the first paragraph of an article begins with the line: “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic.” Clearly the entire introduction was GPT-generated, then lazily copy-pasted without proof-reading. Even more disturbing, the paper then passed through the hands of editors and peer-reviewers without anyone noticing.
The March of Wokeness
Can you quantify just how woke someone is? A psychologist in Finland has tried to do something along these lines, creating and validating a scale for measuring “critical social justice attitudes” using large samples of Finns. Pointer from psychologist Lee Jussim, who thinks its mustard.
On wokeness as educational policy, Economist Bryan Caplan discusses the new “Just Societies” course requirements at George Mason University:
If you read any closer, you unsurprisingly discover that this is a thinly-veiled woke indoctrination requirement. Students are not exploring substantively different views on justice; they are hearing about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in all its Orwellian wonder.
Meanwhile, campus activists continue to deplatform speakers, pressuring officials to revoke speaking invitations or using physical force to shut down events in progress. Greg Lukianoff and Sean Stevens present some data on campus deplatforming. Using their database of 1,400 deplatforming attempts from 1998 to now, they find that about 39 percent are successful.
Of course, not all of these are the work of the woke. For instance, a big chunk of all incidents are The Cardinal Newman Society’s attempts to do things like stop performances of The Vagina Monologues at Catholic colleges. Pre-2012, deplatforming pressure tended to come from the right.
Post-2012, deplatforming tended to come from the illiberal left, and the overall amount of it increased. The authors claim 2023 was the worst year on record for deplatforming speakers and that 2024 is on track to beat it:
Last week, a speaking event at UC Berkeley featuring Israeli Defense Forces reservist and lawyer Ran Bar-Yoshafat was canceled because a mob of angry protestors — hundreds of them — surrounded the venue, broke glass doors, prevented students from entering, and forced their way into the building in a premeditated attempt to, in their own words, “SHUT IT DOWN.”
At the same time, at San Jose State University, a guest lecture by Jeffrey Blutinger was canceled and Blutinger had to be escorted away by police due to a (once again, premeditated) protest that devolved into violence.
This has been happening for a long time, and it will keep happening until universities grow backbones.
The Behavior of Music
I just learned of a 2022 article in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication reporting that the complexity and diversity of Irish folk tunes varies directly with population size. But they also find that songs of intermediate complexity are more popular, and so this constrains the complexity of popular tunes even in larger populations.
Using analyses of a large online folk tune dataset, we show that popular tunes played by larger communities of musicians have diversified into a greater number of different versions which encompass more variation in melodic complexity compared with less popular tunes. However, popular tunes also tend to be intermediate in melodic complexity and variation in complexity for popular tunes is lower than expected given the increased number of tune versions. We also find that user preferences for individual tune versions are more skewed in popular tunes. Taken together, these results suggest that while larger populations create more frequent opportunities for musical innovation, they encourage convergence upon intermediate levels of melodic complexity due to a widespread inverse U-shaped relationship between complexity and aesthetic preference.
Pointer from economist Robin Hanson on X.
This paper reminds me of the work of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. See, for example, his article “Song Structure and Social Structure.” One of his ideas was that solo singing — in which an audience quietly listens to a single performer — is a function of social inequality. It’s supposedly unknown in egalitarian Pygmy bands, where singing is wholly collective — anyone can start a song, but no one leads it.
I first learned of Lomax in the appendix “A Strategy of Pure Sociology” in Donald Black’s Social Structure of Right and Wrong. Here Black cites Lomax when advancing propositions about the behavior of music and dance.
The Behavior of Suicide
This isn’t news, but a discussion on X reminded me it’s not widely appreciated: During the 21st century US suicide rates have risen slowly but nearly steadily, while those of Europe have fallen. Thus, as Allard Thuriot points out on X, the US has gone from having a much lower rate than Europe to a much higher one. Tanner Greer chimes with an even more striking comparison. When I was defending my dissertation on suicide 12 years ago, Japan had a far higher rate than the US. I habitually consider Japan a far more suicide-prone and suicide-approving culture. Only Japan’s rate also fell below the rising US rate. See Our World in Data for the age-standardized rates.
FYI, the US rate was even higher in the early 20th century.
I’ve thought for a while now that as wealthy societies develop top-heavy age pyramids, there’d be more normalization of suicide among the elderly and infirm. Along those lines: Macron Backs Bill that Would Allow Medically Assisted Death.
In the West, the rise of assisted suicide might be part of a larger process of suicide becoming less deviant. See also a controversy over whether a young Canadian woman qualifies for assisted dying.
M.V.'s lawyer Austin Paladeau stressed the case boils down to an adult's right to medical autonomy.
"He's at risk of losing his daughter and while this is sad, it does not give him the right to keep her alive against her wishes," said Paladeau.
"One of the real challenging parts of this process … is what's actually happening," said Paladeau.
"I completely understand [W.V.] does not want his daughter to die … I represent [M.V.], I don't want her to die either but that doesn't play into account here.
"Even though we have or may have very strong views … at the end of the day this is [M.V.'s] decision."
The notion that one’s life is one’s own to dispose of is not a cultural universal. An interesting question is what makes this notion more or less likely to arise.
Talking Heads
I mentioned in the February Links that Arnold Kling and I had a conversation on Patricia Crone’s book Preindustrial Societies. The discussion is now up on Youtube.
On his podcast Harsha Reality, life coach Harsha Perera interviews anthropologist Daniel Everett, famous for studying the Piraha people and their unusual language and culture. Also available on Apple Podcasts
On a recent episode of Ask Chuck Dixon, the veteran comic writer was kind enough to answer my question about good comics for small children just learning to read. Discussion starts at 39:45.
Speaking of comics….
Indie Comics
Independent comic creator Gilbert Deltrez has a series Galactic Rodents of Mayhem (or GROM) that’s an homage to 80s Saturday morning cartoons. There’s a PDF version of the first issue up for free viewing on his website (scroll down for the “click here to read” link).
As an 80s/90s kid myself, I find GROM good fun. Geeks my age might also have a fondness for 90’s Batman artist Graham Nolan. I recently backed his new crowd-funded book Return to Monster Island on Indiegogo.
Of course, the biggest story in indie comics these days is the multi-million-dollar Rippaverse, currently taking pre-orders for their new book Yaira. If you’re an artist yourself, note that the company (owned by an ancap metal musician from Texas) now has an art contest with big prizes.
Be Good
When Bryan Caplan read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, it inspired him to write up a list of supplementary principles (pointer from Rob Henderson on X). Two favorites:
If you think of a nice, true thing to tell another person, say it. It will probably be the best thing that happens to them all day.
On average, intimidation and deception have low returns and high risks. They work well in rare circumstances, but most people are terrible at identifying those circumstances in advance.
The latter seems a more spergy way of expressing Aesop’s lesson that “honesty is the best policy.” And it reminds me that I once described a dishonest acquaintance as “not smart enough to get away with it.”
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Substacks cited above:
(Greg Lukianoff) (Bryan Caplan) (Unsupervised Learning)