erotesis

[erotesis]

Our Kids

by Robert Putnam

[Section 2 of 2]

Putnam suggests a bunch of solutions, and in addition points out that there’s a high chance that these solutions will, in the long run, pay for themselves:

The cost of underinvesting in poor kids are even greater in an era of globalization, because of a ‘skills mismatch’ between what low-skilled workers can do and what employers need in an age of rapid technological change. This leads . . . to the ‘decreased utilization of the less educated’ and slower economic growth.

In other words, we are “keeping disadvantaged potential workers from developing their full capacity”.

Child poverty costs the US economy about $500 billion per year, or the equivalent of nearly 4% of gross domestic product (GDP). This is attributable to three main factors: (1) reduced productvity and economic output, (2) increased likelihood to turn to crime, (3) increased health expenditures

Furthermore, the opportunity gap undermines political equality and thus democratic legitimacy:

College educated youth have been two to three times more likely to vote than their peers who have not gotten beyond high school. Kids from less educated homes are less knowledgeable about and interested in politics, less likely to trust the government, less likely to vote, and much less likely to be civically engaged in local affairs than their counterparts from college-educated homes. Still worse, this gap is increasingly intergenerationl, because poor kids are not just less exposed to politics, they also tend to inherit their parents’ political apathy. . . . As class differences in political voice are amplified, the political system becomes less representative of Americans’ interests and values, in turn exacerbating political alienation.

Suggested policy changes  [I’m too lazy to make this neat]

- Simply providing relatively small amounts of additional cash to poor families can improve the achievements of their kids and put the children on a path toward higher lifetime income, especially if the added funds are concentrated on the child’s earliest years. One explanation is that reduced family stress is beneficial to early brain development. An increase in family income by $3,000 during a child’s first five years of life is associated with an improvement on academic achievement tests equivalent to nearly 20% higher income later in life. Government cash transfers: expand the Earned Income Tax Credit program (but this only helps the working poor, so it doesnt reach the poorest of poor kids). Expand the child tax credit, but make the credit fully refundble, so that it can benefit children in families too poor to owe any federal taxes at all. Protect long-standing anti-poverty programs, like food stamps, housing vouchers, and child care support. These have not been enough to halt the widening opportunity gap, but in the aggregate they are an important part of the safety net

- Regular home visits by trained professionals to help families cope with health problems, child-rearing stress, and other family issues. Examples in America: Nurse-Family Partnership, Child First. Examples in the UK: Troubled Families initiative.

- Publicly subsidized mixed-income housing. Poor kids moved to better neighborhoods and better schools tend to do better. One natural experiment in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, for example, showed that poor kids whose families were moved into a more affluent area achieved higher test scores and went further in school than comparable kids who were not moved, in part because their parents became more supportive of the kids’ education. For example, 96% of the kids whose parents moved into the new neighborhood graduated from high school, compared to 29% of the kids in the control group.

- 9 out of 10 Americans support birth control. And yet there is a large discrepancy between what people say and what they actually do.  By some estimates, 60% of all births to young, single women are unplanned. Subsidize the use of LARCS (long-acting reversible contraceptives) -- 20 times more effective than the pill at reducing the incidence of unplanned pregnancies among contraception-using women, but we don’t know how popular this will actually be.

- “Community schools”: partnership between the school and other community resources; integrated focus on academics, health and social services, and community deveopment. Typically, community shools include youth actitivities at all hours and programs to engage parents and community members actively in the educational process, as well as to link children and families to social service and health agencies. “[In the UK] evaluations have been very positive, especially for kids and communities facing difficulties, even though the program is expensive”. (in the UK these are referred to as full service/extended schools?)

-  Apprenticeship and vocational training - alternative routes to success?

-  Community colleges need more funding, improved student support services, better connections to local job markets and to four-year institutions, and a lower dropout rate.

- Reduce incarceration: Reduce sentencing for nonviolent crime and use greater discretion in parole administration. Redirect current funding for prisons to funding for job training, drug and medical treatment, and other rehabilitation services. Rehabilitate ex-prisoners, keeping in mind that the prison population is comprised of young men with very little education, poor job records, and frequent histories of mental illness and substance abuse.

[erotesis]

Our Kids

by Robert Putnam

[Section 1 of 2]

Putnam’s central thesis is a familiar one: that children from poor backgrounds suffer from an overwhelming set of disadvantages which inhibit social mobility. He identifies six major factors which contribute to the class divide; I’ve only listed three of them here, ie the ones which I thought had some interesting analysis. In section 2, I detail some of Putnam’s public policy suggestions.

[A1] Schools

Schools as causes of class divergence vs sites of class divergence (i.e. schools are merely the setting in which class divergence takes place)

Schools themselves aren’t creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and, he reports, does not grow appreciably as children progress through school. Reviewing the evidence, James Heckman writes, ‘The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age eighteen-- powerul predictors of who goes to college and who does not-- are mostly present at age six, when children enter school. Schooling--unequal as it is in America-- plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.’

(See here for the James Heckman source)

In fact, Putnam makes the argument that the socioeconomic composition of a child’s classroom is number one factor in determining a child’s performance, and growing segregation of neighborhoods means that there is a negative feedback loop in poor schools because the entire class is predominantly poor:

The net result in a school with lots of kids from well-educated, academically ambitious homes is that peer pressure . . . amplifies the collective effects of achievement motivation from their homes. Conversely, in a [school with predominatly poor kids] the peer environment dampens whatever academic aspirations any individual student might bring from home. . . . Composition of the student body is more highly related to achievement, independent of the student’s own social background, than is any other school factor . . . This generalization applies not only to test scores, graduation, college enrollment, and so forth, but also to adult incomes, even holding constant the effects of a child’s own family background and test scores. . . . In a few studies, in fact, the correlation of a student’s high school learning with her classmates’ family backgrounds is greater than the correlation with her own family background. . . . The American public school today is as a kind of echo chamber in which the advantages of disadvantages that children bring with them to school have effects on other kids. The growing class segregation of our neighborhoods and thus of our schools means that middle-class kids . . . hear mostly encouraging and beneficial echoes at school, whereas lower-class kids . . . hear mostly discouraging and harmful echoes.” 

[A2] College completion rates

Needless to say, if you’re poor, community college is where you’d go for higher education, especially because its flexible, and the standards for entry are, frankly, lower. However,

Enrolling in college is one thing, but getting a degree is quite another . . . This matters hugely, because completing college is much more important than entering college . . . When students enter a community college, 81 percent say they plan to get a four-year degree, but only 12 percent actually do.

In fact, barely 10% of students in the lowest socioeconomic quintile graduate from college-- whereas more than half of students from the highest quintile do.

[B] Family

One of the arguments Putnam makes is that among the poor, children are often raised in single-parent families with a lack of resources, whereas those who are well-off tend to see children as a long-term objective, to be planned and saved for.

Those from poor communities tend to start having sex earlier, they use contraceptives less often, and get fewer abortions. As a result, more unintended pregnancies. Children as unplanned vs a long-planned objective. = Resources available for raising those kids.

Furthermore, unlike in the past, shotgun marriages following premarital pregnancies are no longer common, and this has contributed to the rise in single parent families. (In comparison, most baby boomers were raised by both biological parents due to such shotgun marriages). (In contrast, the upper classes continued on in a sort of neo-traditional family structure, with both parents working and in fact delaying kids. In fact, as a result, divorce rates have fallen among the upper third of American society.)

Some stats:

College educated mothers: first birth at around 30 years of age, among those of lower educational status, 19. 

The proportion of extramarial births among mothers with a college-education hovers around 10%. However, among mothers with only a high school education, that number has soared to over 50%. For high school educated black women, the situation is even worse-- 80%.

If you’re a child under the age of 7 and your parents only had a high school education, then there is a 65% chance that you’d be living a single parent household. In America, the problem has been exacerbated by the War on Drugs, “three strikes” sentencing, and the sharp increase in incaceration, all of which have contributed to the rise of single parent families.

Crucially,

Children who grow up without their biological father perform worse on standardized tests, earn lower grades, and stay in school for fewer years, regardless of race and class. They are also more likely to demonstrate behavioral problems such as shyness, aggression, and psychological problems such as increased anxiety and depression. Children who spend part of their childhood in a single-mother home are also more likely to . . . become young, single parents, re-creating the cycle.

[C] Communities

In sum, nearly two thirds of affluent kids have some mentoring beyond their exended family, while nearly two thirds of poor kids do not. Mentoring contributes significantly not just to the opportunity gap, but also to the savvy gap. One of most striking differences between rich and poor kids is “the stark contrast in their capacity to understand the institutions that stand astride the paths to opporunity and to make those institutions work for them . . . Kids from more privileged backgrounds and savvier about how to climb the ladder of opportunity . . . [disadvantaged children] are baffled about school practices, two- and four- year colleges, financial affairs, occupational opportunites, and even programs (both public and private) specifically designed to assist kids like them, such as educational loans. Their less educated parents’ limited skills and experience explain part of this, but equaly important is the fact that these kids lack the dense networks of informal mentors that surround their upper-class counterparts. . . . Well-developed social networks in a communiy provide an important resource for [children]. Conversely, many careful studies have documented that poor neighborhoods foster behavioral problems, poor mental and physical health, deliquency, crime, violence, and risky sexual behavior. . . . Another important channel between neighborhood poverty and bad child outcomes is neighborhood crime, drugs, and violence . . . Poor neighborhoods shape parenting in ways that are not good for children . . . Parents in poor neighborhoods are more likely to experience depression, stress, and illnes, which in turn ‘are associated with less warm and consistent parenting’ . . . Parents in high-resource neighborhoods are mroe likely to nurture their children’s talents by enrolling them in structured opportunities, while parents in low-resource communities are more likely to keep their children at home for safety’s sake.  

[erotesis]

Neurotribes

by Steve Silberman

[warning: slightly incoherent bc pissed off]

A book that’s not just poorly written, but flat-out wrong.

Let’s start with its central thesis: first, that being autistic grants people special abilities beyond the realm of ordinary human beings, and second, that these abilities are contingent on the existence of concomitant “defects”. Both of these claims are utter ridiculous.

Consider this passage, emphasis mine:

Asperger proposed a radical way of thinking about cognitive disabilities . . . “The good and bad in a person, their potential for success or failure, their aptitudes and deficits-- they are mutually conditional, arising from the same source,” he said. “Our therapeutic goal must be to teach the person how to bear the difficulties. Not to eliminate them for him, but to train the person to cope with special challenges with special strategies.”

One recurring theme throughout the book is that “autistic intelligence” and “autistic defects” supposedly go hand in hand. BUT:

1. This makes the mistake of conflating Asperger’s with autism in general-- and it is a mistake which is repeated over and over again to support some very dubious conclusions. The vast majority of those who suffer from autism will never achieve the same successes as the high-functioning, Aspeger’s minority. This in itself should call into question the link between “autistic intelligence” and autism.

2. In fact, there’s another very sneaky, very insidious conclusion that’s often gets snuck in here: that ‘autistic intelligence’ is highly prevalent among people with Aspergers’, which thereby lends credence to the ‘autistic intelligence’ theory. But this is true only by virtue of definition! What’s really happening is that ‘autistic intelligence’ occurs in SOME MINORITY of people with autism, and then we choose to call this group Aspergers’. The only correct conclusion to draw is that ‘autistic intelligence’ is the exception among autistic people, not the norm.

3. If it’s possible for them to retain their ‘autistic inteligence’ while removing aspects of it that make them unhappy, shouldn’t we choose to do so?

4. Even if you argue that some people are happy with their autism, shouldn’t others at least be granted a choice whether or not to continue living in this way?

Right, but it gets worse.

It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. For success, the necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to rethink a subject with originality so as to create new untrodden ways.

This just left me absolutely speechless. Like. What. The. Fuck. You cant just fucking claim out of nowhere that anyone who is remotely successful or original in any way is fucking ‘autistic’ and therefore by definition autism = good. That’s bloody fucking lazy. And untrue.

And by the time we get to this point, you can see a theme developing (emphasis mine):

[Temple Grandin] pointed out that all three of her siblings think visually and that one of her sisters, a gifted interior designer, is dyslexic. Her emphasis on the virtues of atypical minds marked a significant departure from the views of most psychologists, who framed the areas of strength in their patients’ cognitive profiles as mere ‘splinter skills’ -- islands of conserved ability in seas of general incompetence. Instead, Grandin proposed that people with autism, dyslexia, and other cognitive differences could make contributions to society that so-called normal people are incapable of making.

1. There still isn’t a shred of proof that ability (or even creativity) is contingent on mental disorders. There’s not a single shred of evidence to suggest that autism leads to creativity or intelligence, and there’s nothing at all to suggest that autistic intelligence is in any way different from regular people’s intelligence.

2. Even IF intelligence correlated with autism, then surely it should be the CHOICE of neuro atypicals to decide whether or not they want to remove the shitty portions!!!!!!

3. Like seriously. THE VERY FACT that two of your siblings have those abilities without mental disorder IS PRIMA FACIE proof by counter example that creative ability is not contingent on autism!!!! And bringing dyslexia into this is even more fucking ridiuclous like fufk you seriously

4. Now of course you could point out that , ‘oh the point being made is that neurodiverse people still have the ability to succeed.’ ok, i accept that. BUT THAT REALLY ISNT THE POINT THAT THE AUTHOR, OR GRANDIN, IS MAKING!!!!!!!!11111

The closest the author comes to providing evidence for his “autistic intelligence” hypothesis is in this paragraph:

Our DNA tells a different story. In recent years, researchers have determined that most cases of autism are not rooted in rare de novo mutations but in very old genes that are shared widely in the general population while being concentrated more in certain families than others. Whatever autism is, it is not a unique product of modern civilization. It is a strange gift from our deep past, passed down through millions of years of evolution. Neurodiversity advocates propose that instead of viewing this gift as an error of nature . .. society should regard it as a valuable part of humanity’s genetic legacy.

Which really doesn’t prove anything at all!!!! Furthermore, it once again conflates high functioning autistic people with non-functional ones. And once again, if you can have the good parts without the bad parts, then you should leap at the chance + at least give people that choice.

Instead, the author advocates AGAINST an autism cure, claiming that we spend

too much money in autism cure research, not enough in supporting people currently with autism.

That may be true, but that doesn’t give you the right to make the shitty as fuck argument that an autism cure is pointlesws! Like wtf!!!!! You self-centered asshole.

“One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems instead of diagnostic labels like dyslexia and ADHD . . . Just because a computer is not running Windows doesn’t mean that it’s broken. Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs. By autistic standards, the ‘normal’ brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space.

No. No no no no no.

1. I fucking hate analogies.

2. Okay look. Chances are, you’re not running a different operating system. You’re running the same system with a bunch of fucking different features (maybe even viruses), but it’s still fundamentally the same system. And actually, even if it were a different system, if the system is inferior then yes, we’re going to consider it broken. And if the system is strictly inferior but has some interesting features, we port those features into the superior system, rather than claiming the inferior system is acceptable. Jesus christ. I fucking hate analogies.

3. If we go back to ‘intellignece is not contingent on your shitty condition’ then this whole analogy falls anyway, because ipso facto it wont be a different operating system.

4. What the fuck r ‘autistic’ standards’, we’ve established its a spectrum, do you mean ‘aspergers standards’? Let me take the most successful and high performing ‘neurotypicals’ and compare it to the most successful and high performing ‘autistics’. Ooops! ALL DIFFERENCE DISAPPEARS!!!!! Fuc you bitches.

In conclusion, this book was stupid and it sucked.

(Further, personal, unsubstantiated theory: it’s entirely possible that out of the minority of people with autism who have intelligence, such ‘autistic intelligence’ is the only mode of intelligence available to them. Another possible explanation: there is a level of G. G can translate into any form of intelligence based on a person’s choosing. Autistic people have other pathways closed off to them, and could only express it in terms of engineering/mathematical style intelligence, and so congregate in that area)

There are, admittedly, two passage I liked in this book:

Kramer’s serene mood was shaken upon arriving in New York City, where a son of a German colleague accompanied him for his first ride on the subway. Seeing the other passengers clenching their teeth and swiveling their jaws in rotary motion, Kanner ventured that the poor devils had been afflicted by a tic disorder in the wake of the global epidemic of ecephalitis lethargica which began in 1918. His young host gently informed him that their fellow straphangers were in the grips of another plague entirely: the craze for Wrigley’s gum, which had not yet caught on in Berlin. Kanner was mortified by his greenhorn error. ‘For many years to come,’ he confessed, ‘I was embarrassed at the thought of my diagnostic blunder.’

There’s probably a moral in there somewhere.

You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. Your repetitive behavior does not annoy anyone when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in solitude. That’s why teenagers with Asperger’s are reluctant to leave their bedroom for school: the signs of autism, and the degrees of stress and withdrawal, are proportional to the number of people present.

I hadn’t seen it that way before.

And re: the explosion in autism diagnoses:

“Before the 1970s, most kids with learning disabilities were admitted to special schools, vocational training centers, and institutions without being referred to a specialist for a specific diagnosis. By the 1990s, however, referral to a specialist before applying for services had become the rule rather than the exception.

. . .

a set of ammendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act . . . In 1991, autism was included in IDEA as its own category of disability for the first time, which enabled children with a diagnosis to gain access to individualized instruction and other services. The efects of this change rippled outward nationally, motivating clinicians to apply the diagnosis more readily and increasing awareness of autism among schoolteachers and staff.

. . .

Simultaneously, the first standardized clinical instruments to screen for autism became widely available. Before the 1980s, autistic kids were generally considered ‘untestable’ in America. Psychiatrists diagnosed them on the basis of whatever concepts were in vogue in their school of psychiatry. The same child may be diagnosed with early infantile autism by one clinician, by another with schizophrenia, and by a third with minimal brain damage. [And children who were black or poor were likely to end up classified as mentally retarded]

Note also that the diagnostic criteria was continually revised in such a way as to lower the requirements for an autism diagnosis.

[erotesis]

Misbehaving

by Richard Thaler

One thing that constantly catches me off guard is that the adage “people are stupid” includes people who work in professions which I respect.

Anyway, this book more or less purports to show that “people are stupid”. The only thing I took away from it is that “economists are stupid”. And that’s AFTER I’ve taken into account SSC’s advice to “read history backwards”.

A list, not exhaustive, of questions I had while reading Thaler’s book, and which he failed to address:

1. WRT cooperation games: Isn’t our behavior tailored towards the long run, so that we can reap gains within an iterated scenario? Or in SSC’s words, “negotiate [...] a timeless platonic construct”. The possible implications of this: [A] Punishing in the ultimatum game is rational and unsurprising. [B] Being nice in the dictator game is rational and unsurprising. [C] Cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma is rational and unsurprising. [D] Unprovoked defection in the prisoner’s dilemma is irrational.

All of which, of course, flies in the face of Thaler’s theory. Choosing to punish or cooperate within the game might be understood sociologically as an extension of our ingrained instinct to build a cooperative society. (This is not irrational. Cooperative societies succeed, and the benefits of that success accrue to all.) At the risk of sounding unsophisticated: “iterated scenario” potentially refers not to a single game session, but to our lives as a whole. It would be inconsistent to claim that it is rational to cooperate in real life and irrational to cooperate in a game instance, insofar as you view the game instance also as an instance of real life.

2. Isn’t that also why we don’t gouge? Because we are simply profit maximizing in the long term, which bloody obviously makes sense. What’s so irrational about that?

3. Isn’t it the case that insofar as human beings have plans, they have confidence that those plans will succeed? We are risk-averse because we are satisfied with our current trajectory. That’s precisely why the gamblers who put their entire life on the line, don’t have very much of a life in the first place. People pushed to the brink are willing to risk everything because they don’t see any other way for them to achieve satisfaction. Our terminal value isn’t money. It’s happiness.

4. Let me be clearer. Keeping in line with our current life trajectory gives brings happiness. Outperforming that trajectory also gives happiness. But failing to meet that trajectory gives rise to profound dissatisfaction.  And insofar as we are satisfied with our current trajectory, doesn't that also explain the house money effect? Mentally, the extra money has not been completely assimilated into your life trajectory, because you have not committed to doing anything with that money. This makes you less risk averse. One might argue that it’s more rational to instantly recalibrate your life trajectory to include that house money, then re-evaluate whether you can take greater risks with it, or should stick with the same risk tolerance-- but the amount of effort needed to calculate that shit is often more than whatever you gain from calculating it in the first place. As opposed to the guaranteed utility gained from the happiness of punting with it.  

5. In fact, insofar as we are risk minimizers, doesn’t that explain the mismatch between “there’s a virus in the room, how much would you pay for an antidote”, and “how much would I need to pay you for you to walk through a room containing that virus”? In scenario 1, you start off as infected with a chance of dying, and you’re paying money to minimize risk. In scenario 2, you can minimize risk, simply by not taking part! Once again, satisfaction/happiness is a terminal value, money is not. And as far as I can tell, death is a pretty big obstacle in the way of happiness. (EDIT: I’ve changed my mind on this one. Thaler seems to be correct here. Cf the question posed in the beginning of this post.)

6. Not a question, but probably the only result I was surprised by was the experiment with the store-bought pens, because it’s effectively a strong-form endowment effect. I don’t have an explanation for that. It really DOES seem pretty stupid. If I’ve fallen prey to it before, I haven’t noticed, but that’s precisely the point, isn’t it?

7. In the Asian disease problem, I realized something very peculiar. In the original survey, option B uses the phrase “nobody” or “no people”. I find that I can completely change my intuitions about the question simply by changing that phrase to “600 people”. Is this a significant flaw? Possibly. It seems crazy that Kahneman’s claims of “irrational behavior” could potentially be attributed entirely to linguistic sleight of hand, but I’ve seen stranger things. On the other hand, this experiment has probably been replicated with better design. Furthermore, even if I’m right, it doesn’t disprove the existence of irrationality, just proposes that it takes a different form. (In fact, it’ll technically still be irrationality arising from framing, just of a linguistic variety.)

8. WRT most of these trick questions: Would the result change if we gave people more time to think about it? By which I mean, what if we put them in a completely empty room except for one table, and a single piece of paper with just that question on it, and made them sit there for an HOUR? (I suspect we are entering the field of psych here, not “behavioral economics”.) I mean, take the “which cards must you turn over to check whether each card with a vowel on one face, has an even number on the other face” question. I spent ten minutes thinking about it, during which time I changed my answer twice. If you’d asked me for my instinctive twenty second answer, I’d have gotten it wrong.

9. Not a question, but some fool made the following argument: “You wouldn’t take one bet, but you’d take one hundred bets. However, that means that if you’d already taken 99 bets, you wouldn’t take the last, hundredth bet, so you’d only take 99 bets. And that means if you’d already taken 98 bets, [. . .]. Hence, if you wouldn’t take the first bet, you shouldn’t take one hundred bets.” What a fucking fool. It’s a trick of framing. If you fell for this one, you probably think Zeno’s Paradoxes are the greatest thing in the world.

10. Thaler claims that the managers who wouldn’t take the “one risky project” make that decision because they’re afraid that the “failure will be pinned on them”. That explanation is woefully incomplete. He failed to ask if one individual manager would be willing to take 21 risky projects, and to only have his performance reviewed after the completion of all 21 projects. He failed to ask this because he fell for the hundred bets trick above. People are unwilling to take risks even when the odds are in the favor, because those risks aren’t part of an iterated scenario! Why is this so hard to understand!

11. Thaler claims that traditional taxi drivers don’t drive more on “surge” days even though the earnings per hour are better, and this is proof of irrationality. No, it’s proof of failure of information. Without hard data from a centralized source, taxi drivers cannot distinguish whether a productive day is the result of  a surge, or the result of luck. VERSUS uber, where it’s explicit.

12. TBH once you realize that money is merely an instrumental tool with which to gain utility, doesn’t the S curve he draws at the start of the book make perfect sense? Why is this such a big deal?

13. Lastly, this whole, “let’s apply behavioural economics to other fields” thing. That’s like bloody calling criminology “applying behavioural economics to law”. Or calling experimental philosophy “applying behavioural economics to philosophy”. People have realized for AGES that the real world doesn't match up to theory. Economics was late to the party, and now Thaler wants to pretend like it invented the whole thing? In fact, I actually think behavioural economics isn’t an economics field at all. It falls more on the psychology side of things-- because from what I understand, what’s going on is really best described as “behavioural studies, which happen to show that the real world contradicts economic models”. “Economic psychology” might be a better term. (On the other hand, I also think economic psychology is the most useful/insightful area of psychology, mostly because psychology as a whole is trash.)

-

That last point is subject to review. To borrow from Sontag, I talk/write to find out what I think. In other words, just because I’ve said something, doesn’t mean that that’s what “I” “really” “think”.

If I had to guess, I’d say maybe half of the points I raised are valid/relevant to the discussion, and deserve an answer. The other half are probably really fucking dumb with a really obvious answer which I really should have thought of.

[erotesis]

Command and Control

by Schlosser

Section 2 of 2. Section 1 is here; it deals more with the main portion of Schlosser’s book, ie safety of nuclear weapons per se. This is miscalleny.

1: Cold War politics

Interesting primarily because I took junior college history-- more fodder for discussion over “when did the Cold War end”:

Only in 1991 did President George H. W. Bush [announce] . . . that the United States would unilaterally make large reductions in nuclear deployments. It would remove all of the Army’s tactical weapons from Europe, destroy half of the Navy’s tactical weapons and place the rest in storage, take 450 Minuteman II missiles off alert-- and end the Strategic Air Command’s ground alert. For the first time since 1957, SAC’s bombers wouldn’t be parked near runways, loaded with fuel and hydrogen bombs, as their crews waited for the sound of Klaxons.

Also, up until the 1980s, America’s default plan in the event of a nuclear attack was the “Single Integrated Operational Plan” (SIOP), which would best be described as overkill. The idea was as follows: within 15 minutes of receiving the signal that a nuclear strike was imminent, the American president (and his next in commands) would literally only be able to choose between two options: either launch the SIOP, or do nothing at all. Upon being activated, the SIOP could not be halted or slowed, or cancelled. Every nuclear weapon available would be launched over a period of days, targeting over a thousand sites. Important enemy buildings would be struck by up to 50 nuclear missiles. Schlosser writes that

within 3 days of the initial attack, the full force of the SIOP would kill about 54% of the Soviet Union’s population and about 16% of China’s population-- roughly 220 million people. Millions more would subsequently die from burns, radiation poisoning, exposure

And up to the 1980s, that was America’s only plan! It certainly didn’t help that that were numerous false alarms. One example was when

The BMEWS [Ballistic Missile Early Warning System] indicated that the Soviets had launched an all-out missile attack against North America. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were on the phone, awaiting confirmation. The United States had only minutes to respond.

Imagine the panic! America could have started an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, if not for one enterprising officer, who had the good sense to ask, “Wait a moment. Where’s Khruschev today?” Thankfully, they realized that

Khruschev was in New York, at the UN. The Soviet Union was unlikely to launch an attack that would kill the first secretary of its Communist Party. Turns out the BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

Another hero to commemorate on Stanislav Petrov day.

One other interesting thing I noticed (and which I didn’t know about before) was that pre-Vietnam War, it was the Democrats who advocated strongly for the expansion of military powers and the military budget-- a position which today is strongly favored by Republicans and detested by Democrats:

Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. [This despite the fact that America had more nuclear weapons than the Soviets at that time, by an order of magnitude.] The Democratic Advisory Council said that President Eisenhower had “weakened the free world” and “starved the national defence” . . . another democratic senator, John F Kennedy, later accused Eisenhower of putting “fiscal security ahead of national security” and made the existence of a “missile gap” one of the central issues of his presidential campaign.

In fact, it was Eisenhower who coined the term “military industrial complex”, accusing Democrats of seeking new weapons regardless of the actual need.

2: World War II - Firebombing of Japan

Further notes on a thesis which has been around for some time-- the firebombing of Japan caused far more damage and was arguably just as cruel as the nuclear bomb. America didn’t just destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

At first, the United States conducted only precision bombing raids on Japan . . . On the night of March 9, 1945, the Army Air Forces tried a new approach. American planes struck Tokyo with two thousand tons of bombs containing napalm and jellied gasoline. Although a major industrial area was destroyed, the real targets were block after block of Japanese buildings made of wood, paper, and bamboo. Within hours the firestorm consumed one quarter of the city. It killed about one hundred thousand civilians, and left about a million homeless. This was truly, in the words of historian John W. Dower, “war without mercy”.

The firebombing of Tokyo . . . was soon followed by the firebombing of Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama. By the middle of June, the United States had laid waste to Japan’s six leading industrial cities. Then American planes launched attacks on dozens of smaller cities . . . About one quarter of Osaka was destroyed by fire, one third of Kawasaki, more than half of Kobe. Toyama . . . was hit the hardest. After a nighttime raid by B-29 bombers, the proportion of Toyama still standing was an estimated 0.5 percent.

Emphasis mine.

3: So how bad are nuclear bombs, really?

Well, when one was dropped on the island of Elugelab (you can wiki it), the island

became dust and ash, pulled upward to form a mushroom cloud that rose about twenty-seven miles into the sky . . . ll that remained of Elugelab was a circular crater filled with seawater, more than a mile in diameter and "fifteen stories deep". The blast yielded 10.4 megatons of explosive energy, 650 times the energy that leveled central Hiroshima.

and that was in 1952!

Furthermore,

Fallout from a hydrogen bomb was likely to kill far more people than the initial blast . . . if a similar 15-megaton groundburst hit the nation’s capital, everyone in Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia could receive a fatal dose of radioactivity. Residents of New York City might be exposed to [enough radiation] to kill more than half of them. People as far north as Boston or even the Canadian border might suffer from radiation poisoning.

4: Cold War impact on technology

So it’s been beaten to death: preparation for war gave us stuff like the computer and the world wide web, yada yada. If you ever need a clear explanation of how, just copy this:

The size of the guidance computer had been unimportant in radio-controlled systems, because it was located at the ground station. But size mattered a great deal once the computer was going to be carried by the missile. The Air Force’s demand for self-contained intertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry. By 1962 all of the integrated circuits in the United States were being purchased by the Department of Defense, mainly for use in missile guidance systems.

So computers got smaller. Also, the WWW:

After commissioning a number of studies on command and control, McNamara approved the creation of a new entity, the World Wide Military Command and Control system. It would combine the radars, sensors, computers, and communications networks of the different armed systems into a single integrated system . . . Baran, a researcher at RAND, came up with an ingenious method of harmonizing [the] digital communications network . . . [He] proposed a distributed network with hundreds or thousands of separate nodes connected through multiple paths. Messages would be broken into smaller “blocks”, sent along the first available path, and reassembled at heir final destination. If nodes were out of service or destroyed, the network would automatically adapt and send the data along a route that was still intact. Baran’s work later provided the conceptual basis for the top secret comunications networks at the Pentagon, as well as their civilian offshoot, the Internet.

5: Finally, something cool

Antiterrorism research a Sandia led to the development of new perimeter technologies, such as motion detectors, and innovative methods for stopping intruders who somehow managed to get past the door of an igloo. Nozzles on the walls would rapidly fill the place with sticky foam, trapping intruders and preventing the removal of nuclear weapons. The foam looked ridiculous . . . but it worked.

This sounds like the shit that some really shitty DC comics writer would come up with. I love it.

[erotesis]

Command and Control

by Schlosser

(Section 1 of 2. This section deals with the inadequacy of safety mechanisms within nuclear bombs/the lack of safety measures adopted when handling said bombs, both during/after thee Cold War. Section 2 deals with everything else.)

I hate that the title of this book sounds like the adaptation of some shitty RTS video game.

It’s about nuclear security, mostly. The central thesis is that during the Cold War, America (and probably the Soviet Union, but their documents are still classified) was really careless wrt the safety aspect of nuclear weapons, and it’s a huge miracle that we got out of the Cold War without an accidental nuclear detonation occurring within America itself.

Needless to say, even though there were those who recognized the problem, it wasn’t politically expedient to invest time/money into new and improved security measures, and so for a long time they weren’t implemented. 

1: Nuclear weapons: Unsafe during the Cold War

The most startling fact: the number of times a nuclear bomb was mishandled, or accidentally dropped from a plane. In those situations, we got lucky numerous times, in that [1] the bomb didn’t go off at all, or [2] the explosives surrounding the nuclear payload went off, but thankfully, it wasn’t enough to trigger a nuclear reaction. However, in those situations, the weapons occasionally still did a significant amount of damage. In fact,

A study of abnormal environments commissioned by Sandia soon found that at least 1,200 nuclear weapons had been involved in “significant” incidents and accidents between 1950 and March 1968. The armed services had done a poor job of reporting nuclear weapons accidents until 1959-- and subsequently reported about 130 a year. 

Luke Muehlhauser’s blog contains further passages from Schlosser’s book which offer anecdotal accounts of such accidents. In one incident, a B-52 bomber carrying two Mark 39 Hydrogen bombs, each with a yield of 4 megatons, suddenly loses control in mid-air and goes into an uncontrolled spin:

As the aircraft spun downward, centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit. The lanyard was attached to the bomb release mechanism. When the lanyard was pulled, the locking pins were removed from one of the bombs. The Mark 39 fell from the plane. The arming wires were yanked out, and the bomb responded as though it had been deliberately released by the crew above a target. The pulse generator activated the low-voltage thermal batteries . . . The barometric switches closed. The timer ran out, activating the high-voltage thermal batteries. The bomb hit the ground, and the piezoelectric crystals inside the nose crushed. They sent a firing signal. But the weapon didn’t detonate.

Every safety mechanism had failed, except one: the ready/safe switch in the cockpit. The switch was in the SAFE position when the bomb dropped. Had the switch been set to GROUND or AIR, the X-unit would’ve charged, the detonators would’ve triggered, and a thermonuclear weapon would have exploded in a field near Faro, North Carolina… 

Emphasis mine-- the first paragraph of the extract aptly demonstrates that each of the so-called safety measures implemented by the bomb designers was inadequate. 

Even the ready/safe switch mentioned above was hardly immune to danger:

A year after the North Carolina accident, a SAC ground crew removed four Mark 28 bombs from a B-47 bomber and noticed that all of the weapons were armed. But the seal on the ready/ safe switch in the cockpit was intact, and the knob hadn’t been turned to GROUND or AIR. The bombs had not been armed by the crew. A seven-month investigation by Sandia found that a tiny metal nut had come off a screw inside the plane and lodged against an unused radar-heating circuit. The nut had created a new electrical pathway, allowing current to reach an arming line— and bypass the ready/ safe switch. A similar glitch on the B-52 that crashed near Goldsboro would have caused a 4-megaton thermonuclear explosion.

Furthermore, for some missiles

Impact tests revealed that  . . . “[the Genie] didn’t need a firing signal to detonate. The Genie could produce a nuclear explosion just by hitting the ground.

When you consider the fact that the Air Force had planes in the skies over America, carrying bombs back and forth across the country 24/7, just so they could be permanently operationally ready, this gets very, very scary. 

In fact, up until the 70s and 80s, little to no testing had been done on the impact that a high pressure physical environment might have on the bombs’ safety mechanisms. It was later found that:

When circuit boards were bent or crushed, circuits that were supposed to be kept far apart might suddenly meet. The charring of a circuit board could transform its fireglass from an insulator into a conductor of electricity. The solder of a heat-sensitive fuse was supposed to melt when it reached a certain temperature, blocking the passage of current during a fire. But Spray discovered that solder behaved oddly once it melted. As a liquid it could prevent an electrical connection-- or flow back into its original place, reconnect wires, and allow current to travel between them.

Such unexpected electrical signals could detonate a bomb; needless to say, these contingencies were not prepared for.

The human element was another danger.

Harold Agnew was amazed to see a group of NATO weapon handlers pull the arming wires out of a Mark 7 while unloading it from a plane. When the wires were pulled, the arming sequence began— and if the X-unit charged, a Mark 7 could be detonated by its radar, by its barometric switches, by its timer, or by falling just a few feet from a plane and landing on a runway. A stray cosmic ray could, theoretically, detonate it. The weapon seemed to invite mistakes… And a Mark 7 sometimes contained things it shouldn’t. A screwdriver was found inside one of the bombs; an Allen wrench was somehow left inside another. In both bombs, the loose tools could have caused a short circuit.

Furthermore,

The custody arrangements at the Jupiter missile sites in Italy were even more alarming. Each site had three missiles topped with a 1.4-megaton warhead— a weapon capable of igniting firestorms and flattening every brick structure within thirty square miles. All the security was provided by Italian troops. The launch authentication officer was the only American at the site. Two keys were required to launch the missiles; one was held by the American, the other by an Italian officer. The keys were often worn on a string around the neck, like a dog tag.

Congressman Chet Holifield, the chairman of the joint committee, was amazed to find three ballistic missiles, carrying thermonuclear weapons, in the custody of a single American officer with a handgun. “All [the Italians] have to do is hit him on the head with a blackjack, and they have got his key,” Holifield said, during a closed-door committee hearing after the trip. The Jupiters were located near a forest, without any protective covering, and brightly illuminated at night. They would be sitting ducks for a sniper. “There were three Jupiters setting there in the open— all pointed toward the sky,” Holifield told the committee. “Over $300 million has been spent to set up that little show and it can be knocked out with 3 rifle bullets.”

2: Nuclear weapons: unsafe today:

So we finally manage to make nuclear weapons physically safer. Unfortunately, even today, we could easily get fucked over by the physical element.

In 2003 half of the Air Force units responsible for nuclear weapons failed their safety inspections-- despite the three-day advance warning . . . On August 29, 2007, six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber named Doom 99 at Minor Air Force Base in North Dakota. The plane sat on the tarmac at Minot overnight without any armed guards, took off the next morning, flew almost fifteen hundred miles to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisana-- violating the safety rule that prohibits nuclear weapons from being transported by air over the United States-- landed at Barksdale, and sat on the tarmac here for nine hours, unguarded, until a maintenance crew noticed the warhead. For a day and a half, nobody in the Air Force realized that half a dozen thermonuclear weapons were missing.

Emphasis mine. 

[erotesis]

Predictions for 2016

(reposted from main blog)

I personally find it more important to ensure your confidence levels are well-calibrated, than it is to get all of these right. (Or in other words, be accurate 7 out of the 10 times that you say you’re 70% sure). WORLD EVENTS 1. No large scale US ground offensive in any country: 80% 2. Greece will not announce it’s leaving the Euro: 90% 3. Britain will not announce it’s leaving the Euro: 90% 4. Syria’s civil war will not end this year: 75% 5. Assad will remain president of Syria: 80% 6. ISIS will control less territory than it does right now: 70% 7. Raqqa will remain under the control of the Islamic State on December 31, 2016: 75% 8. The Houthis will not hold more territory on December 31 2016, than today: 60% 9. Ukraine will neither break into all-out war or get neatly resolved: 95% 10. No major intifada in Israel this year (ie > 250 Israeli deaths, but not in Cast Lead style war): 80% 11. No interesting progress with Gaza or peace negotiations in general this year: 99% 12. No Cast Lead style bombing/invasion of Gaza this year: 90% 13. North Korea’s government will survive the year without large civil war/revolt: 95% 14. No major revolt (greater than or equal to Tiananmen Square) against Chinese Communist Party: 95% 15. No major civil war in Middle Eastern country not currently experiencing a major civil war: 90% 16. No new non-nuclear state will obtain a nuclear weapon (this includes Iran, excludes weapon sharing): 95% 17. No major war in Asia (with >100 Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, and American deaths combined) over tiny stupid islands: 99% 18. No exchange of fire over tiny stupid islands: 95% 19. No terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 85% 20. …in any First World country:  80% 21. 2016 Will be hottest year on record thus far: 90% 22. No major earthquake (>100 deaths) in US: 95% 23. No major earthquake (>10000 deaths) in the world: 75% 24. Oil will end the year lower than $50 a barrel: 60% 25. No announcement of genetically engineered human baby or credible plan for such: 90% 26. No major change in how the media treats social justice issues from 2015: 80% 27. European far right makes modest but not spectacular gains: 65% 28. Mainstream European position at year’s end is that taking migrants was bad idea: 40% 29. Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination: 80% 30. Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination: 40% 31. Conditional on Trump winning the Republican nomination, he impresses everyone how quickly he pivots towards wider acceptability: 60% 32. Conditional on Trump winning the Republican nomination, he loses the general election: 85% 33. Marco Rubio will win the Republican nomination: 35% 34. Bloomberg will not run for President: 80% 35. Hillary Clinton will win the Presidency: 60% 36. Republicans will keep the House: 55% 37. Republicans will keep the Senate: 55% 38. NASDAQ composite will not fall below 4400 between Feb 1 2016 and December 31 2016: 70% 39. US GDP growth higher than 2% in 2015: 75% 40. US GDP growth will be under 3.5%: 95% 41. US inflation will be under 1%: 75% 42. Congress will not pass any new legislation restricting gun ownership: 85% 43. Congress will not pass any new legislation restricting abortion: 80% 44. Black Lives Matter will lose momentum, fade from prominence: 80% 45. China tops 2016 Olympics Gold medals table: 50% 46. 89th Oscars will have at least one black nominee for best actor and/or best actress: 75% 47. 89th Oscars will not have a non-brown Asian nominee in of these categories (best picture/director/actor/actress/supporting): 95% 48. 89th Oscars will not have a non-brown Asian winner in any of said categories: 99% 49. So-called “Ferguson effect” continues and becomes harder to deny: 60% 50. SpaceX successfully launches a reused rocket: 45% 51. Same-sex marriage will not be recognized in Singapore: 99%

PERSONAL 52. I will not stop using Facebook: 99% 53. I will get a steady girlfriend: 40% 54. I will attend a GWWC (or equivalent) meetup in the UK: 60% 55. I will not have been hospitalized for any reason: 99% 56. I won’t drastically change highest-level political/religious/philosophical positions (eg become a Muslim or Republican): 95% 57. I will not do any illegal drugs this year: 90% 58. I will hate (or at least dislike) the Civil War adaptation: 85% 59. I will hate (or at least dislike) the new Deadpool movie: 25% 60. I will hate (or at least dislike) the new X-Men movie: 50% 61. I will not be involved in a physical confrontation of any kind: 90% 62. I will not struggle with the course material during the first term of law school: 70% 63. I will get at least one paper graded as “first” material: 60% 64. I will finish at least 20 books this year (excluding law textbooks): 80% 65. I will finish fewer than 50 books this year (excluding law textbooks): 85% 66. I will not reconnect with former friends from Tumblr (Sam, Nives, Shuh, etc.): 75% 67. I will not reconnect with former 14A01B (excluding on UCL campus, or currently): 70%

[erotesis]

Thieves of State

by Sarah Chayes

Section 2 of 2

Section 1 can be found here; it deals with the link between corrupt governance in developing nations and increased incidence of insurgency/terrorism. The West is also implicated for implicitly supporting said corrupt governance.

Section 2 details specific policies on how the West can help to curb corruption in developing nations.

Chayes begins with this reminder:

What is it, I found myself wondering, that keeps a country as powerful as the United States from employing the vast and varied nonmilitary leverage at its disposal? Why is it so easily cowed by the trantrums of weaker and often dependent allies? Why won’t it ever posture effectively itself? Bluff? Deny visas? . . . Why is nuance so irretrievably beyond American officials’ grasp, leaving them with a binary choice between all and nothing-- between writing officials a blank check and breaking off relations?

Then dives into specific suggestions:

“Visas [for visiting or studying in] Western countries are highly prized in the developing world. As part of a strategized campaign targeting specific networks, visas should be denied or delayed to select kleptocratic figures.”

“Contracts should be better tailored, stipulating conditions for the use of money . . . Provisions should stipulate-- as Norway’s foreign assistance contracts do, for example-- the reimbursement of aid money when conditions are not met. Future aid should be conditioned on remedial action. To provide sufficient oversight for the millions of dollars in aid provided annually, independent monitoring and evaluation must be featured in every aid contract. Such monitoring activities should be considered integral to the program being funded-- not part of “overhead” . . . Indepedent inspector generals, such as those empowered to oversee U.S. aid to Afghanistan and Iraq, should become the norm, and their enforcement powers should be enhanced.”

“International institutions as well as bilateral lenders should consider canceling or reducing “odious debt” -- particularly in cases where klpeotcratic governments have been removed and transitioning countries are cash-strapped. In cases where the private capture of donor funds is patent, it is unfair to make a victimized population also pay for the criminality of its rulers. Forcing lenders to assume more of the risk might help induce them to choose the loans they will extend with greater care”

“Prosecutions under U.S., U.K., and some other countries’ civil law that allows the forfeiture of assets connected to a crime-- even if no individual has been convicted or even apprehended for committing it-- should also be directed in a more targeted fashion”

“Intelligence professionals should be . . . assigned to study the study the structure and operations of kleptocratic networks as functioning systems. A framework for analysis should include such information as: the levers of power captured by the network, its favored revenue streams, is structure and manning, the degree of vertical integration, the internal and exernal enablers that reinforce its operations, its vulnerabilites . . . as well as the details of financial flows. Analysts and intelligence executives must design new collection requirements to fill knowledge gaps on these issues.”

“A research agenda . . . aimed at better elucidating the interplay between acute corruption and other risk factors in provoking past security events would take this subject beyond he intuitive, towards a substantiated argument that could better influence policy debates.”

“[Businesses] can add to the general knowledge-- and facilitate curbs to the corrupt practices that both distort the business environment and threaten security-- by systematically reporting to their home-country foreign or commerce ministries the bribe solicitations they have received.”

“Western countries and international organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF must gain a better grasp of how development assistance, including loans, millenium challenge assistance, grants by the global fund to fight AIDS, and capital for infrastructure improvements, becomes yet another “rent” that is capured by kleptocratic ruling networks. More resesearch is needed into the ways kleptocratic networks use shell organizations such as [government-organized NGOs] or contractors owned by a family member to monopolize international funds. Donor agencies should also collect information on contract and implemnetation irregularities, including by means of whistle-blower protections and rewards.”

-

She balances these against possible tradeoffs in terms of competing foreign policy objectives, recognizing that in some cases, a country in question might be the sole source of needed goods, facilities, or services, or might possess a pivotal geopolitical position, for example. Furthermore, targeted corrupt officials may be conscious of the other items on their partner’s agenda and strike back in ways that threaten those other priorities. To deter punitive action, they may close overland routes or airspace, cut off energy supplies to neighbors, cease sharing intelligence, or refuse to assist diplomatically with other countries when crises arise. Pressure might also precipitate instability. Any attempt to curb corruption must take these risks into consideration.

However, she warns against being too risk-averse. Most Western nations at the current moment prefer only to take short-term action, in a crisis situations, rather than seek prevention of the problem in the first place. Western governments must begin systematically analyzing the costs of not addressing corruption, which currently go unweighed in national security decision making.

Finally, Chayes recognizes that the West hasn’t been completely incompetent:

It would be wrong to imply that Western governments have been entirely insensible to the problem of corruption. Washington had led the drive to end businesses’ habit of bribing government officials to gain access to markets. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and anti-bribery conventions modeled on it have revolutionized corporate behavior. As concern about terrorist financing and tax evasion ave risen, efforts to combat money laundering and tax fraud have picked up momentum . . . International institutions such as the G-20 are helping tighten norms. Some European nations, such as Norway, have begun attaching strict conditions to foreign aid, including repayment requirements if conditions are not met.

But continues to stress that

Yet where Western governments are paying for anticorruption efforts out of one pocket, they are often paying off corrupt governments out of another-- and far more lavishly, via budget support, miliary assistance, basing rights, international loans, major development projects, or covert cash handouts.

-

One final postscript: Chayes suggests that Pakistan had a major role to play in Iran/N Korea obtaining nuclear weapons, and hence that systemic corruption in Pakistan had a major impact on global security. Wiki backs the first half of that statement up, although the second half is debatable. At any rate, didn’t know of the link between Pakistan and Iran/N Korea nuclear weapons til today. Read here first, then here.

[erotesis]

Thieves of State

by Sarah Chayes

Section 1 of 2

The thing I enjoyed the most about this book was the fact that it offered real, concrete, implementable solutions to the problem it described. That itself is rare enough, but it went one step further and evaluated the efficacy of those solutions. 

The central thesis forwarded by Sarah Chayes is that the widespread corruption in developing nations is what drives locals to support insurgency groups, or at least turn a blind eye to their violent activities. Furthermore, Western nations are complicit in perpetuating that corruption, and it follows that they are in part responsible for radicalising the population against them. Hence, to bring stability to a country, anti-corruption measures must be used in tandem with counter-insurgency measures, as opposed to the current, flawed US policy of achieving stability first, then implementing good governance as an afterthought. Chayes suggets that the current approach is not just idealistic, but impossible. 

Of course, she recognizes that corruption cannot “be solely blamed for such complex phenomena” as terrorism, and that “this book has emphasized acute corruption not because it is the sole driver but because it is a remarkably under-appreciated one”.

(N/b: Tbh a lot of what she discusses reminds me of south-east asian history vis a vis cronyism in the philippines, indonesia, etc.)

This review will be divided into two sections: first, detailing the issue of corruption, and secondly, detailing the policy options available to tackle it. The second section can be found here.

I.

Chayes suggests that corruption in developing nations is a “vertically integrated system”-- wherein at each rung in the system, the government official or businessman has to pay his dues to his direct superiors in order to maintain his position, and so extracts further dues from his inferiors or his dependants, in order to make up for his losses and get his “cut”. Hence, corruption is endemic and permeates the entirety of society, affecting not just all levels of government, but also local schools, businesses, and hospitals. 

One habitual mistake made by Westerners is to explain away minor palm-greasing as relatively harmless, and hence not worth tackling. However,

Distinguishing between such “petty” bribery and so-called “grand” corruption . . . is a flawed analysis in countries such as the ones examined in this book. These systems are vertically integrated, and “petty” facilitation payments enable and reinforce their structures and practices.

Furthermore, because the system is vertically integrated, even the most lowly officials are protected by their bargains with their superiors, and hence there are no "small fish" that an anti-corruption campaign can target:

The whole system depended on faithful discharge, by senior officials, of their duty to protect their subordinates. The implicit contract held . . . no matter how inconsequential the subordinate might be. The Sayfullah arrest-- like any legal challenge-- represented a test case. How well the regime defended even its lowliest officials would broadcast a message throughout the system about the strength of the protection guarantee. If Karzai failed to uphold his end of the bargain, the whole edifice would collapse.

Western officials and international aid organizations are often “captured” by such corrupt individuals, and hence money that would have gone to aid and other developmental projects are frequently siphoned off until nothing is left, and the project is shoddily completed, or not completed at all.

The classic error that outsiders make in Afghanistan is to single out a proxy in whom to repose trust and through whom to interact with most other locals. Over the years of intrusions by outside powers, some Afghans have grown adept at capturing this privileged position and exploiting it to advance and enrich themselves, while disempowering (and thus incensing) their neighbors . . . Western democracy promoters, he explained, would arrive with little experience with or intuition for local dynamics, then get captured by self-promoting “political activists”, who had learned to speak their language . . . These people [had] figured out how to express just what the Westerners expected to hear.

A further technique is to keep foreigners from interacting with anyone else face to face, thereby limiting their interaction with the locals and preventing them from recognizing the problem of corruption.

The result of such systemic corruption is dissatisfaction among the general population, and when Western nations continue to associate with and make deals with corrupt officials, this exacerbates the populace’s unhappiness and directs it partly towards the West. As Chayes puts it, “For many Afghans, the passivity of U.S. officials could only add up to complicity.” And if the West did nothing to solve the problem, then change had to come from within, thereby giving rise to violent uprisings, or movements such as the Arab Spring.

Some turn to religion and personal morality as a potential solution, and saw secular governance built on Western values as an inevitable source of corruption. As a Nigerian lawyer put it:

In 2000 the people wanted “our” shari’a courts. The whole agitation for shari’a was a search for a solution to corruption. You can’t get a fair deal. You have to bribe. The law itself is alien. You can’t get justice. People felt that boko-- Western education that traced back to the mechanics of colonial rule-- was the way we got to this state of affairs.

Chayes further writes that

Indeed . . . residents of countries from Nigeria to South Africa alike deplore what they see as a pattern: that post-independence elites seem to have left much of the structure of colonial-era administration intact, just taking over as beneficiaries of the oppressive and extractive system in positions left vacant by the departed colonizers.

and she condemns what she sees as

a military response to a problem that is fundamentally political and economic in nature: a problem that is rooted in the conduct of government. The current US approach sends a message, wittingly or not, to people who are often driven to violence by the abusively corrupt practices of their ruling cliques, and by frustration at seeing their legitimate grievances systemically ignored. The message seems to be: your grievances are, in fact, of no account. They will not be heard.

From a historical standpoint, she in fact compares violent jihadis to “early protestants”, framing Protestanism as a reaction to kleptocracy/greed/corruption; after their requests for reform were ignored, the Protestants reacted with violence + by smashing icons: “statues were defenestrated, beheaded, their noses cut off. In one case, a Saint Nicholas was executed by hanging. The rioters seemed to be acting out a ritual punishment upon the symbols of the church”. Chayes correctly preempts potential readers’ response to this analogy, with a fantastic paragraph:

Even to suggest such an equivalency-- including the proposition that violence in both cases grew out of legitimate grievances-- may seem offensive to many Americans. But more than a dozen years after 9/11, the events of that day are now entering the realm of history. And to subject them, as historical events, to the type of critical analysis that episodes from earlier times and more distant places receive, is not to dishonor or belittle the victims. Abstracted from that painful psychological context, the resemblance between the language Al Qaeda uses to explain its violence, and that of the earlier Protestant insurrectionaries castigating the acute corruption of the Catholic Church and its royalist allies, is unmistakable.

Her main examples throughout the book were Nigeria, Uzbek, Tunisia, Egypt, and Afghanistan, but she also draws parallels to Iceland, Ireland and Greece vis a vis the global economic meltdown in 2008, claiming that they cases of systemic corruption/poor governance causing economic instability.

Finally, she reminds us that

Actively corrupt governance doesn’t just aid terrorist organizations by driving indignant citizens into their arms. . . it provides haven and logistical support for those very same groups, as officials avert their eyes in excange for a bribe . . . [Trafficking rings] can obtain their product of choice or move it without leaving tracks through highly corrupt environments.

And of course, the classic economic/social problems that come with corruption, yada yada.

[erotesis]

The Gridlock Economy

by Michael Heller

Michael Heller proposes a new kind of market failure-- what he calls the tragedy of the anticommons, in direct contrast to the more well-known tragedy of the commons. From wiki: The tragedy of the anticommons is a type of coordination breakdown, in which a single resource has numerous rights holders who prevent others from using it, frustrating what would be a socially desirable outcome. In his words,

“Private ownership usually creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect-- it creates gridlock. Gridlock is a free market paradox. When too many people own pieces of one thing, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears, and everybody loses.

There has been an unnoticed revolution in how we create wealth. ... Today, the leading edge of wealth creation requires assembly. From drugs to telecom, software to semiconductors, anything high tech demands the assembly of innumerable patents. ... Even with land, the most socially important projects, like new runways, require assembling multiple parcels. Innovation has moved on, but we are stuck with old-style ownership that’s easy to fragment and hard to put together.”

Or, to put it simply:

Sometimes we create too many separate owners of a single resource. Each one can block the others’ use. If cooperation fails, nobody can use that resource. Everybody loses.

Heller lists a few major fields where this problem is systemic. A couple stand out to me, so I’ll cover them in detail:

-

A. Biotechs

In the biotech field, pretty much every discovery/invention is patented. This is a problem because you need to get permission to use patented stuff, and you also need to pay for it. The former can be very difficult, and the latter can be very expensive. Furthermore, these costs occur early in the R&D cycle, when the potential gains are most speculative-- in the biotech industry, initial cost of experimentation very high, with no guarantee of success, so why would you pay a shitton of money to use patents that you might not even profit from? The result of this is that companies simply reallocate research funds to other areas where the property rights environment is less fragmented.

To further complicate things: “patents are probabilistic”, in that the PTO “grants most patent applications, then lets people fight over their validity later on. ... Almost half of patents litigated to judgement are invalidated; of those found valid, half are found not to be infringed”. The problem for innovators is tha they don’t know which ones are bad until they litigate, and “litigating each patent is expensive, time-consuming, and uncertain. Thus, an owner of a weak patent that may be invalid or not infringed nevertheless can use it to extract license fees and hold up innovation”.

Some history!

In fact, until the 1970s, the US still followed a “commons” model, under which anyone could use research results freely. In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which encouraged universities and other institutions to patent discoveries arising from federally supported research and then to try to commercialize these technologies by transferring them to the private sector. In response to the new property rights promoted by the Bayh-Dole Act, patent filings and private biotech investment increased. Billions in private equity funds began to flow into biotech companies.

However, in this new environment, there are the innovation-stifling problems mentioned earlier. Plus, firms respond to rivals by ratcheting up their own property-fragmenting activities, creating a spiral of “defensive patenting”. Finally, all this leads to the spawning of patent trolls.

So, how can we work around all this? Several ways:

First of all, what Robert Merges calls “property-preventing investments”-- firms release their hard-earned and proprietary research results to the public so that the discovery is no longer novel enough for others to get patents in that area. PPIs are not motivated by altruism. Firms are trying to prevent gridlock from blocking their primary business lines.

Secondly, top-down approach for regulators, eg proposals exempting research, experimental, and diagnostic uses from patent protection. Or mandating the creation of an office within the PTO responsible for studying the effects of the patent regime on competition and innovation-- an internal counterweight to the staff’s pro-patent bias.

Patent pools also get around it. However, anti-trust laws require that the pool assemble “essential” complementary patents, and it’s not clear that biotech patents could meet this requirement. Firms fear antitrust law suits. Furthermore, patents matter more to the pharma/biotech industries than to other industries, especially when there are a lack of substitutes for certain discoveries (such as patented genes or receptors). On one level, this makes firms less willing to participate in pools that undermine their exclusive advantage. On another level, this increases some patent holders’ leverage, aggravating negotiation problems.

If we’re lucky, firms sometimes realize how harmful patent thickets are and take unilateral action that benefits all, eg:

In the 1990s, firms tried to file patents for on a type of gene fragment called an “expressed sequence tag”, or EST. The PTO could easily have created gridlock by issuing patents on thousands of ESTs, but luckily, many people recognized the dangers of such patents-- foreseeable commercial products, such as genetic diagnostic tests, would likely require multiple fragments bundled together. A slew of separately owned gene-fragment patents would tangle firms in licensing negotiations before they could even begin to develop useful products. So big drugmakers chose instead to donate gene-fragment data to the public rather than seeking patents, thereby preventing paents from stalling downstream research.

-

B. Real estate and/or property markets and/or building things. Heller lists two main problems:

First, block parties-- wherein an organization wants to purchase all the land in one area but a small group of people block it. Problem worsen when the bid is public; the holdouts try to jack up the price because they know the land is only worth money if the organization holds all the parts. Government solution has to make use of “eminent domain” to confiscate the buildings then pay just compensation. However, this isn’t good either-- clearly the free market rate is insufficient, if it were, the buildings would already have been sold a long time ago. Buildings can have eg sentimental value, or gain value from intangible things such as community.

Heller suggests a solution that’s akin to that of “Business Improvement Districts”, which were first seen in Canada and later spread to America. Basically, after a majority of adjoining business owners vote to create a BID, it becomes mandatory for all owners in the district. No free riders here; everyone has to chip in to pay for the amenities. The BID collects and spends money to create a nicer shopping experience. BIDs gave merchants a tool to solve invisible gridlock in provision of urban shopping amenities. Heller proposes a similar strategy of property-form creation. “Land Assembly Districts” could be retrofitted onto existing neighborhoods. Governments could authorize LADs just as they passed laws enabling condominiums and BIDs to spring up. LADs allow neighborhoods to have increased negotiating power when selling their community, and give decision making power directly to those most affected. Furthermore, stops problem of holdouts, since as long as the requisite majority accepts the deal, all are governed by it.

Second, when everyone has the NIMBY mentality, and the result is a slew of legislation that needs to be complied with in order to get something built. Some of it is public outcry, some of it is environmental lobby groups, etc. Point is, lots of permits are needed, which either halt projects altogether since it’s so darned impossible to comply with all of them, or makes projects prohibitively expensive, either in terms of cost or in terms of time wasted obtaining them. Also jacks up price of houses since scarcity of supply. Eg even in New York, there is plenty of well-serviced, low-density land that is hardly built up, and the average height of new buildings has actually steadily decreased over the past thirty years, though demand has gone up, and higher density would be good from both a cost and an environmental point of view.

Cutting down on the number of permits is made especially difficult because

Few of the requirements are truly unreasonable. In isolation, even the most draconian land-use control rarely amounts to an illegal “taking” of private property. So there is little that courts can effectively do to police these regulations. Local regulators may start with good intentions, but a gauntlet of good intentions kills off all but the most politically connected developers.

Solutions: a city could mandate “one-stop shops” for permits, instead of requiring developers to shuttle from office to office trying to figure out what still needs to be done. Another approach is the deemed-approved remedy for developers. If regulators fail to object within a set time, the developer’s proposal is automatically approved. This approach makes regulators, and ultimately legislators and voters, bear some of the cost of uncoordinated regulatory hurdles. A third approach is “antisnob zoning acts” used in several New England states to streamline approvals for proposed affording housing developments.

The difficulty with these cures is that politicians first must be able to identify gridlock and, second, must want to end tragedies of the anticommons they currently tolerate, even quietly embrace. Gridlock creates patronage jobs to hand out and spurs campaign contributions to flow in. In addition, it’s always easier to respond to a crisis by adding regulations than by paring them away.

Importantly, 

Currently, governments create gridlock without suffering much direct consequence. They have little reason to avoid confusion, error, and lack of coordination. With BANANA republics, private developers go bankrupt awaiting permits, but regulators pay little price. Regulators do not even know the average delay they impose, nor do they know how their city permitting process compares with those in other cities. Collecting data can be a first step toward finding out which cities are most punishing for new development. 

-

C. Miscellaneous

A few other instances of gridlock:

Why do so many people die of organ failure? One reason is gridlock in organ donation. Even when the deceased was in favor of donating his or her organs, any relative may be able to hold up the donation process. Organs go to waste, and potential recipients get sicker and die, while doctors make sure they have all the necessary permissions.

Europe’s air traffic control system ... has been described as “a patchwork, fragmented by national boundaries and differing technical standards.” A one-hour flight from Brussels to Geneva requires pilots to make up to nine manual changes in radio frequencies. Besides the occasional collision, this system “wastes an estimated 350,000 flight-hours a year and costs travellers about $1 billion in flight delays and increased operating costs”.

Heller discusses some international initiatives within the framework of gridlock:

Although we’ve made progress on trade, we have not created all the international institutions our planet probably needs. The Kyoto Protocols were a partial (failed) attempt to solve global gridlock on global warming. Every country can block every other from reaping conservation gains. Americans ask why they should suffer the economic costs of stopping pollution if China will just build more coal-fired plants. ... Everyone blocks everyone else, and in time, we may cook our planet.”

Also, WTO is actually dedicated to solving gridlock in goods and services, since

National tariffs can operate like toll booths on the Rhine. ... Through the WTO and its predecessor agreements, every member country agreed simultaneously to stop blocking everyone else-- up to a point. Indeed, global wealth has grown immensely through lowered tariffs. ... There are still many challenges: minimum environmental and labor standards are not enforced, hidden “non-tariff barriers” still block trade, and some tariffs could still be negotiated away.”

[erotesis]

The Emperor of All Maladies

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Section 2 of 2

This section deals with the miscellany, and only covers 4 points. Imo less interesting than section 1.

1. Ew. Smoking.

Long before lung cancer grew overtly and symptomatically out of a smoker’s lung, the lung contained layer upon layer of precancerous lesions in various state of evolution- like a prehistoric shale of carcinogenesis. The changes began in the bronchial airways. As smoke traveled through the lung, the outermost layers, exposed to the highest concentrations of tar, began to thicken and swell. Within these thickened layers, Auerbach found the next stage of malignant evolution: atypical cells with ruffled or dark nuclei in irregular patches. In a yet smaller fraction of patients, these atypical cells began to show the characteristic cytological changes of cancer, with bloated, abnormal nuclei often caught dividing furiously. In the final stage, these cell clusters broke through the thin lining of the basement membrans and transformed into frankly invasive carcinoma. Cancer, Auerbach argued, was a disease unfolded slowly in time. It did not run, but rather slouched towards its birth.

2. Radical mastectomy: INCREDIBLY disfiguring. Based on mistaken belief that by cutting away more parts of the body, could get rid of metastatic cancer. Of course they failed, so a “macabre marathon” began to see who could cut the most parts of their patients’ bodies away, in the misguided hope this would somehow stop cancer. “In Europe, one surgeon evacuated three ribs and other parts of the rib cage and amputated a shoulder and a collarbone”-- in addition to getting rid of the pectoralis major/minor and cleaning out the anterior mediastinum.  

The reason this wasn’t an improvement over a regular mastectomy:

The woman with metastatic cancer is not going to be cured by a radical mastectomy, no matter how aggressively and meticulously Halsted extirpates the tumor in her breast: her cancer is no longer a local problem. In contrast, the woman with small, confined cancer does benefit from the operation-- but for her, a far less aggressive procedure, a local mastectomy, would have done just as well. Breast cancer was . . . either an inherently localized disease-- thus curable by a smaller mastectomy-- or an inherently systemic disease-- thus incurable even by the most exhaustive surgery.

However, it took nearly one hundred years before anyone realized how dumb radical mastectomy was. In fact, the truly horrific thing was that even though radical mastectomy was so widespread, not a single study had been done to measure it’s efficacy. Even when people finally caught on to the fact that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, it took 10 years for a trial to be completed (1971-1981), because “the surgeons who had so painstakingly created the world of radical surgery had absolutely no incentive to revolutionize it”. “To recruit patients, a trialist has to convince doctors to participate in the trial-- and yet these doctors are often precisely those who have the least interest in having their theory rejected or disproved”. By the time radical mastectomy was conclusively disprove in 1981, an estimated 500,000 had underwent radical mastectomy and been disfigured unnecessarily by it.

3. In fact, patients themselves were fuckin shitty at making good medical decisions. In the radical mastectomy case,

Radicalism became a psychological obsession . . . radical also meant ‘aggressive’, ‘innovative’, and ‘brazen’, and it was this meaning that left its mark on the imaginations of patients. What man or woman, confronting cancer, would willingly choose non-radical, or ‘conservative’, surgery?

So this demonstrates on one level, the capacity of names to mislead and have serious real-world consequences (another example being AIDS-- it was originally called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency).

But more importantly, shows why listening to patients can be a fking dumb idea. Another crucial example of this:

High-dose chemotherapy: body can only take so much toxic drugs, since toxic drugs kill your regular cells as well. So doctors tried taking out the healthy bone marrow of a patient, freezing/storing it, then giving patients high-dose (up to 16 times more toxic than regular) chemotherapy, and afterwards after the patient’s body was decimated, reinserting the original bone marrow. Sounds like a good idea right? Completely wipe out the cancer by completely wiping out everything, then heal the body back with your healthy bone marrow. And once again, all the stupid-ass lay people got super excited and demanded it, and obv doctors made a killing extracting bone marrow/performing this therapy, so no incentive to check it out for real.

Well, in the end, turns out that in terms of stopping the cancer, high-dose chemo offered absolutely ZERO benefit over regular chemo. In fact, most times, it worsened survival rates. Firstly, bec it was super toxic, there were terrible side effects. Like, regular chemo is already bad enough, eg it makes you vomit so hard the blood vessels in your eye burst, and it makes you do this an AVERAGE of 10+ times a day. So 16x the toxicity is pretty damn painful. Even worse, it can lead to organ failure ie death. Which defeats the point of it in the first place. Second, it severely increased rates of mutation, ie can give rise to a SECOND cancer, one that’s even resistant to chemo since it was raised in the midst of chemo. Once again, inevitable death.

(Okay, that wasn’t entirely accurate. High-dose chemo is effective in treating leukaemia. But THAT’S IT. Indiscriminate application of it was still bad.)

Finally: the Herceptin trials. Before the medicine was confirmed to work/be safe, activists (i fucking hate activists) argued that “patients could not wait for drugs to undergo testing; they wanted a potentially lifesaving medicine now”. So they carried out protests, stormed the company’s headquarters, handcuffed them to buildings, etc. and eventually the company producing Herceptin was forced to bow to their demands. And sure, Herceptin worked in the end, but there was a very real chance it fucking wouldn’t have, and after eg the radical mastectomy case, and the high dose chemo case, see below, this seems like a fucking legitimate concern.

4. 2. Showing evolution in action. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._B._Ford

The only formal method to prove the fact that populations undergo defined genetic changes over time involves capturing the change in the real world in real time-- prospectively. . . . To this end, [Ford] persuaded several students to tramp through damp marshes near Oxford collecting moths. Each time a moth was captured it was marked with a cellulose pen and released back into the wild. Year after year, Ford’s students had returned with galoshes and moth nets, recapturing and studying the moths that they had marked in the prior years and their unmarked descendents-- in effect, creating a “census” of wild moths in the field. Minute changes in the cohort of moths, such as shifts in wing markings or variations in size, shape, and color, were recorded each year with great care. By charting these changes over nearly a decade, Ford had begun to watch evolution in action. He had documented gradual changes in the color of moth coats (and thus changes in genes), grand fluctuations in populations and signs of natural selection by moth predators-- a macrocosm caught in a marsh. . . . It was Ford’s student Henry B. D. Kettlewell who used this moth-labeling technique to show that dark-colored moths-- better camoflaged on pollution-darkened trees-- tended to be spared by predatory birds, thus demontrating “natural selection” in action.

[erotesis]

The Emperor of All Maladies

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Section 1 of 2.

This is a mammoth of a book-- a conservative estimate would be at least 200,000 words long. Hence, the reason this write-up is in 2 parts. That said, the book is a very worthy read. This section has 9 points and deals mainly with the aspects of cancer itself-- ie the science-y portion.

--

1. Leukaemia was where the first major advances in combating cancer chemically were made. Focus on leukaemia because it could be measured. At that time, CT scans and MRIs weren’t a thing, so it was hard to quantify eg changes in the size of a breast/lung tumour, unless using surgery. Versus leukaemia which was free floating in the blood, could be measured as easily as blood cells. Any intervention could thus be easily evaluated for its potency in patients.

2. Anaemia = deficiency of red blood cells. Mostly due to iron deficiency, but “pernicious anaemia” due to lack of vitamin B12. And in fact, another unusual form of anaemia was caused by an under-supply of folic acid, or folate. When cells divide, they need to make copies of DNA, and folic acid is the crucial building block for that DNA. In its absence, the production of new blood cells in the bone marrow stops. “Millions of half-matured cells spew out, piling up like half-finished goods bottlenecked in an assembly line”. Hence, a kind of “anti-folate” would be effective in stopping leukaemia, by halting the overproduction of cells. The antifolate possessed a similar structure to folate, so it would be accepted by and bind to enzymes/receptors in cells, like a “false key jamming a lock”. First antifolate was aminopterin.

3. Two classes of genes are critical in the origin of cancers. One class are “positive” genes, such as src, that are mutant activated versions of normal cellular genes. In normal cells, these genes accelerate cell division, but only when the cell receives an appropriate growth signal. In their mutant form, these genes are driven into perpetual hyperactivity, unleashing cell division beyond control. Such a gene is a “jammed accelerator” in a car.  The other class consists of “negative” genes, such as Rb, that suppress cell division. In normal cells, these tumor suppressor genes provide the “brakes” to cellular proliferation, shutting down cell division when the cell receives appropriate signals. In cancer cells, these brakes have been inactivated by mutations. For these “negative” genes, both copies of it must be deactivated (unlike in “positive” genes, where only one copy has to be over-active.)

One gene mutated not enough, need multiple mutations, often from both classes (tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes). This happens over a very long period of time, and mutations arise from a variety of sources. “In genetic terms, our cells were not sitting on the edge of the abyss of cancer. They were dragged toward their abyss in graded, discrete steps.”

4. Nowadays we have kinase-specific inhibitor drugs, eg gleevec for CML (a form of Leukaemia). This drug is taken on a regular basis and patients are fine for the rest of their lives. They just turn off the activated proteins so that the uninhibited reproduction stops.

Note however that cancers can become drug resistant: eg for example, through “molecular pumps”: “In normal cells, these pumps extrude natural poisons and waste products from a cell’s interior. In cancer cells, these activated pumps push chemo drugs out instead. Spared by chemo, the drug-resistant cells outgrow other cancer cells and become the dominant strain.” Cancer cells can also become drug-resistant by activating proteins that destroy or neutralize drugs. Yet other cancers escape by migrating into reservoirs of the body where drugs cannot penetrate, eg leukaemia relapsing in the brain.

Same for gleevec and CML cells, although the mechanism here is exceptionally cunning. “Normally, Gllevec slips into a narrow, wedgelike cleft in the center of Bcr-abl. . . . Gleevec-resistant mutations in Bcr-abl change the molecular “heart” of the Bcr-abl protein so that the drug can no longer access the critical cleft in the protein, thus rendering the drug ineffective. To escape targeted therapy, cancer changed hanged the target.

Scientists get around this by simply coming up with a spectrum of drugs. Each time a patient’s CML evolves, they give them a new kind of drug. (I assume most CMLs undergo a predictable pattern of such evolution)

5. The genetic mutations giving rise to cancer can be thought of as organized by pathways, eg Ras-Mek-Erk. One fucked = entire pathway fucked-- but it's the same pathway, meaning you can treat cancer simply by treating the pathways as a whole, ie fewer "problems" to deal with. however, still a lot. on average, 11-15 pathways fucked in a cancer cell. big number!! but also finite, so maybe one day we’ll succeed, and even better, and maybe no need to target all in order to cure

6. Cancer is terrifying.

The activated ras pathway (Ras-Mek-Erk) does not merely cause accelerated cell division; the pathway also intersects with other pathways to enable several other “behaviors” of cancer cells. . . . Certain activated signaling pathways within cancer cells could also induce neighboring blood vessels to grow. A tumor could thus “acquire” its own blood supply by insidiously inciting a network of blood vessels around itself and then growing, in grapelike clusters, around those vessels, a phenomenon that Folkman called tumor angiogenesis.

Other activated pathways in cancer cells, originating in mutated genes, blocked cell death, thus imbuing cancer cells with the capacity o resist death signals. Other pathways allowed cancer cells to acquire motiliy, the capacity to move from one tissue to another-- initiating metastasis. Yet other gene cascades increased cell survival in hostile environments, such that cancer cells travelling through the bloodstream could invade other organs and not be rejected or destroyed in environments not designed for their survival.

These gene cascades, notably, were perversions of signaling pathways used by the body under normal circumstances. The “motility genes”, for instance, are the very genes that normal cells use when they require movement through the body. Tumor angiogenesis exploits the same pathways that are used when blood vessels are created to heal wounds. Nothing is invented, nothing is extraneous. Cancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

7. Every patient’s cancer is unique. “Even within a single type of tumor, the heterogeneity of mutations is daunting. If one compares two breast cancer specimens, the set of mutated genes is far from identical”. No two cancers have the same set of genetic mutations, which potentially sucks in the quest to cure cancer. However, possibly most of these mutations are “passive”: “as cancer cells divide, they accumulate mutations due to accidents in the copying of DNA, but these mutations don’t necessarily have an impact on the biology of cancer. They stick to the genome and are passively carried along as the cell divides, identifiable but inconsequential.”

8. Donald Berry’s “Effect of Screening and Adjuvant Therapy on Mortality from Breast Cancer” (New England Jurnal of Medicine 353, no 17 (2005)) found that the decline of breast cancer mortality, by 24 percent between 1990 and 2005, could be attributed to both cancer prevention and chemotherapy equally-- 12 percent for mammography and 12 percent for chemotherapy. 

9. Finally:

This, indubitably, is progress. But before we become too dazzled, it is worthwhile putting it into perspective. The morality rate has not improved much for, say, metastatic pancreatic cancer, or for gallbladder cancer that is not amenable to surgery. Even breast cancer shows a marked heterogeneity in outcome. If [a patient]’s tumor has metastasized, or is estrogen-receptor negative, Her-2 negative, and unresponsive to standard chemotherapy, then her chances of survival will have barely changed since 2,500 years ago. Give [her] CML or Hodgkin’s disease, in contrast, and her life span may have increased by thirty or forty years.

Obvious link to point 7.

[erotesis]

Bad Pharma

by Ben Goldacre

Like many other pop science books, this is a good introduction for the uninitiated. As the subtitle states, this book deals with “how drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients”, although it rightly also implicates the medical community at large for letting drug companies get away with so much. 

Lots of good evidence to be found here, and very powerful when taken as a whole, but there’s no single smoking gun so I didn’t really take many notes.

Mantel-Haenszel method was interesting, as was this: “If a side effect hasn’t yet occured in n patients, then you can be 95% confident that it will happen in fewer than one in 3/n patients”, which I suppose can be generalized to any event. Can be rephrased to “If n events are studied, that is only enough to spot side effects that occur more frequently than one in every n/3 events”

[erotesis]

On Tolerance

by Frank Furedi

I concede that a large part of the reason why I like this book is because it affirms the things I already believe; furthermore, it endows me with the language necessary to explain those beliefs. Caveat: the first two chapters are confusing and convoluted and new readers are advised to jump directly to chapter 3, on the “fossilization of identity”.

It is nigh on impossible for me to pick out quotes from this book since I feel like quoting almost everything. The final 3 chapters were actually really, really hard to get through because they quite accurately captured the current depressing state of affairs. 

Furedi effectively argues (among other things) that:

1. The definition of “tolerance” has been distorted to refer to groups rather than beliefs.

1a. Under this definition, “tolerance” sometimes takes on a negative connotation as it is seen as a tokenistic, opportunistic gesture since it stands in opposition to full, complete “acceptance”. However, Furedi points out that, under the classical definition,

One can and should tolerate Judaism, the Islamic faith, and Queer politics -- one cannot and should not ‘tolerate’ Jews, Muslims, or homosexuals on the basis of their group identity. [...] Tolerance is based on the prior acts of reflection, judgement and discrimination. That is why opinions that we tolerate are also ones with which we disagree. The same standards of discrimination and judgement ought not to be applied to cultural, ethnic or racial groups, because a liberal democratic ethos is inconsistent with the idea of discriminating between people on ethnic, racial or cultural grounds. People’s right to equal treatment needs to be accepted, not tolerated.

1b. This cultural shift in meaning ties into the trend of increasing emphasis on group identity, which detracts from individual moral autonomy.

The very pursuit of group toleration often communicates the assumption that individuals exist as the personification of group culture and experience. The tolerance accorded to people is in their capacity as members of their group rather than in relation to their individual beliefs and views. This formulation stands in significant contrast to the Lockean notion that beliefs are matters of personal revelation or deliberation in which our agentic individuality is the expression of our fundamental humanness. In its most extreme form, identity becomes entirely naturalized-- homosexuality, for example, is viewed not as a choice influenced by sexual desire but as the inexorable consequence of a so-called gay gene.

2. Granted, the meanings of terms can change over time, BUT with regards to intellectual discourse this is normally formalized, as opposed to the gradual, subconscious/unintentional shift that we witnessed in relation to “tolerance”.

2a. I feel that a stronger argument would be to point out that the shift in the meaning of “tolerance” doesn’t negate the need for a signifier to denote the original term, nor does it negate the importance of said concept.

3. Tolerance is reinvented as an educational doctrine for conveying moral truths. The very act of associating tolerance with an cause or value communicates the warning that it is beyond debate, beyond discussion, since only the intolerant would question it. Tolerance is taught as a fundamental virtue; in this way the rhetorical positioning of tolerance towards an object invites intolerance towards its critics. 

3a. We reject this because we have to “retain lively apprehension” of our beliefs (ie reaffirm or clarify them):

Unexamined truths need to account for themselves to avoid tunring into dogma. The influence exercised by such powerful opinion could lead to the suppression of unconventional views, thereby losing an important opportunity for clarifying ideas. [Furthermore,] the influence of unquestioned, majority-sanctioned conventions could constrain individuals from exercising their autonomy.

Through speaking and evaluating other people’s opinions, people learn to cultivate their capacity for critical engagement and cease to be passive recipients of handed-down dogma

3b. [Personal input] I think a lot of people are going to point out that, “wait a moment, but surely [x] thing is beyond questioning! are you suggesting that [x] thing could possibly be untrue? you monster!” But I think the response to that is simply that from within the bubble of our perception, we cannot principally prove/differentiate which arguments are unquestionably “right” or “wrong”. We can only do that from a non-existent God’s eye perspective. No matter how certain you are, there will be someone else who holds the opposite belief with equal if not greater conviction, so the strength of your conviction cannot be the basis for truth. You can believe something is categorically true, but you shouldn’t ever discourage someone from trying to challenge it.

The elite consensus against offensive speech exemplifies how the intolerance of critical nonconformist ideas has made such a surprising comeback. Everything from universal suffrage to organ transplants, from contraception to legalized divorce, was once considered an offence to standards of public decency. Each time, the pain caused to some people proved well worth it for the gains offered to humanity as a whole.

4. Infantilization of harm (we even insist on ”inoculating society from so-called linguistic harm”) + the rise of harm-based “identity politics”

4a. This was kind of the part where I felt like quoting everything so I gave up. Lots of important arguments here. I’m already familiar with most of them tbh, but if I actually voiced them regularly I’d probably be made into a pariah forever-- which is kind of EXACTLY the point Furedi is making, that the new “tolerance” has directly caused a massive wave of intolerance by the classical definition and that’s worrying, obviously. Furedi compares it to “heresy hunting in the twenty-first century”

4a. [Personal input] If we think of harm-based identity politics as a meme, it actually becomes clear really fast why it became the dominant mode of identity politics, especially given its “diffuse quality [which] allows it to be deployed in virtually any context”.

--

ugh okay here are some extra quotes i typed out before i realized it was hopeless and i was effectively quoting the whole book. didnt want to let these go to waste

The principal premise for the devaluation of the freedom of speech is the supposition that people lack the intellectual or moral independence to evaluate critically the views to which they are exposed. What most offends critical race theorists is the presumption that the intellectual consumers in the market place are free actors, capable of intelligently and fairly considering competing political ideas, policy proposals and value systems before forming conclusions of their own. [...] People are presumed to be so strongly under the influence of irrational sentiments that they are virtual prisoners of prejudice and consumerist ideas.

-

The Rushdie affair, which errupted in February 1989, demonstrated the disquieting consequences of the loss of cultural support for liberal tolerance. When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, far too many public figures wavered and refused to be counted. Numerous members of the cultural elite argued that Rushdie should not have written a novel that insulted Islam, and Rushdie was accused of “abusing” free speech. The Rushdie event was a defining moment. It showed how readily Westerners could be backed away from a fundamental principle of intellectual liberalism, namely that there is nothing wrong with offending - hurting people’s feelings - in pursuit of the truth. Once the recognition of a difference trumps the right to judge and critcize, it is onl a matter of time before the appearance of the censor.

-

Identity politics is profoundly hostile to any questions or criticisms directed at its representation of the world. Group claims about who they are, their past, and their interpretation of their experience, are presented as sacred doctrines that are beyond debate. Such claims convey the implication that those who question their version of events are showing disrespect, and even relatively restrained criticisms are likely to be dismissed as an offence to a people’s culture.  Those who possess a specific identity implicitly assume that they have a monopoly over a moral claim to their truth. 

Outwardly, identity politics can appear as a friend of tolerance, continually demanding tolerance for diversity and difference. But what they mean by tolerance is non-judgementalism. In exchange for not exposing its own truth to criticism, it is prepared to be indifferent to others’ identities. The coexistence of intolerance towards those who question a politicized identity, and an indifference to other identities’ cultural claims informs the multicultural epistemology that is so prominent in public life. It is based on the narrow-minded principle that only those who live a particular existence are capable of understanding or commenting on it. Since the ascendancy of identity politics numerous groups have taken out a patent on their souls. Their unique way of knowing becomes the validation of their monopoly over understanding. 

The claim that members of different identity groups have their own unique way of understanding and developing knowledge devalues the status of objectivity. It also calls into question the possibility of public debate and communication. If one group has no right to question all the truths produced b another, the celebration of difference becomes simply an apology for restraining the freedom to speak, question and criticized. This provides identity politics with a warrant to be intolerant towards words an ideas that it does not want to hear.

[erotesis]

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

If someone had to choose solely between reading this book or reading the LW sequences, I would strongly recommend the sequences. The book 1. offers no novel information 2, deals primarily with symptoms rather than cures. Can see why it might be useful to the layperson however.

Put it better than I could have, I suppose:

The brain is designed with blind spots, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on us the comforting delusion that we, personally, do not have any.

Self-justification is not the same thing as lying or making excuses. There is a big difference between what a guilty man says to the pubic to convince them of something he knows is untrue ("I did not have sex with that woman; "I am not a crook"), and the process of persuading himself that he did a good thing. In the former situation, he is lying and knows he is lying to save his won skin. In the latter, he is lying to himself. That is why self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie. It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done, the right thing to have done.

But, you say, all those justifications are true! Whether those claims are true or false is irrelevant. When we cross these lines, we are justifying behavior we know is wrong precisely so that we can continue to see ourselves as honest people and not criminals or thieves. Whether the behavior in question is a small thing like spilling ink on a hotel bedspread, or a big thing like embezzlement, the mechanism of self-justification is the same. 

Drew Westen, Clint Kilts, Pavel Blagov (2006):

In a study of people who were being monitored by MRI while they were trying to process dissonant or consonant information, researchers found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain lit up happily when consonance was restored.

Science things:

It doesn't matter how beautiful the guess is, or how smart the guess is, or how famous the guess is; if the experiment disagrees with the guess, then the guess is wrong. That's all there is to it.

For any theory to be scientific, it must be stated in a such a way that it can be shown to be false as well as true. If ever outcome confirms your hypothesis, your beliefs are a matter of faith, not science. 

Crucial question to ask self is, “what would you consider sufficient counter-evidence for you to change your mind?”

Also, importance of the control group -- for example, one study found that 41% of women said that their libido returned after taking viagra. However, so did 43% of the control group who took a sugar pill.

Impact on law and stuff:

Rob Warden has observed dissonance at work among prosecutors whom he considers “fundamentally good” and honorable people who just want to do the right thing. When the exoneration took place, Jack O’Malley, the prosecutor on the case, kept saying to Warden, “How could this be? How could this happen?” Warden said, “He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand. He really didn’t. And Jack O’Malley was a good man.” Yet prosecutors cannot get beyond seeing themselves and the cops as good guys, and defendants as bad guys. “You get in the system,” Warden says, “and you become very cynical. You develop a theory of the crime, and it leads to what we call tunnel vision. Years later overwhelming evidence comes out that the guy was innocent. And you’re sitting here thinking, “Wait a minute. Either this overwhelming evidence is wrong or I was wrong-- and I couldn’t have been wrong because I’m a good guy.

Deanna Kuhn, Michael Weinstock, and Robin Flaton (1994) find that

In one experiment, jurors listened to an audiotaped reenactment of an actual murder trial and then said how they would have voted and why. Instead of considering and weighing possible verdicts in light of the evidence, most people immediately constructed a story about what had happened and then, as evidence during the mock trial, they accepted only the evidence that supported their pre-conceived version of what had happened. Those who jumped to a conclusion early on were also the most confident in their decision and were most likely to justify it by voting for an extreme verdict. This is normal; it’s also alarming. 

I particularly enjoyed this analogy-

It is as if they had started off at the top of a pyramid, a milimeter apart, but by the time they have finished justifying their individual actions, they have slid to the bottom and now stands at the opposite corners of its base. The one who didn’t cheat considers the other to be totally immoral, and the one who cheated thinks the other is hopeless puritanical. 

Modified a passage slightly, re: failure to resolve misunderstandings:

The message heard in her anger was “You have committed a horrible crime” and “You are less than human for the actions of your ancestors”. He was deeply sorry that she had been hurt, of course, and he wished he could do something to make her feel better, but he didn’t think that he had committed a horrible crime or that he was inhuman, and the kind of grovelling apology she seemed to want was not the kind he was prepared to give. So instead, he tried to convince her that situation was not as serious as she had made it out to be. However, she interpreted his attempts to explain himself as an effort to invalidate her feelings. The message she heard in his reaction was “You shouldn’t be so upset; I didn’t do anything bad.” His efforts to explain himself made her angrier, and her anger made it more difficult for him to empathize with her suffering and respond to it.

More appeal to importance of rationality:

Understanding how the mind yearns for consonance, and rejects information that questions our beliefs, decisions, or preferences, teaches us to be open to the possibility of error. It also helps us let go of the need to be right. [...] Most of us wish to live without passions or convictions, which gave our lives meaning and color, energy and hope. But the unbending need to be right inevitably produces self-righteousness. When confidence and convictions are unleavened by humility, by an acceptance of fallibility, people can easily cross the line from healthy self-assurance to arrogance. 

Finally, Richard McNally calls recovered memory therapy “the worst catastrophe to befall the mentally health field since the lobotomy era”. He is correct.

[erotesis]

The Violinist’s Thumb

by Sam Kean

An engaging beginner’s guide. Some selected passages below.

We really lucked out with endosymbiosis, or: why evolution stalled for so long, or: maybe there’s life out there but they didn’t luck out and so didn’t become intelligent life?:

From [early Earth]. autonomous micro-organisms with sophisticated membrans and replaceable moving parts emerged in just a billion years. And from this common beginning, many distinct species popped up in short order. After this miracle, however, evolution flatlined: we had many types of truly living creatues, but these microbes didn’t evolve much more for well over a billion years-- and might never have.

What doomed them was energy consumption. Primitive microbes expend 2% of their total energy copying and maintaining DNA, but 75% of their energy making proteins from DNA. S even if a microbe develops the DNA for an advantageous and evolutionary advanced trait, actually building the advanced feature pretty much depletes it. Adding two is out of the question. In these circumstances evolution idles. Cheap mitochondrial power lifted these restrictions. Mitochondria store as much energy per unit size as lightning bolts. In fact, mitochondria allowed cells to expand their DNA repertoire 200,000 times.

Of course endosymbiosis isn’t 100% confirmed but it’s pretty attractive especially since the same thing happened twice-- this theory would explain not just mitochondria but also chloroplasts.

I enjoyed this passage from a reader’s perspective:

Something even more interesting happened when two scientists, instead of turning DNA into music, inverted the process and translated the notes from a Chopin nocturne into DNA. They discovered a sequence “strikingly similar” to part of the gene for RNA polymerase. This polymerase, a protein universal throughout life, is what builds RNA from DNA. Which means, if you look closer, that the nocturne actually encodes an entire life cycle. Consider: Polymerase uses DNA to build RNA. RNA in turn builds complicated proteins. These proteins in turn build cells, which in turn build people, like Chopin. He in turn composed harmonious music-- which completed the cycle by encoding the DNA to build polymerase. Musicology recapitulates ontology.

(BUT I’m skeptical about reading any more into this. 1. Our bodies contain a serious fuckton of DNA strands. If you try encoding enough music pieces you’ll find a “meaningful” connection eventually, i.e. coincidence. 2. “Strikingly similar” is suspicious. We don’t know the exact level of similarity; I suspect it’s actually not that high, i.e. confirmation bias.)

On how the XX and XY differences came about, and why Y is so darn short:

Most chromosomes, though, discourage long palindromes or at least discourage the inversions (after a double-strand breaks, chromosomes may accidentally flip a chunk of DNA by 180 degrees before reattaching it) that create them. Inversions can break up or disable genes, leaving the chromosome ineffective. It can also hurt a chromosome’s chances of crossing over. Crossing over (when twin chromosmes cross arms and exchange segments) allows chromosomes to swap genes and acquire better versions, or versions that work better together. It also allows chromosomes to perform quality control checks. But a chromosome will cross over only with a partner that looks similar. If the partner looks suspiciously different, chromosomes fear picking up malignant DNA and refuse to swap. Inversions look dang suspicious.

Way back when, before mammals split from reptiles, X and Y were twins and crossed over frequently. Then, 300 million years ago, a gene on Y mutated and became a master switch that caused testes to develop. (Before this, sex was probably determined by the temperate at which eggs wree incubated, the same nongenetic system used in turtles and crocodiles. Because of this change, Y became the male chromosome and began accumulating other manly genes. X and Y began to look dissimilar and shied away from crossing over.

After crossing over slowed down, Y grew more tolerant of inversions. In fact, Y has undergone four massive inversions in history, truly huge flips of DNA. Each one created many cool palindromes, but each made crossing over with X progressively harder. This wouldn’t be a huge deal except, again, crossing over allows chromosomes to overwirte malignant mutations. Xs could keep doing this in XX females, but when Y lost its partner, mutations started to accumulate, and each time one appeared, cells had no choice but to chop Y down and excise the mutated DNA. The results were not pretty. Once a large chromosome, Y has lost all but two dozen of its original fourteen hundred genes.

At this rate, biologists once assumed that Ys were goners. Palindromes, however, may have pardoned Y. Hairpins in a DNA strand are bad, but if Y folds itself into a giant hairpin, it can bring any two of its palindroms-- which are the same genes, one running forward, one running backward-- into contact. This allows Y to check for mutations and overwrite them. Folding over aloso allows Ys to make up for the lack of a partner and “recombine” themselves, swapping genes at one point along their lengths for genes at another. This palindrome fix is ingenious.

Another cool theory:

Protein-producing DNA-- genes-- actually makes up very little of the total DNA in higher animals, as little as 1%. So what does all the extra DNA do? Scientists long assumed it did nothing, and snubbed it as “junk DNA”. The name has haunted them as an embarrassment ever since. So-called DNA actually contains thousands of critical stretches that turns genes on and off or otherwise regulate them. To take one example, chimpanzees and other primates have short, fingernail-hard bumps (called spines) studding their penises. Humans lack the little prick pricks because some-time in the past few million years, we lost sixty thousand letters of regulatory DNA-- DNA that would otherwise coax certain genes, which we still have,  into making the spines. Besides sparing vaginas, this loss decreases male sensation during sex and thereby prolongs copulation, which scientists suspect helps humans pair-bond and stay monogamous, as opposed to other primates.

Bet you didn’t see that one coming!

So we’ve heard of toxoplasma gondii quite a bit in recent years. Some other stuff I didn’t know about it, in a particularly lovely passage...

Toxo [in rat’s brains] toys with mouse desire to enrich its own sex life. When living inside the rodent brain, Toxo can split in two and clone itself, the same method by which most microbes reproduce. But unlike most microbes, Toxo can also have sex and reproduce sexually-- but only in the intestines of cats. It’s a weirdly specific fetish, but there it is. Like most organisms, Toxo craves sex, so no matter how many times it has passed its genes on through cloning, it’s always scheming to get back inside those erotic cat guts. By making mice attracted to cat urine, Toxo can lure them towards cats. 

Toulouse-Lautrec had a custom hollowed-out cane made, to fill with absinthe and drink from surreptitiously. Ideas!

When radiation occurs, lots of double strand breaks and/or DNA gets deleted. Fixing these breaks is technically within the cells’ capabilities, but the process is laborious, and if lots of DNA is affected then the cell does a shoddy job of reparation -> long term problems. Furthermore, if the cells deems the damage irreparable, it might kill itself, which is good for the body in small doses, but in radiation cases many cells kill themselves at once = people die.

Finally, an example of how political/social ideologies spill over into science and hinders it:

People loathed natural selection. Pitiless death seemed paramount, with superior types always crushing the weak. Intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw even felt betrayed by Darwin. Shaw had adored Darwin at first for smiting religious dogmas. But the more Shaw heard, the less he liked natural selection. Shaw later lamented, “There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence.” Nature governed by such rules, he said, would be a “universal struggle for hogwash”. Increasing numbers of people supported the zealotry against Darwinism because they felt it violated the progressive ethos of the young century.

!! The truth is the truth is the truth!! Even if it crushes your high-falutin ideals of beauty and intelligence and justice!!! Just because a certain model of the world appeals to you doesn’t mean that model is accurate!!

And another, more recent example: This guy called Craig Venter invented a super fast way of sequencing genes. But the HGP insisted that it lacked “style and craft” and that it lacked the human element since Venter’s method “could be run by monkeys” His colleagues denounced his work as cheating, and one person compared his process for discovering genes to Sir Edmund Hillary taking a helicopter partway up Mount Everest. Like, so fucking wHAT?! This fucking shit can SAVE LIVES, can VASTLY ADVANCE SCIENCE, and you want to do it the slow way just because it’s more fucking elegant?! If Venter had been more of a conformist he’d jut have backed down; thank god he didn’t. Due to his determination and the speed at which his split-away company was working, HGP was forced to adopt Venter’s methods eventually, but not without a ton of acrimony. (They also quietly covered up the fact that they had originally dissed Venter then later copied him. Tards.)

I bloody hate ideologues.

[erotesis]

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

by Daniel Dennett

This book is technically about religion as seen through the lens of social theory, but I found myself reading it as a book about social theory as exemplified by religion. Hence, in some of the quotes below I have substituted the words referencing religion with more general terms. 

This post will broadly be divided into three parts: first section, quotes for general use; second section, Dennett on the evolution of religion; finally, some quotes on religion vs science.

On the importance of rational, reasonable discourse:

Imperialist universalism of any variety is not a good way to start. Even if “we” are right, insisting on it from the outset is ultimately neither diplomatic nor scientific. Everybody should consider adopting the stable middle ground suggested by Balkin: an open-minded (”ambivalent”) stance that permits a rational dialogue to engage the issues between people, no matter how radically different their cultural backgrounds. We can engage in this conversation with some reasonable hope of resolution that isn’t simply a matter of one culture overwhelming the other by brute force. We cannot expect to persuade others if we leave no room and opportunity for them to persuade us.

On how life isn’t an epistemic black box:

The most popular move is pre-emptive disqualification. According to some radical feminists, only women are qualified to do research on women, because only they can overcome the phallocentrism that renders males obtuse and biased in ways they can never acknowledge or counteract. Some multiculturalists insist that Europeans/Americans can never really cancel out their disabling Eurocentrism and understand Third World people. Well, then, should we all just hunker down in our isolationist enclaves and wait for death to overtake us, since we can never understand one another? It’s as ridiculous as claiming that you’ll never understand music unless you are born with a great ear for music and perfect pitch,. Nonsense. In fact, people who have difficulty training themselves as musicians often grind out insights into the nature of music and how to perform it that were unavailable to those who glide effortlessly to mastery. Similarly, Temple Grandin, who is autistic and hence has a tin ear for the intentional stance and psychology, has come up with striking observations about how people present themselves and interact, insights that had escaped the rest of us /normal/ folk.

On unthinking adherence to ideology:

Have you ever had to face the heart-wrenching problem of a dear friend who has fallen head over heels in love with somebody who is just not worthy of her love? If you suggest this to her, you risk losing a friend and getting slapped in the face for your trouble, for people in love often make it a point of honor to respond irrationally and violently to any perceived slight of their beloved. Similarly, the discomfort or outrage you feel when confronted by my calm invitation to consider the pros and cons of your religion/ideology is the same reaction one feels when asked for a candid evaluation of one's true love. If you are so much as willing to think about comparing your religion with others, you must not be in love with your religion. Has our evolved capacity for romantic love been exploited by religious/ideological/social justice memes? It would certainly get people to think that it was actually honorable to take offence, to attack all skeptics with fury, to lash out wildly and without concern for their own safety-- let alone the safety of the person they are attacking. Of such stuff are fatwas made.

On how this unthinking adherence is maintained:

One of the most effective measures against skepticism is to invoke the concept of the diabolical lie. It is so simple that it’s hard to believe it could ever work, and it goes goes something like this:

“If anybody ever raises questions or objections about our ideology that you cannot answer, that person is almost certainly Satan (or a misogynist, or a racist). In fact, the more reasonable the person is, the more eager to engage you in open-minded and congenial discussion, the more sure you can be that you’re talking to Satan in disguise! Turn away! Do not listen! It’s a trap!”

What is so particularly cute about this trick is that it is a perfect “wild card”, so lacking in content that any sect or creed or conspiracy can use it effectively. Communist cells can be warned that any criticism they encounter is almost sure to be the work of FBI infiltrators in disguise. Radical feminists can squelch any unanswerable criticism by declaring it to be phallocentric propaganda being unwittingly spread by a brainwashed dupe of the evil  patriachy.

Denying the existence of racial differences has severely reduced the ability to make advances in the treatment of breast cancer, diabetes, hypertension, etc: 

Some believe that belief in racial differences is so pernicious that even when it is true it is to be squelched. This has led to some truly unfortunate excesses. For instance, there are clear clinical data about how people of different ethnicity are differently susceptible to disease, or respond differently to various drugs, but such data are considered off limits by some researchers, and some funders of research. This has the perverse effect that strongly indicated avenues of research are deliberately avoided, much to the detriment of the health of the ethnic groups involved.

On the responsibility to condemn extremism within your own in-group (criticism from the out-group will be derided/ignored, leaving only the in-group as its own check and balance):

Those who maintain ideologies, and take steps to make them more attractive, must be held responsible for the harms produced by some of those whom they attract and provide with a cloak of respectability. Defenders of religion are quick to point out that terrorists typically have political, not religious agendas. Even if that is true, the political agendas of violent fanatics often lead them to adopt a religious guise, and to exploit the organizational infrastructure and tradition of unquestioning loyalty of whichever religion is handy.

Any religious person who is not actively and publicly involved in condemning such extremist groups is shirking a duty-- and the fact that you don’t belong to the congregation or denomination that is offending doesn’t excuse you. Any vicious cult that uses Christian imagery or texts as its protective coloration should lie heavily on the conscience of all who call themselves Christians, for instance. Until all priests and rabbis and feminists explicitly condemn /by name/ the dangerous individuals and groups within their ranks, they are /all/ complicit.

One more nice quote:

It’s a story of what can happen when the demands of the public for simple advice run up against the confusing ambiguity of reality.

Dennett cautions that in sketching out the whole story of religion’s evolution, he is simply mooting an empirically testable narrative which can then be refined further over time, and admits that many of his conjectures could be wrong. He rightly justifies all this by pointing out that it is often easier to fix something that is broken than it is to build it from scratch.

He postulates that humans developed an intentional stance, allowing us to better model the intentions of other human beings. However, this also extends to inanimate objects:

At the root of human belief in gods lies an instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agency-- beliefs and desires and other mental states-- to anything complicated that moves.

Simple forms of “practical animism” are arguably not mistakes at all, but extremely useful ways of keeping track of the tendencies of designed things, living or artefactual, such as the gardener who tries to discover what her different flowers and vegetables “prefer”, or “tricks” a dogwood branch into “thinking it’s spring”. Even undesigned physical systems can be usefully described in intentional or animistic terms: the river doesn’t “literally” want to return to the ocean, but water “seeks its own level”, as they say, and lightning “searches” for the best path to ground. It is not surprising that attempts to explain patterns discerned in the world has often hit upon animism as a good-- actually predictive-- approximation of some unimaginably complex underlying phenomenon.

In fact, BF Skinner (1948) finds even pigeons are susceptible to a striking “superstition” effect.

The pigeons were put on a random schedule of reinforcement. Every so often, no matter what the pigeon was doing at the moment, a click and a food-pellet reward were developed. Soon the pigeons put on this random schedule were doing elaborate “dances”, bobbing and whirling and craning their necks.  In a species like ours, the effects are likely to be multiplied. It is not hard to believe that similar effects could be inculcated by happy accident in our ancestors, whose built-in love for the intentional stance would tend to encourage them to add invisible agents or other homunculi to be the secret puppeteers behind perplexing phenomena.

At the very beginning, however, we tended towards ancestor worship rather than gods per se. Dennett suggests that reverence for the dead is a by-product of the intentional stance, because it allows us to store mental models of people who aren’t present; the already highly respectable elders grow further in stature and power after death. Hm, sounds tenuous to me.

Anyway. We then developed divination and shaman medicine. Dennet writes that:

The most important effect of divination is that it reduces responsibility in decision-making, and thereby reduces the acrimony that can result from bad decisions. The rationale is obvious enough: if you’re going to pass the buck, pass it to something that can’t duck the responsibility in turn, and that can be held responsible if things don’t go well.

Hence why we came to rely on ancestors for advice from the grave, and thereby attributed more importance to said ancestors. The explanation for why shaman medicine proliferated is slightly more complicated, but one theory is that it was actually effective, and ties in to why we are susceptible to the placebo effect: 

One of the most ingenious hypothesis under discussion is Nicholas Humphrey’s (2002) “economic resource management” hypothesis. The body has many resources to cure its own ailments: pain to discourage activity that can further damage an injury, fevers to combat infection, vomitting to get rid of toxins, etc. These are all effective but costly; overuse, or premature use, could actually end up harming the body more than helping. Full-scale immune responses are particularly costly. When should a body spare no expense in hopes of a quick cure? Only when it is safe to do so, or when help is just around the corner. Otherwise, it might be more prudent for the body to be stingy with its self-treatments. The placebo effect, according to this hypothesis, is a releasing trigger, telling the body to pull out all the stops because there is hope.

So in sum:

The intentional stance yielded candidates to press into service as decision aids, in divination, or as shaman’s accomplices, in health maintenance. These co-opted or exapted mental constructs were then subjected to extensive design revision under the selective pressure for reproductive prowess.

Dennett stresses that when it came to the evolution of religious rituals,

Nobody had to understand these rationales, or even want to improve the copying fidelity of the rituals in which they participated; it is rather that any rituals that just happened to be favored by these features would have a powerful replicative advantage over competing rituals that lacked them, thus becoming more dominant.

For example, the reason why religion can often be esoteric:

A somewhat less obvious design feature was the inclusion of incomprehensible elements! Why would this help transmission? By obliging the transmitters to fall back on “direct quotation” in circumstances where they might otherwise be tempted to use “indirect quotation” and just transmit the gist of the occasion “in their own words”-- a dangerous source of mutation.

And why religion can often be xenophobic and/or demand high levels of personal sacrifice, something that Scott Alexander touched on when discussing why liberal Protestantism is dying even as more conservative Protestant movements thrive.

Furthermore, the reason why religion tended to be a group-based phenomenon is because:

Memes that foster human group solidarity are particularly fit (as memes) in circumstances in which host survival most directly depends on hosts’ joining forces in groups. The success of such meme-infested groups is itself a potent broadcasting device, enhancing outgroup curiosity (and envy) and thus permitting linguistic, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to be more readily penetrated. This hypothesis can account for excellence of design without postulating rational designers, and can account for the fact that individual fitness is subordinated to group fitness in religions.

Or in other words, memes that promote “groupishness” propagate better. And the memes that best do so are the ones that promise “rewards with general/inexhaustible demand”, such as, you know, eternal life in heaven after death. And some people go it alone, but given the immensity of the task, most people think they need help, and that’s what group religion provides. Also why religions with harder to meet commitments encourage greater groupishness. Whether this belief in the supernatural is justified is irrelevant, it can be perfectly “rational” to invest in a stock that turns out to be worthless. 

(Perhaps one of the reasons we transited from ancestor worship to God worship is that it wasn't a transition so much so as both coexisting for a time, but the latter winning out in the long run since the former promises less reward.)

Dennett does little to justify, however, why we evolved from folk religions to organized religion. He asserts that it was to meet the growing needs of a more highly advanced population (industrial revolution), and draws the analogy of folk music transitioning to “representations, rules, concert halls, critics, and agents”, but does not elaborate much further.

On extremism in religion:

Some people are just bloodythirsty, or thrill-seeking, and as our customs become ever more civilized and opposed to violence, such people are highly motivated to find a cause that can provide them with a “moral” justification for their swashbuckling, whether it is murdering doctors who perform abortions, sending anthrax to “evil” federal employees, murdering an innocent person under cover of fatwa, or achieving matyrdom in jihad. Religion may well not be the root cause of this dangerous yearning. But religions are certainly the most prolific source of the “moral certainties” and “absolutes” that such zealotry depends on. 

Those who want to puncture the reputation of science tend to concentrate on hidden agendas, forged results, etc.

But ironically, when they set out to make their case for the prosecution, all their /good/ evidence of the failings and biases of science comes from science’s own highly vigorous exercises in self-policing and self-correction. The critics have no choice: there is no better source of truth on any topic than well-conducted science, and they know it. 

On why science differs from religion:

We who love science do not honor those whose love of science prevents them from thinking clearly and rationally about it! On the contrary, we are particularly critical of those whose misunderstandings and romantic misstatements of these great ideas mislead themselves and others. In our view, there is no safe haven for mystery or incomprehensibility. Yes, there is humility, and awe, and sheer delight, but it is not accompanied by the willing abandonment of reason. So I feel a moral imperative to spread the word of evolution, but evolution is not my religion. I don’t have a religion.

There is a big difference between religious faith and scientific faith: what has driven the changes in concepts in physics is not just heightened skepticism from an increasingly worldly and sophisticated clientele, but a tidal wave of exquisitely detailed positive results and borne-out predictions. And this makes a huge difference because it gives beliefs about the truths of physics a place where the rubber meets the road, where there is more than mere professing that can be done. For instance, you can build something that depends for its safe operation on the truth of those sentences and risk your life trying to fly it to the moon. These are beliefs that you can act on in ways that speak louder than words.