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Now, on to some items of interest from around the interwebs.
Trunk or Treat
I didn’t read this in time for the October post, but at Systematic Hatreds, Paul Musgrave talks about the politics of trunk or treat.
If you’re not familiar, it’s a form of trick-or-treating where people gather their vehicles in a parking lot and kids go from car to car for candy. We took our kids to one this year at the local community center, and it was like trick-or-treat mixed with tailgating: People decorated their cars in various themes and some even set up a grill to make hotdogs and such.
It’s certainly a lot more convenient than going to door to door if you live in a rural area, as we do. But Musgrave argues the practice doesn’t have rural origins, cropping up first as a church-led movement in mid-sized cities and suburbs. He gives several reasons it might have caught on, including safety concerns and the physical geography of modern communities.
Social Networks
Rob Henderson writes that on surveys, people tend to report that others go to more parties, have more friends, and have bigger social networks than themselves. He connects this to something called the friendship paradox: On average, your friends have more friends than you do. This is due to the structure of social networks, where some people are much more highly connected than others. The social butterflies, the lynchpins of community — since they have so many ties, they tend to show up more often in other people’s networks. We are actually more likely to know people who are more highly connected than ourselves.
It reminded me of this TED talk by sociologist Nicholas Christakis. He explains how we can take advantage of this fact to sample people who are closer to the center of social networks. Take a sample of people, ask them to nominate a friend, and then take a sample of the nominated friends: The second sample will, on average, be more central than the first. Since the central people are first to get whatever is spreading through the network — including diseases — having a sample of them gives you early warning that a big wave of illness (or whatever else) is coming.
Institutional Rot
This piece from Lorenzo Warby at Not On Your Team But Always Fair examines how a society’s institutions can degrade over time.
For example, while meritocratic institutions have a lot of advantages, they too get janky with age. One way they decay, writes Warby, is by selecting for capacity over character: Over time, manipulative social climbers learn how to game the system to its detriment.
Another problem, he argues, is that even a talented elite can lose contact with the world outside their institutions and social circle:
The Ottoman and Qing Empires were both much more systematically meritocratic than their European rivals. The disaster of the Battle of Vienna and after, and then the Opium Wars, demonstrated how functional feedback—effective information and incentive structures—mattered more than meritocracy on its own.
Warby says urbanization helps this by replacing the natural environment with a more purely human one (see also David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, on the shift from personalities geared toward producing things to personalities geared toward social manipulation). Bureaucratization has similar effects:
Cities and bureaucracies are both social arrangements prone to generating insular feedbacks. That is, they produce structures whose connection to wider reality is either inhibited or broken, so that internal feedback structures come to dominate. This effect is increased when bureaucratisation increases the number of people who do not bear the costs of their decisions, which increases the salience of self-referential status and social-leverage plays.
He follows up with: “Another area prone to insular feedback is intellectual life, particularly in an academic setting. There, reality tests are often thin or absent.”
Me: [Tugs collar, sweats.]
Another gem:
The expansion of the non-profit advocacy economy also adds to the undermining of effective feedback. Resources flow into bodies that are judged on intent and not outcomes: a poor feedback structure.
Interesting throughout.
Open AI Drama
For those who didn’t follow it, last weekend there was a lot of drama at OpenAI, the company that gave us ChatGPT and the DALLE image generator. Zvi Mowschowitz at Don’t Worry About the Vase summarizes:
The super short version is that [CEO Sam] Altman gave the board various reasons to fire him that we know about and was seeking to consolidate power, the board fired Altman essentially without explanation, Altman rallied investors especially Microsoft and 97% of the employees, he threatened to have everyone leave and join Microsoft, and the board agreed to resign in favor of a new negotiated board and bring Altman back.
Here are his posts summarizing the first leg of the drama, the conflict of visions that led to the battle, and the return of Altman as CEO.
It seems like part of the conflict was a board member being concerned about the dangers of AI and that the organization wasn’t doing enough to safeguard against them. Unlike Mowschowitz, my Twitter feed parses this as an AI Doomer panicked and tried to pull the plug with a coup that fell flat on its face.
With the coup plotters out and Altman back in, it sure does look like a failure from the outside. Eigenrobot traces it to a lack of realism among rationalist types more used to abstract rules rather than real power relations:
Wanna New Drug
Beware hype, but it looks like there’s been some progress toward a medication that can extend lifespan in dogs. A company called Loyal, dedicated to finding such a life-extending drug, says in their press release:
From our data, the FDA believes LOY-001 is likely to be effective for large dog lifespan extension in the real world. Once we satisfactorily complete safety and manufacturing sections and other requirements, vets will be able to prescribe LOY-001 to extend the lifespan of large dogs while we complete the confirmatory pivotal lifespan extension study in parallel.
….LOY-001 extends lifespan in part by reducing IGF-1 to levels seen in smaller-breed dogs. The IGF-1 axis is one of the most well-studied longevity pathways. In model organisms from c.elegans to mice, reducing IGF-1 extends healthy lifespan, and increasing IGF-1 shortens healthy lifespan. In humans, certain centenarians have been shown to have genetically lower levels of IGF-1.
We designed LOY–01 as a long-acting injectable administered by your veterinarian every three to six months. In parallel, through our recently-announced partnership with Crinetics, we’re also developing LOY-003, a daily pill to address this same IGF-1 over-expression.
They expect the drug to lead to a “large” lifespan extension, though I don’t know what they consider large in this context. Good news for dog lovers, but also big in that if such a thing works in dogs, maybe one can engineer a similar drug for humans.
Speaking of new wonder drugs, Saloni Dattani at Scientific Discovery reports on a promising new drug for treating brain cancers currently going through approval by the FDA. As she writes:
Why am I excited about this? Although brain cancers still remain serious, this is a major step forward in our understanding and ability to treat them. The drug is now under fast-track for approval by the FDA. Another point that’s hopeful is that it’s one of several new drugs. The reason behind this is that scientists know what makes it work and why – it wasn’t discovered by chance, but through ‘rational drug design’.
Coming on the heels of things like a malaria vaccine (which Dattani blogs about here), we might be in for a new age of innovation in medicine. See also the new CRISPR treatment for sickle-cell anemia that has been approved for marketing in the UK.
The Wild West
This week I’m covering New Mexico’s Lincoln County War in my collective violence class. By coincidence, Stuart Humphryes (aka BabelColour), who restores and colorizes old photographs, announced on Twitter that his new pictures of Lincoln County combatant Billy the Kid appeared in Wild West Magazine.
Hes’ a bit uglier than the actors who’ve played him on screen.
Sooner or later my collective violence podcast will get to Lincoln County. When it does, I’ll have a lot of others to compete with. For instance, here’s a detailed and somewhat humorous account of the war from The Wild West Extravaganza on Youtube.
If you’re looking for an account of the famous conflict between the Earps and the Cowboys in Tombstone, Arizona I recommend John Boessenecker’s book Ride the Devil’s Herd. Among other interesting details, he emphasizes the culture of personal honor that made frontier juries unwilling to convict men for murder if they were at all provoked.
Another thing that stands out in that book is the social fluidity of frontier America. A person could be a wanted criminal in one town, a respected lawman in the next, and end up running a business in a third. For instance, in the film Tombstone, Kurt Russel’s Wyatt Earp, explaining his and his wife’s previous life, says: “She was no angel and neither was I.” It’s an oblique reference to famous lawman having been a pimp in Peoria, and his wife a whore. As Captain Mal said, the wheel never stops turning.
Campbell in Areo
Editor-in-chief Iona Italia recently announced that her publication Areo is sadly closing up shop. This led sociologist Bradley Campbell to share a list of his several publications in Areo. I don’t know how long they’ll be up, but for now you can still read them:
“Genocide and Evil.” People will often point out that genocide perpetrators refer to their targets as vermin, but Campbell notes that exterminators rarely try to make vermin suffer. Yet for all their German efficiency, the Nazi regime devoted resources to torture Jews and break their spirit before killing them. Genocide perpetrators see their victims as something worse than vermin: as evil humans.
“Conservative Victimhood.” In our work on victimhood culture, we argued that while its epicenter was the campus left, conservative opponents of campus activists often act in similar ways. Here he discusses some examples of righties playing the victim card.
“Human Response to Contagion: Persecution, Blame, Compassion.” Writing fairly early on in the covid pandemic, he considers some ways that such upheavals shape human conflict. The Black Death led people to blame and massacre Jews. What enemies did covid create?
Regarding the University of Austin, founded as a free-speech alternative to other universities, he welcomes the attempt but is skeptical that it’ll actually work: “Two Cheers for University of Austin.”
Links to Links
If you like this sort of post, check out Links for August; Links for September, and Links for October.
Thanks for reading!
Substacks cited above:
(Systematic Hatreds); (Zvi Mowshowitz); (Saloni Dattani); (Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby);