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# Open Thread 198
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
In case you missed it last week, I’m [accepting grant applications](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant). So far many people have generously volunteered to help fund grants, and relatively few people have submitted really high-quality ideas I’m excited about. So no need to volunteer more funding, but if you have great ideas please send in an [application form](https://forms.gle/UG34SZJDbZiRudTV8).
So far I’ve got about 100 applications. Types of grant proposals I need less of on the margin:
* Social media sites
* Education and science communication projects (these are great, we’re just kind of heavy on them right now)
* Attempts to develop new ways to think about psychology
* Things on blockchains, although if your idea is actually good (eg <https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin>) this doesn’t have to be a dealbreaker
* Lifestyle products that would make people feel self-actualized
* Cool startup ideas of unclear charitable relevance
* Perpetual motion machines (yes, really)
* People who say they want to leverage new ways of thinking to create coordinated high-impact outcomes or whatever, without explaining *what specific things they are going to do.*
* Things that will help advance cutting-edge AI research. Remember, I think AI might be bad, and I hope it comes as late as possible so we have more time to prepare. If you have proposals to *hinder* the advance of cutting-edge AI research, send them to me! Or if you have proposals to help AI *safety* research, send those too (people who are just looking into normal AI applications for health care or whatever don’t have to worry about this).
* People saying “I don’t need money, I just want your official stamp of approval so I can use it to convince other people”. I have already committed to throwing money at things, including unlikely-to-work-but-could-be-cool things. But if I have to *stake my reputation* *on it* then I’ll be looking it over with a fine-toothed comb and being super-conservative.
Types of grant proposals I need more of on the margin:
* Basic research into important scientific questions
* Biomedical research
* Well-thought-out proposals to enact political change
* Field-building
* Forecasting
* Anything that might lead to 20,000 clones of John von Neumann
* High-impact, concrete proposals to help the global poor
The questions I most often had after reading people’s applications were “why would this be good?”, “why isn’t this a for-profit startup?”, “but what *actual, concrete* things are you going to *do?”,* and *“*if you care so much about this and you’re a software engineer at Google and it only costs $1000 why haven’t you just funded it yourself?” If your applications answer those questions, you’ll have a better chance of getting accepted, or at least of saving yourself an email conversation with me about them. | Scott Alexander | 44036157 | Open Thread 198 | acx |
# Apply For An ACX Grant
***[UPDATE:** Grants applications are closed for this year. No more proposals will be accepted]*
**What is ACX Grants?**
I want to give grants to good research and good projects with a minimum of paperwork. Like an NIH grant or something, only a lot less money and prestige.
**How is this different from Marginal Revolution's [Fast Grants](https://fastgrants.org/), Nadia Eghbal's [Helium Grants](https://www.heliumgrant.org/), or [EA Funds](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/apply-for-funding)' grant rounds?**
Not different at all. It’s total 100% plagiarism of them. I'm doing it anyway because I think it’s a good idea, and I predict there are a lot of good people with good projects in this community who haven't heard about / participated in those, but who will participate when I do it.
**How much money are you giving out?**
ACX Grants proper will involve $250,000 of my own money, but I’m hoping to supplement with much more of other people’s money, amount to be determined. See the sections on ACX Grants + and ACX Grants ++ below.
**Why do you have $250,000 to spend on grants?**
Unsolicited gifts from rich patrons, your generosity in subscribing to my Substack, and the second item [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-166).
Also, this isn’t investment advice or anything, but apparently cryptocurrency only ever goes up.
**I thought you were a believer in effective altruism, which says you have to donate your money to the most effective charity - which is probably about fighting malaria or existential risk or something. Giving it to random people on your blog isn’t very effective, is it?**
Some effective altruist organizations suggest that people with large but not billionaire-level amounts of money might want to try acting as charity “angel investors”. They argue that there are enough government agencies and billionaires to fund the biggest and most obvious legible high-impact opportunities. One of the best things that normal people can do with their donations is take a chance on interesting projects too small and illegible to catch governments’/billionaires’ attention. Some of these might accomplish some circumscribed goal with their seed funding; others might use the seed funding to produce preliminary results that convince governments and billionaires to help them the rest of the way. My access to the ACX community gives me a unique opportunity to do this, so I really do feel like this is the best way to donate this money.
But I’ll also, separately, be giving 10% of my income to more standard effective charities, since I’ve [pledged](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge/) to do this.
**What kind of projects are likely to get grants?**
Projects that could make the world a better place, but might not be able to catch the attention of more traditional funders. A (very non-exhaustive) list of things I’m looking for would include projects that:
* help address global poverty, global health challenges, mental health issues, animal welfare issues, or global climate change.
* move forward innovative and potentially socially beneficial technologies and ideas, even if these are very speculative.
* help understand and prepare for potentially disruptive future events, like pandemics or the advent of AGI
* improve the academic, governmental, and decision-making institutions that work on these other causes
* help do basic research, awareness-raising, or meta-level work that could eventually lead to one of the above
I’ll also tentatively be allowing grants for personal or career development, but there will be a high bar in terms of proving that your career would be really great for the world and that you would have a hard time developing your career without this money. I’d be most likely to approve a grant in this category if you were from a developing country that doesn’t have a lot of traditional avenues for building career capital.
These are only suggestions! If you think you have something that could make the world a better place that doesn’t fall in these categories, apply anyway.
I’ll mostly be approaching this from an effective altruist framework, but I’m not wedded to calculating things out exactly (which is impossible anyway), and if you have a great project that doesn’t fit within “traditional” effective altruism, apply anyway.
I’ll be happy to consider your application whether or not you are a traditional academic, whether or not you have a long history of past successful projects, etc.
Because I only have $250,000 and want to make at least a couple of grants, I’m unlikely to fund projects that cost more than about $100,000. If you have a really great project that needs more money than this, you should apply anyway, and I’ll see if I can fund you through ACXG+ or ACXG++
**Can a group of people apply as a team?**
Yes, of course.
**What is ACX Grants + ?**
I know a lot of nonprofits and rich people looking for interesting projects to fund. With your permission (ie if you check a box saying so on the application form), then along with considering your project myself, I’ll forward it to any of these people who I think it’s a good match for. Some of these people have a lot of money and are really excited about this, so I would *highly recommend* opting in (by clicking the checkbox on the application form). This would also be a good option for people who need more than $250,000.
If you’re a nonprofit or rich person interested in participating in ACX Grants + , and I don’t already know about your interest, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com.
**What Is ACX Grants ++ ?**
If you opt into this one (also just a check box on the application form) then I’ll include a description of your project, plus your contact info, in a public post on this blog. Anyone who reads about it and wants to fund it can.
**What’s the process like and how long will it take?**
You’ll fill in a form that should take about fifteen minutes. I will read the form and talk with smart people who seem like they might have good opinions. If you are a leading candidate, I might or might not email you asking for more information, or try to arrange a short call with you. The whole process shouldn’t take more than an hour or two of your time.
I’ll close applications in two weeks, and announce winners between two to four weeks after that.
**Will this be taxed?**
My current understanding is that I will have to pay a gift tax but winners will not have to pay taxes on the grant money. Please double-check this with your local jurisdiction.
Grant-making foundations have some tax advantages, but I don’t have a grant-making foundation. Some grant-making foundations are helping with this project, but I can’t legally “go through them” in a way where I both give them the money and influence their decisions. We’re still talking to tax experts, but most likely we’ll make decisions separately, then compare notes, and split the funding in some legally-permissible way. None of this should matter to you except that your check might come from me or from a foundation (if you opted-in to ACX+). You shouldn’t have to pay taxes either way.
**How do I apply?**
Fill in the form [here](https://forms.gle/UG34SZJDbZiRudTV8)**.** | Scott Alexander | 40213067 | Apply For An ACX Grant | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Orban
[Lyman Stone](https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1456701957125591043) on Twitter:
> I won’t make you read it all in tweet format. He continues:
>
> 1) Dictatorship and democracy. The arguments about Orban cheating in elections might be totally true. I dunno. But that's sort of irrelevant. Neutral opinion polls nobody disputes show he would have gotten 2/3 under almost any system.
>
> His crude poll share was about 60% before the 2010 election, but given the threshold effects, he'd likely have ended up at a supermajority under almost any system. And as [@slatestarcodex](https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex) [says], a lot of the initiatives that the EU most despises under Orban are initiatives that \*everyone agrees\* have supermajority public support among Hungarian voters.
>
> Moreover, I agree with [@slatestarcodex](https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex) that if public opinion turned in Hungary, Orban would probably turn on a dime too. The dude loves power. But that should inform our read of what's going on in Hungary. \*Hungarians wanted\* a right-nationalist authoritarian leader, \*and so they voted for one\*, and the electorate has \*wanted\* recurrent intensifications of that regime. So is it a dictatorship? Or is it a democracy?
>
> This gets at the problem with "democracy" as a concept. Hungary is undeniably Democratic: there is widespread public support for the regime, which is selected by elections, the results of which are a decent approximation of trustworthy and neutral opinion polls. But I think it's still possibly reasonable to call Orban a dictator. He wields enormous \*personal\* power, there are few checks on his power, and he uses power to create a \*personal\* clique of supporters to perpetuate that power and enfeeble the competition.
>
> But this is the point: Democracy and dictatorship aren't opposites. In fact, they are natural companions! So much so that before the 20th century, "democracy" was often used \*literally as a synonym\* for "authoritarian and demagogic rule"! Orban is a great example of why the word "democracy" came into ill repute in the past: because it was widely understood that "the people" (often pejoratively "the mob") will often vote for a strongman to stomp his boot on the face of disliked others. That's not so much a disagreement with [@slatestarcodex](https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex) as just a comment where I think the modern western liberal mindset obscures understanding the phenomenon of populist leadership.
>
> 2) Why admire Orban? Here I think [@slatestarcodex](https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex) misses some important stuff, perhaps because his biographies miss it. Yes, Orban was incompetent in the 90s. So were MOST immediate post-Soviet leaders! And while Orban may have been corrupt, you can compare the personal wealth of the Fidesz clique to the cliques that looted Russia or Ukraine and realize that Hungary got a better class of corrupt leaders than much of eastern Europe. Moreover, Hungary actually had competitive elections with changes of power and leaders who \*respected\* those results! Maybe they were dirty but, like, it happened! This wasn't universally true!
>
> So why might Hungarians admire a dissident-cum-parliamentarian who competed for their votes and when defeated responded democratically by adapting to try to win the next election? Because.... duh?
>
> But it's not just that. The big factor that's absent in all these culturalist accounts of Hungarian politics is.... the economy. Hungary went from below-average unemployment rate for its region under Orban 1 to way above-average under the socialists to again below-average under Orban 2.
>
> This is extremely important. A part of Orban's appeal is that, whether by coincidence or art, he has managed to preside over periods where Hungary's economic performance was better than a lot of its neighbors, and often fairly obviously so. That is, supporting irredentist nationalism in the form of Orban hasn't imposed costs on Hungarians: they aren't like facing sanctions or something or enduring deep economic hardship to stand by their dictator. He's delivered (comparatively) good times!
>
> So when you have a leader who 1) seems marginally-less-corrupt than regional peers, 2) delivers marginally-better-results than regional peers, and 3) adopts policies that are widely popular....that leader will be popular! Duh!
>
> Okay so finally a bonus 3). [@slatestarcodex](https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex) says this:
>
> But your regular reminder that IT'S NOT TRUE. Under Orban's government, family spending as measured by the OECD has actually \*declined\* on a per-child basis! This whole story about redesigning the whole culture is wrong! Indeed, a core part of my critique of Orbanism is precisely that I don't think it's radical enough. It does a lot of flashy stuff.... funded by cutting other programs, and with little eligibility quirks that end up limiting who benefits from it.
>
> So all that to say....
> 1) Orban may be a dictator, but he is absolutely also a democrat.
> 2) Orban is popular because he has delivered popular policies and results
> 3) The pronatal stuff is a lot more talk than money (tho that's starting to change)
My main question here was about point 2 - how did Orban do so well economically. [BobbyP](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3519396) gives what I think is a plausible answer:
> One missing angle from this post is the EU accession of Hungary in 2004. This opened up two things: 1) Access to the single market for a country with low labour costs 2) turned on the taps of EU aid money.
>
> Hungary has been riding a wave of economic growth based on EU accession. the economic growth has driven support for Orban as a leader overseeing raising living standards, and dished the aid cash out to supporters.
---
Richard Hanania on Twitter:
Well no, he’s a dictator because he owns 80% of the media that’s supposed to be critiquing himm and has rigged elections in various ways. But I agree there’s an interesting question of “is exerting more democratic control over the bureaucracy an additional black mark against him”?
Before we get there: I interpreted the paragraph Richard quotes as claiming that, if a teacher or doctor protests Fidesz or Orban *in their spare time*, as part of the normal exercise of their rights as a citizen, they can get fired or otherwise see their career suffer. That doesn’t seem to me like the government exercising control over the bureaucracy, that seems like a nightmarish escalation of the “cancel culture” that both Richard and I are against. In fact, this is an unusual but kind of compelling argument for directionally privatizing education and health care; if the government controls the hiring, promotion, and firing process for people in education and health care, that makes it harder for people in those fields to stand up to authoritarian regimes. But if you’ve got to have a government that controls major industries, and you want to leave room for democratic rights, you’ve got to have some kind of firewall between people’s off-the-clock activities and their government-sponsored careers.
But suppose I’m misinterpreting that, or put that aside. Are governments that try to control the bureaucracy more authoritarian than ones that don’t?
One argument in favor: I think most of us would agree that a government (here used as eg “the Tory government”, a particular political regime) which tries to control the judiciary and pack it with supporters is more authoritarian than one that doesn’t. A democracy is supposed to have some number of independent power centers to provide checks and balances, and if you put too much effort into making every power center bow to you, you stop having checks and balances, and become authoritarian.
But also, if you’re the democratically elected government, and you’re supposed to be setting idk housing policy or something, and the Department Of Housing Policy is refusing to implement any of your ideas, or implementing them incompetently, or just seem like total morons, then yeah, it seems natural to want to get rid of them and replace them with ideologically aligned and competent people.
I think the undercurrent to Richard’s complaint is that right now the situation is asymmetric: most bureaucrats are by nature liberal, and so when a liberal regime is in power, it can cooperate with the bureaucracy, and when a conservative regime is in power, it has to try to struggle with and overcome the bureaucracy, and that unfairly (?) makes conservative regimes look more authoritarian than liberal ones.
I’m not sure I have enough knowledge and context to have a strong opinion on this right now.
---
Sholom writes:
> I don't really see how Orban qualifies as a dictator. Even with the absurdly gerrymandered electoral system and the corrupt influence buying, Hungary is still a democracy and Orban is still a democratically elected head of state. To my mind, the line separating democracies from dictatorships is whether or not a majority of the people can vote out the party/leader in power, and whether or not people can openly campaign against the party/leader in power without being arrested or murdered. Both things are still pretty clearly true in Hungary. If Orban were to rig an election or violently repress his opposition, he would hop right over that line, but I don't think even his harshest critics have claimed that he's done that yet.
>
> All democracies exist on a spectrum from more-or-less gerrymandered and more or less corrupt, but even the ones at the extreme end of the spectrum are still in fact a democracy.
Yeah, this is fair. I called this series “Dictator Book Club” because it had a nice ring to it, but I don’t want to assert that I definitely know what dictatorship is, or that Orban definitely qualifies.
Orban himself calls his regime an “illiberal democracy”, which seems as fair a description as any. Technically people vote, and probably the elections are even mostly fair, but things are rigged enough behind the scenes that it’s really hard for the elections to matter.
In the US, there are a lot of controversies over the democratic process. Should people be allowed to vote by mail? Should they have to show voter ID? Should DC and Puerto Rico be states? Who should get to draw district boundaries, and how? Are the rules distributing Senate seats fair even when they give people in rural states more votes than people in urban ones? Should social media be regulated, and if so, how? How should candidates be allowed to raise money? Are there enough voting booths, and are they in the right places? What’s the threshold for demanding a recount?
If one of the two major parties got to answer all these questions the way it wanted, how many votes would that be worth? Would it turn 49% into a victory? 45%? 40%? If one of the two parties was allowed to create its own system from scratch, and it was allowed to be at least as weird as the Electoral College is now, how many votes would *that* be worth?
Sholom writes that “All democracies exist on a spectrum from more-or-less gerrymandered and more or less corrupt, but even the ones at the extreme end of the spectrum are still in fact a democracy.” I am less sure. Imagine an electoral system where if every single person nationwide unanimously votes Republican, the Republicans win, but as long as at least one person votes Democrat, the Democrats win. Is that a democracy? Is there any real-world difference between that the world where the Democrats just never allow anyone to vote at all and stay in power forever?
Imagine that Democratic sympathizers control every newspaper and TV channel, and fill them with propaganda all the time (obvious joke is obvious, save your breath). Imagine that they control all the social media sites and ISPs, and they all “voluntarily” “self-censor” and delete any conservative opinions or criticism of the government. Nobody even knows what a Republican is, except some vague signifier of evil. Every four years, you’re presented a ballot with the name of your beloved Glorious Leader and some other guy you’ve never heard of with an R next to his name, who you can only assume stands for pure evil and everything you hate - but you are absolutely allowed to vote for that other guy if you really want to. Is there any real-world difference betwen this world and the one where the Democrats just dispense with elections entirely?
It seems more like democracy *and dictatorship* are on a spectrum, with Orban in the awkward middle where we don’t really know what to call it.
---
Furrfu [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3529109):
> "Some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy" is a trick that goes back at least to Caesar; that's why Caesar was called an "imperator" (usually translated into English as "emperor", but previously it was a military term meaning "commander") and "dictator" (a sort of commissioner with emergency powers, prior to Caesar always being temporary) but never a "king" ("rex") like Tarquin. The Roman Senate was the governing body in the Republican period, but it continued to exist all the way through the entire Western Empire and for another century-plus after the Western Empire fell; and, in the East there was still a Roman Senate for another 600 years after that, though not quite until the final fall of Constantinople.
>
> So, rather than saying that this is "one of the big stories of the late 20th/early 21st century," I would say that this is one of the big stories of the first century BCE to the 12th century CE. This is precisely how the Roman Republic was destroyed. And it's far from novel even in modern times.
>
> The USSR retained the trappings of its bottom-up grassroots democracy (that's what the "soviets" were) even while the Party took over real control.
>
> Here in Argentina, our Congress has served unbroken since 01854, 167 years, despite coups installing dictators in 01930, 01943, 01955, 01962, 01966, 01971, and 01976, plus Perón taking Orban-style measures to consolidate his power to such a frightening degree during his first period of rule (01946-01958, during which he changed the constitution to permit his re-election) that in the 38 years since the restoration of democracy in 01983, the party Perón founded has ruled for 27 years, and other parties only 11 years.
>
> In Venezuela, Maduro is clearly a dictator, which results from Hugo Chavez gradually clearing out all the obstacles to dictatorship. But Chavez himself was never a dictator, and he always preserved the forms of democracy, in fact greatly strengthening them in appearances. But at the same time, he weakened them to the point that his successor would face no significant opposition.
>
> It's the same in most recent dictatorships. Hosni Mubarak held multi-party elections which he won, and the Egyptian Parliament was never dissolved during his brutal reign. Pervez Musharraf held elections to, in theory, decide whether he would continue in power, but nobody else was allowed to run. Hungary itself, though Communist, was theoretically a parliamentary republic from 01946 to 01949 and still had a multiparty legislature until 01953; even after opposition parties were prohibited from running candidates, the Hungarian Parliament continued to hold regular elections, and many independent (that is, non-Communist) candidates continued to gain seats.
---
Quite Likely [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3495544):
> Should probably plug here that Hungary has elections coming in 2022 in which all of the non-Fidesz parties have united into a single coalition, and are currently leading in the polls. Unclear how much that will matter given all the gerrymandering, but this is the most significant threat to Orban's power in a long time: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/hungary-anti-orban-alliance-leads-ruling-party-in-2022-election-poll>
And suigeneralist [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3504159):
> It looks like the opposition might win! Betting markets are not particularly liquid but one bookie is offering odds which imply a 60-70% chance that Fidesz will not win a majority at the next election. <https://www.olbg.com/blogs/hungarian-general-election-betting-odds-and-history>
Yeah, I guess that would be pretty embarrassing for the “Orban is a dictator” theory - and for the author of the book I read, who hammered in how thoroughly Orban had subverted democracy and how it was basically impossible anyone could beat him.
---
Stevenjbc [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3495574):
> All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries. In fact, if he ever rigged an election it could be called "fortifying" it (see NYT on February 4, 2021).
There were a lot of conservatives in the comment who made basically this point, or who compared various things Viktor Orban did to various things Joe Biden (actually or imaginarily) did.
I don’t super want to get into a protracted argument about which things are equivalent to which other things, but here’s one point that I think drives home the extent of the difference between them. From the Lendvai book:
> Kerekes demonstrated how the rules of parliamentary procedure as amended on 1 January 2012 have enabled the adoption of urgent emergency legislation requiring no debate…with this measure, it is now possible in peacetime to rush a bill through parliament in less than forty-eight hours […]
>
> The approval of the internationally controversial erecetion of a fence along Hungary’s southern border to keep out refugees, as well as the authorization of the army’s deployment to police it, was dealt with in barely two hours…An admistrative record was achieved on 21 September 2013: the amendment of a law was passed, from its first oral proposal in parliament to a final vote, in a mere ten minutes.
I think one simple signal that Orban has garnered more power than Biden is that Orban got a major controversial law passed in two hours, whereas it took Biden six months to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill that as far as I can tell nobody actually disagreed with.
And yeah, it’s really bad that the US can’t do anything in less than six months and often doesn’t do it at all. A Congress that can pass important legislation in a few hours feels like a dream. To some degree there’s a tradeoff: if it’s hard to do anything, then it’s hard to oppress people; if it’s easy to do stuff, some of the stuff that gets done is bad. I don’t think we’re at the right point in that tradeoff right now and maybe removing a *couple of* checks and balances, like the filibuster, [could be net good](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ezra-klein-on-vetocracy) (or maybe it wouldn’t be, I’m not sure). But if you remove every single one of them and the leader can pass laws in ten minutes, then I think it’s fair to worry that you’ve lost some important aspect of liberalism.
---
Carl [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3496801):
> I'm a compatriot and contemporary of Orban's. I grew up in the Hungarian countryside and my single-mother (!) rose through the ranks in the Kadar era, she finished college when I was already a toddler in the day-care. She nfetched water from the well and coal for heating from a shed at the house that the village provided for her as the teacher in the village school. We moved from there when I was five. The next teacher who moved in still had to do that as far as I know for until the late 80s or early 90s. I worked hard on my grandparents small farm (the size that was still allowed) and I was actually working in the sun in the vineyard with my grandparents and my mother when Orban gave his speech in June 1989. We were listening to it on the radio.
>
> Such an upbringing means nothing really. Hungary and countries like that had a shift in those years; I'm not quite sure if I refer to the right framework, but I think what was going on is that Hungary was becoming an income level 4 country out of an income level 3 (Rosling) in the 1970s. Orban's experience was pretty standard. The accent thing is nothing either. Orban has plenty of complexes, accent never stuck me as one. It hardly ever is in Hungary. There was a lot going on with him at the turn of those decades. I would dig into Soviet/Russian intelligence measures. The poor boy and the accent thing might pique Anglo-Saxon people's interest. It isn't an issue with his contemporaries in Hungary.
---
Several people chided me for genetic essentialism in my paragraph about Magyars. Erusian [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3496497):
> The Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads to at least the extent that Americans are descendants of the English. You can equally say most Americans have very little English blood and have it be true but a weird take. Now, Magyarism as a nationalist ideology is full of weird false facts. The idea they're the Huns that invaded Rome is just plain false. But there's significant linguistic and cultural continuity between Hungarians and their ancestors in addition to a distinct ethnic gene cluster. The article you cited itself even says this. Now, do they have large amounts of Germanic (and even more Slavic) blood? Yes, absolutely.
The analogy seems weird - I think most Americans who think they’re of English descent are, and nobody ever claimed the Italian-Americans, blacks, Hispanics, etc were descended from Englishmen. Still, the point about cultural descent is well-taken.
You can read the rest of Erusian’s very thoughtful 14-part comment [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3496497).
---
Several people pointed out reasons why Orban’s wall worked but Trump’s wouldn’t. [E Dincer](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3498618) writes:
> I think the main difference is that there isn't a 3rd country at the USA-Mexico border and USA is the target country for immigrants anyway. Hungary is just one of a several countries on a route from Middle East to Western Europe, so if they make their wall slighly more inconvenient than the neighboring countries that's enough to sway the torrent of immigrants another way.
Act II [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3497519):
> 1) Unlawful entry only accounts for a small portion of illegal immigration in the US, with most immigrants entering legally and overstaying their visas. [This article](<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/real-immigration-crisis-people-overstaying-their-visas/587485/>) was the first Trump-era hit on the subject I found on Google. As far as I can tell, the current numbers are similar, with there being about double the number of visa overstays annually as unlawful entries. Obviously a wall would only affect unlawful entry.
>
> 2) The wall would not necessarily be effective at preventing unlawful entry in the long term for practical reasons. America's southern border is almost 2000 miles long and crosses several different types of terrain. The barrier would not only need to be built, but manned and maintained across this huge distance. This task is much cheaper and easier for a country like Hungary, whose barrier is only 325 miles.
>
> Argument 1 is hard to dispute. If your overall goal is to reduce illegal immigration, it's not very cost-effective to spend billions to maybe reduce it 30%. Argument 2 is weaker in my opinion; I think it's probably true, but impossible to really prove without actually building a wall and finding out.
Some other commenters bring up counterarguments. The US has much more border to defend than Hungary, but it’s also much bigger and richer than Hungary. visa overstays and illegal crossings seem to fluctuate in importance, and crossings can be the majority of illegal immigration during some years.
Speaking of immigration, polscistoic [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3504512):
> A few points on EU immigration policies that seem not to have been noticed by non-European ACT readers:
>
> EU refugee migration is regulated according to the so-called Dublin agreement. The core point is that a refugee must seek asylum in the first EU country he/she enters.
>
> This means that if you have a large border with a non-EU country, EU countries further inland can send refugees back to wherever they first entered. Since Hungary has a border with non-EU countries, the Hungarians risk being stuck with refugees, even if the refugees themselves would prefer to move further West or North. (The problem is even larger in countries like Italy and Spain.)
>
> …A North American equivalent would be if there had been an agreement between Canada, US and Mexico that refugees could be returned to the country of “first entry” – which would usually be Mexico. For obvious reasons, Mexico would not have been happy with such an agreement (and EU countries bordering on non-EU countries, including bordering on the Mediterranean, have also tried – so far unsuccessfully- to change the Dublin agreement).
>
> Are other EU countries secretly “happy” about the Hungarian border fence, as some commentators suggest? Well, because of Dublin, they should not really care that much, since they can legally send refugees crossing from Hungary back to Hungary.
>
> Notice that it therefore makes sense for Hungary to build a fence, since they risk being stuck with refugee migrants thanks to Dublin.
THANK YOU. I had been really confused why Hungary didn’t just buy every migrant a train ticket to Germany (where they all wanted to go anyway) and tell them to have a good time.
On a related note, the EU migrant situation might be about to get pretty weird:
---
Mikk [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3497906):
> I am quite surprised about the review. I am no expert of Hungary, but my understanding has been a bit different.
>
> My impression (even reading opponents of Orban) has been:
>
> 1) Fidesz rise to power was caused by Socialists, their corruption and mismanagement of Hungarys economy.
>
> 2) "We lied" tape was leaked in 2006, Fidesz won elections in 2010. The review gives an impression that these two events were closely related. They were not.
>
> 3) Reading opposition newslets of Hungary, I would say that up until 2013-2014, their main narrative was: socialist were bad, Fidesz promised change and won, thats the reason, not leaked tapes or tricks by Orban. And (grudgingly) Orban has delivered change and improved economic situation of Hungary, that boosted his status even more. From 2013-2014 stories about corruption, anti-democratic measures etc have became more prominent.
>
> 4) For most of his political career Orban was described (even by his opponents) as quite ordinary right of center free marketeer. Just recently reread some stuff from Anne Applebaum, typical liberal cosmopolitan, what she said about Orban: "For 20 years we were on the same side".
>
> 5) I am not hungarian, but I am from Eastern-European country. I do not think that hick vs urban elite applies here. If talking about social status and background, communism (and fall of communism) changed so much, that everything else is irrelevant. I am coming from a small Baltic country and most of our political parties have their historical roots in different underground movements of 1980-s. 30 years late you can still see lot of friends, schoolmates, roommates in politics. So, I am not surprised that smth similar can be seen in Hungary.
>
> 6) I am not sure what to make about gerrymandering. It seems that Orban has used it to benefit himself, but I have read some credible people who say that these accusations and effects of gerrymandering have been overblown.
>
> Overall, I am on the fence. Having watched situation in Hungary for years, it seems to me that critics of Orban (especially from the outside) are a bit biased, they simplify, exaggerate and misinterpret sometimes. At the same time, I also cannot agree with defenders of Orban, who say that nothing is wrong and they attack him only because he is conservative. This does not seem true either.
---
DannyK [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3498234):
> You don’t even mention Orban forcing a whole university out of the country, which I think is the single most dictatorial thing he’s done.
Yeah, I didn’t get into Orban’s crusade against George Soros. I think all the “no worse than Biden” people would have been extra angry about that one; is this different from the US crusade against the Koch Brothers?
Maybe the difference is that it feels potentially anti-Semitic? But the same week I wrote my post, Congress was interrogating the Facebook whistleblower about what’s basically an accusation that a manipulative Jewish billionaire is responsible for all the political opinions we dislike, in a way contradicted [by all the evidence](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/mobile-internet-and-political-polarization.html). I think billionaires with political influence, Jewish or not, seem to be unpopular everywhere.
That having been said, I disagree with this tendency, and Soros is a good example of why: billionaires are independent power centers who are able to build things without government approval, and so they play an important role in pushing back against authoritarianism. Orban [trying to shut down Soros’ university](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/george-soros-viktor-orban-ceu/588070/) was bad and I hope they’re able to figure something out to stay in Hungary.
---
Vicoldi [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3498790):
> As a Hungarian, I found some glaring problems in the review, almost enough that I feel myself in a Gell-Mann Amnesia situation. I don't really blame Scott though, getting informed about the politics of a foreign country is very hard. Still, I trust the Erdogan and Modi reviews significantly less now.
>
> First of all, I broadly agrre with the personal characterization of Orban, and I also think he is an extremely corrupt leader and a threat to democracy.
>
> The review doesn't even mention some of the worst strikes against him: his schoolmate from his home village, who he got to know while going to the same football mathces is now the richest person in the country, whose hand is in every conveivable industry. Everyone knows he is Orban's straw-man, and collects the money for him and for his political cause.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C5%91rinc_M%C3%A9sz%C3%A1ros>
>
> Also, at one point, Orban's agents secretly bought up the largest Leftist newspaper, Népszabadság, and simply cancelled it. In the post Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, Scott wonders if there is so surprisingly littel money in politics, why doesn't some billionaire simply buy up all the newspapers and get to control what people hear about. Orban did exactly that, using the money his straw-men, like Mészáros, got from corruption.
>
> On the other hand, the review is probably based on books and articles seriously biased against Orban, which causes the review to be seriously misleading about a number of things.
>
> Most importantly, the gerrymendering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000. I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting. I suggest that this quote should be removed form the review, unless it is supported by more sources, because I stronly suspect it is just blatantly false.
>
> Also, you can just look at the election maps: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hungarian_parliamentary_election>
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hungarian_parliamentary_election>
>
> Orban won almost all districts. There is no gerrymendeing that can explain that.
>
> The main change Orban's new Constitution brought was that previously Hungary had more or less a proportional electoral system: every party gets seats in the parliament proportional to the number of votes they got. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, in the UK, every district delegates one member of the parliement with first-past-the-post voting.
>
> In my opinion, both system has advantages and disadvanteges, the German system is more balanced, but its result is that usually no party has parliamentary majority, which forces them to form coalitions, which can be a nightmare of instablility (eg Italy).
>
> Orban changed the Hungarian electoral system to be a mix of the two: there are 199 seats in the parliament and 106 districts delegating members with first-past-the-post voting. The other 93 seats are distributed among the parties proportionally with the votes they got. (On a ticket, you vote both for a delegate in your district and you also vote for a party.)
>
> I think this system is not entirely unreasonable, although the first-past-the-post element gives the winner more seats compared to the previous system, so it is easier to win 2/3 majority. But this also means that it is aeasier for the opposition to get 2/3 and remake the changes (although it is very unlikely that they will get that in this election).
>
> The votes from abroad are also seriously overemphasised in the review. It is true that they overwhelmingly vote for Orban, but only the 4% of votes come from abroad, and they don't have district delegates, so that's like 4 seats from the 199. Significant, but Orban's power doesn't depend on these few seats.
>
> I had some othe minor problems: Orbán emphasisees Christian, not Catholic ethics, as Hungary has a significant Protestant population (Orban himself is Protestant). The review claims that Orban was pretty bad in governing during his 1998-2002 leadership, meanwhile I usually hear from older friends, both left and right, that Orban-government was reasonably good back then, they were a moderate center-right party and mostly played by the rules. Most people I know claim that Orban only really broke evil when he lost the election of 2002.
>
> Also, I feel the review is a bit too kind to Socialist leader Gyurcsány: when he gave the infamous speech, he was already the prime minister for two years, the speech is about his premiership, not his predecessor's. And after he was caught on tape claiming he lied all day and night and meanwhile didn't do anything good, he refused to step down. He used police brutality against the protesters and governed for three more years while being probably the most hated man in the country. No wonder Orban won in a nandslide after that. And Mr Gyurcsány still didn't step down after that, because there is approximaeetly 10% of voters who are really devoted to him, so he can remain an important figure in the opposition to this day, while the majority of the country still loathes him for his speech, for the police brutality and for mismanaging the 2008 recession which hit Hungary especially hard. Any reasonablye person would retire in his place, but he is never going to, because he is as much of a mud-fighter as Orban is. A big part of the reason the Left can't beat Orban is that they can't throw out Gyurcsány and his devoted supporters, but they can't win until he is on the ticket.
>
> Also, border wall: not long after Orban built his wall and was called a fascist for that, the Germans also panicked after the first one million migrants poured in in a few months, so they made a deal with Erdogan, and paid Turkey not to let in more migrants to Europe, so now most Syrian migrants are stopped on the turkish border, sometimes by gunfire.
>
> <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/18/eu-deal-turkey-migrants-refugees-q-and-a>
>
> <https://www.dw.com/en/turkish-border-guards-accused-of-shooting-at-syrian-refugees/a-42444813>
>
> Orban is understandably bitter about being called a fascist, when in a sense he was just ahead of the curve, and I agree with him that EU leaders were pretty hypocritical about this. Also, before Orban bouilt is wall, leftist critics in Hungary also confidently calimed that it won't stop any migrants, but it did. I give it a nice chance that Trump's wall would work too.
>
> Overall, Orban is still very bad, and I agree it is a shame that some western right-wingers are admiring him, but his critics often seriously exeggerate: somewhat similarly with the situation with Trump. If you only hear about Trump from texts written by angry leftists, you will get a very biased image, hited with a few banal lies. Scott has some good articles from the past calling out some of the craziest accusations against Trump. There are a similar number of absurd accusations written about Orban in the western media, but fewer well-informed people calling them out. So treat everything with a grain of salt.
---
The most common comment was that it was a stretch to call Orban a dictator. Maybe I’ll rename the series - Autocrat Book Club? Political Leader I Am Uncomfortable With Book Club? Suggestions are welcome.
But I think it’s doing its job of raising tough questions. I asked what Orban had accomplished that conservatives could be excited by. After reading your comments, I think I understand the answer better: it’s not any particular policy, it’s that he was *able to gain and hold power despite being conservative*.
The idea is something like: there are a few ways to govern. One is to be Angela Merkel. Be more or less an elite, who only likes things other elites like. Then you can do things like have an independent judiciary (because the elites in the judiciary will mostly be nice to you), have an independent media (because the elites in the media will mostly cover you positively), have independent academic experts (because they will say the evidence supports you), etc.
Another is to be Donald Trump. Go against elite opinion, have all of the elites hate you, and - realistically - don’t accomplish very much. When you try to accomplish something, the courts will declare it unconstitutional, the media will attack it, and academic experts will say the evidence is against it. You can ram the government really hard against all these other institutions and try to break past by sheer inertia, but it’s a tough battle.
Another is to be Viktor Orban. Go against elite opinion, and when the elites try to stop you, crush them. Crush the judiciary and replace it with your college friends. Crush the media and replace it with your college friends. Crush the intelligentsia and replace them with your college friends. Then do whatever you want, and the judiciary, media, and intelligentsia will take your side!
…is I think how conservative Orban supporters model the situation. But I’m not sure it’s that simple. Trump had a lot of problems getting anything done. But Biden isn’t having an easy time either, judging by the increasingly-shabby-looking reconciliation bill. If Biden wants $3.5 trillion in spending, a tax on unrealized capital gains, and maybe Medicare For All for good measure, who does *he* have to crush? Maybe the “liberalism = hewing to elite opinion = playing on easy mode” equivalence isn’t the right way to think of things.
Okay, fine. So regardless of your politics there’s a tiny Overton Window of things you can actually get done, things that you can sneak past the gauntlet of various liberal and conservative elites trying to frustrate you at every turn. You can either do some minimal thing within this window - Trump’s tax cut, Biden’s spending-bill-lite - or you can crush all those people.
Crushing those people has a lot of positives. A while back, we reviewed the evidence that places that were conquered by Napoleon [grew faster than places that weren’t](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-radical-reform), presumably because Napoleon crushed the previous rulers and then cleared the backlog of common-sense policies that nobody had been able to implement before. In America, we remember FDR as somebody who did something similar, for better or worse. Lots of people on both sides of the aisle dream of an FDR-like figure to do the same for what *they* consider common-sensical reforms - [which is hardly new](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-gabriel-over-the-white).
In the first model, the Orban-supporting conservative one, the maddening Lovecraftian revelation at the end was “either you’ll get whatever liberal elites want, which is awful, or you need someone who at least flirts with dictatorship.” In the second model, the politically-neutral one, it’s “either you’ll get stagnation and dysfunction, or you need someone who at least flirts with dictatorship.” Are either of these true?
We’re back to our old question of “What is a dictator?” I’ve been unconsciously working off a definition that has something to do with “somebody who tries to clear away the normal mechanisms of civil society in an attempt to make it hard for people to oppose them.” So shutting down the press, making it illegal to join opposing parties, committing voter fraud, that kind of thing.
You could imagine a system that has strong leaders who don’t fit this definition. For example, what about a country that elects an autocrat once every four years, the autocrat can do literally whatever they want, and then they stand for re-election (or not) on the strength of their accomplishments. If you get a really virtuous autocrat, maybe George Washington, this works fine. If you get anyone else, part of what they do in the “do literally whatever they want” phase involves making it hard for other people to vote them out. Part of the goal of having checks and balances is to make sure there are lots of different power centers and if one of them starts looking like they’re going to make a move against democracy, the others can unite to crush them.
Viktor Orban is, alas, not George Washington. He became powerful enough to get whatever policies he wanted (and if you’re a conservative, you can really appreciate the policies he enacted), but then used the power to make it really hard for the voters to remove him.
Are there systems of government that can let leaders take decisive action without degenerating into dictatorship? I have no good answer right now, and I look forward to exploring it further in whatever we decide to name this book club. | Scott Alexander | 43814429 | Highlights From The Comments On Orban | acx |
# Secrets Of The Great Families
**I.**
Let's talk impressive families.
**[Aldous Huxley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley)** was an author most famous for *Brave New World*, though his other work is also great and underappreciated. His brother **[Julian Huxley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Huxley)** founded UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund and coined the terms "ethnic group", "cline", and "transhumanism". Their half-brother **[Andrew Huxley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Huxley)** won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering how nerves work. Their grandfather was **[Thomas Huxley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Huxley)**, one of the first and greatest advocates of evolution, and President of the Royal Society.
**[Henri Poincare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9)** was a great mathematician, credited with pioneering chaos theory and topology. The Poincare Institute, Poincare Prize, and the Poincare Crater on the moon are all named after him. His cousin, **[Raymond Poincare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Poincar%C3%A9)**, was president of France from 1913 to 1920. Raymond's brother, **[Lucien Poincare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Poincar%C3%A9)**, was a distinguished physicist, and head of the University of Paris.
**[Charles Darwin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin)** discovered the theory of evolution. His grandfather **[Erasmus Darwin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Darwin)** also groped towards some kind of proto-evolutionary theory, made contributions in botany and pathology, and founded the influential Lunar Society of scientists. His other grandfather **[Josiah Wedgwood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Wedgwood)** was a pottery tycoon who "pioneered direct mail, money back guarantees, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, and illustrated catalogues" and became "one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of the 18th century". Charles' cousin **[Francis Galton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton)** invented the modern fields of psychometrics, meteorology, eugenics, and statistics (including standard deviation, correlation, and regression). Charles' son **[Sir George Darwin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Darwin)**, an astronomer, became president of the Royal Astronomical Society and another Royal Society fellow. Charles' other son **[Leonard Darwin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Darwin)**, became a major in the army, a Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Geography Society, and a mentor and patron to Ronald Fisher, another pioneer of modern statistics. Charles' grandson **[Charles Galton Darwin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Galton_Darwin)** invented the Darwin-Fowler method in statistics, the Darwin Curve in diffraction physics, Darwin drift in fluid dynamics, and was the director of the UK's National Physical Laboratory (and vaguely involved in the Manhattan Project).
**[Niels Bohr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr)** developed the modern understanding of the atom, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. His father, **[Christian Bohr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Bohr)**, discovered the Bohr effect in hematology. His brother, **[Harald Bohr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Bohr)**, was both a great mathematician in his own right, and one of Denmark's top football players; he led the team to a silver medal in the Olympics, and "when he defended his doctoral thesis the audience was reported as having more football fans than mathematicians". Niels’ son **[Aage Bohr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aage_Bohr)** won another Nobel Prize in Physics, his other son **[Ernest Bohr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Bohr)** was another Olympic athlete, and his grandson Tomas Bohr was another physics professor.
**[Gavin Newsom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Newsom)** is currently Governor of California. He is a distant cousin of singer **[Joanna Newsom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Newsom)**, and great-grandson of **[Thomas Addis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Addis)**, who pioneered the field of nephrology and helped discover the cause of haemophilia. He is some relation I cannot quite track (great-great-grandson?) of **[Samuel and Joseph Newsom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Newsom)**, whose Newsom and Newsom firm of architects created some of the grandest buildings in San Francisco and beyond (most famously the Carson Mansion).
**[Marie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie) and [Pierre Curie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Curie)** discovered radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize. Their daughter **[Irene Curie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ir%C3%A8ne_Joliot-Curie)** also won a Nobel in chemistry. Their other daughter, **[Eve Curie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%88ve_Curie)**, is described on her Wikipedia page as "the only member of her family who did not win a Nobel Prize" - but her husband, Henry Labouisse, *did* win a Nobel Prize (Peace, for his work in UNICEF). Marie and Pierre's granddaughter, **[Helene Joliot-Curie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Langevin-Joliot)**, is a professor of nuclear physics and former president of the French Rationalist Union; their grandson **[Pierre Joliot-Curie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Joliot)** is a biology professor and Director of Research at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
**[Freeman Dyson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson)** was a legendary physicist at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, known for inventing Dyson's transform, the Dyson series, and of course the Dyson sphere. His father, **[Sir George Dyson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dyson_(composer))** was a well-known British composer and director of the Royal College of Music. His daughter **[Esther Dyson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Dyson)** is a venture capitalist who has apparently been called "the most influential woman in all the computer world" even though I have never heard of her. His son **[George Dyson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dyson_(science_historian))** is a historian of science.
Inscribed along the circumference: “THE FATHER OF THE GUY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS WROTE SOME REALLY GOOD SYMPHONIES”
**[Rabindranath Tagore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore)** was an Indian poet and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His father **[Debendranath Tagore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debendranath_Tagore)** founded a new religion, Brahmoism, which apparently has several million adherents although I have never heard of it. His brother **[Dwijendranath Tagore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwijendranath_Tagore)** was a prominent scholar, translator, composer, and mathematician. His other brother **[Satyendranath Tagore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendranath_Tagore)** was the first Indian to make it into Britain's colonial Indian Civil Service. His other brother **[Hemendranath Tagore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemendranath_Tagore)** was a physicist who experimented with radio waves (in the 1860s!) and wrote "the first scholarly Asian work on physics", as well as being a "renowned wrestler". His nephew **[Abanindranath Tagore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abanindranath_Tagore)** was a famous artist and the founder of the Indian Society of Oriental Art. His...okay, look, just assume there are an approximately infinite number of Tagores, all of whom have names ending in -dranath, and all of whom have some set of amazing accomplishments in music, art, literature, occasionally science or politics. You can see a list of some of them [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagore_family), but bring a flashlight and remember to drop bread crumbs behind you, or else you'll never find your way back.
Getting a strong “my family has a history of founding religions and I might found a new one at any moment” vibe from this guy.
How do these families keep producing such talent, generation after generation?
**II.**
One obvious answer would be “privilege”. It’s not completely wrong; once the first talented individual makes a family rich and famous, it has a big leg up. And certainly once the actual talent in these families burns out, the next generation becomes semi-famous fashion designers and TV personalities and journalists, which seem like typical jobs for people who are well-connected and good at performing class, but don't need to be amazingly bright. Sometimes they become politicians, another job which benefits from lots of name recognition.
But I've tried to avoid mentioning these careers, and focus on actually impressive achievements that are hard to fake. And also, none of these families except the Tagores were fantastically rich; there are thousands or millions of families richer than they are who don’t have any of their accomplishments. For example, Cornelius Vanderbilt's many descendants are famous only for being very rich and doing rich people things very well (one of them won a yachting prize; another was an art collector; a third was Anderson Cooper).
**III.**
The other obvious answer is “genetics!” I think this one is right, but there are some mysteries here that make it less of a slam dunk.
*First,* don’t genetics dilute quickly? You only share 6.25% of your genes with your great-great-grandfather. But Charles Galton Darwin was a brilliant and distinguished scientist, and his great-grandfather Erasmus Darwin was also a brilliant and distinguished scientist. Can 6.25% of the genome really do that much work?
We can formalize this objection using IQ, which is nice and quantifiable. Suppose Erasmus Darwin had a genius-level IQ of 150. And suppose that he tried very hard to marry a bright woman, and his screening mechanism was as successful as the Ivies or Oxbridge when *they* screen for bright people - in that case his wife would have the same IQ as an average Ivy Leaguer, maybe 130ish. We would predict their average child to have an IQ of 124. Why is the average lower than either parent? Regression to the mean - IQ is probably a combination of genes and random factors, and if your IQ is very high it means you probably have a combination of good genes and good random dice rolls, and even though you can pass on the good genes your kids will probably only get average dice rolls.
But 124 isn’t even as high as the average Ivy Leaguer. If that IQ 124 kid marries another IQ 130 spouse, things deteriorate less quickly - I think the regression process has selected for his 24 IQ point advantage over average being entirely genetic, so it’s not going to regress further. But his spouse’s IQ can still regress further, so they’ll probably end up with a kid who has an IQ somewhere in the high 110s or low 120s - for comparison, not much higher than [the average Ashkenazi Jew](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/). Maintaining a super-high-IQ family over several generations is really hard!
And the *second* problem is: what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete? What gene did Henri and Raymond Poincare share that made one of them a math genius and the other President of France? What gene did George and Freeman Dyson share that made one of them a great composer and the other a quantum physicist? The gene for excellence? Seems suspicious.
I think these challenges are at least partly answerable.
The answer to the first question is *really impressive assortative mating* and *having vast litters of children.*
Take Niels Bohr. He’s a genius, but if he marries a merely does-well-at-Harvard level woman, his son will be less of a genius. But in fact he married [Margrethe Nørlund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margrethe_Bohr). It’s not really clear how smart she was - she was described as Bohr’s “sounding-board” and “editor”, and that can hide a wide variety of different levels of contribution. But her brother was [Niels N](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Erik_N%C3%B8rlund)[ø](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margrethe_Bohr)[rlund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Erik_N%C3%B8rlund), a famous mathematician who invented the Nørlund–Rice integral and apparently [got a mountain range named after him](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norlund_Alps). He may have been the most mathematically gifted person in Denmark who was not himself a member of the Bohr family - so marrying his sister is a pretty big score on the “keep the family genetically good at math” front.
The Darwins were even more selective: they mostly married incestuously among themselves. Charles Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgwood; Charles’ sister Caroline Darwin married *her* cousin Josiah Wedgwood III; their second, cousin, Josiah Wedgwood IV, married *his* cousin, Ethel Bowen (and became a Baron!)
Darwin family member Francis Galton, inventor of eugenics, who presumably felt very conflicted about all this cousin-marrying
When the Darwins weren’t marrying each other, they were marrying others of their same intellectual caliber. There is at least one Darwin-Huxley marriage: that would be George Pember Darwin (a computer scientist, Charles’ great-grandson) and Angela Huxley (Thomas’ great-granddaughter) in 1964. But also, Margaret Darwin (Charles’ granddaughter) married Geoffrey Keynes (John Maynard Keynes’ brother, and himself no slacker - he pioneered blood transfusion in Britain). And John Maynard and Geoffrey’s sister, Margaret Keynes, married Archibald Hill, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. And let’s not forget Marie Curie’s daughter marrying a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
(another famous Darwin in-law is Edward Pease, whose book I reviewed [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/30/book-review-history-of-the-fabian-society/))
If you find yourself marrying John Maynard Keynes’ brother, or Niels Nørlund’s sister, or future Nobel laureates, you’re going way above the bar of “just as selective as Harvard or Oxford”. In retrospect, maybe it was stupid of me to think these people would settle so low.
But also, all these people had massive broods, or litters, or however you want to describe it. Charles Darwin had ten children (insert “Darwinian imperative” joke here); Tagore family patriarch Debendranath Tagore had fourteen.
I said before that if an IQ 150 person marries an IQ 130 person, on average their kids will have IQ 124. But I think most of these people are doing better than IQ 130. I don’t know if Charles Darwin can find someone *exactly* as intelligent as he is, but let’s say IQ 145. And let’s say that instead of having one kid, they have 10. Now the average kid is 129, but the smartest of ten is 147 - ie you’ve only lost three IQ points per generation. And if you’re marrying other people from very smart *families* - not just other very smart people - then they might have already chopped off the non-genetic portion of their intelligence and won’t regress. This is starting to look more do-able.
What about the second question? Why does “talent” run in families but express itself in such different ways?
Let’s start with the Dysons. Lots of studies show correlations between IQ (especially the nonverbal IQ which is helpful for math) and musical ability, usually around 0.2 ([1](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.502.4185&rep=rep1&type=pdf), [2](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1936-04658-001), [3](https://www.researchgate.net/publication)). Their tests for musical ability are usually really simple things like pitch recognition, so plausibly complicated things like being a great composer are even more g-loaded.
What about the Poincares? Is political success g-loaded? There’s actually [a great study on this](http://perseus.iies.su.se/~tpers/papers/Draft170103.pdf)! Sweden makes everyone take an IQ test as part of their mandatory military service, and if you ask the military very nicely they will give you people’s results. A team of researchers got the IQ tests of all Swedish politicians, leading to the following table:
The cognitive test has a mean of 5 and an SD of 2, so a cognitive score of 7 = IQ 115, and a score of 9 = IQ 130+. I think. I don’t know how the ceiling effects here are supposed to work.
Not only do politicians have higher IQs than the general population, but the higher you go in politics (from nominated, to city council, to mayor, to member of Parliament), the higher your IQ! Members of Parliament average 6.7 on this test, which I think equals IQ 115 - not as high as Ivy Leaguers, but still well above average. So the same intellectual skills that made Henri a great mathematician could have helped Raymond become Prime Minister.
But what about the Bohrs? [Vestberg et al](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0034731) use some kind of special snowflake cognitive tests instead of normal IQ, but their result is still pretty clear - as *Wired* puts it, [Elite Soccer Players Are Smarter Than You Are](https://www.wired.com/2012/04/soccer-cognitive-functions/) - “and the sharpest of them score more often than dimmer teammates.” Since Harald Bohr was a soccer player, this *sort of* checks out.
I’m still pretty weirded out by this; even granted that soccer talent and mathematical talent are correlated at above zero, it can’t be that *high* a correlation, can it? But I guess this is why the Bohrs are Olympic athletes but Grigori Perelman isn’t. Whatever.
Does this mean in some sense that talented people can choose their field? If Henri got tired of math, could he have gone into politics, given that he apparently had some Generic Talent Genes that were pretty good for politics too?
Here I can only give personal anecdote - while it would be hubris to compare one’s self to Poincares or Darwins, I’m pretty proud of my own family. [My brother](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Siskind) and I both have Wikipedia pages - mine redirects to a page about my blog, his focuses on his career as a musician. If we were judging ourselves by the same standards we judge Darwins and Huxleys, we might assume that we both got some share of Generic Talent Genes, he focused on music, and I focused on writing. But in fact I tried really hard to be good at music and failed, badly. I don’t have that talent and I can’t develop it. I can imagine Henri feeling the same way if he tried to go into politics, or Raymond into math. Maybe they both got a big heap of Generic Talent Genes, plus some other genes that helped them specifically apply their talent to one field or another.
**IV.**
So much for genetics. Is there anything else these families did right?
I was hoping to find evidence that the distinguished parents home-schooled or otherwise taught or made apprentices of their children, but this is pretty conflicting. Charles Darwin went to boarding school; he was later apprenticed as a doctor to his father, but I’m not sure how much effect that had on him. Rabindranath Tagore’s childhood was just weird:
> As a child, Tagore lived amidst an atmosphere where literary magazines were published, musical recitals were held, and theatre performed. The Jorasanko Tagore were indeed at the center of a large and art-loving social group. Tagore's oldest brother, Dwijendranath, was a respected philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, was the first ethnically Indian member appointed to the elite and formerly all-white Indian Civil Service. Yet another brother, Jyotirindranath Tagore, was a talented musician, composer, and playwright…
>
> For the first decade or so of his life, Tagore remained distant from his father, who was frequently away touring northern India, England, and other places. Meanwhile, Tagore was mostly confined to the family compound — he was forbidden to leave it for any purpose other than travelling to school. He thereby grew increasingly restless for the outside world, open spaces, and nature. On the other hand, Tagore was intimidated by the mansion's perceived ghostly and enigmatic aura. Further, Tagore was ordered about the house by servants in a period he would later designate as a "servocracy". Incidents included servants dunking the heads of Tagore and his siblings into drinking water held by giant clay cisterns — used as a means to quiet the children. In addition, Tagore often refused food to satisfy servants, was confined to a chalk circle by the second-in-command servant named Shyam in parody of an analogous forest trial that Sita underwent in the Ramayana, and was told horrific stories telling the bloody exploits of outlaw dacoits.
>
> Tagore was also tutored at home by Hemendranath, his brother. While being physically conditioned — for example, swimming in the Ganges River, taking long treks through hilly areas, and practicing judo and wrestling — he was also given Bengali-language lessons in anatomy, drawing, English language (Tagore's least favorite subject), geography, gymnastics, history, literature, mathematics, and Sanskrit imparted before and after school […]
>
> Tagore started writing poems around age eight, and he was urged by an older brother to recite these to people in the mansion — including to an impressed Brahmo nationalist, newspaper editor, and Hindu Mela organizer.
Marie Curie, on the other hand, was a real Tiger Mom:
> Marie joined forces with a number of eminent French scholars, including the prominent French physicist Paul Langevin to form "The Cooperative", which included a private gathering of nine students that were children of the most distinguished academics in France. Each contributed to educating these children in their respective homes. The curriculum of The Cooperative was varied and included not only the principles of science and scientific research but such diverse subjects as Chinese and sculpture and with great emphasis placed on self-expression and play. Irène studied in this environment for about two years. Irène and her sister Ève were sent to Poland to spend the summer with their Aunt Bronia (Marie's sister) when Irène was thirteen. Irène's education was so rigorous that she still had a German and trigonometry lesson every day of that break.
Overall I’m not sure I can find any commonalities in these families’ educational styles except that they were all pretty weird. Did I mention Aldous Huxley went to normal school but his schoolteacher there was his mother? Who was also the niece of Matthew Arnold who wrote *Dover Beach*?
**V.**
One last thing, which I have no evidence for. Eliezer Yudkowsky sometimes talks about the idea of a [Hero License](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dhj9dhiwhq3DX6W8z/hero-licensing) - ie, most people don’t accomplish great things, because they don’t *try* to accomplish great things, because they don’t think of themselves as the kind of person who *could* accomplish great things. I don’t run for President, partly because I rationally conclude I won’t win, but partly because I’m not cool enough to be President and I know it. Presidents are some different species with whiter teeth and better smiles than me, and I couldn’t set out to become one any more than I could set out to become a dolphin.
On the other hand, I did apply to medical school. I never even questioned whether I was cool enough for it, because my father is a doctor and “doctor” has always seemed like the default career path if you don’t actively exert effort to do something else. If I had been born a poor kid in the ghetto, then even if I’d had the same educational opportunities, and even if the medical schools were equally willing to accept me, I might have just not aimed that high.
(sure enough, children whose parents were doctors [are 25x more likely](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/22/upshot/the-jobs-youre-most-likely-to-inherit-from-your-mother-and-father.html) to become doctors than others)
It seems weird to think of “genius” as a career you can aim for. But maybe if your dad is Charles Darwin, you don’t *just* go into science. You also start making lots of big theories, speculating about lots of stuff. The fact that something is an unsolved problem doesn’t scare you; trying to solve the biggest unsolved problems is just what normal people do. Maybe if your dad founded a religion, and everyone else you know is named Somethingdranath Tagore and has accomplished amazing things, you start trying to write poetry to set the collective soul of your nation on fire.
Have you*,* dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire? If no, why not? And does that fully explain why Rabindranath Tagore succeeded at this and you didn’t? | Scott Alexander | 43579557 | Secrets Of The Great Families | acx |
# Model City Monday 11/8/21
### Telosa, USA
Bloomberg: [The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-01/how-diapers-com-founder-marc-lore-plans-to-build-utopian-city-telosa)
Marc Lore founded diapers.com and various other internet startups, served a stint as Wal-Mart’s e-commerce director, and made a few billion dollars. Now he wants to start a city in the deserts of the American West, with a new vision of socially responsible democracy.
Why move to this city instead of one of the many existing cities which are not in deserts and, you know, actually exist? Lore’s pitch is that [Telosa](https://cityoftelosa.com/) (working name) will be inclusive and sustainable by following a Georgist model: all the land will be held in a community-owned trust, and all profits will go to social services.
Here’s a picture some artist drew, which we are supposed to believe is relevant in some way.
I like Georgism as much as anyone else, but I’m not sure a new city in the desert is the right place to try it. Land in the desert is already really cheap. You’d have to really succeed at building a pretty big and desirable city before landlords started capturing a lot of value.
Also, model cities are a weird match for Georgism, because a big part of Georgism is that landowners don’t deserve credit for their land becoming valuable; the land is valuable because it’s in a big desirable city. But in model cities, the landowner (usually the model city founder) *is* responsible for the city being big and desirable. Usually the founder would keep the land and use the rent to recoup their investment in making the city.
Lore doesn’t seem to want to do that, which is going to be tough. Sure, he has a few billion dollars. But building a city is expensive; he estimates it will cost “over $25 billion for the initial phase (1500 acres, 50,000 residents) and over $400 billion for the city build out.” But, he says, “funding will come from various sources including private investors, philanthropists, federal and state grants, and subsidies for economic development.”
I’m not sure which philanthropists have billions of dollars and want to spend it on a random desert city, or which federal grants have billions of dollars earmarked for random desert cities. Realistically a lot of this is going to depend on the private investors. And private investors tend to want to make a return on their money. If you’ve committed yourself to Georgism, a philosophy specifically designed to make it impossible to get money from increasing land value, you’re making things pretty hard for yourself.
But let’s not think of depressing things like that! Let’s focus on how innovative and diverse and inclusive Telosa is going to be!
There’s a lot of stuff like this. Concerned about education? Telosa will have an innovative diverse inclusive educational system where every student is above average. Concerned about unemployment? Telosa will have lots of innovative diverse inclusive jobs for everybody! How? Usually some bullshit answer like “by fostering a culture of innovative diverse inclusiveness” or something.
I think you can divide these promises into three categories.
First, there’s the stuff that you can potentially solve just by being a well-planned model city. I think sustainable architecture is in this category; people didn’t know it was a thing when they were building New York, but now we do know it, so we can include it. These promises are plausible.
Second, there’s the stuff you get from doing Georgism right. Plausibly having all the profits from the land go into social services means they can afford to have better schools, etc, than anywhere else. I’m skeptical that they can do this, because it trades off against attracting investors, but in theory it’s possible.
Third is the stuff that’s totally made up, and just promises that things will work better in Telosa than elsewhere because they’ll try really hard.
This is especially questionable because I don’t see any claim that Lore or his team will retain any control over the city once it exists; all the documents promise Telosa will be *exceptionally* democratic. That’s fine, but then why are they making promises to do X or Y? Surely the city government will decide whether they do X and Y or not?
I’m more skeptical of Telosa than some other projects for two reasons. First is that the other projects are libertarian, and libertarianism is easy; if you want to avoid taxes, and you find a jurisdiction that won’t tax you too much, congrats, you’ve achieved your dream. But if you want to build the innovative diverse inclusive city of the future, you have to ask yourself what advantage you have over all the other cities that wish they could do this, but are currently failing (ie all of them). And second, the other projects contain a little bit of an authoritarian element, so that there’s a clear path between the founders wanting something and it being likely to happen - and if there’s any of this in Telosa, they’re hiding it pretty well.
Still, if they can pull this off it would be amazing. Right now we can’t create big cities at will. There’s a lot of *demand* for big cities (witness all the people moving to NYC and SF despite high prices), but the supply stays capped. It’s a coordination problem: if three million people agreed to create a new big city, a new big city would happen - and they’d be in on the ground floor with land prices. But nobody wants to be the first (or the second, or the 99,999th) person to move to a random uninhabited desert that could *potentially* become a new metropolis later. Maybe making a lot of big promises like this is what the city creation process looks like. In the end you’d get a new big city, it would probably be more sustainable and walkable than average just because it’s new and well-planned, and even if it wasn’t any more innovative and diverse and inclusive than everywhere else, at least it’s no worse. And all your investors are super rich.
### Prospera, Honduras
The latest from Prospera is some kind of drama with the neighboring community of Crawfish Rock over water rights. News site [Rest Of World](https://restofworld.org/2021/honduran-islanders-push-back-libertarian-startup/) gives local leaders’ version:
> In the summer of 2019, after issues with its cistern led Crawfish Rock to lose access to running water, Próspera connected the village to its own water tank. The villagers were grateful. But some villagers were surprised when water bills arrived. Stranger still, monthly payments went to the Institute for Excellence. Why, they wondered, was a charitable foundation acting like a water utility? Brimen would later explain that, in general, Próspera doesn’t “believe in charity as a primary source of support, because I think it creates dependencies.” But dependency, Cárdenas would come to suspect, was exactly what this was all about.
>
> This wasn’t the first time Próspera had insinuated itself into life in Crawfish Rock. In Honduras, patronatos are hyperlocal councils empowered to speak on behalf of their communities. In June 2019, Próspera arranged for villagers to elect a new patronato. Monterroso handpicked a slate of candidates, who ran uncontested.
>
> In May 2020, just after Próspera broke ground, its relationship with Crawfish Rock started to unravel. There were protests over the fact that few construction jobs went to villagers and an outcry after Próspera’s armed security guards, responding to a spate of robberies, began asking people coming and going from Crawfish Rock to identify themselves and state their business. On Próspera’s website, Cárdenas found sketches of its future footprint. Although hard to tell, it looked worryingly like the ZEDE planned to absorb Crawfish Rock, and some villagers worried that Próspera officials would ask the Honduran government to expropriate their land on the ZEDE’s behalf. At best, as Próspera grew, it would cut off Crawfish Rock from the rest of the island, pinning it against the sea.
>
> In June 2020, Brimen, who was stuck in the U.S. due to Covid travel restrictions, sent villagers an almost hour-long voice message over WhatsApp. Próspera would never seek or accept expropriated land, he said. Brimen cataloged all that Próspera’s foundation had done for Crawfish Rock, finally turning to the water supply, for which Próspera had agreed to stop billing during the pandemic. His tone veered from disappointment to veiled threats. “Wow,” he said, in a breathy whisper of faux-astonishment, “how terrible, eh? To live in this modern age and lack running water.” He went on: “Running water to your home, such a basic yet transformative and essential service.” A pause for effect. “Who did that?”
>
> The following month, Brimen flew to Roatán. Several civil society groups had issued a statement criticizing Próspera’s treatment of Crawfish Rock, and he wanted the patronato to disavow it on the village’s behalf. But before that could happen, villagers opposed to the ZEDE called for a new vote, one not orchestrated by Próspera. Though only in her 30s, Cárdenas, now a leader of Crawfish Rock’s opposition to Próspera, was elected vice-president, and her friend Luisa Connor became president.
>
> Throughout early September, Covid-19 cases surged on Roatán. After learning that Brimen planned to hold a public meeting to address community concerns, the new patronato sent him a letter, civil in tone, asking him to postpone the event. “We are open to dialog,” the letter read, “in hopes of a favorable solution, for all parties.” Brimen reacted furiously in a voice message sent to Cárdenas’ mother. He demanded the patronato retract its letter, which he characterized as an assault on free speech and the right to assemble. “They can end up in jail if they keep up this type of behavior,” he said.
>
> Brimen held the meeting that evening in front of the turquoise house in Crawfish Rock — at least until the police shut it down. Cárdenas saw the performance at the public meeting as a PR stunt—the klieg lights, the porch-turned-pulpit. She believes Brimen wanted an incontrovertible record of him engaging with transparency and candor to undermine villagers’ claims that Próspera hadn’t been forthcoming. If so, it backfired. Brimen’s encounter with the police made the rounds on social media and even the local news, only adding to Próspera’s image problem.
>
> In late October, Cárdenas and Connor received an unsigned letter from the Próspera Foundation, a new name for the charitable organization Monterroso oversees. The foundation had heard that the pair were looking at ways of restoring Crawfish Rock’s old water supply. The letter said that the foundation assumed that meant they no longer wanted to access water from the ZEDE’s well, and was going to cut them off in 30 days’ time.
>
> There was only one way to keep the water flowing, the letter concluded — the patronato had to ask for it “in writing on behalf of the community.” A second letter went out at the same time, this one a notice, from Próspera to villagers across Crawfish Rock, alerting them that they would lose water service in 30 days. Próspera placed the blame squarely on the patronato. “The current leaders do not want the community to have access to Próspera-ZEDE sourced water,” the letter claimed, repeating — in a bolded and underlined passage — the ultimatum Cárdenas and Connor had received. If the patronato made a request in writing, the pipes would remain open.
>
> Cárdenas saw it as a divide-and-conquer tactic. The patronato had never asked Próspera to shut off the water, and its members didn’t want the community to go without while they worked to get the old water system online again. But given all that had happened, they refused to sign anything Próspera could spin as proof that the ZEDE had the village’s blessing. A month later, the taps in Crawfish Rock ran dry.
Devon Zuegel, a friend of the blog who was on the ground at Prospera at the time, gives the ZEDE’s version:
> **Unwanted competition with the water monopoly:** The leading family of Crawfish Rock used to be the sole provider of water in the town, and they control the patronato (the town council which claims to speak for the town, sort of like a homeowners' association). Many people in the village didn’t have access to running water, so Próspera built pipes connecting from the well on their property to the town.
>
> Próspera said that the patronato didn’t like this because it threatened their water monopoly, so they forced Próspera to shut off the water. Several people who live in Crawfish Rock confirmed that “it’s mostly just the patronato that’s opposed to Próspera, the rest of us are positive or neutral”.
I’m probably biased here, but I trust Devon more than I trust some anti-tech e-zine. [Other sources](https://payamag.com/2020/09/24/prosperity-on-the-horizon/) confirm that Crawfish Rock citizens have had big problems getting water for a long time. Rest Of World wasn’t really able to deny that Prospera gave Crawfish Rock water when they really needed it, try as they might to make it sound sinister. And they weren’t able to deny that their only condition was that the city officially say they wanted it, which sounds like a pretty reasonable demand with the news coverage being what it is.
### Elsewhere In Honduras
Christophe Biocca describes the ZEDE presentations at the Liberty In Our Lifetime conference:
> Próspera's presentation was mostly a rehash of information everyone here knows with a handful of new tidbits. The Apolo Group apartment buildings (totaling 250 units) [did break ground recently](https://prospera.hn/news/press-releases/construction-of-duna-residences-begins-in-roatan-pr%C3%B3spera) (they're still using the La Ceiba, Honduras building code, but not having to deal with zoning and other permitting was a huge draw). The Zaha Hadid residences will break ground "soon". PES has about 30 people working and living in Próspera and there's apparently upcoming announcements relating to increasing this massively. They've got plans to attract medical and finance (specifically crypto/distributed finance) industries. There's currently a bank going through the "propose your own regulatory code" process.
>
> Morazán's presentation was entirely a "what happened since last year" update. They're making good progress, with 8 houses (more built) and about half of the industrial space they've built (2000/4000 m2) rented out. The government entity is already getting close to revenue matching all of the expected expenses (largely off of the tax revenue from the industrial tenant). Massimo (the founder) is considering doing outside fundraising to accelerate construction of phase three one. They also acquired more adjacent land, about 50% of the original site.
>
> In addition, two intentional communities are being built on the other Bay Islands:
>
> Coral Beach Village, sited on Utila, the western neighboring island to Roatán is building an apartment building. The promoter (who runs "Free Talk Live" radio apparently) semi-jokingly mentioned that in the next few years they may ask to join Próspera (or possibly becoming a ZEDE of their own). Guanaja Hills sited on Guanaja, the eastern neighbor, are building bungalows and a dock.
And Greg Foley writes:
> Econ Americas [interviewed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAliXsVz05g) (44-minute video) Guillermo Peña, [Orqueida ZEDE]'s Technical Secretary. He summarizes Honduras's recent political and economic history (and seems to believe things are getting better). Orchid has 400 employees already and the locals are typically doubling their income. They'll start exporting in January 2022. They'll invest $85 million over four years with 2,700 employees eventually. It's the largest greenhouse in Central America, exporting vegetables and flowers, over 160 hectares. While all three opposition parties are opposed to ZEDEs, Pena is pretty optimistic that the ZEDEs won’t be shut down, at least immediately, if the opposition wins the November election (see 35:25).
### Auroville, India
I recently learned about this place, and it’s pretty crazy:
The story is: in the 1910s, a [nice Jewish girl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirra_Alfassa) moved to India to find herself and fell in with a guru named [Sri Aurobindo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Aurobindo). Fast forward twenty years and she is calling herself “[The Mother](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirra_Alfassa)” and running what an uncharitable observer might consider maybe *sort of kind of* a cult.
Fast forward another twenty years and she has a vision of a city built for all humanity. A city where mankind can complete its spiritual transformation into a higher being. A city with a giant gold golf ball in the middle.
([source](https://thehospitalitydaily.com/auroville-the-utopian-city-of-india/))
Thus, Auroville. I don’t know if it’s fair to describe Auroville as a “charter city”, but it does have a charter, which says:
> 1: Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
>
> 2: Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
>
> 3: Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realizations.
>
> 4: Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.
Auroville was originally planned for 50,000 people, but has about 2,500 official citizens, and about another 10,000 squatters. It seems like an, ahem, highly selected population. From [a great Slate article](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2015/07/auroville_india_s_famed_utopian_community_struggles_with_crime_and_corruption.html) on the town:
> Another woman I met from America told me that she’d moved to Auroville because everything in the States “just feels really fake.” She was on the waiting list to become an Aurovilian, a two-year process that requires applicants to prove they are self-sustainable and dedicated to the cause. Applicants are not allowed to leave Auroville for two years and must work for free as a contribution to the township. After two years they face the Entry Services, a small group that reviews applications and ultimately decides who can become an Aurovilian. An Aurovilian from Germany who worked for Entry Services told me her primary job was to weed out what she called “the cuckoos.” I didn’t ask what that meant.
Despite housing the remnants of the Mother’s cult and getting large subsidies from the Indian government (which apparently has some kind of sentimental attachment to it), Auroville currently seems kind of anarchic.
([source](https://www.dw.com/en/indias-auroville-shows-the-way-in-green-living/a-16575905))
There’s supposed to be some sort of moneyless card-based gift economy, but:
> When I arrived I was forced to buy (with cash) an Aurocard, and told to use it in shops and restaurants around the township. It was a bit like a meal card in college: If I lost it, I would have to pay a $10 fine (in cash). But the idea hadn’t quite caught on. The first shop where I tried my Aurocard asked for cash instead. As did the second. When the third asked for cash, I asked why the Aurocard existed. The shopkeeper shrugged uninterestedly.
And the voluntary consensus-based utopian governing structures don’t really seem to work and nobody really knows who is in charge of fixing it. Problems include "robbery, sexual harassment, rape, suicide, and even murder".
Still, there’s a core population of hippies and seekers who are staying put despite everything. And it’s a great place to be if you want to learn weird kinds of dance, yoga, and faith healing.
Or you could just do what everyone else does and go to the SF Bay Area instead. But after seeing \*our\* levels of crime and anarchy maybe you’d rather take your chances with Auroville.
Honestly the only part of this story which surprises me at all is that the Mother was a Sephardic Jew; usually it’s us Ashkenazi who end up in these kinds of situations.
### Elsewhere In Model Cities
— An attempt to turn a cruise ship into a cryptocurrency-themed seastead [has failed](http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2021/09/ms-satoshi-attempt-to-seastead-on-a-bitcoin-cruise-ship-fails-not-surprisingly/).
— The Charter Cities Institute has created a [Governance Handbook](https://www.dropbox.com/s/wfuyedus303yc6x/CCIGovernanceHandbook.pdf?dl=0). If you just remembered that you have to govern a charter city tomorrow and forgot to study, this is your cram sheet.
— Did you know: in 2018, the Nebraska Assembly came within one vote of [creating a charter city](https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/nebraska-lawmakers-reject-pitch-to-create-sovereign-city/) which would have been “sovereign…not subject to Nebraska laws or regulations” | Scott Alexander | 43340291 | Model City Monday 11/8/21 | acx |
# Open Thread 197
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** I’m hoping to post a Highlights From The Comments On Orban thread sometime soon, but until then, [Lyman Stone’s Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1456701731358773251) is (predictably) a good place to start.
**2:** And I didn’t realize one of the authors of the genetics study I wrote about last week has [a FAQ about it](https://kph3k.medium.com/investigating-the-genetic-architecture-of-non-cognitive-skills-using-gwas-by-subtraction-b8743773ce44).
**3:** Interesting fact: last week’s open thread got 1,151 comments. The weeks before were 285, 576, 439, and 603. The main difference is that I posted it Sunday instead of Friday, and I didn’t combine it with a meetup announcement. The last two times I posted Sunday announcementless threads, I got 887 and 845. Maybe open threads with important announcements attached feel less open and hold people back from commenting? Weird that such a small thing can have such a big effect - tell me what else I should do to get you talking! | Scott Alexander | 43706605 | Open Thread 197 | acx |
# Dictator Book Club: Orban
*(previously: [Erdogan](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan), [Modi](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-modi-a-political-biography))*
**I.**
Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some are Victor Orban's college roommates.
*[Orban: Europe's New Strongman](https://amzn.to/3pMNAPD)* and *[Orbanland](https://amzn.to/2ZAWqp7)*, my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembly. Joszef Szajer, drafter of the Hungarian constitution. All of them have something in common: they were Viktor Orban's college chums. Gabor Fodor, former Minister of Education, and Lajos Simicska, former media baron, were both literally his roommates. The rank order of how rich and powerful you are in today’s Hungary, and the rank order of how close you sat to Viktor Orban in the cafeteria of Istvan Bibo College, are more similar than anyone has a right to expect.
Our story begins on March 30 1988, when young Viktor Orban founded an extra-curricular society at his college called The Alliance Of Young Democrats (Hungarian abbreviation: FiDeSz). Thirty-seven students met in a college common room and agreed to start a youth organization. Orban's two roommates were there, along with a couple of other guys they knew. Orban gave the pitch: the Soviet Union was crumbling. A potential post-Soviet Hungary would need fresh blood, new politicians who could navigate the democratic environment. They could get in on the ground floor.
It must have seemed kind of far-fetched. Orban was a hick from the very furthest reaches of Hicksville, the “tiny, wretched village of Alcsutdoboz”. He grew up so poor that he would later describe “what an unforgettable experience it had been for him as a fifteen-year-old to use a bathroom for the first time, and to have warm water simply by turning on a tap”. He was neither exceptionally bright nor exceptionally charismatic.
Still, there was something about him. To call it "a competitive streak" would be an understatement. He loved fighting. The dirtier, the better. He had been kicked out of school after school for violent behavior as a child. As a teen, he'd gone into football, and despite having little natural talent he'd worked his way up to the semi-professional leagues through sheer practice and determination. During his mandatory military service, he'd beaten up one of his commanding officers. Throughout his life, people would keep underestimating how long, how dirty, and how intensely he was willing to fight for something he wanted. In the proverb "never mud-wrestle a pig, you'll both get dirty but the pig will like it", the pig is Viktor Orban.
Those thirty-six college friends must have seen something in him. They gave him his loyalty, and he gave them their marching orders. The predicted Soviet collapse arrived faster than anybody expected, and after some really fast networking ("did you know I represent the youth, who are the future of this country?") Orban got invited to give a speech at a big ceremony marking the successful revolution, and he knocked it out of the park.
He spoke about freedom, and democracy, and the popular will. He spoke against the older generation, and the need for a rupture with the crumbling traditions of the past. And also, he spoke against the Russian troops remaining in the country - the only speaker brave enough to say what everyone else was thinking. The voters liked what they heard: in Hungary's first free election, he and several of his college friends were elected to Parliament on the Fidesz ticket.
Unfortunately, he wasn't a very good liberal MP.
Separated from his pomp and platform, he was just a 27 year old kid without a lot of political experience. There was a glut of liberal democrats in Hungary - the country had just had a successful liberal democratic revolution - and Orban and Fidesz couldn't differentiate themselves from the rest of the market. Most liberal democrats wanted cosmopolitan intellectual types; Orban - despite his herculean efforts to lose the accent and develop some class - was still just a hick from Hicksville. During the next election, Fidesz did embarrassingly badly.
So Viktor Orban got everyone from his liberal democratic party together and asked - what if, instead of being liberal democrats, we were all far-right nationalists?
Wait, what?
**II.**
The Hungarians believe themselves to be the descendants of proud steppe nomads.
Realistically [this is all false](https://razib.substack.com/p/hungarians-as-the-ghost-of-the-magyar). Some steppe nomads conquered Hungary in the 9th century, but their lineage soon died out, probably through centuries of bloody warfare. The modern Hungarians are genetically more or less German. Realistically, they're completely normal white people who give their kids names like “Attila” and build yurts to celebrate the ancient ways.
Hungarians celebrating a steppe nomad festival ([source](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/hungary-letter-steppe-festival-celebrates-mysterious-origins-1.2759437)).
But in their own minds, they are proud steppe nomads. And they keep the language of the steppe nomads alive, a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's. In their own mind, they are an orphan people, Asiatic horselords surrounded on all sides by hostile Europeans who are probably snickering behind their back at their uncouth ways and unpronounceable letter combinations. Sometimes this contempt turned violent; Hungary has been conquered and occupied by Ottomans, Austrians, and Russians. The worst insult was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when the victorious Allied Powers stripped away 2/3s of Hungarian territory in retaliation for its WWI loss, the ceded land going primarily to Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hungarians have never forgotten this humiliation, but through the long Soviet occupation there wasn't much to do but let it fester.
Enter Viktor Orban. There was a glut of liberal democrats and leftists. But the right was wide open. It had been a while since Hungarians had thought in irredentist nationalist terms. But remind them of their glorious steppe ancestry and history of humiliations, and it might work.
So Orban told his college chums that they were all going to be far-right nationalists. “The erstwhile rebels, who had once been bearded and casually clothed, [began] dressing conservatively and had their hair neatly styled”. The confirmed atheists of Fidesz, who “had previously mocked the clergy and protested against the introduction of religious instruction in schools” converted to Christianity *en masse*. Orban, who had been married in a civil ceremony a few years ago, remarried his wife in a spectacular church wedding.
(according to his biographer, “Viktor Orban is a man who almost automatically believes in the veracity of whatever he considers to be politically useful to him”)
Did anyone at all fall for this? I guess yes; Fidesz won the 1998 elections and Orban briefly became prime minister. But he wasn't very good at it then either, and he lost control to the Socialists a few years later. He shrugged, gave up, and retired to live a quiet life in the country.
Haha, no, he spent the whole time plotting revenge. "The thirty-nine year old Orban was not disheartened in the slightest by the shock of the defeat; on the contrary, it filled him with new vigour". Conventional wisdom was that Orban had lost by being overly confrontational; when a journalist asked his opinion, he said that, no, he hadn't been confrontational *enough*. The book is kind of ambiguous about this, but I think it suggests that during his last few weeks in office he raised everyone's salaries to an unsustainable level, just so the socialists would have to lower them again and look like the bad guys. He started rumors that the election had been stolen - less because he thought anyone would believe it, more just to keep the opposition off-balance - and then started every other rumor he could think of.
The Socialists had a tough start; they had promised everyone lots of money during their campaign, and eventually the country ran out of funds. They replaced their original lackluster PM with charismatic businessman Ferenc Gyurcsany. Gyurcsany had to implement austerity measures, and those are never popular, but he was good at it and potentially could have gone down in history as a strong man during hard times.
Unfortunately, someone leaked Viktor Orban the text of a private speech he'd given to a party conference, including such colorful turns of phrase like:
> Obviously we have been lying our heads off for the last one-and-a-half, two years. It was quite clear that what we were saying wasn’t true...and, in the meantime, we have, by the way, been doing nothing for the past four years. Nothing. You can’t name me one single important government measure we can be proud of, apart from pulling the government out of the shit again in the end.
> We fucked up. Not just a little bit but totally. No other country in Europe has committed such stupidities as we have.
> I’ve almost killed myself the last one-and-a-half years having to pretend that we’ve been governing. Instead we’ve been lying morning, noon, and night.
There's a charitable reading of this speech. Gyurcsany was describing his predecessor's administration, and seemed genuinely committed to changing things. He used harsh language in his speech to describe how drastically Hungary needed to break with its past. This guy is a straight-shooter, someone who's willing to call out the country on how bad it screwed up and demand a new direction. Realizing this, Viktor Orban decided not to make a big deal out of the comments.
Haha, no, he decided to destroy Gyurcsany harder than anyone had ever been destroyed before. Without leaking the speech, Orban started shifting the frame, starting a PR campaign around the idea of the Socialists as liars. When the Socialists said they weren't, *then* Orban leaked the speech. A parade was scheduled for the 50th anniversary of Hungary's revolt against the USSR. Orban got 100,000 protesters to attend. Hundreds were injured, millions of euros of property were destroyed. "An extreme right-wing pensioner seized control of an old Soviet tank that had been wheeled out as an exhibit for the commemorations, and for a shot time drove it around the center of Budapest".
In the 2010 election, Fidesz trounced the Socialists and won 68% of parliamentary seats.
**III.**
Before his victory, Orban told supporters “we only have to win once, but then properly”. He wasn’t kidding. After his 2010 victory, Orban focused on using his control of Hungarian institutions to change the rules and make sure he could never lose again.
There was a rule that the Hungarian constitution could not be amended by less than a four-fifths majority. Unfortunately, that rule itself could be amended by a two-thirds majority. Orban used his two-thirds majority to trash the rule, then amend the constitution with whatever he wanted.
In fact, his party started amending the Constitution like it was going out of style. Certainly they removed roadblocks to their power. But they also wrote new laws they passed directly into the Constitution so future governments couldn’t change them. At one point, Orban replaced the Constitution entirely with a new version, which according to rumor one of his college chums wrote on an iPad during a train ride (for some reason, this is the part that gets to me - at least use parchment!) It got so bad that the EU Justice Commissioner complained that “the constitution is not a toy”.
He passed a new law saying he could fire any civil servant at will, then fired people in key positions and replaced them with his cronies and college buddies. He made sure everyone knew that their continued employment was dependent on his good will:
> Fidesz has nationalized the education system and created a system in which all school principals are appointed by politicians. “There are 5,000 schools in Hungary, so there are a huge number of principals, and none of them have independence when it comes to hiring the school’s teachers. If someone criticizes the government, that person can easily be tracked and he or she will never again get a job anywhere in Hungary”, Magyar claims. Particularly teachers have been among the sharpest critics of the government since Fidesz came to power, and initially, it was often the teachers who organized demonstrations and protests against government cuts in educaiton. “But now teachers are afraid to participate in demonstrations, and this dynamic has spread to other professions, such as nurses, doctors, and other public sector workers.”
He announced lavish advertising and public awareness campaigns. The exact point people were being made aware of changed from month to month, but the point was to throw lots of money at newspapers. Newspapers that criticized Orban found themselves excluded from the campaigns; newspapers that praised him got lavished with cash. Seeing which way the winds were blowing, many media figures voluntarily sold their papers to Orban’s cronies and college buddies, especially ex-roommate Lajos Simicska. [NY](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/viktor-orbans-far-right-vision-for-europe): “Around ninety per cent of Hungarian media is now owned or controlled by people with personal connections to Orbán or his party, and eighty per cent of Hungarians who listen to the radio or watch television hear only news that comes from the government.”
He granted the franchise to Hungarians living abroad. Remember, the Treaty of Trianon took 2/3 of Hungarian territory and gave it to neighboring countries (especially Slovakia and Romania). Lots of ethnic Hungarians still live on that land; Orban gave them all voting rights. Their situation made them natural irredentists and nationalists, plus Orban was the only person who thought it was reasonable to let them vote, so in all subsequent elections they have voted 95%+ for Fidesz. Or something. All these people vote by mail in poorly-observed conditions and a lot of observers suspect rampant voter fraud.
(on the other hand, Hungarian diplomats and foreign exchange students are mostly liberal and vote against Orban. *These* people cannot vote by mail; Orban makes them trudge to a Hungarian consulate. The closest Hungarian consulate to where I live is still three hundred miles away)
He shamelessly gerrymandered unequally sized districts. Left-wing voters were crammed into a few very large districts; likely Fidesz voters were put into many much smaller ones. The big districts and the small districts each elect one MP; as a result, [one observer calculates](https://verfassungsblog.de/legal-but-not-fair-viktor-orbans-new-supermajority/) that in terms of power to elect parliamentarians, “1 Fidesz vote = 2.1 Left Alliance votes = 2.6 Jobbik votes = 3.1 LMP votes” The system also uses a weird electoral quirk called “winner compensation” to ensure that the largest party gets Parliamentary representation even larger than its actual majority would suggest; due to the gerrymandering (plus infighting on the left) the largest party is always Fidesz.
He manipulated government procurement contracts so intensely that it’s hard to accuse him of corruption, because corruption requires that there be some standard noncorrupt practice to compare it to. “If something is done in the national interest, it is not corruption”, said the head of a government-affiliated think-tank. The Fidesz-controlled national bank grants loans to promising national projects (read: anyone who Orban would like to grant loans to). Sometimes this is as simple as loaning a Fidesz loyalist enough money to buy some important business (ie a newspaper). The business will offer the buyer a great deal (so it doesn’t get on Fidesz’s bad side), the loyalist will continue running the business, and either repay the loan or get it forgiven. Other grants are for vanity projects - for example, building a giant football stadium and football academy in Orban’s home town (like Erdogan, the Hungarian dictator is a fan of football and former semiprofessional player).
The European Union tries to object to all this. But Hungary is in the EU, and Orban’s party is in a pretty big coalition with a lot of other parties that don’t really want to mess with him. Also, from the [New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/viktor-orbans-far-right-vision-for-europe):
> For the past seven years, Orbán has used a maneuver that he has called the “dance of the peacock.” His government would insert measures into new laws precisely for the purpose of removing them. “He’ll generally put in one outrageous thing and one super-outrageous thing,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a legal scholar at Princeton who studies Hungary, told me. “But the super-outrageous thing isn’t really necessary—it’s designed to be jettisoned.” When the European Parliament or the European Commission has challenged Orbán’s government on the antidemocratic measures, he has made a few symbolic gestures of conciliation, “as if,” he has said, “we would like to make friends with them.”
In the end, the EU usually backs down. And who else can stop him? Orban controls the media, and has a captive population of friendly voters in the form of the Hungarians living abroad. The constitution says he can do whatever he wants, and the constitutional courts are all on his side anyway. Government statistics always say things are going great, and the few independent economists/demographers/whatever saying otherwise find themselves unable to get a hearing.
Lendvai concludes that “the bastion of power constructed since 2010 is, as far as it is humanly possible to tell, impregnable to external assault”.
**IV.**
Orban hardly needed other advantages. But he got one, in the form of the 2015 refugee crisis.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees traveling from the Middle East to Europe found themselves passing through Hungary. They filled up the underfunded refugee camps, they filled up city streets, they camped by the thousands outside railway stations they hoped would take them to Germany or Scandinavia. When there were no food or tents left, they rioted.
“Muslim migrants [shouted] ‘Allahu akbar!’ as they set garbage bins on fire and jumped on cars in the parking lot outside the refugee camp’”. I don’t pretend to know whether Allah approves of suicide bombers invoking His name, but I can’t imagine setting garbage bins on fire meets the implied bar in the Third Commandment. ([image source](https://hungarianfreepress.com/2015/09/16/hungary-refugee-crisis-descends-into-violence-chaos/))
Word came from Brussels: we are going to take all these people in. Every country will accept its fair share. Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, and all the other continental leaders agreed: this was our responsibility to our fellow human beings.
Viktor Orban shocked Europe by saying no. Not no as in “we agree with your grand vision but we request that you lower our quota”. No as in “haha, as if”.
There’s no mystery why he did it. Viktor Orban is a guy who likes winning. And despite being beyond the pale of conventional opinion, rejecting refugees was a winning proposition in Hungary. As Syrians began trickling in, Orban watched the neo-Nazi Jobbik Party’s polling numbers go up and up, until they started to look like a serious competitor. But they only had one issue, and Orban could easily steal it from them. So he did.
But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them? Lasse Skytt thinks maybe it’s the Iron Curtain. The Western psyche is still traumatized by fascism, and the opposite of fascism is taking in any dark-skinned foreigner who knocks on your door. But the Eastern psyche is traumatized by communism, and the communists were all about the Brotherhood of Man - ethnonationalist sentiments feel like a bold revolt against tyranny rather than its inevitable companion. Or maybe it’s colonial guilt: the West is wracked with it, but Hungary, never having colonized anywhere, doesn’t see why it owes anything to the rest of the world. Or maybe it’s because bad blood between the Hungarians and Roma has soured Hungary on the entire concept of having minorities. Whatever the reason, anti-immigrant measures in Hungary were polling around the mid-80s-percent. For Viktor Orban, who really likes winning, co-opting the issue was a no-brainer.
So he declared war on migrants. He told them to leave. He put up giant billboards all across the country, saying things like “Migrants: Remember you can’t take Hungarian jobs!” - but as lots of people pointed out, the messages were in Hungarian rather than Arabic, making it pretty clear these were for domestic consumption. And in fall 2015, he constructed a Trump-style wall along the eastern border. Immigration numbers dropped from tens of thousands a month to a trickle.
The Hungarian border fence ([source](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-the-hungarian-border-fence-remains-a-political-symbol-1.5476964)). Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?
This certainly successfully raised Orban’s popularity within Hungary. It so completely outflanked Jobbik that they gave up on being neo-Nazi and switched to being a moderate pro-EU party that “rejects hatemongering” (what is it with Hungarian parties changing their whole platform?), then declined into irrelevance. Even if Orban hadn’t spent the past five years mangling the Constitution to make it impossible to ever not elect him, he probably *still* would have won elections in a landslide.
But it also catapulted him to fame in the wider world. Rightists across the continent began hailing him as the savior of Europe, the man who blocked the flood of refugees when no one else could. All Orban had ever wanted was to become a two-bit dictator of a small country. But now he started having grander plans, plans of becoming a beloved model for the world.
To that end, he - probably sarcastically - opened Hungary to “*genuine* refugees”, by which he meant refugees from globalism - “Germans, Dutch, French and Italians, terrified politicians and journalists, who here in Hungary want to find the Europe they have lost in their homeland”. A few right-wingers took him up on it and resettled in Hungary. Potentially his most famous admirer is [former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-orban-bannon/ex-trump-strategist-bannon-says-to-work-with-hungary-pm-orban-media-idUSKCN1NM07X), who’s been going back and forth to Hungary as part of his plan to build a populist network across Europe.
I’m on the fence about how exaggerated this is. Certainly left-wingers love to accuse rightists of cozying up to dictators, and Orban fits the bill. But a pretty worrying number of US right-wingers are getting worryingly cozy. Mike Pence seems like [kind of a fan](https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pence-praises-hungarian-leaders-conservative-policies-hopes-scotus-bans-abortion-1631986), or at least not as hostile as he should be. Tucker Carlson is a [big fan](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58104200), and gave him [a softball interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s01ZL5TnBNY). Rod Dreher [writes that](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/viktor-orban-postliberal-right-hungary/) “Viktor Orban’s Hungary, whatever its flaws, and whatever his flaws, is the place to be right now”. [FT](https://www.ft.com/content/9eb06f95-944f-4593-aa44-594467d3329e) and [NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/magazine/viktor-orban-rod-dreher.html) have more on this, obviously.
You can like a dictator’s policies without necessarily admiring his dictatorship. I myself am a fan of Lee Kuan Yew, not always the most liberal guy. Still, it’s not really obvious what positive lessons one could learn from the policies of Orban’s Hungary. Is there something he’s doing that proves that being conservative works, or is better than expected?
The main claim I hear is about his demographic strategy. Hungary has a fertility problem. They started with the usual developed-country drop in fertility rates, plus some extra for being a post-communist state. Then when they joined the EU, 500,000 Hungarians emigrated to richer countries like Austria and Germany. Now they have about 10% lower population than in the 1980s. They’re not going to make it up with immigration, so they need some other solution.
Part of Orban’s solution is the general conservative milieu - traditional gender roles, Catholic values, and the like (he is known for his belief that women should not be in Parliament because “[they] cannot endure the style of Hungarian politics…it’s built on continual character assassination”). But alongside that he’s instituted a grab bag of other policies: did you know Hungarian women with more than three children don’t have to pay taxes? That if you have enough kids, the government repays your student loans? Plus Viktor Orban leads by example: he has five children (one of whom is, in true Orban family tradition, a professional footballer).
Is this working? Lyman Stone analyzes the question at length [here](https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-induced-baby-boom) and says “maybe a little”. I am a bit skeptical, though:
(source: [World Bank](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?contextual=default&end=2019&locations=HU&start=2000))
Here’s fertility rate for various Eastern European countries. Hungary doesn’t really seem like a standout.
It’s a little better if you just look at relative growth since 2010, which is some sense is the fairest way to do this:
(source: [Our World In Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-birth-rate?tab=chart&stackMode=relative&time=2010..latest&country=HUN~CZE~SVK~SRB~POL~ROU~AUT~SVN~UKR~HRV))
…except that if you look back to the first graph you’ll notice Hungary was in a big slump in 2010 and got a bonus just by regressing to the mean (also, what is going on in Austria)?
Overall I agree with Lyman that *maybe* Orban has boosted the fertility rate by 0.1 - 0.2 children per women, certainly no more. And this is by bringing out all the stops - transforming the entire culture and spending heaps of money on the project. I’m not sure this really provides some kind of exciting proof that conservative policies work, even if you’re only looking at the fertility rate.
But take away the family planning, and it’s hard to see what you can admire about Orban’s regime, other than the brute fact that it’s conservative and still standing. “If conservatives rig elections, they can stay in power.” Probably true, but seems kind of obvious, and hardly worth building a political philosophy around.
**IV.**
In case you couldn’t tell, I don’t like Viktor Orban.
I mean, it’s Dictator Book Club, I’m not supposed to like the guys. But I had some sympathy for Erdogan and Modi. They both seemed like committed, idealistic people who fought for something they really believed in, and maybe took it a little too far. Okay, a lot too far. Still, they fought for a cause.
I don’t see any of that with Orban. Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee. But you can tell that if focus groups ever started saying nice things about Trotskyist international socialism he’d pivot in an instant.
And more than the other two, Orban seems to play into American fears of dictatorship. His policies are the ones we’re afraid of happening here. He combines the nightmares Democrats have about Republicans (gerrymandering, voter suppression) with the ones Republicans have about Democrats (court-packing, cancellation mobs, media control, postal vote without ID checks). He does it all legally, turning the machinery of government against itself, tightening the noose bit by bit.
How do we prevent it from happening here? The key to Orban’s power was getting a 2/3 majority in Parliament and unlocking the ability to amend the Constitution. The American equivalent would require 2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress, which seems hard to do in these polarized days (though LBJ managed it, briefly). Just don’t let anybody get caught on tape saying they “lie morning, noon, and night”, I guess. I also have to recommend banning court-packing, by Constitutional amendment if necessary. I can’t stress enough how many descents into dictatorship go through something like that, and how much it’s a gaping security hole in our current system.
There’s an urban legend about a test for psychopaths. Usually the test is some kind of riddle that can only be solved by killing a person for some completely stupid reason - the one I remember hearing involved how to meet with one of your father’s friends, without your father knowing, when you don’t have their contact info - and the answer was to kill your father and assume he would come to the funeral. I assume none of these tests work at all, but the assumption behind them is that if you’re evil enough, it you have more possibilities in your solution set than normal people.
This is what I think of when I look at Orban. He was able to beat everyone else by taking advantage of loopholes everyone else left open because they didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to use them. I imagine that being Orban feels puzzling, like everyone else is leaving low-hanging fruit on the ground constantly. He’s a fascinating psychological specimen, but everyone else needs to up their game and stop leaving things open for people like him to take advantage of. | Scott Alexander | 42566685 | Dictator Book Club: Orban | acx |
# Non-Cognitive Skills For Educational Attainment Suggest Benefits Of Mental Illness Genes
Suppose you want to study the genetics of intelligence. You probably want a sample size in the six digits, and you can't make a six digit number of people sit down and take IQ tests. Also, whenever you say "genetics" and "intelligence" in the same sentence, an angry mob shows up at your door. One solution is to switch to a more popular / less stressful line of work, like Mafia snitch or al-Qaeda second-in-command. But another solution is to use educational attainment.
"Educational attainment" means how far you got in school - did you graduate high school? Get halfway through college? Go to grad school? It's a nice simple number that everyone already knows, and studies show it's closely correlated with intelligence. This is the most common way people investigate cognitive genetics, and if you hear someone talk offhanded about finding "genes for intelligence", they probably found genes for educational attainment.
Educational attainment is closely correlated with intelligence, but not perfectly correlated. How far you go in school depends not just on your IQ, but on other skills: how hard-working and motivated you are, how well you can cope with adversity - and arguably also less desirable qualities, like whether you so desperately seek societal approval that you're willing to throw away your entire twenties on a PhD with no job prospects at the end of it. "Genes for educational attainment" will be a combination of genes for intelligence, and genes for this other stuff.
At some point, some geneticists just did the hard thing and found some actual genes for actual intelligence, separate from educational attainment. And if you have both the educational attainment genes and the intelligence genes, you can subtract the one from the other to find the non-intelligence-related genes that affect educational attainment in other ways. That's the thought process behind [Investigating the genetic architecture of noncognitive skills using GWAS-by-subtraction](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-020-00754-2), by Demange et al (the "al" includes some researchers whose work has featured here before, like Paige Harden, Elliot Tucker-Drob, and Abdel Abdellaoiu).
They admit not doing a perfect job. Their genetic measure of non-cognitive skills (ie factors that affect educational attainment other than intelligence) was still correlated at r = 0.31 with IQ (higher than most things in social sciences ever correlate with anything). So take their results as directionally rather than exactly true. Still, what did they find?
Unsurprisingly, both sets of skills contribute to educational attainment (that’s the point), and cognitive skills contribute more to IQ (that’s also the point). I was pretty surprised by how much more specifically “self-reported math ability” isolates cognitive ability compared to “highest math class taken”, but I guess people are good at self-assessment.
But the real fun is Figure 4:
EA FDR correction tries to impute the results from the main timeline, where Roosevelt was an effective altruist and diverted the resources of the Depression-era US into curing all diseases.
This is correlation between the genes for cognitive/non-cognitive skills related to educational attainment, and the genes for something else (eg household income). Note that these are *genetic* correlations, so they’re not looking at your actual household income, they’re looking at the genes that would cause you to have a high household income. This is probably better since it avoids lots of possible confounders.
Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills increase your income a lot, no surprise there. Both sets of skills improve your lifespan (probably more educated people are better at judging health advice - get your COVID vaccine!) and prevent you from making bad decisions like teenage pregnancy, smoking, or excessive drinking.
The Big 5 personality factors are yet more evidence for stereotype accuracy: the intelligent people are more introverted, more disagreeable, and less conscientious; the people who do well for reasons other than intelligence are more likely to be extraverted, agreeable, and diligent. Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills are *negatively* correlated with neuroticism, which is not what I would have expected.
And then there’s mental illness.
I [have been saying for years](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-653) that I think some of the genes for some mental illnesses must have compensatory benefits. Everyone else said that was dumb, they’re mostly selected against and decrease IQ. But here we get a pretty clear picture of where this is and isn’t true.
Depression is just bad. I strongly recommend not having it. Don’t even have any risk genes, if you can avoid it. All of you people trying to come up with clever evolutionary benefits for depression, I still think you’re wrong, and so does the genetic correlation with cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of educational attainment.
ADHD is also just bad here. This doesn’t entirely match my previous beliefs; I think it’s helpful with a certain kind of high-stress task switching. But we can’t blame this study for not picking that up; it’s just using the giant bucket “non-cognitive skills that affect your ability to stay in school”, of which ADHD is definitely one and definitely net bad. I suspect that there are different forms of the syndrome that are vs. aren’t associated with low intelligence (and maybe some associated with high intelligence), but this is total speculation and this study tells us nothing about this one way or the other, except that it’s correlated with lower intelligence on net.
But genes for some other conditions increase non-cognitive skills related to educational attainment. Bipolar disorder, fine, something something manic creativity hard work. OCD, fine, it’s probably on a spectrum with OCPD which is on a spectrum with regular perfectionism. Autism, fine, probably a lot of Math PhDs.
But the big shock here is schizophrenia. As of last time I checked, the leading hypothesis was that schizophrenia genes were just really bad, evolutionary detritus that we hadn’t quite managed to weed out. And although they definitely decrease IQ, they seem to be good in other ways. Not with certainty: the correction for false discovery rate kills a lot of the effect (though this is the question I would have been most interested in before reading these results, so maybe I can ignore that?). But there’s at least a faint signal here.
I may write some future posts going down the very weird rabbit holes this result opens up. | Scott Alexander | 43510105 | Non-Cognitive Skills For Educational Attainment Suggest Benefits Of Mental Illness Genes | acx |
# Mantic Monday 11/1/21
### **Keynesian Beauty Contests**
I have no source for this, someone told me about it at a meetup.
Suppose you want to run a forecasting tournament on whether nuclear war will destroy civilization by 2100. But nobody cares how much money they have in eighty years, plus if civilization is destroyed you can’t collect your winnings.
There are lots of kludgey solutions to this, but one possibility is a [Keynesian beauty contest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest). Get a lot of isolated teams, and make them predict what *all the other teams* will guess. Whoever gets closest to the average wins the prize.
Let’s start with the good: in theory, this does solve the problem. Presumably the easiest way for the teams to all guess the same is to converge on the “right” answer. In some sense, the *definition* of probability is what a smart person who knows a certain amount of information should estimate, so if you ask someone to predict what a person just as smart as you who has the same information as you will estimate, that’s like asking for your probability.
Okay, that’s in theory. In practice there are a lot of ways this could go wrong. For example, one stable equilibrium is that the right answer is the obvious Schelling point so everyone tries to coordinate around that. But another stable equilibrium is that “one thousand” is a very round number, so everyone tries to coordinate around that. Probably you can prevent that by hiring one expert to make an educated guess outside of the beauty contest, and including that in the mix.
A more serious problem is that it penalizes anybody who’s smarter and better-informed than average. If you come up with some really clever argument for why nuclear war is more/less likely than everyone else thinks, but you don’t think other people will come up with the same argument, Keynesian beauty contests incentivize you to ignore it (whereas prediction markets incentivize you to buy as many shares as you can to exploit your superior information). If you happen to overhear Vladimir Putin saying he’s going to start a nuclear war tomorrow, then in a Keynesian beauty contest you should just sit on this information (in a prediction market, you should insider trade and make a killing).
Finally, the need to isolate everyone limits your options. You can’t do this in a prediction market; you would have to have a tournament. And you can’t do an open tournament, because then lots of stupid people would be in it and the challenge would be figuring out what stupid people would guess. My source says that the Good Judgment Project is looking into this, which makes sense - they’re the kind of closed tournament between savvy forecasters where this could actually work.
### **This Week In PredictIt:**
The big news in the US is the upcoming Virginia election:
([source](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7001/Which-party-will-win-the-2021-Virginia-gubernatorial-election))
Wait, what? That wasn’t how things looked the last time I…
([source](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7001/Which-party-will-win-the-2021-Virginia-gubernatorial-election))
Looks like a big shift in the Virginia gubernatorial election market, mirroring a shift in the polls:
([source](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/governor/virginia/))
A lot of this comes from a single *Fox* poll which found found Youngkin way ahead. There’s been some debate over how much to trust it, but it looks like both 538 and the prediction markets trust it quite a bit.
Why the big shift? Washington Post [blames](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/29/virginia-polls-democrats/) McAuliffe’s comments that parents shouldn’t get to tell schools what to teach, putting him on the wrong side of debates over critical race theory, etc. And probably [the thing where](https://www.newsweek.com/terry-mcauliffe-glenn-youngkin-lincoln-project-virginia-governor-charlottesville-1644180) some of his supporters were caught pretending to be pro-Youngkin white nationalists didn’t help.
Moving on to the national level:
([source](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7291/How-much-spending-in-the-reconciliation-package))
The markets have been working on how much money will be in the Democrats’ omnibus social programs bill when progressives and Manchin/Sinema finally come to an agreement.
([source](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7538/How-many-Yea-votes-in-the-House-by-Nov-19-to-pass-reconciliation))
…and on when it will pass. Looks like people are optimistic.
### Teacher Merit Pay
I want to provide some exegesis on this Tweet:
(not on the dath ilani part, that’s too bottom-of-the-conspiracy-iceberg-meme, but the rest of it)
So suppose you want to do teacher merit pay, or fire the bad teachers and promote the good ones, or something else that involves knowing how good a teacher is.
If you treat “teachers whose students get high test scores = good”, then you’ll just promote teachers who work in rich areas, or who get lots of smart students, or some other confounder related to student selection effects.
What if you promote teachers whose students tend to *gain* many points on their (relative position in) test scores compared to last year? This is the idea behind value-added models ie VAM, which were big in education about five years ago (see section II - III [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/19/teachers-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/) for more). Various studies show this works much less well than you would think. Certain classes, races, and genders of students consistently produce higher VAM than others, and a teacher’s VAM can apparently predict their students’ *past* performance, which makes no sense unless there’s some kind of bias going on. These aren’t useless, but they’re not great, and the problems are severe enough that they’ve become politically toxic.
How would you solve this with prediction markets? Suppose you got a bunch of specific students, published lots of data about them (race, gender, ZIP code, previous test scores, etc), published lots of data on the teachers in the school (education, preferred instruction philosophy, previous students’ test scores, etc), and asked market participants to predict little Johnny’s test scores conditional on ending up in Mrs. Andrews’ class, vs. in Mrs. Brown’s class. They say he would get an 83% on the test if he got Mrs. Andrews vs. an 81% if he got Mrs. Brown. Boom, Ms. Andrews is the better teacher and deserves more money or whatever.
(if you don’t like standardized tests, replace this with some other outcome like graduation rates or acceptance to top colleges)
The idea is that market participants are incentivized to figure out biases in the data and adjust for them in a way that dumb algorithms like VAM aren’t. If VAM attributes higher teaching skill to teachers who get classes full of white kids, then VAM sucks and you’re screwed. If a prediction market attributes higher teaching skill to teachers who get classes full of white kids, then that’s a bias and someone who notices the bias can beat the market by bidding it back down to the right level.
Okay, but how do you get a prediction market on every student and every teacher in a country of millions of people? Well, it would have to be automated. You’d have different teams competing to come up with algorithms based on past performance, and applying them massively at scale to datasets consisting of data about real teachers and real students. Then (some subset of) the students would be randomized to different teachers, and whoever guessed the test scores right would get lots of money.
Once you’ve got this, you’ve also got the ability to answer questions like “how would my child do at public school vs. Montessori school vs. Success Academy”? If the prediction markets say the test scores would be about the same no matter what, then Freddie de Boer is right, private schools are all grifts, and the whole thing is hopelessly confounded by selection bias.
### This Week In Metaculus
([source](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4927/what-will-spacex-be-worth-in-2030-125b-100t-range/), units are billions of dollars)
AFAIK, right now SpaceX [is worth about $100 billion](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2021/10/08/elon-musks-spacex-reportedly-lands-100-billion-valuation-in-private-investor-transactions/?sh=301215ed4416). But the median estimate for 2030 is $500 billion. An 8% rate of return over nine years is ~100%, so even in a great economy the average company will “merely” double by then, whereas SpaceX will quintuple. Seems bold to say a company is undervalued by a factor of >2. I guess this doesn’t technically violate any theorem about stock markets or prediction markets because SpaceX is a private company. Maybe $100 billion is its valuation by normal private investors, and $500 billion is what the sort of people who buy Tesla stock would give it, and Metaculus is siding with the Tesla buyers? Still, take it public!
([source](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/1433/will-the-fraction-of-american-18-24-year-olds-enrolled-in-colleges-in-2025-be-10-less-than-were-enrolled-in-2015/))
Lots of online learning startups hope to disrupt college. Intellectuals like Bryan Caplan have been pointing out that college gives people a lifetime of debt for little value beyond signaling, and business leaders like Peter Thiel have tried to [incentivize](https://thielfellowship.org/) young people to break out of the college racket and gain education and experience in other ways.
Caplan wishes the college bubble would deflate, but he [bets it won’t](https://www.econlib.org/education-the-betting-continues/). Metaculus makes the same bet, albeit not very strongly. They estimate only a 20 - 25% chance that the rate of college enrollment will go down by 10% (not 10 pp) in the decade 2015 - 2025.
So far we only have data up to 2018, but between 2015 and 2018 numbers have gone *up*, from 29.9% to 31%. But [here](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/school-s-out-u-s-college-enrollment-hit-two-decade-low-in-2020?utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business) is a very different data source that calculates its numbers differently and says enrollment is way down because of COVID. Not sure if that will last until 2025, though.
([source](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8026/hours-a-week-coders-use-language-models-2026/))
GPT Codex is an AI that auto-completes code for programmers. You can see a really amazing and/or rigged demo [here](https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/):
Programmers who have worked with it are really impressed, but also say it’s not quite ready for real jobs. Certainly OpenAI would like to make it ready as soon as possible.
Hence the market above: how frequently will the average programmer (who follows Robin Hanson’s Twitter, so maybe an early adopter) use Codex in 2026?
The median guess is 3/4 of an hour. On the one hand, in some sense that’s not much time. On the other hand, it either means every programmer uses it 45 min/week, 10% of programmers use it 450 minutes/week (= 8 hours), or 2% of programmers use it all the time. Any one of those actually sounds a lot more impressive than the original framing!
Maybe Metaculans don’t understand how strong a claim they’re making here? Or they’re expecting response bias on Hanson’s poll? Or who knows, maybe they think a decent fraction of programmers will be using this a decent fraction of the time five years out.
Also, this is an interesting example of using a Twitter poll to power a prediction market resolution, and so far it seems to be going well.
### Everything In Moderation
I’d previously missed [this 2018 post by Vitalik Buterin](https://ethresear.ch/t/prediction-markets-for-content-curation-daos/1312) proposing prediction markets as a social media moderation plan.
Suppose we want to moderate ACX comments. Maybe you all trust me as moderator, but I am busy and don’t want to read all 1000 comments underneath every post. You could email me to alert me to specific bad comments, but maybe some people overdo it and I’m spammed with lots of dumb moderation request emails. Or maybe the blog gets more popular, there are *10,000* comments*,* and I don’t even have time to read all the ones I’m alerted to.
Reddit solves this with an upvote-downvote system, but it’s vulnerable to brigading (eg all the conservative posters get together and agree to downvote all the liberal comments). How would you get an upvote-downvote system to mimic my (presumably excellent) moderation judgment?
Merge the system with a prediction market. An upvote invests $1 (Vitalik says 1 ETH, but the post is from 2018 and maybe he didn’t expect that to be worth $4325) in a prediction of “Scott won’t ban this”. A downvote invests $1 in a prediction of “Scott will ban this”. A certain randomly-selected subset of posts with high downvotes come to my attention, I ban/don’t ban them, and everyone collects their winnings/cedes their losses. If the prediction market fits the usual conditions for accurate pricing, it should mimic my judgment as closely as humanly possible - and so I could just have any sufficiently downvoted post get auto-banned. You could have one guy moderating a site the size of Reddit (not a specific subreddit, the whole site) and still have it work pretty well. No more moderator drama!
(or at least *much* higher variance in the size of moderator drama)
The main flaw I can come up with in five minutes of thinking about this: suppose there’s some obviously terrible post, like outright spam. Nobody would predict I don’t ban it, so how would there be any money to reward the people who correctly predict I will? Maybe there’s a 1% tax on all transactions, which goes to subsidizing every post with a slight presumption toward don’t-ban.
Also, if I were to play this prediction market, I could insider trade and steal all your money. I guess if you trust me enough to make me a moderator, maybe you also trust me enough not to do that?
If somebody actually wants to code this, let me know, and I’ll see if I can get Substack to let me use it (though I’m not holding my breath)
Vitalik didn’t end with “and we should also replace all lower courts with prediction markets about what the Supreme Court would think”, but I’m not sure why not.
### Links
— [Tyler Cowen article in Bloomberg on prediction markets](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-04/predicting-the-future-of-prediction-markets): “They make economic sense, but for some reason have never really taken off.”
— High-level player Avraham Eisenberg gives some of his [Tales From Prediction Markets](https://misinfounderload.substack.com/p/tales-from-prediction-markets). EG:
> There was a market on how many times Souljaboy would tweet during a given week. The way these markets are set up, they subtract the total number of tweets on the account at the beginning and end, so deletions can remove tweets. Someone went on his twitch stream, tipped a couple hundred dollars, and said he'd tip more if Soulja would delete a bunch of tweets. Soulja went on a deleting spree and the market went crazy. Multiple people made over 10k on this market; at least one person made 30k and at least one person lost 15k.
— Not exactly a prediction market (in fact, kind of the opposite of a prediction market insofar as it delights in things without objective answers), but [here are](https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1403908055138332674) Venkatesh Rao’s Twitter followers trying to predict the 2020s along a bunch of dimensions, eg:
— DARPA [investigates how prediction markets do vs. expert surveys](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181308) when guessing the results of social science studies. Answer: neither of them does well. Some suggestive evidence that averaging the price of the prediction market over a while does better than taking the final price, at least in these very non-liquid markets.
—UC Berkeley AI researcher Andrew Critch [gives his predictions](https://www.facebook.com/andrew.critch.1/posts/10215991811708429) for the next few decades.
— In the US, real-money prediction markets are still illegal, unless they’ve undergone the harrowing, expensive, and highly constraining process of registering as a securities exchange. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the relevant regulatory watchdog, [is investigating Polymarket](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/23/largest-defi-prediction-market-polymarket-said-to-be-under-investigation-by-cftc-report/) for not doing this. I hope everyone involved will be able to come to an agreeable solution instead of crushing what’s currently the leading prediction market or forcing it to become worse.
— Jacob Steinhardt: “Earlier this year, my research group commissioned 6 questions for professional forecasters to predict about AI.” [Updates And Lessons From AI Forecasting](https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting/).
— The superforecasters [have a Substack now](https://supers.substack.com/p/how-long-does-kabul-have-left), although they don’t seem to have posted any more after making a July forecast that Kabul had a 6% chance of falling before September (which it did).
— And [CrowdMoney.io](https://www.crowdmoney.io/) is another great prediction market newsletter including interviews with lots of key players in the field. | Scott Alexander | 43323996 | Mantic Monday 11/1/21 | acx |
# Open Thread 196
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
**1:** We’re finally done with meetup season (except Skopje, which has one scheduled for December, but which I am officially declaring Doesn’t Count). If you organized or attended a meetup, Mingyuan would like you to fill out [a survey on your experience](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfLbWA3EOB28HT3xl2O_SX5OkvJBPwqfCi7ptIo2yVgWV5uoA/viewform?usp=send_form). And thank you for bearing with the lower frequency of posts while I was in Europe.
**2:** Remember there might still be unofficial meetups in your city year-round and you should get in touch with your local organizer (maybe you can find their information [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/community)?) | Scott Alexander | 43356113 | Open Thread 196 | acx |
# Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem
The [Dark Room Problem](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00130/full) in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things?
The usual workaround is inbuilt biological drives, considered as "set points". You "predict" that you will be well-fed, so getting hungry registers as prediction error and brings you out of your dark room to eat. Et cetera.
Andrés Gómez Emilsson recently shared a perspective I hadn't considered before, which is: actually, sitting quietly in a dark room is *really* great.
The Buddha discussed states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation:
> *Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion* (Samyutta Nikaya)
I had always figured that "sensual pleasures" here meant things like sex. But I think maybe he just means stimuli, full stop. The meditator cuts themselves from all sensory stimuli, eg by meditating really hard on a single object like the breath and ignoring everything else, and as a result gets "rapture and happiness born of seclusion".
The serious meditators I know say this is real, meaningful, and you can experience it after a few months of careful practice. You become really good at concentrating on one stimulus and ignoring all other stimuli, and eventually your brain kind of gets "in tune" with that stimulus and it's really blissful. They say this seems to have something to do with the regularity or predictability of the stimulus; if you're concentrating really hard on something, regularity/predictability/symmetry is just viscerally very good, better than anything you've felt before.
Andrés [takes this pretty literally](https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/12/17/the-symmetry-theory-of-valence-2020-presentation/). Something like regularity/predictability/symmetry is really good. So why doesn’t a metronome make you bliss out? Andrés says it’s because you can’t concentrate on it hard enough. It’s not engaging enough to occupy your whole brain / entire sensorium /whatever.
Symphonies are beautiful, and we intuitively feel like it’s because they have some kind of deep regularity or complicated pattern. But they’re less regular/predictable/symmetrical than a metronome. Andrés thinks this is because they hit a sweet spot: regular/symmetrical/predictable enough to be beautiful, but complex/unpredictable enough to draw and hold our attention. Compare to eg games, which are most fun when they’re hard enough to be challenging but easy enough to be winnable.
But this sweet spot is the fault of your own inattentiveness. If you could *really* concentrate on the metronome, it would be even more blissful than the symphony. Emilsson says he’s achieved these levels of concentration and can confirm. I talked to another meditator who agrees metronomes can be pretty blissful with the right amount of (superhuman) focus, although - as per the Buddha quote above - total silence is best of all.
I find this to be an elegant explanation of what the heck is going on with jhanas, more convincing than [my previous theory](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/20/meditative-states-as-mental-feedback-loops/). It’s also a strong contender as a theory of beauty - a little different in emphasis from [Schmidhuber’s theory](https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html), but eventually arriving at the same place: beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed. | Scott Alexander | 40744814 | Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem | acx |
# Epistemic Minor Leagues
*[I’m traveling this week - here is an older essay I never previously got around to posting]*
Viral game designer Adrian Hon wrote an article about [What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon](https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qanon/).
It argues that people fall for QAnon because it gives them an interesting mystery. It's a place where new discoveries are always around the corner, where a few hours of research by an amateur like you can fill in one of the missing links between Joe Biden and the Lizard Pope. The thrill of QAnon isn't *just* learning that all your political opponents are secretly Satanists or Illuminati or whatever. It's the feeling that *you* have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it.
One place you could go from here is to talk about how QAnoners are the sort of people who are excluded from existing systems of knowledge production. They are never going to be Professors of Biology, and they know it. Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy.
This is sort of true. But it needs to acknowledge that even *being included in* existing systems of knowledge production isn't that great. You become a Biology PhD student, you spend ten years learning about fungal ribosomes, and probably there's still some guy in China who knows more than you and beats you to the one interesting thing about fungal ribosomes left to figure out, plus nobody cares about fungal ribosomes anyway. Meanwhile, the QAnon devotee has discovered five earth-shattering facts about the Lizard Papacy in the last two hours, including previously-unrecognized links to the Kennedys, World War I, and ancient Lemuria.
I think Hon is right that this drive to discover secrets and add them to a shared community of knowledge-seekers could be a contributor to the QAnon phenomenon. Like I said, it's a good article.
But it would have been even better if he'd gone meta and noticed that he himself is being motivated by the discovery drive. He claims to have found a secret resonance - one between QAnon and alternate reality games (for best effect, imagine him having a [conspiracy corkboard](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StringTheory) and pinning red string between pins marked QANON and ARGS). Then he contributes it to a shared community of knowledge-seekers. The community of people who read blog posts to try to understand QAnon is vast, and Hon's post quickly became a classic that got profiled in *[Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/qanon-most-dangerous-multiplatform-game/)* and *[The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/opinion/qanon-conspiracy-theory-arg.html)*, and inspired countless further works of analysis (including this one).
This isn't meant in any way as a criticism of Hon. I'm transparently doing the same thing he is here - claiming to have an interesting insight, then contributing it to a shared community of knowledge-seekers. My point isn't that Hon is similar to QAnon and therefore bad. My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are.
Partly this is all for the greater good. If we don't know about the Lizard Papacy, we won't be able to resist them; if we don't know what secretly drives QAnon, we won't be able to fight it. But another part of it seems to be - a critic might say "intellectual masturbation" but I would argue "intellectual exercise" is a better term. Exercise is sort of about building strength and skill that you might use later, but it's also guiltlessly joyful, done for nothing's sake but its own.
Athletes understand that not everyone can be Babe Ruth. That's why you have local baseball leagues, or Little League, or the Minor Leagues, so that everybody can satisfy their sports competition drive whether they're a superstar or not. But what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you're not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?
You can create a minor league in sports by matching the less-than-stellar players against each other. You can't do that with intellectual curiosity; there's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first. The closest you can come is to pull a QAnon - secede from reality, and then you'll only be competing with other secedees.
Yet somehow Hon is doing this well. He hasn't seceded from reality. And he's not (I hope it isn't insulting to say) a Babe Ruth-level intellectual superstar - the Babe Ruth equivalent would be Albert Einstein or someone. He's just a normal person satisfying his discovery drive and doing minor-league intellectual activity successfully. And maybe he's a bad example: I only know of him because he had this insight, so looking at him and saying "normal people can make discoveries too" is kind of selection-biased. But I see other random people do this all the time. People I follow on social media. Personal friends. It doesn't seem so uncommon. The hope that it's possible to add something of value to the conversation without being a domain expert and double PhD fuels this blog and its associated community. But it also fuels every other Substack, and the editorial page of major newspapers.
How is this possible? Maybe the space of knowledge is so vast and so high-dimensional that there are billions of different directions to push in - enough that everyone can explore *some* new frontier. Maybe it's combinatorics. Comparing and contrasting everything to everything else is a hard task, and maybe you have to be both a veteran gamer and an obsessive amateur QAnon devotee to get the particular insight Hon got, and maybe lots of people have a near-unique mix of unusual characteristics of the same level as "veteran gamer" and "obsessive amateur QAnon devotee".
Maybe the heap of already-discovered knowledge is so unwieldy that diving into it and retrieving a particular piece of already-discovered knowledge becomes its own form of discovery. I once won a research prize for a paper which was basically "HEY GUYS HAVE YOU HEARD DONALD KLEIN'S THEORY OF PANIC DISORDER?" Everyone who read my paper agreed that the theory was beautiful and important and they'd learned a lot from it, but my apparently prize-worthy contribution was just to dig it up and show how it applied to a particular patient whose condition was otherwise mysterious. Probably a lot of work linking conspiracy theories and the discovery drive has already been done somewhere; Hon either independently rederived it, or read it and realized it applied to QAnon. Either way, he got it in front of a lot of people who were happy to learn about it and it's fair to celebrate his contribution.
Or maybe there are some subtle differences between forms of knowledge that I'm eliding. I don't think there's a minor league equivalent to discovering the Theory of Relativity; if you come across something like *that* as a non-expert, you're probably a crank, same as the Lizard Papacy guy. But what is the non-relativity knowledge I trust Hon or myself to discover? Different "perspectives"? Putting existing knowledge into different and easier-to-understand words? "X is kind of like Y if you think about it, isn't that interesting?"
And I notice how often the intellectual minor leagues are about politics: that rare area where there are no real experts, and it's every man for himself. Read some physics, think a bit, and announce you've discovered the Theory of Everything, and people will call you a crank. Read some history, think a bit, and announce you've discovered the secrets of the Lizard Papacy, and people will call you a nut. But read some politics, think a bit, and announce you've figured out how all existing institutions are corrupt and only you know how to run them fairly - and you can end up anywhere from interesting-at-parties, to newspaper columnist, to US President.
I often find myself trying to justify my existence; how can I write about science when I'm not a professional scientist, or philosophy when I'm not a professional philosopher, or politics when I'm not a professional policy wonk? When I'm in a good mood, I like to think it's because I have something helpful to say about these topics. But when I'm in a bad mood, I think the best apology I can give for myself is that the discovery drive is part of what it is to be human, and I'm handling it more gracefully than some. | Scott Alexander | 43040292 | Epistemic Minor Leagues | acx |
# Open Thread 195 + Cambridge/Edinburgh Meetups This Weekend
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** Cambridge meetup this Saturday, October 23, 1 PM, at [proper.event.wiring](https://w3w.co/proper.event.wiring), aka near the Jesus Green Skatepark.
**2:** Edinburghmeetup this Sunday, October 24, 5 PM, at LAST SECOND CHANGE it's now at Le Monde on George Street sorry everyone.
3: Comment of the week is [nickiter](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects/comment/3302338), [Kevin Jackson](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects/comment/3297306), and everyone else who pointed out that people can die of hypothermia at surprisingly high temperatures - and I guess I have no evidence that temperature effects on heart attacks can’t start at surprisingly high temperatures either. I’ve updated to believe that a lot of the sub-Saharan African hypothermia deaths may in fact be cold-related and not flu. | Scott Alexander | 42977392 | Open Thread 195 + Cambridge/Edinburgh Meetups This Weekend | acx |
# Chilling Effects
*[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]*
**I.**
On [the recent global warming post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-kids), a commenter argued that at least fewer people would die of cold. I was prepared to dismiss this on the grounds that it couldn’t possibly be enough people to matter, but, um:
There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right?
You can find the source here ([study](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext), [popular article](https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/extreme-temperatures-kill-5-million-a-year-20-year-study-77875)). The study confirms that it is claiming that 8.52% of all deaths are cold-related (plus an additional ~1% heat-related). It separates the world into a grid of 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree squares. It uses a bunch of assumptions and interpolations to get a dataset of daily average temperatures and mortality rates for each square over ten years. Then it calculates a function of how mortality varies with respect to temperature. The lowest point of that function, usually a pretty normal temperature, gets dubbed “the minimum mortality temperature” or “MMT”. Then they calculate how many extra deaths happen compared to the counterfactual where it was always the MMT, and they get five million. Where are these deaths?
People are most likely to die of extreme cold in Sub-Saharan Africa, and most likely to die of extreme heat in Greenland, Norway, and various very high mountains. You’re reading that right - the cold deaths are centered in the warmest areas, and vice versa.
This has got to all be wrong, right? 10% of Africans freezing to death, a substantial number of Greenlanders dying of the heat? The paper doesn’t have any answers. It just presents its mathematical model and runs away. So what’s going on?
**II.**
When you’re skeptical of complicated models, sometimes it helps to go back to the rawest data you can find. So here’s a graph of mortality rates in New York City over time. It was published to put the coronavirus in context, but we can use it to look at seasonal effects:
(source: [NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/coronavirus-deaths-new-york-city.html). I have truncated the vertical axis edited it so it takes up less space)
Deaths definitely go up every winter, from about 4000 to 4500. So yeah, this is about 10% extra deaths during the cold season. Why?
Before we go further - are the deaths coming from the cold, or the winter? That is, if it’s a colder-than-normal day in the winter, do deaths go up even higher than normal? If it’s winter, but it’s still pretty warm out, are there still excess deaths?
The papers I read disagreed pretty intensely about this. [This study from London 1997-2012](https://journals.lww.com/epidem/Fulltext/2016/07000/The_Excess_Winter_Deaths_Measure__Why_Its_Use_Is.6.aspx) concludes:
> Most of the excess winter deaths are driven by cold: The excess winter deaths index decreased from 1.19 to 1.07 after excluding deaths attributable to low temperatures. Over 40% of cold-attributable deaths occurred outside of the December–March period, leading to bias in the excess winter deaths measure.
But [this study](https://oro.open.ac.uk/57830/8/57830.pdf) from London 1951 - 2011 says:
> We found that the association of year-to-year variation in [excess winter deaths] with the number of cold days in winter (< 5ºC), evident until the mid 1970s, has disappeared, leaving only the incidence of influenza-like illnesses to explain any of the year-to-year variation in EWDs in the last decade. Whilst excess winter deaths evidently do exist, winter cold severity no longer predicts the numbers affected.
You can see further debate between these groups [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2302) and [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2302), but rather than get bogged down in the math, I want to take a common sense perspective.
There *has* to be a winter component separate from the cold component. I mentioned before that these studies begin by finding an MMT - a “minimum mortality temperature” - and then figuring out how quickly mortality increases to either side of that minimum.
But MMT [is very different](https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/pdf/10.1289/ehp.1509692?noaccount=true) in different regions. In Sweden, it’s 18C (64F). In Florida, it’s 27C (81F). The only constant is that it seems to be about 80% of the way through the temperature distribution of a region - so if some city ranges from 0 to 100 degrees, its MMT will probably be around 80; if some other city ranges from 25 to 125, its MMT will be 105. In very hot places, it sometimes gets a bit less than 80%, but never below 60% or so.
Mortality rate by temperature in selected cities ([source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4521077/))
You could argue that this is at least partly because of cultural adaptation. The “effective temperature”, the one that’s reaching your blood vessels and your heart, depends on things like how many layers of clothing you wear, how often you go outside, how much air conditioning you use, et cetera. So for example, in the figure above, Stockholm doesn’t get any increased mortality from the cold, no matter how cold it gets. Plausibly that’s because they’ve organized their lives and built environment around surviving cold winters. One study failed to find any excess cold-weather deaths in Siberians even at temperatures as low as -52C (-62F).
But it can’t all be cultural adaptation, can it? Look at Bangkok in the figure above. They start getting excess cold-weather mortality at around 27C (81F). Grant that they have no adaptation for cold weather at all and none of their houses have heating and whatever. They *still* should be doing fine at 81F! A [study from Kuwait](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720328060) finds that the Kuwaitis start getting increased mortality when the temperature gets below 35C (95F). It doesn’t matter how unprepared you are, that temperature shouldn’t kill you.
The only logical explanation is that this is an artifact of mortality being higher in the winter. In Kuwait, temperatures below 35C/95F mean you’re in the winter half of the year.
Why is mortality higher in the winter (as opposed to in the cold)? Probably flu and other respiratory illnesses. We still don’t really know why flu is seasonal (it doesn’t seem to be about cold *per se*) but it definitely is. Observed cases of flu only make up a small fraction of excess winter deaths, I think even only a small fraction of excess seasonal-as-opposed-to-cold deaths. I find this suspicious, and I wonder if there are a bunch of less obvious seasonal viruses going around causing deaths that don’t get recorded as “seasonal viruses”. Or: we know that sometimes people can get strokes and heart attacks as complications of the flu - maybe we don’t notice the flu, or coroners don’t record it, and it just gets marked as a stroke or heart attack.
[Other studies](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412018308997) find cold related mortality, separate from winter-related mortality. What could cause this?
The majority of this cold-related death is cardiovascular. Heart attacks [are more common during the winter](https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/behind-the-headlines/cold-weather-and-heart-attacks). The effect is pretty big; lower the temperature 20 degrees C (or 35 degrees F) and heart attack risk goes up about 15%. Why? The most common story is that surface blood vessels constrict in colder weather, which increases blood pressure and makes the heart work harder. But it’s probably more complicated than this - for whatever reason (maybe partly downstream of the blood vessel constriction?) cooling causes [increases in](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6437575/) blood viscosity, platelet number, and coagulability - ie your blood is more likely to clot, including the kinds of clots that cause heart attacks and strokes. This seems to take a while; studies show that the effect of cold peaks about two weeks after it starts being cold.
Since heart attacks and strokes are among the most common causes death, a 15% increase is huge. And this is a real effect of cold, not just of winter. So cold weather *has to* have some independent effect, meaning I side with the team that finds that it does. Probably both winter (through influenza) and cold (through heart attacks) contribute to excess winter/cold mortality. I’m sympathetic to the confusion around this in the models; it’s probably hard to distinguish “winter” from “long period of protracted cold with a lag”. Or “heart attack directly from the cold” vs. “heart attack as a complication of the flu, which happens during the cold season”.
Okay, but why are cold-related deaths most common in Africa? And why are heat-related deaths most common in Greenland?
**III.**
It’s actually worse than this. There are more cold-related deaths the warmer and more tropical you get, and they’re worst of all in Africa, but I think these two findings are for different reasons.
First, the warmer-and-more tropical thing. See eg [this paper](https://www.demogr.mpg.de/books/drm/003/2.pdf), where the key graph is:
Again, everyone’s answer for this is “adaptation”. The worse your climate, the more likely you are to have good central heating, sheltered bus stops, and parents who nag their kids to put a hat on before they go out. I’m not entirely convinced by this story. Shouldn’t this mean that everywhere has the *same* level of excess death from the cold? Why would cold places adapt so hard that they did *better* than warm places? I don’t know, but this is what everybody says.
What about sub-Saharan Africa? This can’t just be adaptation. Sure, they’re not prepared for the cold. But it never *gets* cold there. The lowest recorded temperature in Kampala, Uganda [was](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kampala) 12C (54F). Most years it doesn’t even get *that* low! Who’s dying from that?
I think cold-related deaths are most common in Africa because of the flu. Flu hits sub-Saharan Africa [really hard](https://medcraveonline.com/IJVV/influenza-associated-morbidity-and-mortality-in-sub-saharan-africa.html), much harder than the developed world. Partly this is because it’s very poor and lacks good health care. And partly it’s because it has many other diseases - especially HIV/AIDS - which weaken people’s immune systems and constitutions to the point where the flu can finish them off. Flu hits in the winter in not-completely-equatorial areas, and all year in equatorial areas. I don’t know if anyone has ever proven whether flu is worse in random non-seasonal cold snaps in equatorial areas, but [it would make sense if it was](https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JVI.02186-10). Even though most cold-weather deaths in temperate areas are heart attacks, I don’t know of any studies showing this is true in equatorial Africa, so I think probably this is all flu cases.
I realize it’s awkward to propose two different mechanisms for the general heat/cold-death relationship and the African extreme, but I don’t have any better ideas.
Okay, what about heat deaths? Why are they most common in Greenland, Tibet, and the Andes?
The only treatment of Greenland I can find is in [this article](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_YvvYpu0LPcC&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=greenland+death+rate+seasonal&source=bl&ots=ZOEjGpdE7p&sig=ACfU3U2sOMsGy5CUGKNFrp1AzFwkJW7UmA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiyotrsldfzAhVPgFwKHYISCqM4ChDoAXoECAsQAw#v=onepage&q=greenland%20death%20rate%20seasonal&f=false), which states that mortality is highest in the summer in Greenland for two reasons. First, it is the traditional hunting season, and there are lots of ways to die while hunting. Second, nobody visits Greenland in the winter, and when visitors (mostly tourists and Danish colonial officials) return in the summer, they bring new diseases. The effect is decreasing as traditional hunting gives way to modern going-to-the-supermarket, and as Inuit become more resistant to Western diseases. Seems plausible, I guess.
I can’t find anything on Tibet or the Andes. The obvious connection is that these are both very high mountains, so I don’t know, something something altitude? The way evaporation works means [it’s easier to dehydrate at high altitudes](https://hydrapak.com/blogs/beyond-adventure/high-altitude-hydration), and dehydration is a common cause of summer heat death, so maybe this checks out? Please let me know if you have any better data or theories on this.
**IV.**
So let’s get back to the original question? Will global warming increase heat-related death? Will it decrease cold-related death? And which effect will predominate?
I originally expected that the beneficial cold-related effects would be more important; after all, almost 10x more people die of cold than of heat. If global warming halved cold-related deaths while doubling heat-related ones (completely made up numbers), then naively that would be enough to flip its overall effect on humanity from very bad to pretty good. It would save millions of lives per year, even after sea level rise and famines and so on.
Most scientists in the field don’t think this is true.
I’m getting this partly from people who have done sophisticated mathematical models of this, for example [Bressler et al](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-99156-5), who say that:
> In the absence of income-based adaptation, the global mortality rate in 2080–2099 is expected to increase by 1.8% [95% CI 0.8–2.8%] under a lower-emissions RCP 4.5 scenario and by 6.2% [95% CI 2.5–10.0%] in the very high-emissions RCP 8.5 scenario relative to 2001–2020. When the reduced sensitivity to heat associated with rising incomes, such as greater ability to invest in air conditioning, is accounted for, the expected end-of-century increase in the global mortality rate is 1.1% [95% CI 0.4–1.9%] in RCP 4.5 and 4.2% [95% CI 1.8–6.7%] in RCP 8.5 […] For all 23 countries, Gasparrini et al. predict an increase in heat-related excess mortality and a decrease in cold-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios, **with most countries experiencing a net increase in mortality.**
See also [this paper](https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/48786976/Winter_mortality_in_a_warming_climate_A_20160912-15125-18bphz.pdf?1473733137=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DWinter_mortality_in_a_warming_climate_a.pdf&Expires=1634257200&Signature=PpmUvfqr6FBKWMsR~92qwlXzo7tstyk6NRA3XtWmytJu1tgYLZe49OnTznTb3tCKHNncx2-nRhkeVlYjCFCcFMRAz6yrqfFbbsOoxtIussBP3p6JjtsfgoO8m3VZGEYYArojHBT5Ha-NdPvvj5ucqONtrcKGcAZKvuQvNdD2Vkplz74jzkA9-ziZsVsvBvm5lO9rff7zGEO3QW0flYF6606X5ouq2fUqHPM4fUI2pWlm~mIWTuhXJhlY1Ag5VfWRdvtuJwN3dQ9qb6wXN9S2yaLg9Pb0bZFumDWLTNCmHz12xkJfjCwxeExlrQb4KZW-newrJc4mDKsglHti-RldKQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA), which is the closest thing to a useful summary by people with a smidgeon of curiosity that I could find in this space.
Why is the naive view wrong?
I’m not really impressed with the people working in this field. Most people don’t clearly say that excess winter deaths are a combination of season-related (from the flu) and cold-related (from cardiovascular) deaths, even though something like this has to be true. I can’t find anyone who says that flu seems to be a bigger deal in Africa than in Europe, even though something like that has to be true too. I can’t find anyone expressing even a smidgeon of curiosity about the Greenland question, which is why I had to cite a Greenland-specific journal from 1986 for the answer. A lot of these studies and analyses just take the temperature record from London and generalize. So I don’t want to say I 100% trust these people and the naive view is definitely wrong.
But some of these analyses do make a good point. Given that warmer cities have higher winter mortality than colder cities, it doesn’t seem likely that making the colder cities have more warm-city-typical temperatures will help very much. I find this hard to analyze because I still don’t really get why cold cities over-adapt and end up with even lower mortality than the warm ones.
We still don’t really understand why the flu is seasonal. But it doesn’t seem to be a direct effect of the cold and there’s no clear reason to think global warming will help.
Global warming *should* theoretically help prevent the excess winter heart attacks, which are a direct effect of cold weather. But then why don’t we see any effect from excess winter heart attacks in very cold places like Stockholm or Siberia? Overall I’m not convinced of this one either.
Everyone says that global warming *will* worsen mortality from heat. I’m a bit confused by this also, because just as hot places have worse cold-related mortality, [cold places have worse heat-related mortality](https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/155/1/80/134292). I can’t really find anyone taking this seriously and saying that, as colder cities get warmer, their heat-related mortality will decrease.
One more thing: is all of this is mostly killing very frail people who are on the verge of death anyway? Like, with the heart attack victims - sure, if you have lots of risk factors, your inevitable heart attack is more likely to come on a cold day than a warm one. But it’s not like these people would live forever if the temperature stayed high, is it?
There’s a cute study to this effect by [Auliciems and Frost](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01212767) modeling this as a “pool of susceptible individuals”. I think the idea is something like if an extreme weather event kills lots of people one year, the next year extreme weather events will kill fewer people than normal, because a lot of the vulnerable people are already dead. Their experiment finds some limited support for this hypothesis.
I’m going to end here - even though I don’t have a firm conclusion, I’m not going to be able to top a study on cold-related deaths by a guy named Frost. | Scott Alexander | 42609174 | Chilling Effects | acx |
# Open Thread 194 + London/Oxford Meetups This Weekend
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
**1:** London meetup this Saturday, October 16, 1 PM, at [drums.decide.secret](https://w3w.co/drums.decide.secret), aka the Barbican Lakeside Terrace.
**2:** Oxford meetup this Sunday, October 17, 5 PM, at [analogy.lively.truth](https://what3words.com/analogy.lively.truth), aka the beer garden of the Star on Rectory Road off Cowley Road.
Both of these have changed since the original meetups post, but these are the correct and current locations (unless I’m wrong, in which case an organizer should email me ASAP*)*. Please feel free to come to these even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc, etc, etc. Mingyuan has added an Amman meetup, so if you’re in Jordan, check it out. And regardless of where you are, check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you. | Scott Alexander | 42617554 | Open Thread 194 + London/Oxford Meetups This Weekend | acx |
# Links For October
*[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** [Our World In Data](https://ourworldindata.org/oil-spills) - we are winning the war on oil spills:
**2:** [@incunabula](https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1434803410902167552): “Cheese is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails, Jesus, underwear and spectacles. If even one of these things was absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I'll explain why…”
**3:** [Mansana de la Discordia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illa_de_la_Disc%C3%B2rdia) (“the block of discord”) is a city block in Barcelona where four of the city’s most famous architects built houses next to each other in clashing styles:
It’s also a pun on manzana de la Discordia, “Apple of Discord”
**4:** As late as the 1930s, most upper-middle-class American families had servants. By the end of World War II, almost nobody did. The transition was first felt as a supply-side issue - well-off people wanted servants as much as ever, but fewer and fewer people were willing to serve. Here’s an article on [the government commission set up to deal with the problem](https://daily.jstor.org/how-america-tried-and-failed-to-solve-its-servant-problem/). I first saw this linked by somebody trying to tie it in to the current labor shortage.
**5:** Harvard Gazette [reviews Stephen Pinker’s new book on rationality](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/an-excerpt-from-steven-pinkers-latest-book-rationality/). Someone sent this to me for the contrast with *Secret Of Our Success* - Pinker argues that hunter-gatherer tribes use critical thinking all the time, are skeptical of arguments from authority, and “owe their survival to a scientific mindset”. I’d love to see a debate between Pinker and Henrich (or an explanation of why they feel like they’re really on the same side and don’t need to iron anything out).
**6:** It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, [Nazis hated IQ research](https://twitter.com/SilverVVulpes/status/1125756632061837313), worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
**7:** Pain reprocessing therapy, a series of explanations and exercises intended to help chronic pain patients realize that their pain is psychogenic, [seems strongly effective against chronic pain in new study](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2784694). As with all niche therapies, I am skeptical that more than a tiny fraction of people with chronic pain will be able to access it unless it gets turned into an app ([preferably not](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-terrible-world-of) a prescription-gated $1000 one) - but if people could access it, the effects could be huge. Though for the bear case, see @literalbanana, and yes, your default assumption for everything in pain management should be “doctors will use this as an excuse not to give you necessary medications”:
**8:** Hopefully not related: self-defeating admonitions to Trust Science (look at that scatterplot and that trend line!)
**9: MR:** [This Experiment Will Be Run](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/this-experiment-will-be-run.html): New York Public Library, in order to protect “vulnerable communities” and “grapple with inequality”, eliminates late fees for books. But before making a snap judgment based on your preconceptions (or on the library president’s last name) read [the comments](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/this-experiment-will-be-run.html#comments) (wait, when did MR comments start being good?!) which explain that this has already been tried in many other cities, you still can’t take out new books until you return or replace the old ones, and having a potential monetary fine looming over your head for forgetting something turns a lot of people off (especially poor people, but also everyone else). I think the best lens for this is behavioral econ - fines were a kind of “reverse nudge” that made people nervous and unhappy far out of proportion to any good they did, so the library system is being restructured to route around them.
**10:** [Intransitive dice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intransitive_dice) are “three dice, *A*, *B*, and *C*, with the property that *A* rolls higher than *B* more than half the time, and *B* rolls higher than *C* more than half the time, but it is not true that *A* rolls higher than *C* more than half the time.” See also [the story about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intransitive_dice#Warren_Buffett) - should I be less amazed than I am that Gates was able to figure all of this out on the spot?
**11:** [Twinder](http://twinder.me/) is a cross between Twitter and Reciprocity. It lists all of your Twitter friends, you click a checkbox beside any you secretly want to date, and if you and your crush both checkbox each other, it tells you. Seems like a great idea, although when I try it I don’t see any people available to check - maybe none of my Twitter friends use this?
**12:** I’ve previously written some stuff on why various groups (including ACX readers) seem to be disproportionately firstborn children. One puzzle piece (pun not intended) I’d missed is that [firstborns are more likely to have autism](https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/clinical-research-autism-risk-abates-in-later-born-children/). Here’s [a study](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24750573.2018.1457489) showing that this is not just reproductive stoppage (ie once parents have an autistic child, they’re overwhelmed and don’t have any m/ore kids). If firstborn-ness shifts every child a little bit further onto the autism spectrum, maybe that would explain firstborn overrepresentation in STEM groups, like ACX readers and [Nobel laureates in physics.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QTLTic5nZ2DaBtoCv/birth-order-effect-found-in-nobel-laureates-in-physics) If some college student is looking for a psychology undergrad thesis project, I would love to see them survey several classes and see whether the humanities people have different birth order proportions than the STEM people.
**13:** Latest salvo in the “was colonialism good/bad for economic development?” debate - areas of India that were under direct British colonial rule [have 39% less nighttime illumination](https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/impact-colonial-institutions-economic-growth-development-india#) (a common proxy for developedness) than areas that maintained more local autonomy. Although there are probably confounders in terms of which areas the British directly annexed, these are more likely to strengthen the case than weaken it - the British annexed the most productive areas, and a subanalysis based on areas where annexation/non-annexation depended on quirks of royals dying shows stronger effects than the original finding. [**EDIT:** See [this comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october/comment/3239031) for skepticism]
**14:** Whimsi, author of the review of *Down And Out In Paris And London* that won second place in the book review contest here, [reviews](https://whimsi.substack.com/p/book-review-the-emperor) *[The Emperor](https://whimsi.substack.com/p/book-review-the-emperor)*, a book on the court of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.
**15:** Here’s a good profile of [profile of Wave](https://randle.substack.com/p/wave), a mobile money and remittances company some friends of mine work at which is doing great work to help people send money to Africa.
**16:** Early in the COVID pandemic, I linked to a theory that getting a smaller dose of virus meant less severe disease (so, for example, a mask that blocked 95% of viruses would still be useful, even though 5% of viruses is enough to infect you). NEJM recently published an evidence-free article [vaguely against this](https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1319689468421402624), and Stephan Guyenet says it doesn’t always apply for [other diseases](https://twitter.com/whsource/status/1320107008855437312).
**17:** Related to Bryan Caplan’s theory that most parents put too much work into parenting:
**18:** Light drinkers appear to live longer and be healthier than never-drinkers. Is this a real effect, or just some kind of confounding based on (eg) sick people being less likely to drink? [This blog post](https://dynomight.net/alcohol-trial/) is the story of the giant government study that was supposed to answer this question, its attempts to balance the need for industry funding with the need for objectivity, and how it all came crashing down. Useful sausage-is-made style story about government-run science. Related: Alcohol-related research [is much likelier](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953621007826) to say positive things about alcohol when funded by the alcohol industry.
**19:** From the above, but deserving of its own highlight: [Mendelian randomization suggests even small amounts of alcohol are harmful](https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g4164). That is, people with genes that predispose them to drink less alcohol have better cardiovascular health even at low levels of drinking. Since genes are harder to confound than most other things, this suggests that even light drinking is a bit bad for you. I’m slightly concerned that it’s based on a single variant but the sample size is large enough that I’ll provisionally trust it.
**20:** Some good comments on my architecture articles, from [@literalbanana](https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/1445784214838730758) and [Scott Sumner](https://www.econlib.org/some-random-thoughts-on-modernism/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=some-random-thoughts-on-modernism).
**21:** When the Spanish crown forced Jews to convert to Christianity, the Jews tried to keep their traditions alive however they could. Purim became “[the Festival of Santa Esterica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_of_Santa_Esterica)”, on the grounds that there were so many saints that the Inquisition probably couldn’t keep track of all of them and would just assume it was a colorful local tradition. This worked so well that Christians in Latin America are still celebrating the festival today with no awareness of its Jewish roots.
**22:** AI safety group Redwood Research has a fun new project, which starts with [trying to train a GPT-like language model to avoid violence in its stories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k7oxdbNaGATZbtEg3/redwood-research-s-current-project). If you prompt it with “Dr. Villain put his ray gun to the hero’s temple and pressed the trigger”, it should continue with “…but the gun failed to go off, and the hero escaped peacefully” or something. This will involve a lot of humans rating how violent various things are, and probably end up with a clunky “performance-uncompetitive” model. Redwood wants to see how far behind the “safe” model lags the “natural” one, whether it’s possible to train a “natural” model using the “safe” one as a classifier/reward function, and whether that new “natural” model is performance-competitive. In practice this involves a lot of people trying to present violent stories to a robot to see if it can weasel its way out of them - [go here](https://rr-data.herokuapp.com/talk-to-filtered-transformer) if you want to help.
**23:** [The Falador Massacre](https://runescape.fandom.com/wiki/Falador_Massacre) was an incident in the MMORPG Runescape. A glitch gave the players who attended a certain party the ability to fight and kill other players even in neutral “no-fighting” zones; other players not subject to the glitch couldn’t fight back. Gamers being gamers, the attendees took advantage of this to massacre the unsuspecting players in no-fighting-allowed zones. “The killing lasted almost an hour before Jagex Moderators were notified...the bug was fixed and Jagex permanently banned many players. Mod Peter apologised to the victims who were attacked from this glitch, but no items were recovered, nor was the game rolled back.”
**24:** [Orwell on “nationalism”](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/). Surprisingly deep and modern.
**25:** [The 1517 Fund](https://www.1517fund.com/) is a venture capital firm that “focus[es] on backing founders without degrees”. Their site says: *“On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg to protest the sale of indulgences. These were pieces of paper the establishment church sold at great cost, telling people it would save their souls. The church made a fortune doing it. Likewise, universities today are selling a piece of paper at great cost and telling people that buying it is the only way they can save their souls. Universities call it a diploma, and they’re making a fortune doing it. Call us heretical if you like, but the 1517 Fund is dedicated to dispelling that paper illusion”.* Can’t believe you can found a Ninety-Five Theses-based venture capital organization without mentioning the gematria perspective that “95” in Roman numerals is “VC”.
**26:** The Polynesians have long used a tea made from kava to help relax, but so far nobody’s been able to turn it into a pill effectively - for some reason it only works in tea form, and the tea is annoying to prepare. Pretty-Chill on the Nootropics Depot subreddit [claims to have solved this problem](https://www.reddit.com/r/NootropicsDepot/comments/ptzy0u/new_product_alert_high_bioavailability_noble_kava/he030oz/): kavalactones are only soluble when combined with some of the starches in kava roots, which happens in traditional tea preparation and not in the pill manufacturing process. Yes, this link is pretty close to shilling a product, but I trust this team a lot and think this is a potentially exciting development in the pharmacology of anxiety.
**27:** [What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FcRt3xAF4ynojfj6G/what-do-gdp-growth-curves-really-mean) (and why are they usually so smooth?)
**28:** Leverage Research is a nonprofit at the edges of my social circle in the Bay Area. A new essay argues that they are [kind of a harmful cult](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b). A lot of the more outrageous parts are new to me (especially the part with the demons) but I can confirm that they constantly insist they have “solved psychology” when in fact they’ve just come up with a mildly-invigorating self-help technique, same as every other cult in California. Here’s a Less Wrong post making [more or less the same accusations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1), and here’s [a response by a Leverage employee](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kz9zMgWB5C27Pmdkh/common-knowledge-facts-about-leverage-research-1-0-1?commentId=GLzJfWbsPzY229gun). The version of Leverage described in the essay is mostly defunct (I think?), so this isn’t an emergency, but I agree with its conclusion that people need to stop giving Geoff Anders more money and power.
**29:** Sick of the Columbus discourse? Why not try Zheng He discourse? In particular, were his treasure ships *really* that much bigger than Western vessels of the time? Chinese and Western scholars [argue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship#Dimensions_and_size) that traditional estimates for the size of his ships are implausible, since wooden ships that big are not seaworthy. Most likely the ships he took on his expedition maxed out at around 200 - 250 ft, [the same as the largest Western ships of the era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship#Dimensions_and_size).
**30:** They might have had some [really impressive river ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louchuan), though. | Scott Alexander | 42248551 | Links For October | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
Ramparen [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3201665):
> No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life
Of course, this was immediately followed by some people ([1,](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3201911) [2](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3213235)) saying *they* were seriously considering not having kids because of climate change, and this article had caused them to rethink their stance (you can find more further down).
I don’t want to pick on Ramperen in particular because a lot of people made this point. But I do want to pick on *someone*, so here goes.
We talk about the Principle of Charity here a lot, and most of you are willing to grant it to right-wingers. If this was the post about how some people [really do oppose abortion for moral reasons](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/30/fetal-attraction-abortion-and-the-principle-of-charity/), and it’s not just sexism - or how some people [really do oppose immigration for cultural reasons](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/), and it’s not just racism - or anything along these lines, everyone would be on board. But I think this ethos of acknowledging that people can be honest and have principles, and not immediately jump to “they’re making it up” cuts both ways. Some people are actually really concerned about global warming.
Some people in the comments linked to a University of Bath survey in which [56% of young people](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58549373) said they thought “humanity is doomed” because of climate change. I haven’t looked at the survey closely to see if the methodology was good or if this is a fair summary, and probably some of this is just mood affiliation - “‘yes’ is the side you’re supposed to take if you’re progressive, right?” But I think a lot of young people actually think the world is doomed. If you think the world is doomed - and that its death throes will be pretty horrible - that actually does sound like a good reason not to have children, doesn’t it?
And - a lot of people are vegetarian for ethical reasons, right? That suggests that people sometimes make really major and inconvenient life changes because of their principles. Why is it hard to believe that the decision to have kids could be one of them?
We know that [knowing about biases can hurt people](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people). All this cynical stuff about bias and signaling and mood affiliation is good to know, but at some point you have to drop it and admit that occasionally some people do things for the reasons they say that they’re doing them, or else it’s impossible to have a conversation or think in a straight line. I’m sure that for a lot of people the climate is just one of many reasons why they’re turned off of having children, but I take them seriously when they say it is one of the reasons.
I will grudgingly tolerate Luis Pedro’s take on this for at least bringing up an interesting question:
I knew a few people in this situation who I was pretty sure actually really wanted to marry, but I don’t know if I ever followed up on them. Does anyone else have an experience with a couple like that? If so, what happened?
moonshadow [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3205539):
> Indeed, looking at other replies here - people are "too lazy" to have kids, "too immature" to have kids, have "excuses" not to have kids... the reality is that not having kids is a decision one is continuously called to justify and defend against attack in ways other life choices are not.
I agree - I don’t see this a lot in my everyday life, so it was pretty disappointing to see how many commenters here want to challenge other people’s life choices not to become parents. I’m always surprised how willing people are to tear up the liberal contract of “I don’t question your (non-externality-having) life choices, you don’t question mine”, *especially* when they’re not guaranteed to be on the winning side, and would completely freak out if the other side tried to create stigma against *them*.
Plus, other people not having children just means more places at top colleges available for *your* kids!
Am *I* being one of those people? Moonshadow fairly [asks me](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3201740), in the context of why I wrote this post:
> Why do you think it is important to convince people who are planning not to have kids to have kids?
Here I have a simple answer, which is that a lot of people really want kids, and having kids would make them happy, and if some of those people weren’t having kids because of climate change, that would make their lives worse. I think telling them that their reason for making their life worse is wrong is an easy way to give them a happier life.
Crotchety Crank [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3202399):
> Thanks for this article, Scott - I have a few friends who want kids themselves, but who have found themselves being talked down to by joyless scolds who will denounce them (to their faces, in public) for wanting to have kids, and insisting they would be deeply wrong to do so, for climate-related reasons. (I hope people like this are not also problems in other people's circles.
I think a lot of people who don’t want kids feel like society is pressuring them to have kids, and a lot of people who do want kids feel like (other parts of) society are pressuring them not to. I think society should take a chill pill and people should have however many kids they want.
---
Mrx [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3205382):
> The argument about future elections seems flawed. It is not an accident that elections are very close: the parties are strongly incentivised to position themselves in a way that appeals to approximately the number of people they need to win elections. If you removed 1% of the electorate's left wing, the Democrats wouldn't sit there losing elections for ever, they'd just move slightly to the right until they picked up enough centrists to restore the equilibrium. So there is an effect on policy outcomes, but it's roughly proportional to the population change rather than being hugely amplified by elections as claimed.
This is a good point, which several people brought up.
I’m not sure how to think of the Median Voter Theorem right now, for a few reasons.
First, the MVT assumes that both parties will end up as indistinguishable centrists, but this clearly hasn’t happened, probably because of the primary process. Probably it’s trivial to extend MVT into a world where this happens, but it’s a trivial thing I haven’t done and am not completely sure about.
Second, often elections *aren’t* close. As a commenter brings up in that thread, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives nonstop for 38 years from 1955 - 1993. Reagan won the 1984 election by 525 to 13 (and AFAICT MVT should be aiming at the median electoral vote in an electoral system). I think some of this has to do with irrational emotions - ie the South hated Republicans so much after Lincoln and the Civil War that Democrats could do whatever they wanted and still win there. But there sure are a lot of irrational emotions in politics today and I wouldn’t want to count this factor out.
Third, I’m not sure how to think about this particular issue. Washington State proposed a carbon tax a few years ago, and it failed 56 to 44. Suppose that a bunch of pro-carbon-tax activists equal to 7% of the population moved in the next day. How would this change politics? Would the climate change activists propose something even more ambitious, so that chance of success is held constant? And is there a binary distribution here, such that “carbon tax” is going to offend some people and excite others no matter what the rate is, and so it’s hard to get something that is “like a carbon tax but appeals to 6% more voters”?
I bet political scientists have good answers to all these questions, but I don’t know them.
This also reminded me of the recent [Ezra Klein piece on David Shor](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html). Shor is telling Democrats that if they took more popular positions they could get more votes; Democrats’ response has been mixed:
> Many in the Democratic data world simply disagree that policy communication holds the power Shor believes it does or that the popularity of a message is as important as he thinks it is.
>
> “There’s no argument that saying unpopular things is better than saying popular things. My argument is it’s not close to being an important enough factor to warrant attention,” [Democratic bigwig Michael] Podhorzer told me. “If the object is for Democrats to win, that’s a tertiary, at best, factor.” [...]
>
> Shor’s critics argue that he’s too focused on the popularity of what Democrats say, rather than the enthusiasm it can unleash. When pressed, Podhorzer called this theory “viralism” and pointed to Trump as an example of what it can see that popularism cannot. “A lot of things Trump did were grossly unpopular but got him enormous turnout and support from the evangelical community,” Podhorzer said. “Polling is blind to that. Politics isn’t just saying a thing at people who’re evaluating it rationally. It’s about creating energy. Policy positions don’t create energy.”
I’ve written about this [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/10/change-minds-or-drive-turnout/), where I think the research agrees with Shor, but the road from “the median voter changes” to “the parties change their position” seems surprisingly treacherous.
---
Anatoly Karlin [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3203156):
> Not having children because of climate change hysteria just means the Earth gets inherited by people less susceptible to such maladaptive mind viruses, i.e. it is self-defeating at the most fundamental level.
This is basically a eugenics argument (we want the next generation to have good genes), so I think it’s fair to respond to it with another eugenics argument.
The people refusing to have kids because of climate change are some of the most intelligent and ethical people around. This is my assessment from knowing some of them, plus my inference from all the articles about them which usually mentions how they went to top colleges. And by definition, they’re people who really care about helping others and are willing to make major sacrifices to do so.
These are exactly the sort of people whose genes I want in the next generation. And if this article successfully catches the ones most likely to change their mind in response to evidence, even better!
---
Justin [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3203033):
> Good points, but I have to question the methodology on per capita emissions by state/DC. It seems likely that these numbers are based only on generation specifically within the boundary which would creating a misleading impression of standard of living attainable relative to emissions. For example Wyoming imports 14x more energy than it consumes, whereas DC imports almost all of its energy ([EIA.gov](http://eia.gov)). 2/3 of DC's electricity mix is fossil fuel <https://www.pjm.com/~/media/library/reports-notices/special-reports/20170330-pjms-evolving-resource-mix-and-system-reliability.ashx> DC is uses more electricity per capita than 89% of the country, but since it's all imported that seems to not be counted.
>
> This holds true for all the high use states, they export coal or gas, or refine crude oil, to be used in other areas of the country. NY's numbers don't include the carbon from the millions of yards they use annually, steel from Pennsylvania, or the incineration or burial of their rubbish at out-of-state facilities.
>
> I've also always questioned how flights play into this, even though the share of emissions is relatively small. Rural residents do drive much more, but rarely fly. Half the US never flies. Based on my anecdotal experiences in NYC and DC it seems likely that they account for an outsize share of these emissions as well, although I can't find data on this beyond broad emissions stats - <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/17/climate/flying-shame-emissions.html>
Thanks. After checking this information I agree this is sketchy and that what state you live in matters less than I thought for how much CO2 you emit.
As far as I know the [urban vs. rural carbon calculations](https://www.livescience.com/13772-city-slicker-country-bumpkin-smaller-carbon-footprint.html) do correct for this, and so urban-dwellers will still emit somewhat less than the US average, but someone can tell me if I’m wrong.
---
Several people argued I was underestimating the downsides of climate change. Scri [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3203128):
> I definitely agree with the general thrust of your argument, that the damage caused by climate change is not going to be so terrible that you shouldn't have children, but I would quibble the point about climate change being unlikely to affect peoples lives in the west.
>
> Climate migration, and food and water insecurity, both have potential as destabilising political forces. Add into this the political dysfunction in the US, and you could get into a situation where these problems, which are solvable to be sure, don't get dealt with in an effective way. I think that could lead to many kinds of disruption in peoples day to day lives, and I don't think that that's a scenario that is totally unrealistic.
I agree that I didn’t do a great job addressing concerns about global warming somewhere in between “bad for Third Worlders but not for you” and “everyone dies”. I haven’t seen these fleshed out very well (maybe someone did flesh them out, but I haven’t seen it).
I tried to explain in the post that the First World is really, really far away from significant food and water shortages. “The government pays farmers not to grow crops” still sounds like a 90’s era conservative talking point, but it’s still true, and the Biden administration has [increased not-growing-crops payments to be higher than ever](https://thecounter.org/biden-administration-farmers-conservation-reserve-crp-usda-vilsack/). Right now we only eat [about a third](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed) of our crops directly - the rest goes mostly to animals, usually requiring about 10x calories of grain to produce x calories of meat. There are currently many foods that can give a day’s worth of calories for about $2, meaning that the cost of food could dectuple and still be affordable on minimum wage. I’m not sure how much more I can stress how far we are from practical First World food and water shortages.
I agree the Third World could run into a lot of problems. Many people brought up the prospect of climate refugees affecting quality of life in developed countries. I guess I have a pretty cynical perspective on this, which is that - we’ve already proven developed countries will reject refugees long before they start to have any significant economic impact. Refugees seem to be something we take zero chances with, something where we’re heavily biased towards rejecting them at the slightest sign that maybe someone thinks something might possibly be affecting vague unmeasurable qualities. If we ever approached a point where refugees could actually cause techno-economic decline or civil war or whatever, we would have already built a giant unscaleable border wall. I don’t think our civilization should necessarily be proud of this, but I think it’s true and makes the threat of climate refugees less impactful.
A few people have claimed that one danger actually *is* that the flood of climate refugees will put right-wing governments into power. I guess that if you don’t like right-wing governments, think left-wing parties are too principled to take anti-refugee positions, and think the median voter theorem is imperfect, then this is a real risk.
---
Other people think I’m *overestimating* the risks from climate change. David Friedman [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3206522):
> I agree with your conclusion, but you should not be so willing to believe alarmist scare stories.
>
> *"This has already been pretty bad, with unusually many hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts."*
>
> The IPCC claimed that climate change had increased droughts in the fourth report, retracted that claim in the fifth. For hurricanes, a long discussion by Chris Landsea, who wrote a substantial part of one of the IPCC report's section on hurricanes is at <https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/gw_hurricanes/>
>
> If you actually read the IPCC reports with care, instead of the news media, things look a lot less bleak. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
>
> *There is no evidence that surface water and groundwater drought frequency has changed over the last few decades, although impacts of drought have increased mostly due to increased water demand.*
>
> *Economic losses due to extreme weather events have increased globally, mostly due to increase in wealth and exposure, with a possible influence of climate change (low confidence in attribution to climate change).*
>
> *Some low-lying developing countries and small island states are expected to face very high impacts that, in some cases, could have associated damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of GDP.*
>
> *... most recent observed terrestrial-species extinctions have not been attributed to recent climate change, despite some speculative efforts (high confidence).*
>
> *With these recognized limitations, the incomplete estimates of global annual economic losses for additional temperature increases of ~2°C are between 0.2 and 2.0% of income ... .*
>
> I was also struck some years ago by a piece written by William Nordhaus responding to a WSJ OpEd that argued that climate change was not a catastrophe requiring immediate response. His calculation at the time was that the net cost of doing nothing for fifty years instead the optimal policy starting immediately was about $4.1 trillion. Spread out over a century and the entire world, that works out to a reduction of average world GNP of about one twentieth of one percent. He didn't put it that way. You can find my comments on his piece and a link to it at:
I broadly agree with this. The direct effects on world GDP will be low.
My concern is something more like: one commenter brought up [the 1980s Ethiopia famine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%931985_famine_in_Ethiopia), which killed about a million people (also, “400,000 refugees left the country…2.5 million people were internally displaced, [and] almost 200,000 children were orphaned.”) Climatologists suspect a major contributor to the famine was [global dimming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming), a phenomenon where air pollution decreases sunlight over certain parts of the world.
So here are various true things you can say about global dimming:
* It probably cost less than a trillion dollars and less than 0.1% of GWP
* If we’d made any really serious efforts to prevent it, those efforts would have cost more, in monetary terms, than the dimming itself
* For all we know it improved the climates of other parts of the world and made them better off, who knows? Maybe some deserts were able to grow more plants because global dimming made them less scorching.
* In the grand scheme of things, most people didn’t notice it. It didn’t bring down civilization, or cause technological collapse. I had never heard of it until right now, and there’s no real reason I should have.
* The famine was mostly the fault of communism and an incompetent government destroying Ethiopia’s agricultural sector, which made it extra vulnerable to global-dimming-induced drought. If we had only had global dimming and not these other vulnerabilities, it would have been fine.
* We will never actually be able to know for sure whether the Ethiopia famine would have happened anyway without global dimming. Wikipedia cites a claim that dimming was the “leading factor” in the famine, but other sources go quite into depth about the climatological causes of the famine without even mentioning it.
But, also:
* There’s a pretty decent chance that global dimming killed like a million people.
My expectation for global warming is that it will be a few times worse than global dimming, but basically follow the same dynamics. In 2100 or whenever, we developed-country-citizens will still be alive, we’ll still be squinting really hard to see if global warming made a difference in economic growth, and there will be several million people dead from disasters that we suspect (but will never be sure) that global warming made more likely or worsened.
Preventing global warming will never seem cost-effective because the global economy just doesn’t place a very high value on the lives of Ethiopian subsistence farmers. But we can choose place a high value on their lives, and I think if we do that then preventing global warming seems worth it in expectation.
I am much less certain of any of this than I am certain that it’s funny that the hurricane report is by a guy named “Landsea”
---
Kyle M [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3202159):
> I looked into this during a previous California drought and my (very limited) understanding is that alfalfa is an important part of crop rotation in California because it sucks salt out of the ground very effectively. CA starts with high salt content and other crops raise the salt content more, which risks “salting the land” and wrecking the soil. I’m sure there are other crop mixes and intensiveness that could work, but the issue isn’t alfalfa specifically.
Thank you. I had previously used “California devotes a lot of water to growing alfalfa” as an argument that we waste resources, since alfalfa mostly goes to cows and is very inefficient. But it sounds like there’s a good reason for this, so I’ll leave this point out of future arguments unless someone convinces me there isn’t.
---
Prince Machiavelli [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3207388):
> *"Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always."*
>
> Exactly, life will be slightly harder and will get harder until we reach an equilibrium or intervene to prevent further climate change. A slightly worse economy probably also means the cost of having a child increases even further into absurdity i.e people with children will burden \*more\* of the climate change induced costs even if the average person isn't effected much.
I think the first sentence is claiming there’s an equilibrium - if climate change ever gets so bad that it starts inconveniencing people more than attempts to fix climate change would, we’ll act.
I think the flaw here is that it takes a lot of time to act to stop climate change. Both in terms of the physical action (eg transitioning from fossil fuel plants to solar plants) and in terms of emissions (CO2 emitted today stays in the atmosphere and keeps warming the planet for decades to centuries). If we start acting once climate change becomes un-ignorably bad, it will be decades before we see any results. And by that time, things will have gotten worse and we will have wished we’d done even *more*. The only exception might be fairly extreme geo-engineering attempts that we’ll wish we didn’t have to experiment with. I think trying to respond to climate change early is the right call.
---
Stephan Wäldchen [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3213550):
> I really support people having children even in the face of the climate crisis. However, I think the strongest argument that I have heard so far is that children are just a high opportunity cost and the money and time spent on them should go into activism, since we are at a decisive moment for how bad it will be. Is there a counter to this argument?
I agree that it’s true that time/energy spent raising children inevitably trades off against time/energy spent doing charity work.
But if you weren’t doing charity work 100% of the time already, then you can sacrifice some other thing you were doing in order to raise children. If you’re not doing very much charity work at all right now, then, well, no problem, is there?
My personal preference is to decide how much time/energy/money I want to spend on charity (I’ve settled on 10% of money; time and energy are harder to budget), and then spend the rest of it however I want. If I want to spend my money on a giant diamond or something else useless like that, I don’t have to feel bad about being privileged or wasteful (or at least no worse than I would feel if I spent it on something tasteful like a flower garden for my house) because it’s all coming out of the same 90% non-charity budget.
I think most people only put a tiny amount of their effort into charity, meaning that they have a big budget of slack to reallocate without harming their charitable efforts. If you want to allocate some of that to having kids, I think that’s as acceptable as any other choice. Maybe kids are such a big choice that it’s inevitable that some of the cost would bleed into your other projects, and I do think that’s a risk, but I also know cases where they don’t. Elon Musk has seven kids, and he’s no slacker.
---
Phil Getz [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3208246):
> You wrote, "The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter by 2100".
>
> The linked page says instead, "In its 2019 report, the IPCC projected (chart above) 0.6 to 1.1 meters (1 to 3 feet) of global sea level rise by 2100 (or about 15 millimeters per year) if greenhouse gas emissions remain at high rates (RCP8.5)."
>
> The page THEY link to says instead that RCP8.5 is the most-extreme scenario of RISING emissions, not of emissions continuing as at present.
>
> So the IPCC doesn't predict that sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter. RCP8.5 is an unlikely scenario. The consensus median sea rise by 2100, when I checked about 2 years ago, was about one foot. The only findings since then that I'm aware of would lower that to maybe 8 inches, but that's a guess with high variance, since the findings involved local effects such as the circulation of water underneath ice shelves, rather than global effects.
>
> This is yet another example of climate change claims getting exaggerated with every repetition. All it takes to do that is to let one or two qualifying words slip past which indicate that the result being presented is not the expected result.
Thanks for this correction. Several other people pointed out that even if sea level does rise this much, it doesn’t mean much - many cities are already below sea level and protected by seawalls. Expanding them enough to be prepared for sea level rise will be expensive, but in most cases it’ll be a lot more cost-effective than letting cities drown.
---
MarketsAreCool [writes](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/q5udvg/please_dont_give_up_on_having_kids_because_of/hg8bc8e/):
> Matt Yglesias touches on this in One Billion Americans. He argues that climate change can only be solved by technological progress. Even if America cut its population by 50%, there are billions of people in south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa whose lives are rapidly improving, and therefore will see their emissions per capita increase. It's unethical to try and thwart this improvement in their lives, and so the only way to fix climate change is through technological innovation. And the best way to achieve innovation is with *more people* not less. Yglesias therefore encourages policies to make it easier for Americans to have children, but also to increase immigration to the largest technologically innovative economy.
>
> Edit: I believe he also makes his more generalized case that we have to accept political realities, and that most Americans don't actually want to reduce their energy consumption by 50 or 90%. The solution then is massive renewable energy abundance (including nuclear and geothermal!), along the trends we've seen in the last 20 years, not degrowth through actions or population.
---
Restam [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3202385):
> I'm reminded again of C.S. Lewis's "[How Will The Bomb Find You?](https://www.crossroads.net/media/articles/how-will-the-bomb-find-you)" essay. It was quoted a fair bit in light of coronavirus fears, but I think it applies even better to climate change:
>
> *In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year [...]; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.*
>
> *In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.*
>
> *[...] If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.*
>
> To be clear, this doesn't preclude advocating sensible policies about climate change (or sensible precautions against a virus), any more than C.S. Lewis would have opposed sensible policies about nuclear weapons.
>
> But I think this question of "can I even have children" speaks to a way that people are being eaten by fear over climate change in a way that goes beyond mere sensible policies.
Man, I wish I could write like this. Seems like a waste to blog when one could be quoting CS Lewis instead. | Scott Alexander | 42503142 | Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change | acx |
# Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change
**I.**
A [recent poll](https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/572140-poll-finds-huge-percentage-fear-having) finds that 39% of young people “feel uncertain” about having children because of climate change. And sure, people say a lot of things on polls, but people seem to be talking about this more and more. For example, from NPR: [Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?](https://www.npr.org/2016/08/18/479349760/should-we-be-having-kids-in-the-age-of-climate-change)
> Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many. He's at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a "small-family ethic" — to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to "give them grandchildren."
>
> Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe. For years, people have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the students that future isn't so far off anymore.
Or, from CNBC, [Climate Change Is Making People Think Twice About Having Children](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/climate-change-is-making-people-think-twice-about-having-children.html):
> Analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note to investors last month that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.” Some people are choosing not to have children because they fear that that doing so will amplify global warming while others are concerned about extreme weather events their children may have to endure and the knock-on effects.
See also [Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/27/climate-apocalypse-fears-stopping-people-having-children-study), [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190920-the-couples-reconsidering-kids-because-of-climate-change), [NYT](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/parenting/climate-change-having-kids.html), etc, etc, etc.
The people profiled in these articles make two arguments. First, climate change will be so destructive that it would be wrong to bring children into such a bad world. Second, the more people there are, the more carbon they produce, so having more children will make climate change worse.
I disagree with both arguments. Starting with the first:
The current scientific consensus, as per leading scientific organizations like the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that [climate change will be very bad, but not world-endingly bad](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climate-change-human-civilization-existential-risk).
Climate change will cause worse hurricanes, fires, and other disasters. It will lead to increased spread of invasive species and diseases. It will hit subsistence farmers in poor agricultural countries very hard, and some of them will starve or become refugees. But it won’t cause the collapse of civilization. It won’t kill everyone. Life in the First World will continue, with worse weather and maybe a weaker economy, but more or less the same as always. The people who say otherwise are going against the majority of climatologists, climate models, and international bodies.
One way to think of this is to notice that we’ve already gotten about 25-30% of the global warming we’re likely to see by 2100.
([source](https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-qa-the-ipccs-sixth-assessment-report-on-climate-science))
This has already been pretty bad, with unusually many hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts. It’s hard to tell how many people have died of climate-change-related causes. Maybe thousands? Maybe tens of thousands? Probably trillions of dollars have already been lost to disasters and agricultural problems. But tens of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars lost is completely compatible with the average person in the First World not really noticing much of a change to their daily lives. The next 75 years of global warming are going to be worse than we’ve gotten already, maybe millions of lives lost and tens of trillions of dollars in damage. In aggregate, they’re going to be a giant disaster. But the average person in the First World, probably including your child, *still* won’t notice much of a change to their daily lives.
I want to focus on sea level rise because it’s easy to quantify and display. Sea levels [have already risen](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level) about a quarter of a meter since 1880. This has flooded some low-lying islands, damaged some coastal cities, and devastated some wetlands and other habitats. But the average person in the First World hasn’t noticed. The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another [half a meter to a meter by 2100](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148494/anticipating-future-sea-levels), so maybe 2-4x as much as they’ve risen already. This also won’t be very noticeable to average people. Here’s San Francisco now (top picture), after 1m of sea level rise ie the IPCC’s worst-case scenario for 2100 (middle picture) and after 3m of sea level rise ie the worst-case scenario for 2200 (bottom picture):
(source: [FloodMap.com](https://www.floodmap.net/))
Here’s the same analysis for NYC:
Realistically people will build floodwalls or try to fight this some other way so it probably won’t get this bad, so think of this more as a worst-case scenario.
I don’t want to trivialize this. In the pictures, about 1% of SF and 10% of Manhattan are gone by 2200. Lots of people would lose their homes, and lots of businesses would lose multi-billion-dollar skyscrapers. But none of this is happening by 2100 (ie during your kids’ lifetimes), and no serious expert endorses those pictures where the Statue Of Liberty is underwater up to the shoulders or anything like that. Again, this is going to really suck for a lot of wetlands and beaches and people with houses in those places, but the average person in the First World isn’t necessarily even going to notice.
(exception: Miami, New Orleans, Venice, and a handful of other extremely low-lying cities could sink before 2100 unless strong measures are taken. If you live there, you should be extremely worried - but instead of giving up on having kids, consider moving somewhere else.)
What about problems other than sea level rise? One way of looking at this is to think of how much slack there is in First World systems. For example, California has had lots of droughts recently, and probably this is related to climate change. Probably those droughts will get worse in the future, and it’s easy to imagine parched Californians begging for water.
But so far, the droughts haven’t been bad enough that California stopped golf courses from watering their massive lawns to keep them perfectly green every day. But if anyone was actually dying of thirst, or even having enough trouble getting water that they might be motivated to vote out some politician over it, the government could redirect the golf course water, or any of a thousand other things like this, and everyone would have more than enough. You see this everywhere - lots of resources are being wasted for stupid political reasons. If the political calculus ever changed - as it will, if these problems ever start inconveniencing privileged First World citizens - then we can stop wasting the resources, and use them to address the symptoms of climate change instead.
Am I sure that things will work out like this, rather than end up in some runaway loop where the planet turns into Venus? Not *totally* sure. The scientific consensus says it’s very unlikely that will happen - according to the IPCC, "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by [anthropogenic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_environment "Human impact on the environment") activities." Still, let’s say there’s still a 1% chance that everyone’s wrong and this can happen. Is it fair to bring children into a world with a 1% chance of getting destroyed?
I can’t answer this question, but I would remind you that your parents faced the same question. Ever since World War II, the world’s been at risk of destruction from nuclear Armageddon - at some points probably a lot higher than 1% risk - and your parents chose to have you anyway. I am grateful for my parents’ decisions here and so I conclude that having children in a world with a 1% risk of apocalypse is fine.
I think this point is true more generally. Most of the people profiled in the articles above are well-off, educated Americans. I think it’s important to remember that well-off, educated Americans are in the top 1% of people today in terms of how good their children’s lives are likely to be, and probably in the top 0.1% throughout history. Five hundred years ago, an average child had about a 40% chance of dying of some terrible disease before they were five years old. If they survived, they would be chattel property of some lord who would make them do backbreaking farm labor their entire lives without any hope of earning more than subsistence wages. If female, she could be married off against her will to some random man 10-20 years older than she was, with the legal right to rape her as much as he wanted. If male, he might be drafted to serve as a literal pawn in some border war, and die of dysentery on the way to being bayonetted by some enemy. If gay, they could be burned alive; if black, enslaved; if poor, left to starve. Much of the world is still pretty similar to this! Meanwhile, *your* child is likely to live in a stable home, get spoiled and bought a thousand different kinds of toys, go to a good college, and make well above median US income. Even quite a lot of global warming-related suffering doesn’t take them out of the luckiest 1% of people in history.
If you think privileged modern Americans shouldn’t have children now because of quality-of-life issues, you implicitly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900, should ever have had children. This isn’t necessarily wrong. There’s a group of philosophers called “antinatalists” who believe nobody should ever have kids because life is suffering. These people are at least consistent. If you’re not one of them, I think the quality-of-life argument for not having kids *now* is pretty weak.
**II.**
The other argument is the moral one. Yes, climate change will probably mostly affect poor subsistence farmers - so not your own children. But isn’t it still immoral to have children, knowing that they’re making the problem worse for others?
I think no. How many people are you expecting to not have children because of global warming? 1%? 2%? 1-2% of people changing their individual decisions will do basically nothing. What we actually need is concerted government action.
But your choice not to have children makes that government action less likely to happen. Suppose 1-2% of Democrats stop having children because they’re worried about climate change. Meanwhile, Republicans don’t care about this and have just as many children as ever. Since children tend to share their parents’ political beliefs, this skews elections in favor of the Republicans, who will prevent strong government action.
(sorry for being so America-centric here - other people can figure out how this applies to their own countries)
I did an analysis to try to figure out how much this matters, and I predict that if 5% of people in the last generation had avoided having children because of climate change, that would have been enough to switch the outcome of the 2020 presidential election from Biden to Trump. Remember, most presidential elections are very close. So even though 5% fewer kids will only decrease carbon emissions by 1-2%, it will decrease Democrats’ chance of winning elections by a lot more.
This matters even if you’re not in a swing state. Washington isn’t a swing state, but a first-in-the-nation carbon tax that could have encouraged other places to follow suit [failed 60-40 there](https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Carbon_Emission_Tax_and_Sales_Tax_Reduction,_Initiative_732_(2016)). There are constant state primaries between senators, representatives, and governors with different levels of climate urgency.
(some people have argued these calculations are meaningless because of the median voter theorem. I don’t know how to adjust the median voter theorem for the large differences in existing US parties and the electoral college, so I admit I haven’t factored it in here)
It feels kind of mercenary to say you should let your decision about having kids hinge on how it affects national politics. Normally I wouldn’t recommend it. But if you’re already going to let your decision hinge on how it affects climate change, it does seem relevant that (through national politics) it would probably make climate change worse instead of better.
For any percent of people not having children because of climate change, this affects the climate some linear amount, and the political calculus some much larger amount (because it affects a razor-thin majority). But this is just the most quantifiable part of a more general argument. The future is going to need more climate scientists, climate activists, renewable energy engineers, and climate-friendly politicians. Not all of those people are going to come from families that care a lot about climate change. Some of them will be born to climate deniers and change their minds. But that’s an uphill battle, and it’s the people who care a lot about climate change who have the *best* chance of raising those people. If you take the few percent of people most committed to stopping climate change, and remove them from the next generation, that doesn’t look good for the next generation.
**III.**
Finally, I want to respond to the news articles that say having a kid will create 60 tons of carbon a year and be a disaster for the planet. You can find these at [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children), [Yale](https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/03/how-family-size-shapes-your-carbon-footprint/), [Euro News](https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/04/28/what-s-worse-for-the-climate-crisis-your-child-or-your-pet), etc.
I think most people would be surprised by the methodology of the study involved. It assumed that you would have a child, that child would have children of their own, those children would have children, et cetera. Each of those children would produce carbon, meaning that in theory your decision to have a kid could produce infinite carbon. But then they assumed that due to declining reproduction rates, maybe the chain of having kids would end at some future point, producing a very large but finite amount of carbon. Then they divided all these generations of future carbon production by the number of years you personally would live, and said it would produce 60 tons of carbon per year.
There’s a lot wrong with this study. For one thing, almost nobody who reads it realizes that this is about the amount of carbon produced by a vast clan of descendants, and that an actual kid produces more like 1 ton of carbon yearly while they’re still living at home. For another thing, it assumes people in the future will produce exactly as much carbon as we do, which is almost certainly false - carbon emissions per person have been decreasing rapidly since 2000, and are on track to decrease more. Finally, it covertly assumes that global warming won’t cause too many problems - if it leads to disaster in 2050, your kid won’t be having a giant clan of descendants who keep on producing 2010s-levels of carbon all the way to 2100 and beyond.
Even the scientist who wrote this study [said in an interview](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22399882/climate-change-kids-children-overpopulation) that she still believes people should have kids if they want to:
> **SS [interviewer]:** What I think is really interesting is that despite you and your colleague being the ones who ran this study that produced this finding, you still say that people should totally have kids if they really want to be parents. So how do you square that circle?
>
> **KN [scientist]:** One thing it’s really important to realize is that population is actually irrelevant to solving the climate crisis. And the reason for that is that we only have the next few years to solve the climate crisis reasonably well.
>
> We know that we have this limited carbon budget that determines how much warming we’re going to experience. We’re really close to [scary and dangerous limits](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/3/21045263/climate-change-1-5-degrees-celsius-target-ipcc) right now. And we know what we have to do, which is leave fossil fuels in the ground and switch to regenerative and sustainable agriculture. That’s what our job is basically in this next decade.
>
> So in that sense, creating new people? Well, yes, of course, it is true that more people will consume more resources and cause more greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s not really the relevant timeframe for actually stabilizing the climate, given that we have this decade to cut emissions in half.
Another interesting way to look at this is: how much money would it take to offset the carbon cost of your future child? That is, you can build machines that suck carbon out of the air - how much would it cost to use these machines to suck up exactly as much carbon as your future child will emit over their lifetime?
The average child emits about 1 ton of carbon per year during childhood. The average adult emits about 15 tons of carbon during adulthood. But if emissions decline at the same rate they’ve been declining recently, by the time your child is in their 20s that’ll be down to 7.5 tons. Also, location matters - the people of Wyoming emit 100 tons each, and the people in DC only 4 tons each (rural lifestyles require more carbon than urban ones). I’m going to predict your future child is more likely to live in a city than in Wyoming, and round off their adult carbon output at 5 tons/year. Suppose your child lives for 90 years - 20 years at home, 70 as an adult. Then their total lifetime carbon emission is 20\*1 + 70\*5 = 370 tons.
Right now the people with giant carbon-sucking machines charge $1000/ton to remove carbon. There are prototype machines already working that can do it for $500, so that price point should be available shortly. There seems to be a Moore’s Law for this kind of thing, and when people calculate it out it looks like it’s going to get cheaper pretty quickly:
([source](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652619307772))
So by the time your child is an adult, carbon removal will probably cost about $50/ton.
So 20 tons of near-term carbon offset at $500/ton, plus 350 tons of long-term carbon offset at $50/ton = $10000 + $17500. Round up for uncertainty, and my guess is you can offset your child’s lifetime carbon emissions for about $30,000.
This is a lot of money, but most of the people considering not having children for climate reasons are pretty well-off. Most privileged parents are already resigned to having to pay $100,000 - $200,000 to get their kid into the best college; surely they should also be willing to pay $30,000 to let their kid exist at all.
But also - how little confidence in your own parenting skills do you have to have, to believe that your child will add less than $30,000 in value to the world? Even if you’re *not* an Ivy Leaguer and you *don’t* have that kind of money, if you want kids at all you have to believe they’re going to add something to the world, right? Maybe it’ll be as a climate change activist or environmental scientist, maybe it will be in some totally different field, but if you don’t think your kid is going to make the world a better place in *some* way, why bother?
I realize this is not really as sober an argument as some of the others, but those others were my attempts to make sober arguments. This is the one I actually believe.
In conclusion, climate change will probably be very bad for the world, but not in a way that will have catastrophic effects on your child in particular. Cancelling plans to have kids because of climate change will decrease emissions a very limited amount, while having a disproportionately large effect on the government’s ability to pass climate change related legislation. A less destructive way of assuaging your guilt over having children would be to donate some money to climate charities or carbon offsets in your kid’s name. Nobody who really wants a kid should avoid having one because of climate-related concerns. | Scott Alexander | 39944722 | Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change | acx |
# Open Thread 193 + Berlin/Paris Meetups This Weekend
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** Berlin meetup this Saturday, October 9, 1 PM, at [directly.packing.pardon](https://w3w.co/directly.packing.pardon), aka the Südplateau in Fritz-Schloss-Park.
**2:** And Paris meetup this Sunday, October 10, 5 PM, at [rotonde.tartiner.éloigner](https://what3words.com/rotonde.tartiner.%C3%A9loigner), aka the top of Trocadero park, West of Musée de l'Homme, near the pond, [here](https://goo.gl/maps/e6x139yMRQyMBa5p8) . There should be a big ACX sign. Please feel free to come to either of these even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc, etc, etc. Mingyuan has added a Bangkok meetup, so if you’re in Thailand check it out. And regardless of where you are, check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you.
**3:** We’re still not 100% done with meetups, but in the interests of getting an early start, coordinator Mingyuan would like to know what you thought of your local meetup - please take [her survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfLbWA3EOB28HT3xl2O_SX5OkvJBPwqfCi7ptIo2yVgWV5uoA/viewform), especially if you were an organizer. | Scott Alexander | 42319358 | Open Thread 193 + Berlin/Paris Meetups This Weekend | acx |
# Classifieds Thread 10/2021
I overestimated my ability to write stuff while traveling, so let’s do this again. Advertise your blog, product, resume, dating preferences, etc. | Scott Alexander | 42248329 | Classifieds Thread 10/2021 | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
Thanks to everyone who commented on [Whither Tartaria](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria) (currently 1079 comments). Many of you *really* like modern architecture, and many others of you *really* hate it. I appreciate most of you being able to accept disagreement on that and move on to the bigger question of why there’s so much more of it now.
The most interesting thing I got from the comments was [Chaostician](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3017112) linking to Wikipedia’s page on the [Great Male Renunciation](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3017112) - men’s fashion changing from ornate colorful clothing to dark suits. Wikipedia seems pretty convinced that this was because of egalitarianism norms:
> The Great Male Renunciation is the historical phenomenon at the end of the 18th century in which Western men stopped using brilliant or refined forms in their dress, which were left to women's clothing. Coined by psychoanalyst John Flügel in 1930, it is considered a major turning point in the history of clothing in which the men relinquished their claim to adornment and beauty. The Great Renunciation encouraged the establishment of the suit's monopoly on male dress codes at the beginning of the 19th century.
>
> The Great Male Renunciation began in the mid-18th century, inspired by the ideals of the The Enlightenment; clothing that signaled aristocratic status fell out of style in favor of functional, utilitarian garments. The newfound practicality of men's clothing also coincided with the articulation of the idea that men were rational and that women were frivolous and emotional.
>
> During the French Revolution, wearing dress associated with the royalist Ancien Régime made the wearer a target for the Jacobins. Working class men of the era, many of whom were revolutionaries, came to be known as sans-culottes because they could not afford silk breeches and wore less expensive pantaloons instead. The term was first used as an insult by French officer Jean-Bernard Gauthier de Murnan but was reclaimed by these men around the time of the Demonstration of 20 June 1792.
>
> In the United States, the movement was associated with American republicanism, with Benjamin Franklin giving up his wig during the revolution, and later the Gold Spoon Oration of 1840 denouncing Martin Van Buren.
>
> The post-Renunciation standards for men's dress went largely unchallenged in the Western world before the rise of the counterculture and increased informality in the 1960s.
I see no reason to disagree, *except* that one could argue that there’s a more general trend towards less formal dress - eg from men wearing a suit and hat in public in the 1940s, to today’s t-shirt and shorts, and I’m not sure if that’s also because of egalitarian feelings.
(a few people added that the shift in men’s dress became controversial for a little while after someone on Twitter dramatically [attributed it all to a guy named Beau Brummell](https://twitter.com/_alexrowland/status/1100074022728019968); more sober historians were [very doubtful](https://twitter.com/greg_jenner/status/1100767889462910976?lang=en) - see also this really funny [thinkpiece on terrible social media historical claims](https://theoutline.com/post/7295/buckle-up-twitter-is-cancelled).)
This is interesting because the male fashion change happened around 1800, but the architecture change happened around 1930. Those are different enough times that I need to re-evaluate my theory that the move from ornate to plain across many different artistic fields was all part of the same big transition. If every field changed for a different reason, then some things I ruled out (because they didn’t apply to fashion or poetry or whatever) might need reconsideration as possible explanations for architecture.
For example, cost. Long Disc [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3017170):
> For architecture, the headline theory is more or less correct: we are living in an era of a technological regress. We would not be able to build most of these landmarks even if we tried. I live near a nice Victorian bridge <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammersmith_Bridge> built in 1880s for around £80k. The standard Bank of England inflation measure gives inflation on a broad basket of about x110 from there to now, so the construction would have cost be around £9m in today money. Now, the bridge is still standing but needs repairs. It is not clear if the repairs can be done for less then £150m. The last time this city built a bridge over the same river, it was a much smaller pedestrian only bridge which cost £18m and then another £5m to repair just a few years later. The last time they tried to build a proper large bridge, they spent £60m on thinking about it, realised it will cost over a £1bn and abandoned the project.
Auros [agrees](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3017242):
> Baumol's Cost Disease and concepts of comparative advantage are critical in here. And you can tell, because actually we \_are\_ still building, or re-building, a few of these -- there was active renovation on Notre Dame (which went horribly wrong with an accidental fire), and Sagrada Familia is actively under construction. But the cost to employ skilled masons to produce that kind of ornamental stonework has gone up \_drastically\_ relative to the baseline of what laborers broadly earn. It used to be that if you were a lower class person with the aptitude for engineering, "mason" was probably your best career choice. And you could still choose that! But you also could be any of a dozen other flavors of engineer, and many of those choices would carry considerably less risk of bodily harm, plus many of them have the "bits versus atoms" leverage, such that your work can ultimately produce much more marginal revenue per hour of labor. The fact that the kind of person who might decide to become a mason has that kind of life choice available feeds back into what it costs to hire a mason.
>
> If for a given pile of money, we can either build one beautiful art deco skyscraper, or twenty featureless cubes, then the people who have capital to allocate to buy office space are probably going to buy the featureless cubes.
And Max [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023574):
> One 1994 attempt to construct a large building in a classical style (Castello di Amorosa in Napa Valley) cost the owner ~$73m in 2021 dollars, and the quality of the workmanship still doesn't come close to what you see in the best examples of the 1800s.
Remember, the Baumol effect happens when new technology makes some industries more productive. Since the high-tech industries are so lucrative, wages go up. Then low-tech industries have to raise their wages so that their workers don’t all desert them for the high-tech industries. But since low-tech industries aren’t improving their productivity, they just because more expensive, full stop.
If stonemasonry is a low-tech industry, and new high-tech industries are arising all around it, stonemason wages could get prohibitively high (compared to everything else) until nobody wants to hire them anymore. This would create pressure for architectural styles that require as little masonry (or, generalized, human labor) as possible.
This has gotten me thinking about furniture.
I got a new place recently and have been looking for furnishings. Sometimes I look at people’s furniture Pinterests. If Pinterest is any kind of representative window into the soul of the modern furniture-enthusiast, people *really* like Art Nouveau. Typical pictures that people pin will look like this:
As far as I can tell, you can’t buy any of these anywhere - they’re a combination of antiques and concept pieces. The people who pin these and pine after these end up getting minimalist Scandinavian furniture with names like UJLIBLÖK, just like everyone else.
Anything that even comes close to the above costs [high four to five digits](https://www.pamono.eu/italian-carved-and-gilt-metal-mounted-sideboard-cabinet). I don’t know if this is because it’s antique, because it requires more labor, or both.
But this isn’t an antique, and it doesn’t,uh, seem to be going for the high-end classy market, yet it still costs $2399. Maybe this is because it actually costs a lot to produce?
I’m harping on furniture because it avoids a lot of the complicating factors in architecture. There isn’t some vague collection of “elites” making our furniture decisions. It’s a pretty free market! There are lots of normal middle-class people spending big chunks of money on furniture, lots of them really really like the old stuff, and the old stuff is still either unavailable or unaffordable. It seems like it used to be affordable - it wasn’t *just* kings and dukes who had the old Art Nouveau stuff - but for some reason that’s changed. I think Baumol effects offer a tidy explanation here, and if we use them to explain furniture, then they start looking really attractive for architecture.
I want this one to be true, because it exonerates our civilization. If we could make things like the Art Nouveau furniture above, or the Taj Mahal, relatively cheaply and easily, then the question of why we aren’t doing that demands an answer. If it’s just a quirk of basic economics, then our civilization is fine, and maybe we can hope that stoneworking technology advances to the point where we can do this kind of thing again cheaply.
My big remaining objection is: if this is true, why isn’t it obvious? How come we don’t have architects saying “Of course I’d like to build something ornate, but it costs too much”? How come we don’t have rich people (and the occasional cash-flush government working on a monument that it *really* cares about) saying “screw the price, I really want this one thing to look nice”? I feel like I’m doing some kind of weird archaeology here to try to discover why this happens, whereas every single person in architecture and construction and so on should know whether or not this is true.
Even if Baumol is part of the explanation, there must be some other part, a kind of Stockholm Sydrome style explanation for why, after it became hard to build ornate things, we went all sour grapes and decided that actually, ornateness is bad. I don’t want to speculate further here, because the responsible thing to do would be to actually figure out the economics here before moving on to the consequences of the economics; I have a friend who might work on that and I’m going to hold off until they’re done.
---
Jacob [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3018146):
> Any theory of this change has to account for buildings like this one: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Zayed_Mosque>
>
> And this one: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaminarayan_Akshardham_(New_Delhi)>
>
> The things that these two buildings have in common are:
>
> - Built by very low-wage South Asian laborers (maybe the economic explanations really do matter?)
>
> - Religious and nationalist goals (thus designed to express/elicit popular not elite sentiments?)
>
> I'm sure there are other examples as well, but these were the first two that came to mind. Both are very very impressive IRL! In particular, the pietra dura work on the Sheikh Zayed mosque is very similar in both style and quality to that of the Taj Mahal.
Related, from aesthetics tweeter [Xirong](https://twitter.com/Xirong7):
Thailand seems to have a daily minimum wage of $10, which probably works out to a little over a dollar an hour, which is probably close to what the West was paying people back when it had Art Nouveau and such. I don’t know if this is a coincidence.
---
But Kaleberg argues the [exact opposite point](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3018251):
> Architectural ornament is much cheaper than it used to be, so it is less important. There was a big boom in statues and curlicues in the late 19th century and into the early 20th, but a lot of it was about new techniques for sculpting forms in stone or metal. All those charming buildings in NYC's Chelsea were the result of the falling cost of cast iron fixings. Sure, adorn your office or apartment building with colonnades and six dozen statues of Audrey Munsen and see if you impress anyone.
BronxZooCobra [agrees](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3018820):
> The other issue I had explained to me involves the Queen Anne style Victorian. A generation before that kind of detail would have been ruinously expensive. But with new technology they were able to mass produce all those wooden details. For a while poorer (but obviously not poor) people used that to build houses that were above their station. And then the rich had to go in the opposite direction and go much simpler.
A Queen Anne style house ([source](https://www.homestratosphere.com/queen-anne-architecture/))
Okay, this ought to be an empirical question. Does architectural ornament cost more or less than it used to? If somebody does a deep dive into this, I will absolutely link them. If you think you could do exceptionally good research in exchange for money, please contact me.
---
William Cunningham [frames](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3021496) the political angle a little differently:
> There are some interesting side details to this. 1) civil engineers \*hate\* the fancy parts of new architecture frequently. Turns out that if something looks impossible, it’s often at least very hard. 2) building code, building science, even availability of materials and construction crews familiar with particular techniques are often huge constraints on this sort of thing. LEED gold certification is a big deal for any entity capable of affording a classical style massive building, and in many ways it actively insists on not doing the things that make classical buildings last. Watch just about anything by Joe Lstiburek where he discusses wall and window efficiency and issues, and marvel at how poorly we build buildings these days. 3) good luck getting the permits in a typical city to build something like the Art Deco Detroit Train Station — it’s massively too big for its neighborhood these days and all the “in character for the area” crap isn’t going to be easy for the cool old giant buildings. I don’t have great evidence that this is the case, but I have a feeling that selling a small group of “elite” people like a planning board on the exciting new thing is easier than an Art Deco style fancy building. 4) cost to do a lot of the old style things has skyrocketed, so going cheap or justifying new expensive on environmental grounds is the new way of the world.
Yeep [says](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3026293):
> Part of the issue is building something traditional that meets modern standards for things like insulation is prohibitively expensive. Most of those Barrett homes are still modern timber frame with a facade of stone or brick on the outside, the more offensive ones don't even put the stone somewhere that makes sense from a structural view, it's obviously just a decorative layer.
>
> There's currently a new house being built near where I live entirely out of stone, complete with masons and chisels on site, presumably because it's in a conservation area and had to match the surrounding properties. But it looks like they're building a traditional stone shell then lining it with what is effectively an entire modern house on the inside, which is going to be almost as expensive as building two houses.
And one of the responses is by Jim, who is finally (hallelujah!) a real architect. He [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3039376):
> I'm a professional architect, albeit one of the minority who does traditional design work. Will try to answer a few of your questions here and below.
>
> *>>But if the changes wrought by these thinkers are so unpopular, why haven't market forces simply swept them away? People have agency over which art they buy, which galleries they visit and over which houses they buy. In the UK, where I'm based, basic market logic supports your intuitions: old houses command a premium. But that preference hasn't been carried through into the housing projects that are built.*
>
> Because almost all of the architects are modernists, and you need to hire an architect to get a new building built. The complexity of design and construction has increased enormously in the past century, in part because of new technologies and in part because of regulation. The design professionals have the licenses and expertise that you need to navigate the maze, which puts you at their mercy. They can throw you a few bones by making vague references to your preferred aesthetic, but mostly they’ll do what they’ve been taught to do and like.
>
> And since modernism is all they know, even their sincere attempts to do traditional design work tends to generate kitsch. That goes to your comment about Poundbury below.
This goes back to a point I [revisit a lot](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/): capitalism is still not capitalist enough. No matter how hard you try to get everything based on money and market forces, it’s still controlled by kind of elite taste and sense of “wouldn’t want to make waves”. We need double-capitalism - no, *fifty* capitalisms!
Jim [continues](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3039426):
> The funny thing is that, in my experience of actually dealing with them, NIMBYs are motivated in part by the sheer ugliness of so much new development. The YIMBYs hate on the historical commissions and their stringent design reviews, but it never occurs to them that if new developments looked more like the historic districts they degrade, people might actually support them more.
>
> Note that the preservation movement followed close on the heels of widespread modernist building. It's quite possible that modernist architecture has had an enormous, though indirect, negative economic impact on middle class Americans by driving land use restrictions that make housing more expensive.
Oh, thank goodness - finally a way to turn this into an EA cause!
---
I also got some comments from a professional sociologist, Cicada Meth Orgy Fungus (look, people on Twitter have weird names sometimes). He writes:
…with the recent stuff being [this](https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v8-12-230/) and [this](https://t.co/eleSIt3KEX?amp=1).
---
Some people mention Steven Pinker’s *The Blank Slate*, which apparently has a chapter on this. It contrasts a traditional idea that architecture needs to appeal to some innate sense of beauty vs. a modern idea that there are no innate senses and so it can be whatever is easiest or more politically convenient. Fluffy Buffalo writes:
> I think Steven Pinker had some good insights on that issue in "The Blank Slate". If I remember the argument correctly: modernist architecture/ city planning/ art came into fashion as the conviction spread that there was no such thing as a "human nature" - that, in fact, human tastes and human society were nearly totally malleable, and shaped by their surroundings.
>
> That can take different flavors: the proactive approach is, if you thought that the olden ways were bad and needed to be changed (and after centuries of monarchy, after the excesses of the industrial revolution, and after World War I, there was good reason to believe that), getting rid of the art and architecture of these periods and replacing them with something radically different was a good first step toward molding a new society. This was explicit in communist countries, maybe less so in democratic ones.
>
> The lazy approach is, if people don't have innate preferences, you don't have to worry about making buildings aesthetically pleasing, providing green spaces etc. You can build stuff as cheap and as functional as you can make it, and after a generation no one will miss the pretty old houses and cozy parks. That was probably the thinking behind a lot of post-war planning in Europe - partly out of necessity, because the old stuff was lying in ruins, and rebuilding it close to the original would have been a luxury that would have been hard to justify. The same approach is also present in US housing projects from the 70s onward. And in office buildings around the world, for that matter :-/
>
> Did this reshaping work? Yes and no - we ended up in a place where people still miss the old elaborate styles (because, IMO, they did tap into universal human aesthetic preferences) and pay good money to travel to see the old masterpieces of art and architecture, but where it would still feel weird and anachronistic to just bring them back. It may be time to find a new twist - a new way to please those preferences that doesn't feel 100% rehashed old-school. In architecture, I think new technologies should help a lot - with 3D painters, CNC machines, robots, CAD and AI, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a way to produce eye-pleasing ornaments , murals and building shapes at a reasonable price. But no one is doing it, because the current crop of architects can apparently only think in steel, concrete and glass.
Michael Watts [quotes Pinker at more length](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3022799):
> Steven Pinker devoted a chapter ("The Arts") of The Blank Slate to this question. He comes down pretty strongly in support of the idea that the elites do this stuff \*because\* people don't like it. (As presented above, "Maybe elites are specifically trying to signal not being commoners, by choosing the opposite of commoners’ aesthetic preferences?")
>
> Modernism certainly proceeded \*as if\* human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. In painting, realistic depictions gave way to freakish distortions of shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy \*Art\*, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamentation, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and buildings were "machines for living" made of industrial materials in boxy shapes.
>
> Why did the artistic elite spearhead a movement that called for such masochism? In part it was touted as a reaction to the complacency of the Victorian era and to the naive bourgeois belief in certain knowledge, inevitable progress, and the justice of the social order. Weird and disturbing art was supposed to remind people that the world was a weird and disturbing place.
>
> But modernism wanted to do more than just afflict the comfortable. Its glorification of pure form and its disdain for easy beauty and bourgeois pleasure had an explicit rationale and a political and spiritual agenda.
>
> Modernist and postmodernist critics fail to acknowledge another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, especially their \*own\* hunger for status.
>
> The problem is that whenever people seek rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial turnover of styles in the arts.
>
> In twentieth-century art, the search for the new thing became desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation.
>
> [O]nly a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new workds of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
>
> In his 1913 book *Art*, the critic Clive Bell [] argued that beauty had no place in good art because it was rooted in crass experiences.
>
> Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was "the desire to destroy beauty".
>
> In the year 2000, the composer Stefania de Kenessey puckishly announced a new "movement" in the arts, Derrière Guard, which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative. If that sounds too innocuous to count as a movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the movement "a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters."
>
> I mentioned that last anecdote to the art teacher in my high school, and was surprised to get a fairly enthusiastic response to the effect that yes, there is a raging controversy over whether art should be beautiful, and if not, whether beautiful art should even be allowed. She directed me to [a recent story](https://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1001/p03s01-ussc.html), clipped and posted to her bulletin board, about a city which had arranged for a public art project, seen the proposal somehow come in as a larger-than-life statue of Poseidon in the form of a merman holding the reins of five orcas, canceled the project because \*that's just not the sort of thing we do\*, and run into the absolutely unprecedented problem of massive public support for the public art project they wanted to cancel.
---
Other people focus more on the idea of deliberate ugliness because our civilization doesn’t deserve beautiful things. Aka [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3015422):
> So so much postwar art is exactly about this, clearly and explicitly. please read some midcentury criticism or like any art history or theory. I dare you to read this: <https://www.amazon.com/Art-Culture-Critical-Clement-Greenberg/dp/0807066818>
And [Pachyderminator](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3016700):
> Theodore Adorno famously said "It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz."
Some people were very insistent about this, saying that I was stupid for not having read the primary sources where post-WWII builders explain that this is exactly what they are doing. I admit that my claim in the original post that I hadn’t heard people say this before had more to do with my own ignorance than with what other people had said, and I will try to read those sources, but I think these people’s strident tone is a bit misplaced. Even granting that many people said that, there still seems to be a mystery here. Did Google think about the horrors of WWII before deciding to build a kind of ugly headquarters? Did some random 1990s suburb think about the horrors of WWII before deciding to build a kind of ugly City Hall?
Usually there is some group of people with some silly idea, like “let’s only build ugly things to remind ourselves of the horrors of WWII”, and they make like five things, and then the market gives ordinary people what they want, which is pretty things (at least for some watered-down mass market definition of “pretty”). If someone said “let’s only eat bad food from now on to remember 9-11”, it would never work. Heck, people won’t eat slightly-worse-tasting food to avoid diabetes and save their own lives. If some group of architects actually coordinated the entire world into only building ugly buildings for 70 years to in order to make an important moral point, this would be one of the most impressive acts of coordination in the history of the world. We should find these same architects and ask them to coordinate us into only building environmentally-sound buildings in order to prevent climate change, or whatever.
I guess I’m willing to accept “some people did this originally, and those people were cool, and then that became the cool thing, and then we ended up in a vicious cycle where everyone has to pretend to like it”, but if that were true it would still be pretty astonishing.
Also, are we still doing this? Because people like Frank Gehry are making stuff like this:
…which doesn’t exactly scream “penitence” or “silent contemplation of the evil within us all”.
---
Phil Getz goes…[a](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023457) *[lot](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023457)* [deeper than I was expecting:](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023457)
> I've been exploring the question you're asking for the past several years. I haven't got a well-organized answer yet, nor time today to say much. But this isn't an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it's a pattern that has repeated throughout history and around the world, one of naturalist art executed with great skill being deliberately replaced with highly abstract art not requiring as much skill.
>
> - The cave paintings of Chauvet Cave in France ca 30,000 BP (before present) are more natural and technically much more sophisticated than any cave or rock paintings found after 20,000 BP (some of which are quite abstract and stylized).
>
> - The stone "goddess" idols of Europe circa 6000 BP were more realistic than their artistic descendants, the highly abstract, smooth, angular stone "idols" of the Cyclades, ca. 5000 BP, which were strong influences on modern art.
>
> - Minoan and Mycenaean art (circa 2000 BCE) were both much more naturalistic and sophisticated than the highly abstract Greek art of the Geometric and Archaic periods.
>
> - Ancient Egypt produced extremely skilled naturalistic art, and very stylized, abstract, and seemingly less skillful art at the same time. Check out the art of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who briefly introduced very naturalistic, realistic art, and was erased from history after his death. Note that most Egyptian wall paintings are Cubist.
>
> - The representational art of Western Europe, starting with Constantine, and throughout the Middle Ages (with the exception of the Frankish court and some Byzantine art), up until nearly 1300 AD, seems to have been very deliberately bad, and in many times and places it was banned entirely. This was probably due to Christianity and Islam both having a horror of the misleading power of representational art (which fear came straight out of Plato). Note much medieval art was also Cubist.
>
> - 19th century African art, which is what everyone today thinks of as "African art", is nearly all highly abstract and anti-naturalistic (and was also a big influence on modern art). Yet the very few pieces of pre-colonial African art (pre-1500 CE) which we have are more naturalistic and technically sophisticated, including a few (from present-day Nigeria) that were more skillfully made than their European contemporaries. I've even seen a series of statues made in Benin, from IIRC 1400 to 1900 AD, which show the gradual loss of realism and heightening abstraction.
>
> Don't think of this as "progress". We also see change in the opposite direction; e.g., the gradual naturalization of Greek art from the Archaic, through the Classical, and into the Hellenistic era. Art around the world has always cycled between the poles of naturalistic realism and abstract spiritualism. The former tends to appear in times of wealth, safety, sea trade, and intellectual freedom (e.g., Athens, Venice, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Masters, Elizabethan England); the latter, in times of great crisis. I think this is because abstract art is, seemingly without exception, more spiritual in its motivation.
>
> These two opposing types of art are based on two general opposing philosophies, one which takes the physical world as real versus one which takes the transcendent as real. Many artistic features of each recur consistently. For instance, abstract art is often linear, with clear black borders between solid (unshaded, unmixed) primary colors, cubist in perspective, & uses size and distance to denote spirituo-political rather than physical truths.
>
> The underlying opposition is not so much stylistic, as about the "purpose" of art. "Spiritual" art comes from the point of view that one already possesses absolute Truth, and the purpose of art is only to indoctrinate (as in Plato). Nazi and Stalinist art both used "naturalistic" representational techniques, yet were spiritual in nature: they used art for the same propagandistic purposes as religions do; they always presented images of either the ideal or the demonic; they are generally images of power. Art that is naturalistic "in nature", by contrast, is made by people who are studying nature and trying to understand it, as opposed to people who scorn messy, "imperfect" nature in favor of their beautiful abstract "Truth". Naturalists don't see everything in terms of propaganda, power, and conflict.
>
> The rise of modern art is well-documented. The motivation for its abstraction derived originally from Plato--modern art is supposed to be the artist-as-prophet providing humanity with a more-direct vision of Plato's transcendent forms; the argument for why representational art is bad comes straight from Plato's Meno. (Though many of the early modern artists got their Plato indirectly, through Christianity or Hegel; and Romanticism and the decadents were also major influences.) Those other periods of abstract art I just mentioned which were just then being discovered were also influential, as was medieval art.
>
> But analysis of the rise of modern art has been hindered by the fact that it was an ideological movement which still controls academia and Western art institutions, and it has always been in that movement's interests to revise the past in order to blame its failures on its enemies. For instance, you'll commonly read that modern art began as a response to the horrors of WW1. The truth is quite the opposite: proto-modern artists were demanding a great war from about 1906, and got quite psyched up about WW1 (see eg Ezra Pound's BLAST). They believed Western civilization was systemically corrupt and needed to be utterly destroyed before they could create "true Art". (They used phrases like "a clean sweep" and "a great burning".) Albert Gleizes, one of the founders of Cubism, hoped for the complete destruction of cities and a return to a more pastoral, spiritual, community-oriented medieval lifestyle. The artists now paraded as "modern" to give the illusion that modern art was some sort of peace protest movement--e.g., Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen--weren't modernists at all; just read their poems. Not a single modernist technique among them.
---
Spencer Maynes [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3017741):
> One of the largest causes, as stated by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ezra Pound, Monet and other important early modernists themselves was the collision with minimalist Japanese culture/Zen philosophy in the late 1800's. Frank Lloyd Wright and other early modernist architects were heavily indebted to Japanese architecture (see <https://franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wright-and-japan/>). Minimalist poetry descended from the haiku (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Station_of_the_Metro>).
>
> Impressionist art was modelled after wood block prints (<https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/influence-of-japanese-art-on-western-artists/>).
>
> So minimalist modernism in the West may actually owe more to curiosity about Japan following the Meiji Restoration than to internal factors. As the rare person who actually enjoys (some) modernist buildings and art, I think this cultural appropriation was probably a good thing.
>
> The ugliest buildings to me nowadays are probably McMansions. They try to imitate traditional 19th century or earlier building styles, but fail heavily, partially because Baumol's cost disease means less easy access to the heavy manual labor those styles required.
I might be the only person in the world who likes McMansions. They just look like nice, pleasant buildings made by people who want to vaguely enjoy the place where they live. Probably the least offensive thing people are making these days.
Left: the dreaded McMansion, widely reviled as an eyesore ruining the built environment. Right: a house designed by Valerio Ogliati, an a world-famous architect [profiled by the New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/t-magazine/valerio-olgiati-architecture.html) last month.
---
Michael Watts brings up an aspect of signaling I’d forgotten about:
> There is something to this point:
>
> > *This only works if making beautiful things is expensive. For example, the clothing of the Kanxi Emperor (first picture on left) required servants to create the intricate patterns, dyes that had to be harvested from finicky insects and rare plants, etc. Displaying your ornate dyed objects let everyone know you were rich. With the invention of sewing machines, industrial dyes, rhinestones, etc, even poor people could dress like the Kangxi Emperor.*
>
> [But] it is overstated. This problem was encountered by pretty much every traditional society, and they almost all implemented the obvious answer of sumptuary laws. Wearing yellow clothing in China could get you in serious trouble. Wearing clothes with dragons on them \*would\* get you in serious trouble. Feudal Ireland had a careful system in which your social status determined the number of different colors you were permitted to wear simultaneously. Etc. etc. etc.
>
> And while imperial costumes are popular in modern China, and lots of people have them or rent them, they are, predictably, cheap imitations. A true imperial robe would be cheaper now than it was at the time, but it wouldn't exactly be cheap today.
---
Fern [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3017833):
> From my own reading the best theory I've seen is that we lost the language of beauty. It's a bit like trying to revive Latin. For any but the most genius artists to make beautiful things, you need centuries to build up a corpus of techniques, habits, useful misunderstandings, etc, so to raise the general level.
>
> This level itself seems to be many things. Firstly technical, we literally don't have enough stone carvers, people don't understand the value of it, and economics compounds things in losing economies of scale.
>
> Secondly cultural, surely you need a period of time for the taste of the audience to be both discovered and formed by art, and this in a coherent cultural context. Globalisation might kill art by removing context, as if you were to paint a painting without a canvas.
>
> Thirdly there's freedom to follow patterns that lead towards beauty, paradoxically because we preach too much freedom. I personally suspect our lapse from making beautiful things has sewed ways of thinking that prevent any but the most extreme free thinkers from reconstituting the foundations for beauty, which is not the same skillset as an artist. I'm personally interested in rediscovering how buildings were ornamented, and managed to read an entire book that said nothing useful at all. A good example of a pattern in ornament that we'd struggle with today is that ornament isn't meant to overwhelm, it's decoration, it should develop and harmonise with building form. Today the artist is told to show their vision, but this harms them if they leave the canvas. Their idea of freedom prevents them from appreciating the nature of their restraints, and the new freedom that creates.
>
> So I'm personally unsurprised that we're struggling to make beauty today, though it's a mystery how we got here in the first place. My best idea is high modernist mass construction undermined the economics of art long enough to break continuity of knowledge between generations, but his isn't a sufficient theory.
Hard disagree.
Here are some of the art installations from Burning Man:
([source](https://www.everfest.com/magazine/the-otherworldly-art-installations-of-burning-man-2016))
I will leave it up to you whether this is “true art” or “beautiful” or any of those vague terms. But nonprofessionals with limited budgets are making things very different from the usual modernist stuff. If we wanted our public art to look very different, we could do it tomorrow.
---
David, The Economic Model [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3018679):
> So, is it just me or is the Tartaria conspiracy theory… blatantly obviously correct? Like, our modern society has all the trappings of that sort of “twilight of the gods” fiction. We have technology which we still use despite being unable to produce it (nuclear power, skyscrapers, space travel), a culture of pessimism and trying to hold on to what we have over producing anything new, a decadent and onanistic upper class, a drugged-into-complacency lower class. Like, there’s nuttiness which I don’t accept, but this seems so abundantly obviously true-in-substance that I feel like it just barely counts as a “conspiracy theory”. Just scratch out the references to "Tartarian Empire" and replace it with "Interwar America" and it seems like a fairly accurate description of history.
I want to make it clear that even though I used the Tartarian conspiracy theory as a frame story for my (hopefully) reasonable speculations about art, the actual conspiracy theory is bonkers and not “basically correct” in any sense. I haven’t explored all the nooks and crannies, but I know part of it is that Tartaria was destroyed by a “Great Mud Flood” which explains why so many buildings have basements with bricked-up windows (I have never seen this - is it true? If so, what *is* the explanation?) I have been looking at the preview of [this book](https://www.amazon.com/Tartaria-Coronavirus-David-Ewing-Jr-ebook/dp/B08N1JYWDS/ref=pd_sbs_5/142-3175953-8867156?pd_rd_w=KOijT&pf_rd_p=80c0d3b7-327a-454b-88c8-6e53987776ab&pf_rd_r=T52TV424RJCTBR8D56S7&pd_rd_r=a5950dac-3693-48a0-9f64-cd42b1b62735&pd_rd_wg=uvrCk&pd_rd_i=B08N1JYWDS&psc=1&asin=B08N1JYWDS&revisionId=db9dd573&format=1&depth=1), which appears to assert that (among other things) that Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin were the same person, but scientists have covered this up. It also includes the truly excellent sentence “Researchers concluded that history and science are probably a set of lies".
So no, this conspiracy isn’t just shorthand for “there’s been some technological regress over the past century.”
---
Summer [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3015386):
> i think you might be ignoring the role of novelty here. like, if youre the sort of person who is very interested in a given art form (say, designing buildings), youre gonna study them a lot, and then get bored of the types of buildings that already exist, and want to see and create new weird buildings. i mean, i agree that its weird and maybe bad that weird artsy buildings have become a thing for government buildings, but i dont think its surprising that the architecture world is interested in buildings that the average person isnt, because the average person doesnt want an interesting or novel building, they just want a good building (a reasonable desire!). its like stravinsky's atonal music. it sounds worse, like, aesthetically, but its very clearly weird and novel, and if you think about music all the time, (maybe) you want that..
>
> i think the most famous and esteemed architecture of the last 50 years is \*extremely\* diverse. frank gehry vs frank lloyd wright vs moshe safdie vs zaha hadid look like they come from different planets.
In case you don’t immediately recognize all those names, here’s one top building from each:
Tom P [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3016506):
> In the 1800s, an elite person had probably only seen a few dozen magnificent buildings in their life. Today, every architect has seen (pictures of) nearly every magnificent building on Earth. So as the pool of comparable buildings has exponentially expanded (from dozens to thousands), novelty has become much more prized.
Daniel [makes a similar point](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3018224) about music:
> Prestige within a creative field is so tightly bound with novelty that it’s pretty much inevitable that ambitious new works must abandon older forms, even when many of the artists and elites may prefer them.
>
> Personally, I think the greatest music ever written was from the Romantic era, specifically Beethoven’s symphonies. Plenty of music critics (classical ones, at least) would agree. And yet, nobody writes in that style anymore, and nobody seems to think anybody should be writing in that style. Romantic music is done, like it or not (I don’t).
And then it devolves into complicated discussions by people who know music theory a lot more than I do, for example [Heinrich](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3038579):
> I agree with all this. I think where it gets challenging is where the most parsimonious ways of doing something, given the constraints of tonality and the other rules of music, have already been “taken”, so to speak. I think this may be true of fugal counterpoint, which seems to want to tend stylistically towards a kind of robust baroque language a la Bach and Handel, and no-one since the mid C18th has really been able to do it particularly differently. So do we accept that that’s basically how fugues sound, or do we resolve not to write fugues? Not sure
I think my objection to this is that modern buildings look alike to me on most axes. I understand that one is a pile of weirdly-shaped concrete blocks and another is a pile of differently-weirdly-shaped concrete blocks, and that in some sense those must be totally different architectural problems. But there’s no modern building that looks as different from any other modern building as either looks from a cathedral - let alone more different than a cathedral looks from a Chinese pagoda. If you were really trying to maximize variety, you should have a bunch of buildings that look “modern”, a bunch of buildings that look “traditional”, and a bunch of buildings exploring weird spaces in between or totally different from either. Instead every building looks modern in about the same way.
Why doesn’t anyone make a building with the structure of top left, but the color and decoration theme of bottom-right? Wouldn’t that *actually* be new and unusual?
---
Demost [gives us a story from Germany](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3024172):
> The Berlin Stadtschloss ("city palace") was reconstructed in the last 10 years, and has just been officially inaugurated last week. It's mostly a reconstruction of the old style, with lots of ornaments.
>
> There was (and is) a furious debate on whether the reconstruction should be in this ornamental, reconstructive style. As far as I can tell, one side of the debate included most of the architectural/artistic world, who would have favoured something modern and condemned the reconstruction as "fake Baroque palace.. a stage-set of an old capital, with phony, manufactured charm, erasing traces of the bad years of the 20th century."
>
> The other side was the general public, who generally was in favour of lots of ornaments and its beautiful aesthetics. Perhaps untypically, the general public won this fight.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Palace>
Fluffy Buffalo finishes the tale:
> Except it didn't, really. Three sides were reconstructed in original, ornamental styles, and the fourth, facing the river, was designed in modern plain blocky-rectangly style ( <https://www.smb.museum/nachrichten/detail/eroeffnung-des-humboldt-forums-am-17-dezember-2020/> ) ... and I was struck by how ugly it is, and how pointless the outcome of that redesign was.
And Webster [gives us](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3024652) stories from Macedonia and Austria:
> I think Skopje is a major counterargument to Scott's claim about people preferring traditional architectural styles. Briefly, the Macedonian government decided to build a bunch of public buildings and monuments in a neo-classical style to remind everyone of their ancient heritage - it looks awful, and everyone inside and outside the country agrees that the buildings are super kitschy and shouldn't have been built.
>
> My interpretation is that people prefer \*old\* buildings, not \*old-style\* modern buildings. The 19th century saw a large number of buildings built in revivalist styles, mostly neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque, but most of these buildings are forgotten nowadays (compare the relative popularity of the Stephansdom and the Votivkirche in Vienna - they look the same, they're both located right in the centre of the city, but the Votivkirche barely gets any visitors).
I’m including this because I was in Vienna last week, I went to Stephansdom like everyone else, and then I got lost and stumbled into Votivkirche and thought - wait, this is at least as good as Stephansdom, why isn’t it in any of the tourist books, how come nobody else is here, what’s going on?
Maybe this is even more proof that I don’t have taste.
---
Deiseach gives us some more information about Luigi Bocconi University (the modern building on my comparison graphic). You can [read the comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3029558) if you want to see the whole thing, but she quotes part of the architects’ prospectus, eg:
> In order to make this grand place of exchange we thought about the research offices as beams of space, suspended to form a grand canopy which filters light to all levels. The offices form an inhabited roofscape. This floating canopy allows the space of the city to overlap with the life of the university. Allows internal and external public spaces to merge. The beehive world of the research is physically separate but always visually connected to the life of the lower levels
>
> The underground accommodation is treated as an erupting landscape which offers support to the inhabited light filters above. Spatially this underground world is solid, dense and carved. We tried to establish a continuity between the 'landscape' of the city and the 'made landscape' of this undercroft […]
I used to hate this kind of stuff - it always reminded me of [that one really pretentious Pepsi logo](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/). But I recently visited the Sagrada Familia Museum, and it had quotes from Gaudi’s notebook, and he sounds exactly like this. So maybe it started with brilliant architects actually having thoughts like this, and then everyone else had to fake it in order to keep up?
Several people brought up opinions that the first generation to make non-traditional art (eg modern architecture, [impressionist painting](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3035734), Art Deco, jazz, e.e. cummings) were very good, original, and actually quite interesting critiques. Then every generation after that was terrible. They suggested something like that rebellion is good and constructive when you have a very specific thing you’re rebelling against, understand it inside and out, and are still in some sense “constrained” by the world it created, and then the generation after you doesn’t understand the traditional forms at all and just sort of does vague rebellion-adjacent things cluelessly in the hope of capturing some of the original energy.
This reminds me of Athrelon’s claim that first-generation Chinese-American immigrants insist on slavish adherence to all the (seemingly pointless) rules of Chinese culture, second-generation immigrants have the good parts of Chinese culture (driven, intelligent, lawful) without the bad parts, and third-generation immigrants lose the good parts and become indistinguishable from other Americans. Maybe rebellion can be good and productive for one generation, and after that you’re just confused.
---
Simultan [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3036547):
> You may find my interview with the neo-romantic composer corentin boissier interesting: <https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/interview-with-corentin-boissier-romanticism-modernism-composition/>
>
> **CORENTIN:** Always wanting to experiment further, to move forward, is part of human nature. The use of new chords and more and more complex rhythms in order to express as closely as possible the spirit of the new times has led to the dissolution of tonality. As long as it remained natural, this evolution produced masterworks in which tradition and novelty coexist in infinitely variable percentages. The dosage was sometimes explosive, sometimes tousling, but often successful.
>
> Today, I’m more convinced than ever that there is no natural border between styles. The schools may be opposed but not the styles, which should complement each other. But in the 1960s, suddenly it was all about serialism and electro-acoustic music; there was the quasi-institutional obligation to wipe out the past, and the subsidies only went to what has been called “contemporary music” (the word “contemporary” being abusively linked to a style instead of just meaning “of our time”). Without this political, ideological, and basically non-artistic doctrine, there would have been a natural complementarity between tradition and innovation, in music as in all other arts.
>
> [...]
>
> **ERICH:** I know some great American composers, like Arnold Rosner and Harold Shapero, have spoken of having felt alienated in American music departments, due to the dogmatic serialism there. In your experience, have the conservatoires of Paris been more accepting of 19th-century idioms?
>
> **CORENTIN:** Absolutely not – quite the contrary! Western Europe, and France in particular, has spearheaded this systematic destruction of all artistic tradition, of any style that could be related to the past. The conservatories have been forced to practice a clean slate policy. This undermining action, well supervised by the institutions and the media, has had the disastrous result that, for several decades, composition – in the original sense of the word – is no longer taught in the conservatories. I did all my musical courses at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (CNSM) of Paris. I obtained five Prizes … but I was not able to attempt the “Composition” Prize since this Prize is only for composers of so-called “contemporary” music, that is to say “experimental”.
---
Many people recommended books or papers on this subject. I haven’t read them yet, but the most enthusiastically mooted were:
*The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction*
*From Bauhaus To Our House*
*The Rite of Spring* by Modris Eksteins
*Art and Culture: Critical Essays* by Clement Greenberg
*The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939*
*Shock of the New* (TV series)
*The Civilizing Process* by Norbert Elias
*Distinction* by Bourdieu | Scott Alexander | 42030368 | Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture | acx |
# Open Thread 192 + Vienna/Prague Meetups This Weekend
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
**1:** Vienna meetup this Saturday, October 2, 1 PM, at [informal.courage.courage](https://w3w.co/informal.courage.courage), aka Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; the organizer will have an ACX Meetup sign.
**2:** And Prague meetup this Sunday, October 3, 5 PM, at [magnets.hurry.charm](https://w3w.co/magnets.hurry.charm), aka the garden of Dharamsala Teahouse. Please feel free to come to either of these even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc, etc, etc. Mingyuan has added a Bangkok meetup, so if you’re in Thailand check it out. And regardless of where you are, check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you. | Scott Alexander | 42021519 | Open Thread 192 + Vienna/Prague Meetups This Weekend | acx |
# Book Review: The Scout Mindset
**I.**
You tried Carol Dweck’s [Growth Mindset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth_mindset), but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s [Gorilla Mindset](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Cernovich#Books), but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. Yet without a mindset, what separates you from [the beasts](https://www.beastbody.org/single-post/lion-is-who-we-are)? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us *[The Scout Mindset](https://amzn.to/3AfvNTL)* (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t).
Galef admits she’s a little behind the curve on this one. Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago (*Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan*, etc). Nowadays “smiling TED-talk-circuit celebrity wants to help you improve your thinking!” is more likely to elicit groans than breathless anticipation. And that isn’t the *least* accurate description of Julia (you can watch her TED talk [here](https://www.ted.com/speakers/julia_galef)).
But Galef earned her celebrity status honestly, through long years of hard labor in the rationality mines. Back in ~2007, a bunch of people interested in biases and decision-making joined the “rationalist community” centered around the group blogs [Overcoming Bias](https://www.overcomingbias.com/) and [Less Wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/). Around 2012, they mostly left to do different stuff. Some of them went into AI to try to save the world. Others went into effective altruism to try to revolutionize charity. Some, like me, got distracted and wrote a few thousand blog posts on whatever shiny things happened to catch their eyes. But a few stuck around and tried to complete the original project. They founded a group called the Center For Applied Rationality (aka “CFAR”, yes, it’s a pun) to try to figure out how to actually make people more rational in the real world.
Like - a big part of why so many people - the kind of people who would have read *Predictably Irrational* in 2008 or commented on *Overcoming Bias* in 2010 - moved on was because just learning that biases existed didn’t really seem to help much. CFAR wanted to find a way to teach people about biases that actually stuck and improved decision-making. To that end, they ran dozens of workshops over about a decade, testing various techniques and seeing which ones seemed to stick and make a difference. Galef is their co-founder and former president, and *Scout Mindset* is an attempt to write down what she learned.
Reading between the lines, I think she learned pretty much the same thing a lot of the rest of us learned during the grim years of the last decade. Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds. This is the bias that explains why your political opponents continue to be your political opponents, instead of converting to your obviously superior beliefs. And so on to religion, pseudoscience, and all the other scourges of the intellectual world.
But she also learned that just telling people “Hey, avoid confirmation bias!” doesn’t work, even if you explain things very well and give lots of examples. What does work? Research is still ongoing, but the book concentrates on emotional and identity-related thought processes. Above, I made fun of everyone and their brother having a “mindset”, but this book uses the term deliberately: thinking clearly is about installing an entirely new mindset in yourself in a bunch of different ways.
Galef’s preferred dichotomy is “soldier mindset” vs. “scout mindset”. Soldiers think of intellectual inquiry as a battle; their job is to support their “side”. Soldiers are the people who give us all the military and fortress-related language we use to describe debate:
> Beliefs can be *deep-rooted*, *well-grounded*, *built on fact*, and *backed up* by arguments. They *rest on solid foundations*. We might hold a *firm* conviction or a *strong* opinion, be *secure* in our convictions or have an *unshakeable* faith in something.” This soldier mindset leads us to defend against people who might “poke holes” in our logic, “shoot down” our beliefs, or confront us with a “knock-down” argument, all of which may be our beliefs are “undermined”, “weakened”, or even “destroyed” so we become “entrenched” in them less we “surrender” to the opposing position
A Soldier’s goal is to win the argument, much as real soldiers want to win the war. If you’re an American soldier fighting the Taliban, you want to consider questions like “What’s the most effective way to take that mountain pass?” or “How can I shoot them before they shoot me?”, but definitely not “What are the strongest arguments for defecting and joining the Taliban?” Likewise, someone with Soldier Mindset considers questions like “What’s the most rhetorically effective way to prove this point?” or “How can I embarrass my opponents?”, but not “Am I sure I’m on the right side?” or “How do we work together to converge on truth?”
Scout Mindset is the opposite. Even though a Scout is also at war, they want to figure out what’s true. Although it would be convenient for them if the enemy was weak, if the enemy is in fact strong, they want to figure that out so they can report back to their side’s general. They can go on an expedition with the fervent hope that the enemy turns out to be weak, but their responsibility is still to tell the truth as they understand it.
But isn’t there still a war you have to win? Aren’t there some beliefs you want to fight for, such that even if you need to be reasonable when figuring out the best way to proselytize them, they themselves should be beyond challenge? Julia thinks this point is probably further back than you expect. Even a true American patriot might want to consider the possibility that, instead of trying really hard to win the war in Afghanistan, the best thing for the US is to cut their losses and get out. If you were too focused on winning the war because “that’s the most pro-America thing to do”, you might (*might!*) miss that.
And maybe you’re not *just* an American patriot. Maybe you only support America because you think it best embodies certain values you really care about. If America had stopped embodying those values, wouldn’t you want to know about it? When Andrew Jackson toasted “the Union - of all things the most dear” didn’t John Calhoun respond with “to the Union, of all things the most dear - except freedom”?
(not that John Calhoun was very good at promoting freedom - maybe he should have used more scout mindset!)
**II.**
Are Scouts really better than Soldiers? Isn’t this just evidence-less cheerleading for your team (ie Team Scout), exactly the sort of thing Scouts are supposed to avoid?
Julia Galef is *extremely* prepared for your trollish comments to this effect. She avoids the “Scouts are better than Soldiers” dichotomy, instead, arguing that both these mindsets have their uses but right now we lean too hard in the direction of Soldier. She gives lots of evidence for this (including an evolutionary argument that Soldier was more useful in small bands facing generally simple problems). I’ll review a little of this; for the full story, read Chaper 3 of the book.
One justification for Soldier mindset is that you are often very sure which side you want to win. Sometimes this is because the moral and empirical considerations are obvious. Other times it’s something as simple as “you work for this company so you would prefer they beat their competitors.” But even if you know which side you’re supporting, you need an accurate picture of the underlying terrain in order to set your strategy. She gives the example of the Humane League, an animal rights group that was picketing laboratories to stop animal testing. After a while they evaluated that program and found it rarely worked, and when it did work, the animals saved were only a drop in the bucket. So they tried other strategies, and one of them (pressuring agribusinesses to improve animal welfare) worked really well and saved far more animals. Even though the Humane League remained good Soldiers for their cause of animal welfare, their Scout mindset let them abandon an unpromising strategy and switch to a promising one.
Galef spends a lot of time in Silicon Valley, where the tech crowd has a different objection: don’t you need to be insanely overconfident to launch a startup? 90% of startups fail. But a lot of good founders seem absolutely certain they can succeed. They act as good Soldiers for Team “we’re definitely going to make a billion dollars”, and that certainty rubs off on employees, investors, etc and inspires confidence in the company. Wouldn’t a more realistic Scout Mindset doom them?
Galef says not necessarily. Did you know that Jeff Bezos said outright he started off with a 30% chance Amazon would succeed, even going so far as to tell investors “I think there’s a 70% chance you’re going to lose all your money”? Or that Elon Musk said the odds of SpaceX working were “less than 10%”? Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said he’s “never had 100% confidence in cryptocurrency as a sector…I’m consistent in my uncertainty”. And since the book came out, I stumbled on [this profile](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-profile-085444366.html) of billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, which says he believed his chances of success “were only 20% to 25%”.
Galef adds a story from the early days of Intel. They were making computer memory components, and the Japanese were outcompeting them. The executives talked among themselves, admitted they probably couldn’t beat the Japanese, pivoted to a different kind of computer chip - microprocessors - and the rest is history. Even though on the larger-scale they remained Soldiers for their final goal (Intel should make money), being able to play Scouts for their subgoal (what should our strategy be?) served them better than insane overconfidence.
**III.**
The book divides learning Scout Mindset into an intellectual half (Part II) and an emotional half (Part III - V). The intellectual half emphasizes probabilistic thinking and thought experiments.
You’ve probably heard the probabilistic (aka Bayesian) side of things before. Instead of thinking “I’m sure global warming is fake!”, try to think in terms of probabilities (“I think there’s a 90% chance global warming is fake.”) Instead of thinking in terms of changing your mind (“Should I surrender my belief, and switch to my enemy’s belief that global warming is true”), think in terms of updating your probabilities (“Now I’m only 70% sure that global warming is fake”). This mindset makes it easier to remember that it’s not a question of winning or losing, but a question of being as accurate as possible. Someone who updates from 90% to 70% is no more or less wrong or embarrassing than someone who updates from 60% to 40%.
(this comes up again in the last part of the book, the part on how to be emotionally okay with changing your mind. “Probability update” is less emotionally devastating than “I said X, but actually ~X, so I was dead wrong.")
Not sure how sure you are? The book contains a fun probability calibration exercise. I won’t violate its copyright, but you can find a very similar automated test [here](http://confidence.success-equation.com/)
My results on the quiz above. See if you can get closer to the line than I did!
But you probably already knew all of this. One of the genuinely new ideas in *Scout Mindset* is its endorsement of various counterfactual “tests”. The idea is, imagine yourself considering a similar question, under circumstances that would bias you the opposite direction. If you stick with your opinion, it’s probably honest; if you’d change your opinion in the counterfactual, you probably had it because of bias.
So for example, if a Republican politician is stuck in some scandal, a Republican partisan might stand by him because “there’s no indisputable evidence” or “everyone in politics does stuff like that” or “just because someone did one thing wrong doesn’t mean we should fire them”. But before feeling too sure, the partisan should imagine how they would feel if a Democrat committed exactly the same scandal. If they notice they’d feel outraged, then their pro-Republican bias is influencing their decision-making. If they’d let the Democrat off too, *then* they might be working off consistent principles.
I try to use this test when I remember. I talk a good talk about free speech, and “don’t cancel other people for discussing policies you don’t like, they have a right to their opinion and you should debate it instead”. But a while back I read an article on Harvard hosted a conference on “the risks of home schooling”, with an obvious eye towards seeing whether they could get home schooling regulated or banned. My first twenty thoughts were something like “is there some way to get revenge on Harvard for being the sorts of people who associate with causes like this?”, plus anger that the administration was probably going to pretend it was neutral on this issue and just “encouraging debate”. Then by my twenty-first thought I remembered this is exactly the sort of thing I was supposed to be against, and grudgingly decided to be more understanding and sympathetic of everyone in the future.
Or: sometimes pundits will, for example, make fun of excessively woke people by saying something like “in a world with millions of people in poverty and thousands of heavily-armed nuclear missiles, you’re really choosing to focus on whether someone said something slightly silly about gender?” Then they do that again. Then they do that again. Then you realize these pundits’ entire brand is making fun of people who say silly things (in a woke direction) about gender, even though there are millions of people in poverty and thousands of nuclear missiles. So they ought to at least be able to appreciate how strong the temptation can be. As Horace puts it, “why do you laugh? Change the name, and the joke’s on you!”
Some other counterfactual tests like this you can try:
**Status Quo Test**: If you’re defending the status quo, imagine that the opposite was the status quo. Would you be tempted to switch to what you have now? For example, I sometimes feel tempted to defend American measurements - the inch, the mile, Fahrenheit, etc. But if America was already metric, and somebody proposed we should go to inches and miles, everyone would think they were crazy. So my attraction to US measurements is probably just because I’m used to them, not because they’re actually better.
(sometimes this is fine: I don’t like having a boring WASPy name like “Scott”, but I don’t bother changing it. If I had a cool ethnically-appropriate name like “Menachem”, would I change it to “Scott”? No. But “the transaction costs for changing are too high so I’m not going to do it” is a totally reasonable justification for status quo bias)
**Conformity Test:** Imagine that some common and universally-agreed idea was unusual; would you still want to do it? If not, you might be motivated by conformity bias. Suppose only 5% of people got married or had kids; would you still want to be one of the 5%? Suppose almost everyone started a business after high school, and going to college instead was considered a weird contrarian choice - would you take it anyway?
Again, sometimes this is fine. Doing the same thing as everyone else earns you friends, and is usually good evidence that you’re not making a terrible error. But it’s at least worth being aware of. Julia writes:
> When I was a kid, I idolized my cousin Shoshana, who was two years older than me…during a family camping trip one summer….as we sat in her tent, listening to the latest album on her cassette player, Shoshana said “Ooh, this next song is my favorite!” After the song was over, she turned to me and asked me what I thought. I replied enthusiastically “Yeah, it’s so good, I think it’s my favorite too.”
>
> “Well, guess what?” she replied. “That’s *not* my favorite song. It’s my *least* favorite song. I just wanted to see if you would copy me.”
>
> It’s possible my cousin Shoshana crossed paths with Barack Obama at some point, because he used a similar trick on his advisors when he was president. It was essentially a “yes man” test: If someone expressed agreement with a view of his, Obama would pretend he had changed his mind and no longer held that view. Then he would ask them to explain to him why they believed it to be true. “Every leader has strengths and weakness, and one of my strengths is a good BS detector” Obama said.
**The Selective Skeptic Test:** How credible would you consider the same evidence if it supported the other side?
A meta-analysis of ninety careful studies, published by a prestigious psychology professor, shows that there is no such thing as telepathy, p < -10^10. Does that put the final nail in the coffin? Does it close the debate? Is anyone who tries to pick holes in it just a sore loser? Does it mean that anyone who keeps believing in telepathy after this is a “science denier”?
In the real world, [a study meeting that description](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/) shows there *is* such a thing as telepathy. Hopefully you left yourself some room to say that you think the study is wrong.
This is another one with some subtlety. By Bayes’ Rule, you should believe evidence for plausible things [more than you believe evidence for implausible things](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/confirmation-bias-as-misfire-of-normal-bayesian-reasoning/). If my friend says she saw a coyote out in the California hills, I believe her; if she says she saw a polar bear, I am doubtful. I think the best you can do here is understand that, a giant meta-analysis proving telepathy is false doesn’t force a believer to change her mind any more than a giant meta-analysis proving it’s true forces you to change yours.
A lot of the best rationalists I know instinctively apply these tests to everything they think. One technique for cultivating this practice (not the book’s recommendation) is to go on Twitter, where the adage is “there’s always an old tweet”. Argue that people who say racist things should be cancelled, and someone will dig up your old racist tweet and make you defend why you shouldn’t face the same consequences. Argue that it’s disgraceful when the other party uses extreme violent language about their outgroup, and someone will dig up an old tweet where you used even more extreme language about yours. Demand that the Republican senator resign for sexual misconduct, and someone will find the old tweet where you said the Democratic senator should tough it out. Eventually, if you want to maintain any dignity at all, you learn to double-check whether your beliefs are consistent with one another or with what you’d believe in vaguely similar situations.
*Scout Mindset* says: why not try the same thing, even when you’re not on Twitter, just to determine what’s true?
**IV.**
And one very likely answer is: because it would hurt.
*Scout Mindset* tries to differentiate itself from other rationality-and-bias books by caring a lot about this. It argues that, while other rationality books just told you what to do, most people wouldn’t do it; they’d be too emotionally attached to their existing beliefs. So after giving a few intellectual suggestions, it goes on a deep dive into the emotional side.
At times, this sounds a little facile. There are lots of pages to the effect of “instead of relying on false beliefs in order to feel good about yourself, have you considered just having true beliefs but feeling good anyway?” The book phrases this a little more politely:
> There is an abundance of different coping strategies, and you don’t need to be so quick to go with the first thing you happen to pull out of the bucket. You can almost always find something comforting that doesn’t require self-deception if you just rummage around in there.
For example:
> I once felt guilty about something inconsiderate I had done to a friend and spent a week trying to justify my behavior to myself. Should I apologize? “No, that’s unnecessary, she probably didn’t even notice” I told myself, at various times - and “She probably forgave me already anyway” at other times. Obviously I didn’t find these internally contradictory justifications fully satisfying, which is why I had to keep having the same argument with myself again and again.
>
> Finally I asked myself: “Okay, suppose I had to apologize. How would I do it?” It didn’t take me long to draft in my head the rough contours of an apology that I felt I could deliver without too much angst. And when I imagined my friend’s reaction, I realized that I expected her to be appreciative, not angry. Once the prospect of apologizing seemed tolerable, I returned to my original question: “Should I apologize?” Now the answer was much clearer: yes, I should. It’s striking how much the urge to conclude “That’s not true” diminishes once you feel like you have a concrete plan for what you would do if the thing *were* true.
I’m mentioning this story in particular because because of how it straddles the border between “rationality training” and “being-a-good-person training”. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis - especially *The Great Divorce*, whose conceit was that the damned could leave Hell for Heaven at any time, but mostly didn’t, because it would require them to admit that they had been wrong. I think Julia thinks of rationality and goodness as two related skills: both involve using healthy long-term coping strategies instead of narcissistic short-term ones.
I know some rationalists who aren’t very nice people (I also know others who are great). There are lots of other facets of nice-person-ness beyond just an ability to acknowledge your mistakes (for example, you have to start out thinking that being mean to other people is a mistake!) But all these skills about “what tests can you put your thoughts through to see things from the other person’s point of view?” or “how do you stay humble and open to correction?” are non-trivial parts of the decent-human-being package, and sometimes they carry over.
In one sense, this is good: buy one “rationality training”, and we’ll throw in a “personal growth” absolutely free! In another sense, it’s discouraging. Personal growth is known to be hard. If it’s a precondition to successful rationality training, sounds like rationality training will also be hard. *Scout Mindset* kind of endorses this conclusion. Dan Ariely or whoever promised you that if you read a few papers on cognitive bias, you’d become a better thinker. *Scout Mindset* also wants you to read those papers, but you might also have to become a good person.
(in case this is starting to sound too touchy-feely, Julia interrupts this section for a while to mercilessly debunk various studies claiming to show that “self-deluded people are happier)
Here *Scout Mindset* reaches an impasse. It’s trying to train you in rationality. But it acknowledges that this is closely allied with making you a good person. And that can’t be trained - or, if it can, it probably takes more than one TED talk. So what do you do?
*Scout Mindset* goes with peer pressure.
We hear about [Jerry Taylor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Taylor), a professional climate change skeptic who would go on TV shows debating believers. During one debate, he started questioning his stance, did some more research afterwards, decided he was wrong after all, and became an environmental activist.
And about [Joshua Harris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Kissed_Dating_Goodbye), a pastor who led a “don’t date before marriage” movement. At age 21, he wrote a book *I Kissed Dating Goodbye*, which became a hit in evangelical circles. But over the years, he got a lot of feedback from people who said they felt like the book really hurt them. Twenty years later, he retracted the book and urged people to date after all.
And about scientist Bethany Brookshire, who complained online that men always wrote to her as “Ms. Brookshire” vs. women’s “Dr. Brookshire”, proving something about how men were too sexist to treat a female scientist with the respect she deserved. The post went viral, but as it became a bigger deal, she wanted to make sure she was right. So she went over hundreds of past emails and found that actually, men were more likely to call her Dr. than women; the alternate pattern had been entirely in her imagination. So she wrote another post saying [I Went Viral. I Was Wrong](https://bethanybrookshire.com/i-went-viral-i-was-wrong/), which was generally well-received and prompted good discussion.
And:
> The example of intellectual honor I find myself thinking about most often is a story related by Richard Dawkins from his years as a student in the zoology department at Oxford. At the time there was a major controversy in biology over a cellular structure called the Golgi apparatus - was it real or an illusion created by our observational methods?
>
> One day, a young visiting scholar from the United States came to the department and gave a talk in which he presented new and compelling evidence that the Golgi apparatus was, in fact, real. Sitting in the audience of that talk was one of Oxford’s most respected zoologists, an elderly professor who was known for his position that the Golgi apparatus was illusory. So of course, throughout the talk, everyone was stealing glances at the professor, wondering: *How’s he taking this? What’s he going to say?*
>
> At the end of the talk, the elderly Oxford professor rose from his seat, walked up to the front of the lecture hall, and reached out to shake hands with the visiting scholar, saying, “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” The lecture hall burst into applause.
>
> Dawkins says: “The memory of this incident still brings a lump to my throat.” It brings a lump to my throat too, every time I retell that story. That’s the kind of person I want to be - and that’s often enough to inspire me to choose scout mindset, even when the temptations of soldier mindset are strong.
Julia says that these people were able to change their minds so effectively because they had an identity as “scouts”, moreso than their identity as global-warming-skeptics or dating-skeptics or Golgi-apparatus-skeptics or whatever. It was more psychologically painful for them to be obstinate and irrational than for them to admit they were wrong. So they were able to use healthy coping mechanics and come out okay on the other side.
Once she’s finished bombarding you with examples of epistemically healthy people, she moves on to epistemically healthy communities. The rationalist and effective altruist communities get namedropped here, as does the [r/changemyview](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/) subreddit. At every point, Julia mentions how much she personally respects all these people - and, implicitly, how much she is rooting for you to become like them.
All of this reminds me of a theory of psychotherapy, which is that one way people get messed up is by knowing a lot of messed-up people, so much so that the little voice in their head that tells them what to do, gets trained on messed-up people. When you think “what’s the right thing to do in this situation?” the abstracted voice of your community of epistemic peers answers “Something messed-up!”
Then you get a therapist, who is (hopefully!) a really together, with-it, admirable person. You talk about all your issues with them, so much so that when you have an issue, it’s your *therapist’s* voice you hear in your head giving you advice about it. When you ask “what would other people think of this?”, it’s your therapist you’re thinking of. Plus, your therapist is credentialed as an Officially Correct High Status Person. She’s not just speaking for herself, she’s serving as an ambassador for a whole world of healthy normal people; her words are backed by the whole weight of polite society. So if you’re making a decision to, like, commit a crime, instead of feeling internalized peer pressure from all your scummy friends to do it, you feel internalized peer pressure from your therapist (and the normal world she represents) not to.
This last section of *Scout Mindset* seems to be trying something like that. Julia is trying to normalize changing your mind, to assure you that lots of great people who you respect do it, that there are whole communities out there of people who do it, that *she* does it and she is a TED-talk-having celebrity who you implicitly trust.
One last story, that goes almost a little too far:
> One week in 2010, I was following a heated debate online over whether a particular blog post was sexist. The blogger, a man in his mid-twenties named Luke, chimed in to say that he had considered his critics’ arguments carefully but didn’t think that there was anything wrong with his post. Still, he said, he was open to changing his mind. He even published a list titled “Why It’s Plausible I’m Wrong”, in which he summarized and linked to some of the best arguments against him so far, while explaining why he wasn’t persuaded by them.
>
> A few days later, by which point the debate spanned over 1,500 comments across multiple blogs - Luke posted again. He wanted to let everyone know that he had found an argument that had convinced him that his original post was harmful.
>
> He had surely already alienated many readers who believed his original post to be morally wrong, Luke acknowledged. “And now, by disagreeing with those who came to my defense and said there was nothing wrong with my post, I’ll probably alienate even more readers,” he said. “Well, that’s too bad, because I *do* think it was morally wrong.”
>
> “Wow,” I thought. I admired both the fact that Luke didn’t change his mind in the face of strong pressure, and the fact that he *did* change his mind in response to strong arguments. I decided to message him and share my appreciation: “Hey, this is Julia Galef - just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your thoughtful writing! It feels like you actually care what’s true.”
>
> “Hey, thanks - I feel the same way about your writing,” Luke replied.
>
> Ten years after that exchange, we’re engaged to be married.
I know Julia and Luke, they’re both great, and you should absolutely substitute them for whoever was judging you in your mind before. If it would help to have a voice to attach to the name, you can listen to Julia on the [Rationally Speaking](http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/) podcast. | Scott Alexander | 41163009 | Book Review: The Scout Mindset | acx |
# Open Thread 191 + Madrid/Zurich Meetups This Weekend
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** Madrid meetup this Saturday, September 25, 11 AM, at [picture.proceeds.turned](https://what3words.com/picture.proceeds.turned), aka Teatro de Titeres at El Retiro Park.
**2:** And Zurich meetup this Sunday, September 26, 5 PM, at [paints.shows.dressy](https://what3words.com/paints.shows.dressy), aka the Blatterwiese. Please feel free to come to either of these even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc, etc, etc. And if you’re somewhere else, check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you. | Scott Alexander | 41734737 | Open Thread 191 + Madrid/Zurich Meetups This Weekend | acx |
# Whither Tartaria?
Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, [Tartaria](https://unherd.com/thepost/long-live-the-tartarian-empire/). Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this:
The headquarters of Google, one of the richest corporations in the world. A third-rate 1500s merchant would be ashamed to live anywhere as bare.
So (continues the conspiracy) probably we suffered some kind of apocalypse a hundred-ish years ago. Our elites are keeping it quiet, and have altered the records, but they haven’t been able to destroy all the buildings of the lost world. Their cover story is that technology and wealth level haven’t regressed or anything, those kinds of buildings have just “gone out of style”.
People say that conspiracy theories are sometimes sublimated expressions of critiques of our society. No mystery what this one is criticizing. Some people don’t like modern architecture. How many? I sometimes see claims like “nobody really likes it”, and certainly it feels intuitively incontrovertible to me that the older stuff is more beautiful. But I know some people who claim to genuinely like the modern style. Are the modern-is-obviously-worse folks just over-updating on their own preferences?
The best source I can find for this is [a National Civic Art Society survey](https://www.civicart.org/americans-preferred-architecture-for-federal-buildings), which finds Americans prefer traditional/classical buildings to modern ones by about 70% to 30% (regardless of political affiliation!). In [a poll of America’s favorite architecture](https://www.civicart.org/americans-preferred-architecture-for-federal-buildings), 76% of buildings selected were traditional/classical (establishment architects said the poll was invalid, because you can’t judge buildings by pictures). A [study of courthouse architecture](https://patterns.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-206835) determined that “[our] findings agree with consistent findings that architects misjudge public likely public impressions of a design, and that most non-architects dislike “modern” design and have done so for almost a century.”
Yet [92%](https://www.civicart.org/americans-preferred-architecture-for-federal-buildings) of new federal government buildings are modern. So I think there’s a genuine mystery to be explained here: if people prefer traditional architecture by a large margin, how come we’ve stopped producing it?
While changes in building materials, cost-cutting, etc might have a role, I think it would be myopic to focus too hard on architecture-specific explanations. The shift from Tartarian to modern aesthetics is consistent across art forms:
I have tried to be as fair as possible here. The first pair is the formal dress of the highest-status person in China in each time period. The second is an architecturally-celebrated building from Milan in each period (the university [won the World Building Of The Year award](https://www.dezeen.com/2008/10/27/universita-luigi-bocconi-by-grafton-architects/) for the the year it was constructed). The third pair is the receiving room of the mansion of a rich person from each period. For the last pair, I used a famous old public sculpture, and searched for [the most-celebrated public sculpture](https://www.sfweekly.com/culture/san-franciscos-10-best-public-sculptures/) from San Francisco, the nearest big city to where I live.
Older art tends to have bright colors, ornate details, realistic representations, technical skill, and be instantly visually appealing to the average person. Newer art tends to be more abstract, require less obvious skill, and have less direct appeal. Although it doesn't fit in meme format, I would carry the analogy to poetry (cf. The Fairie Queene vs. William Carlos Williams) and certain pieces of high status music (cf. Mozart vs. Philip Glass). Obviously these are broad generalizations vulnerable to cherry-picking; I'm mostly relying on your common sense here.
There is a lot of writing about "the modernist turn" and the origins of modern art, but I haven't been able to find anything that links all these artistic fields and tries to explain what happened in general. I am sure you will link me to great resources about this in the comments. Until then, some speculative responses that one might give the Tartarians:
**The Modernist Turn As A Change From Flaunting Wealth To Hiding It**
[Paul Fussell](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class) says that pre-Great Depression mansions were beautiful giant houses in the center of town, where everyone could see them and marvel at how rich the owner was. During the Depression, it became awkward to flaunt wealth while everyone else was starving, and the super-rich switched to a strategy of having mansions in the countryside behind lots of hedges and trees where nobody could see them. I remember somebody (not a historian) claiming that the French Revolution had a similar effect on European nobility - it stopped being quite as cool to rub how rich you were in peasants' faces, and going to court in silks and gold jewelery became less fashionable. The closer you get to the present, the more rich people start to feel like their position is precarious, and other people might resent them - and to act accordingly.
On the other hand, they still want to show off their wealth. So they do it in a plausibly deniable way. They wear a really nice tailored suit or buy an abstract painting that seems completely black until you look closer and see it's a famous piece of modern art worth millions of dollars. This gets the message across, but it's not quite the same kind of "f$@k you poor people" as wearing a suit made of gold thread or building a palace with marble statues of griffins in front of every door. If a poor person were to try to complain about how ostentatious and disrespectful you were by having a painting that mostly just looks black, it would fall flat.
I'm a little skeptical of this explanation because I'm not sure that this is actually fooling anyone. In some ways, it's even more disrespectful to spend millions of dollars on something most people don't even consider pretty. People don't really complain when some billionaire buys a Rembrandt, but they did roll their eyes [when someone paid $69 million for an NFT](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/17/nft-beeple-metakovan-christies/).
**…Or As Elites Getting More Out Of Touch Than Ever**
A lot of people really angry about modern art say the opposite: that in the past elites made at least some effort to cater to the tastes of common people. But due to declining social technology, now elites prefer to signal allegiance to the elite class, and they do that by making buildings which please elite tastemakers and no one else.
It’s still kind of mysterious why not-generally-popular aesthetics would please elite tastemakers, though. Maybe elites are specifically trying to signal not being commoners, by choosing the opposite of commoners’ aesthetic preferences?
This sounds a little conspiratorial for an explanation we originally came up with to counter a conspiracy theory, but I can’t rule it out. It might be helpful to go through a list of countries, see which have more modern vs. traditional architecture, and correlate that with their system of government and level of inequality. My impression is that the more democratic and developed a country, the more modern its architecture, which would require a lot of additional explanation.
**…As A Change From Catholic To Protestant Aesthetics**
Catholicism traditionally goes heavy on the ornateness, Protestantism heavy on the plainness. Something to do with a Protestant rejection of wealth as too linked to the powers of this world, and trying to get back to the poverty and humility of the original Church. If Protestant aesthetics "won" in a way that affected even people who weren't thinking in religious terms, that could explain some of the shift.
But the timeline and, uh, spaceline don't really work. The ornate room from Cardiff Castle is from 1880s Britain (albeit deliberately referencing older styles), and modern Milan is hardly Protestant. I think this might have been one of the threads that fed into this change, but it needs further explanation why it stuck around and spread so far beyond people who cared about religious matters.
**…Or As New Timeless Aesthetic Truths**
One possibility is that, even though normal people prefer traditional architecture, modern architecture is actually better, and good architects know this.
This is not really the way I think of aesthetics, but I guess it’s possible.
A weaker version of this might be the difference between a very sugary soda and a fine wine. Most ordinary people would prefer the sugary soda, but the fine wine has some kind of artistic value. Right? I don’t know, people always tell me this, but I’ve never been able to enjoy it.
This raises the question of what architecture/art/etc are for. Should eg the government, as a representative of the people, build buildings that people will like? Or should it build buildings with objective artistic value? Maybe in the hopes that this will cause people to appreciate the value, even though this hasn’t worked for the past hundred years? I think you would have a really hard case arguing for the last one, but it’s possible in theory.
You could also frame this as architects deliberately choosing some value other than beauty. Maybe beautiful buildings make everyone feel very proud of their country and connected to their past, but after World War II we realized that nationalism and romanticization-of-history are scary things, and now we’re trying to discourage them. Maybe our civilization is still on probation after a multi-decade-long mass murder spree and we need buildings that carefully avoid inflaming our emotions.
**…As A Result Of Increased Cost Of Labor**
I’ve added this in because people keep bringing it up in the comments, but I don’t think it works. Sure, it might explain architecture. But I don’t think it explains trends in modern clothing, art, poetry, or sculpture, all of which have also shifted towards decreased ornamentation, symbolism, and realism.
I predict you could buy clothing that looks like [this](http://www.muslimmarriagecenter.com/site/muslim-groom-in-bangalore) for less than the cost of a nice suit, but nobody does. Is this connected to nobody making buildings that look like the Taj Mahal anymore?
**…As A Result Of The Split Between Art And Mass Culture**
Modern poems don't sound very much like the Odyssey. But modern superhero movies are a little bit like the Odyssey. Modern poetry doesn't have a lot of rhyme or rhythm. But modern pop music does have lots of rhyme and rhythm. Modern gallery art doesn't have colorful ornate realistic-looking scenes. But modern computer games and animation have lots of those scenes.
Older generations didn't have superhero movies, pop music, or animated features. Mostly they were missing the technology, but the genres themselves have also evolved. Maybe the existence of pop music makes people less likely to write poems that are "close to" pop music in some kind of artistic space. If you were going to write [this](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43845/so-well-go-no-more-a-roving) today, why wouldn't you meet up with a garage band somewhere and put it to music?
Or maybe: since pop music is low status, if you want to write high status poetry, you need to make it as unlike pop music as possible, so people don't accuse your poem of sounding pop-music-y. Or maybe: pop music fulfills what people want out of some poetry much better than the poetry itself does, so if you want an audience, you need to write poetry that fulfills some other kind of need.
Maybe all the people who were looking for easy-to-enjoy things left poetry, gallery art, etc for easier-to-enjoy pursuits like superhero movies, computer games, and pop music, and so poetry and high art were left with disproportionately the sorts of people who were looking for more intellectual pursuits (or who wanted to pretend/signal that they were).
I'm a little skeptical of this one too - what replaced architecture? Or fashion? Also, I still very much want poems that rhyme and I don't feel like pop music is a perfect substitute for them.
**…As A Change From Signaling Wealth To Signaling Taste**
One use of art is signaling wealth. Pharaohs, nobles, and billionaires would patronize artists, funding the creation of masterpieces that sent the message "look how great I am". This only works if making beautiful things is expensive. For example, the clothing of the Kanxi Emperor (first picture on left) required servants to create the intricate patterns, dyes that had to be harvested from finicky insects and rare plants, etc. Displaying your ornate dyed objects let everyone know you were rich. With the invention of sewing machines, industrial dyes, rhinestones, etc, even poor people could dress like the Kangxi Emperor. With the invention of photography and printing, everyone could have realistic pictures of whatever they wanted. Actual rich people needed better ways to distinguish themselves.
One attractive option is to switch from signaling wealth to signaling taste. Rich people are more likely to know other rich people and be plugged into rich people social networks (and if they're not, they can always hire people who are). To signal taste, you need art where the difference between good art and bad art is very hard to discern (if anyone could discern it, then ability-to-discern wouldn't signal having more taste than average). You want some kind of complicated code that makes sense to tasteful people, feels impenetrable to tasteless people, and (if possible) changes every so often so that tasteless people can't just memorize it.
I don't have taste, so I'm agnostic as to the virtues of the particular code that people ended up with. Maybe it involves real but hard-to-explain aesthetic truths, such that far-off civilizations who have no contact with us would independently converge on the same art being better or worse. Maybe it's arbitrary but self-consistent, the same way lots of features of English grammar (saying "was" instead of "be-ed") are arbitrary but self-consistent and it's reasonable to think of that as "good English" and various deviations as "grammatical errors". Or maybe it's all totally made up, and elite tastemakers randomly declare stuff that seems cool to them to be the new big thing, almost as a taunt ("look how socially powerful I am, such that I can make people fall in line and call any old garbage Art, even this stuff"). Cf. the [Ern Malley Hoax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley_hoax). Probably all three of these are true in different subfields at different times.
A friend, more in touch with the pulse of rich-people-society than I am, objects that billionaires still like buying paintings by Old Masters. But I don't think that contradicts this. Being able to buy a Rembrandt still signals wealth fine: Rembrandts are in limited supply and everyone knows they're expensive. But a modern painter with Rembrandt's skillset wouldn't be able to make it big - their talents are no longer in short supply.
**Why Does This Matter?**
Partly because art is nice and we should want more beautiful things or at least try to understand where our beautiful things come from.
Partly because exploring these questions can shed light on broader questions of class, signaling, and how intellectual/cultural/economic elites relate to their social inferiors. It seems like premodern artistic elites and commoners were on the same page. Then something happened to put them on different pages. Why? How does that relate to the formation of classes in general? Is society better off if elites successfully win the support of commoners by patronizing art that they like, or win their respect by surrounding themselves in awe-inspiring trappings of wealth? Or if elites are barred from using that particular propaganda lever?
And partly because modern art and architecture are examples of fields talking to themselves. In a way, this is good - they've successfully implemented a technocracy where the best and brightest are able to pursue their own visions rather than pander to the masses. In another way, it's confusing - public art, architecture, etc is supposed to be to the benefits of residents, but it seems like those residents can’t get their voices heard.
Every field is shaped by some combination of ground truth - the thing they're supposed to be studying - and incentives. Economic theories in capitalist and socialist countries will share some characteristics - there’s a real world with real economic laws that are hard to miss - but they'll also take different paths depending on what the surrounding society celebrates vs. condemns.
And the incentives depend on who they're trying to impress. Sometimes fields are trying to impress the public - Justin Smith writes about so-called ["Spiderman Studies" classes](https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/what-are-the-humanities) where college humanities departments try to look hip and in-touch to attract more students. Other times fields are definitely not trying to do this - you get status by appealing to other experts in your own guild. Doctor Oz might be the most famous and publicly-beloved doctor, but he has zero credibility in the medical field. I may have a popular blog where I write about psychiatry (and I try not to lapse into Doctor Oz style charlatanry) but the blog doesn't raise my status in the medical hierarchy at all, and might actively hinder it. Best-case scenario, you want a field that talks to itself enough that you get status for impressing other experts with your expertise, not for impressing the public with demagoguery.
But if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling. Science has a safety valve here - they've got to at least contact the real world enough to do experiments. But humanities fields (or social sciences where experimentation is hard and wrapped in layers of interpretation) don't have that defense. If their signaling incentives lean too far one way, they surrender to the public so cravenly that it's pointless for them to have expertise at all. If they lean too far the other way, they become actively contemptuous of the public, ignore all criticism, and the whole edifice risks becoming vulnerable to any Sokal-style attack that uses the right buzzwords.
Art is interesting because in some ways it's less "about something" than other fields are. Maybe there are real timeless aesthetic truths, but they're a lot harder to detect than the timeless truths of math or science, and you can do art history pretty well without worrying about them at all. That makes it an unusually clear laboratory for examining the status incentives within fields. Sometimes the definition of "good art" changes. It probably wasn't the discovery of a new timeless aesthetic truth, so what was it?
The turn is an especially vivid example of a shift in the art world. If we understood what factors shaped it, maybe we would learn more about the factors shaping other fields with clearer targets. | Scott Alexander | 41586693 | Whither Tartaria? | acx |
# Links For September
*[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1**: My parents’ and grandparents’ generations had lots of weird rules about fashion like “never wear white after Labor Day”. I’d always been baffled by this kind of stuff - why not? What would happen if you did? In 1922, someone wore a straw hat after official stop-wearing-straw-hats date September 15, leading to the week-long [Straw Hat Riot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot) in New York and several hospitalizations.
**2:** [The Story Of Adrenochrome](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-qanon-became-obsessed-with-adrenochrome-an-imaginary-drug-hollywood-is-harvesting-from-kids): QAnon believes that elites are addicted to adrenochrome, a drug synthesized from the glands of tortured children. Where did this theory come from? The short version is “Hunter S Thompson made it up for *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”.* But read the long version for, among other things, explanations for why it shows up in *Dune* and *A Clockwork Orange*.
**3:** While the Aztecs were sacrificing prisoners to the gods, their neighbors in the Tlaxcala were [“a republic ruled by an assembly of commoners and nobles”](https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1423268262435954688).
**4:** Contra speculation, there is [no link between](https://www.kqed.org/news/11861810/no-the-tuskegee-study-is-not-the-top-reason-some-black-americans-question-the-covid-19-vaccine) knowledge of the Tuskegee experiment and black people’s unwillingness to take the COVID vaccine.
**5:** The [Phoney War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War) was the eight months at the beginning of WWII when nobody was doing large-scale fighting. Everyone had different clever puns making fun of this: the British called it the Bore War; the Germans called it the Sitzkrieg. Anyway, be careful what you wish for.
**6**: [Making fun of calling things paradoxes](https://twitter.com/picklesecond/status/1400128907370582018).
**7:** Not sure if this counts as “the left is eating itself”, but the (unofficial) [Brandeis Suggested Language List](https://sites.google.com/brandeis.edu/parcsuggestedlanguagelist/categories) now recommends students not use the term “trigger warning” because it is “violent language”.
**8:** [ArrangedMarriages.co](https://arrangedmarriages.co/) is a site by some trad Twitter people who offer to arrange a marriage for you. They claim to have [already completed](https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1424070474359877634) one pairing. I cannot get any more information about how they work, let me know if you have some.
**9**: Noah Veldtman’s [AI-Generated Movie Posters](https://noahveltman.com/aimovies/). “Each of these images was generated by AI based on a brief text description of a movie. Can you guess the movie from the image?”
**10:** A while ago I linked Glenn Greenwald’s claim that (contra most media sources), the bungled clearing of Lafayette Park in Washington DC wasn’t President Trump’s fault. Many commenters argued that it was, or at least that Greenwald’s argument was overly simplistic. I was finally able to find a good article making the anti-Trump case in full, which I link here in penance: [Trump’s False Lafayette Square Exoneration](https://theweek.com/donald-trump/1001404/lafayette-square-clearing-inspector-general-report). At this point I’m at the “sounds really complicated, don’t care enough to sort this one out” phase.
**11:**
**12:** Bobobob of DSL [reviews](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4082.0.html) *[War Against The Weak](https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4082.0.html)*, a book on early 20th century American eugenics. I had always imagined this as a carefully-planned conspiracy by sinister eggheads, but the book argues that even by its own standards it was a total train wreck. Eugenicists launched a national campaign to sterilize blind people, even though 90%+ of blindness is non-hereditary. People who didn’t like their totally-normal-IQ family members sent them to the courts as “feebleminded”, and the courts ordered their sterilization after rubber-stamp examinations. Not sure if all of it was that bad or the book focused on the worst examples - but the worst were pretty awful.
**13:** H/T Marginal Revolution - [During economic recessions, women (but not men) report higher rates of chronic pain](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027795362100664X). This makes sense to me in the context of women having higher rates of somaticizing negative emotions (see part 5 [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted) for more).
**14:** Congratulations to Jason Crawford, whose [Roots Of Progress](https://rootsofprogress.org/) blog is now [a nonprofit organization](https://rootsofprogress.org/nonprofit-announcement) working within Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, etc’s Progress Studies movement to “[establish] a new philosophy of progress for the twenty-first century”. They are [fundraising](https://rootsofprogress.org/nonprofit-announcement) and also looking for a [Chief of Staff](https://rootsofprogress.org/wanted-chief-of-staff).
**15:** Speaking of progress, every few months I see an article saying that however good you thought SpaceX was before, it’s even better than that. Anyway, according to [this article](https://www.cringely.com/2021/04/20/starlink-is-a-global-isp-built-at-zero-cost-to-spacex-enabling-nasas-artemis-launch/), SpaceX is even better than however good it was you thought last time you read an article about it. Lots of stuff there, but one key point is that Starlink is pretty close to becoming a completely uncensorable Internet service. Elon Musk is apparently aware:
([source](https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1433109248007933960))
Plausibly SpaceX will still have to follow the rules of its host country, the US. “The whole world will depend on US internet regulatory law” would have sounded more inspiring a few years ago than it does today. But [this Tumblr user](https://moral-autism.tumblr.com/post/661057112234917888) gives the sci-fi ending I was looking for:
> As space-based manufacturing capability is built and expanded, it is quite possible that no terrestrial presence will be required to maintain the space-based side of the ISP. Tesla has a history of releasing patents into the wild; it is not an inconceivable future in which anyone who wishes can construct a Starlink-compatible satellite terminal without approval from the local regulatory bodies. The resultant information hyperloop is uncensored, accessible to all who try, with no controls on content or expression save what the user decides to implement for themself
>
> Where am I going with this?
>
> Imagine a future in which Earth’s dominant ISP is constructed, maintained, administered, and governed by Martians, who operate it for free as a public-relations campaign. And Earth can’t do anything about it except try to jam the airwaves and confiscate end-user terminals, because to attack the actual satellites would begin a Kessler Syndrome that would deny space to Earth.
**16:**
**17:** Why are published papers so bad about sharing their data? An academic on Discord (no link, sorry) proposes one potential explanation: it takes a lot of work to gather a dataset. Journals won’t publish datasets, so you can’t include them as a publication on your resume, so by default you get no credit for doing this difficult thing. The recognized workaround is to turn your hard-won dataset into lots of papers: “We Surveyed Youth Food Tastes And Found Apples Are Very Popular”, “We Surveyed Youth Food Tastes And Found Strawberry Consumption Is Highest In The Midwest”, “We Surveyed Youth Food Tastes And Found White People Are More Likely To Eat Pears”, etc. But if you publish your data with your first paper, then other researchers can beat you to Papers #2, #3, etc, and all your hard data-collection work will be unrewarded. I found this theory enlightening; this seemingly inexplicable failure is a totally normal problem of how to internalize the rewards for hard work. I wonder why there’s no *Journal Of Datasets*. [EDIT: There is, *[Scientific Data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Data_(journal))*, but commenters say that informal “what gets you respect” is more important than formal “what gets you citations”]
**18:** Devon Zuegel actually physically visits the charter city of Prospera and writes [a very long FAQ](https://devonzuegel.com/post/prospera-faq) about what she learned.
**19:** D’Alonzo and Tegmark [try to use AI to evaluate media bias](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.00024.pdf). They create a giant corpus of articles from different sources, then look for words or phrases with high predictive power for which source a given article comes from. For example, the algorithm might find that some sources always use “abortion rights” but never “pro life” or vice versa, and so using one or the other of these phrases is useful for determining an article’s source. Once it has a bunch of pairs like these, it does a principal components analysis (I can’t tell whether “two components” naturally fell out of the data, or they decided it by fiat), and are mostly able to recreate a standard political compass with dimensions of “right vs. left” and “pro vs. anti-establishment”, as well as plot where different phrases and sources fall on the compass. The actual paper has lots of goodies, and I might blog about it more later, but for now, the headline result is:
This picture has some glaring flaws, but the authors at least provide us with some hilarious explanations. For example, right-wingers overuse the word “socialist” so much (eg “Obama wants socialist health care!”, “The Democrats are trying to smuggle socialism in through the back door!”) that the AI interprets use of the word as a cue for conservatism, and so misclassifies *Jacobin* (a socialist magazine) as right-wing. Still, neat idea.
By the way, this is the same Tegmark who in 1998 developed [a leading theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis) for what the universe is and why it exists at all. I feel like going from “discover fundamental nature of the universe” to “attempt to investigate media bias, but it has glaring flaws” is a slightly-too-on-the-nose metaphor for the past 25 years of science as a whole.
**20:** Mea culpa: last month, I linked to a poll showing that PhDs had the most vaccine hesitancy of any group. I explicitly considered the possibility that the poll had been skewed by malicious responders, but based on the time course I said it seemed unlikely. Now someone with access to the raw data has investigated that question, and it was [definitely skewed by malicious responders](https://coronavirus.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-PhDs-are-the-most-vaccine-resistant-group-https-www-nationalreview-com-corner-the-most-vaccine-hesita-1). There is no evidence that PhDs are any more vaccine-resistant than the general population, and the smart bet would be that they’re less.
**21:** More mea culpa: last month, I linked to some articles speculating on why, even though Haiti and the Dominican Republic had the same GDP in 1960, the Dominican Republic eventually did much better. Now a Haiti econ blog (appropriately named [Vodou Economics](https://vodoueconomics.substack.com/p/dont-believe-the-haitidr-graph)) proposes a much better explanation - the data are wrong, and the DR was always ahead of Haiti. The DR’s recent economic boom is still interesting, but we should stop insisting on finding a post-1960 explanation for Haiti’s current woes.
**22:** Twitter increasing max tweet length from 140 to 280 characters [had little effect on average tweet length](https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/twitters-doubling-of-character-count-from-140-to-280-had-little-impact-on-length-of-tweets/?guccounter=1).
**23:** The Heckman Curve is the claim that you can get bigger effects by targeting interventions at young children compared to adults - eg money spent on preschool goes further than money spent on vocational training. Here’s a old but good [Andrew Gelman](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/08/12/heckman-curve-update-update/) post on the controversy around it.
**24:** We now have okay biomarkers for aging. [What happens when we test them on hunter-gatherers](https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2020/020033/aging-process)? Answer: the Tsimane, a hunter-gatherer tribe who have low rates of chronic age-related disease compared to Westerners, don’t seem to be aging much slower. Whatever is giving us so many chronic diseases can’t really be described as “accelerated aging”, at least not in whatever sense these biomarkers test.
**25:** Researchers gave students a dataset about exercise and BMI, and asked them to analyze it. In one condition, the students were told what hypotheses to investigate; in the other, they weren’t. Then the researchers checked which students noticed that the “dataset”, when plotted, looked like this:
This was a self-conscious riff on the psych experiment about the students watching the video of the sports game with the gorilla.
Students trying to prove the hypothesis were [less than half as likely](https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-020-02133-w) to notice the gorilla than those investigating aimlessly. I’m agnostic as to whether this proves something important about science or is just funny.
**26:** People have commented before on how Rage Comic Guys/Wojaks/4chan/Reddit/PCM are creating a new symbolic online language, but I didn’t appreciate it fully until I read [this Greek mythology 6x6 Wojak compass](https://i.redd.it/em9ch9jl26l51.jpg) mapping the new archetypes on to the old. Warning: very high-context.
**27:** Why is commercial real estate so often vacant during recessions? Even if there’s really low demand, wouldn’t landlords still prefer to lower the price until someone accepts, and make a little money rather than none? [This Reddit explainer says no](https://old.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothirds_of_new_york_restaurants_may_have/g49g4c5/), because of quirks of how banking works.
**28:** [MHC compatibility among couples does not seem to differ from chance](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2020.1800). That is, some people previously claimed that we preferentially fell in love and mated with people whose immune systems were especially compatible with ours, maybe because we could smell this in their body odor. This study says that’s probably not true.
**29:** Study shows [Donald Trump is grumpy when he does not get enough sleep](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176520303554?via%3Dihub). Being an important enough figure that scientists study you personally sounds exhausting.
**30:** A Voxsplainer about [the potential promise of geothermal energy](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical).
**31:** A Voxsplainer in spirit (actually on Works In Progress) by Stephan Guyenet on new weight loss drug [semaglutide](https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-future-of-weight-loss/). Although it is excellent, I find it raises more questions than it answers. The drug was originally designed to increase insulin secretion, but apparently its weight-loss-related effects are completely separate from that and involve some action in the hypothalamus? And it decreases alcoholism and generally improves impulse control? I’m really curious what lever it’s pressing here and I hope that - despite already being one of the biggest science stories of the decade - it eventually leads to even more mental health applications.
**32:** Mina, [the tent city of Mecca](https://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/08/mina-city-of-tents.html):
**33**: Related**:** [Poniente Almeriense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poniente_Almeriense), the greenhouse plain of Spain:
**34:** It’s generally-believed that IQ is mostly-environmental early on in life, but mostly-genetic after adulthood. Lots of adoption studies show that adoption makes a big difference early on, but what about later? In [the latest study](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-willoughby.pdf), 415 adoptees had their IQs tested during adulthood. IQ of biological parents explained about 42% of variance; IQ of adoptive parents explained only 1%. “Variance explained” is a non-intuitive statistic with a lot of confusing properties - but in this case the obvious conclusion that genetics matter vastly more than environment and environment more-or-less doesn’t matter at all is basically right. Critics note that there isn’t much range in adoptive families, either in intelligence (you don’t get too many very low-IQ parents adopting) or in environment (adoption agencies successfully screen out atrocious environments), so the real numbers might be higher. I would have more to say about this if I could access the supplemental data. Still, I think this is really strong evidence (in case you needed more) that environment has practically no effect on adult IQ in the normal range. Ethnicity was mostly white and Asian, and IQ didn’t vary enough by ethnicity to do anything with it, so no direct implications for learning anything about race. But the indirect implication of “within a racial group, environment has so little effect on IQ that even being adopted leaves it practically unchanged” is that cross-race differences can’t be due to anything that’s likely to vary within (this group of) white families, eg families speaking different number of words to their children or whatever.
**35:** [Problems with using East vs. West Germany as a “natural experiment” in the effect of different policies](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/461-2020_becker.pdf) - the populations were already pretty difference, plus a (selected) 20% of the East German population fled to West Germany before they built the Berlin Wall.
**36:** [Criticism of Henrich’s](https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28QL9PWWETSD6/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B07RZFCPMD) *[WEIRDest People In The World](https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28QL9PWWETSD6/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B07RZFCPMD)* [argument](https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28QL9PWWETSD6/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B07RZFCPMD).
**37:** Semiconductor manufacturers [have](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E_HLEoEVEAM-X31?format=jpg&name=large) “about as much built-in voodoo and superstition as a major-league baseball team” (h/t [Artir](https://twitter.com/ArtirKel?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)). Sometimes (according to the link) justified: "One company found its yield dips corresponded to phases of the moon: it seemed that high tides also raised groundwater levels and thereby increased the moisture in the lab." | Scott Alexander | 41085979 | Links For September | acx |
# Open Thread 190
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
**1:** The US government is in the middle of debating its future pandemic preparedness policy. Some politics-savvy friends I trust have organized [Guarding Against Pandemics](https://www.againstpandemics.org/about), a PAC trying to lobby them to take a stronger line. The usual strategy of asking tech billionaires for money isn’t going to work here because of campaign finance laws that privilege small donors, so they’re asking interested parties to contribute [here](https://secure.actblue.com/donate/guarding-against-pandemics-1) (maximum $5000/person if you want to help with the campaign finance issues, though any amount would be appreciated). See [this post](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Btm562wDNEuWXj9Gk/guarding-against-pandemics?fbclid=IwAR2RmneJNcwAE7QvRh-WmEpAQLgjOhXJoqvR_TPqB2RSm_Hc0Z-cyUuRjX0) for more information and information on an upcoming Q&A with their director.
**2:** Thanks to everyone in Europe who was patient while I finished working out my meetup schedule. The current *very provisional* plan is:
**Madrid -** Saturday 9/25 11:00
**Zurich** - Sunday 9/26 17:00
**Vienna** - Saturday 10/2 13:00
**Prague** - Sunday 10/3 17:00
**Berlin** - Saturday 10/9 13:00
**Paris** - Sunday 10/10 17:00
**London** - Saturday 10/16 13:00
**Oxford** - Sunday 10/17 17:00
**Cambridge** - Saturday 10/23 13:00
**Edinburgh** - Sunday 10/24 17:00
Amsterdam asked me to squeeze them in, and I could potentially do this as long as they don’t mind me visiting on a weeknight. Get in touch with me at scott@slatestarcodex.com to coordinate. Everywhere else should [check the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) as usual.
In order to avoid spamming you with too many meetup announcements, I’ll be combining them with the Open Thread and moving them to Friday for the next month or so. So the next open thread will be called OT191: Madrid and Zurich Meetups This Weekend. I’ll move the Hidden Open Thread to Tuesday or something to compensate. | Scott Alexander | 41483615 | Open Thread 190 | acx |
# Lisbon Meetup This Saturday
**When:** Saturday, September 18th, 5 PM
**Where: [g](https://what3words.com/guitars.record.caps)**[uitars.record.caps](https://what3words.com/guitars.record.caps), aka a suspiciously ordinary-looking tree in Parque da Pedra, Monsanto Park. Our intrepid organizer writes: “Spot the tall white guy in pink pants. There's an adjacent road with street parking, and a clearing at that point that opens onto a trail that leads to the park.”
**Who:** Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you.
If you’re somewhere other than Lisbon , check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you. | Scott Alexander | 41453820 | Lisbon Meetup This Saturday | acx |
# Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public
**I.**
Martin Gurri's *[The Revolt Of The Public](https://amzn.to/39ePhMe)* is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which might as well be *Beowulf*. The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the book on its "accurately predicted the present moment" cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it's barely worth reading anymore. It might as well just say "open your eyes and look around".
In fact, I can't even really confirm whether it predicted anything accurately or not. Certainly everything it says is true. Anyone who wrote it in 2000 would have been a prophet. Anyone who wrote it in 2020 would have been stating the obvious. Was writing it in 2014 a boring chronicle of clear truths, or an achievement for the ages? I find my memories are insufficiently precise to be sure. It's like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on March 1 2020 was a bold visionary, but someone who warned about it on March 20 was a conformist bandwagoner - except about the entire history of the 21st century so far. Maybe the best we can do with it is [read it backwards](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philosophy-backwards/), as an artifact of the era when the public was only ambiguously revolting, to see how the knowledge of the coming age arose and spread.
We remember the Arab Spring, those few months in 2011 when revolts spread across various Arab countries and longstanding regimes were toppled by protesters with smartphones and Twitter accounts. Gurri hits the relevant beats, but doesn't limit himself to the Middle East.
In Spain, a vague formless group called the *indignados* (or Real Democracy Now, or Youth Without A Future) took to the streets. For months, they filled public squares, streets, and tent cities. Some protests attracted tens of thousands of participants; a few, hundreds of thousands. Some of them were vaguely socialist, but it wasn't exactly a socialist protest; in fact, the government they were protesting was dominated by the Socialist Workers Party. They were just sort of vaguely angry. From their manifesto:
> Some of us consider ourselves more progressive, others more conservative. Some are believers, others not. Some have well-defined ideologies, others consider ourselves apolitical...but all of us are worried and outraged by the political, economic, and social landscape we see about us. By the corruption of the politicians, businessmen, bankers...
And so on.
At the same moment, hundreds of thousands of people were marching through the streets of Israel. The apparent trigger was a 25-year-old video editor named Daphni Leef who couldn't afford an apartment near her job. She started a Facebook page saying people should protest the cost of living, one thing led to another, and soon 300,000 people were marching through the streets of Israel and Leef was a national hero.
> The protesters' message was savagely critical of the market-friendly government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and blandly admiring of themselves: words like "awakening", "renewal", and "rebirth" were thrown around by them, in an effort to describe the transcendental change they had brought about. They were not alone in applauding their actions. Opinion surveys showed remarkable levels of public support for the protests - up to 88% in one poll [...]
>
> The Israeli protesters attracted contradictory political fantasies because of the fuzziness of their definition. This repeated a pattern established in Egypt and Spain. The lack of leaders, programs, and organizational structure was if anything more pronounced. Those who spoke to the media on a regular basis, like Leef, were attractive and clever, but they lacked the power to command or decide, and they quarreled constantly among themselves. The question of whether to negotiate with the government divided the protesters. The goal of social justice - supposedly the North Star of the uprising - appeared to be as foggy a notion to them as to their media admirers.
But also, in August 2011 600,000 people protested in Chile. In October, 80,000 Portuguese marched on Lisbon. In September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement began in the US, eventually expanding to hundreds of cities:
> The movement doesn't need to make demands, because this movement is an assertive process. This movement has the power to effect change. It does not need to ask for it. The OWS does not make demands. We will simply assert our own power to achieve what we desire. The more of us gather to the cause, the more power we have. Make no demands for others to solve these problems. Assert yourself.
In conclusion, 2011 was a *weird* year.
Gurri argues all of this was connected, and all of it was a sharp break from what came before. These movements were essentially leaderless. Some had charismatic spokespeople, like Daphni Leef in Israel or Tahrir-Square-Facebook-page-admin Wael Ghonim in Egypt, but these people were at best the trigger that caused a viral movement to coalesce out of nothing. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.
Also, they were mostly well-off. Gurri hammers this in again and again. Daphni Leef had just graduated from film school, hardly the sort of thing that puts her among the wretched of the earth. All of these movements were mostly their respective countries' upper-middle classes; well-connected, web-savvy during an age when that meant something. Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries' most privileged ethnic groups. Not the kind of people you usually see taking to the streets or building tent cities.
Some of the protests were more socialist and anarchist than others, but none were successfully captured by establishment strains of Marxism or existing movements. Many successfully combined conservative and liberal elements. Gurri calls them nihilists. They believed that the existing order was entirely rotten, that everyone involved was corrupt and irredeemable, and that some sort of apocalyptic transformation was needed. All existing institutions were illegitimate, everyone needed to be kicked out, that kind of thing. But so few specifics that socialists and reactionaries could march under the same banner, with no need to agree on anything besides "not this".
([source](https://news.sky.com/story/no-home-comforts-for-greta-and-crew-as-they-sail-to-new-york-11784736))
Gurri isn't shy about his contempt for this. Not only were these some of the most privileged people in their respective countries, but (despite the legitimately-sucky 2008 recession), they were living during a time of unprecedented plenty. In Spain, the previous forty years had seen the fall of a military dictatorship, its replacement with a liberal democracy, and a quintupling of GDP per capita from $6000 to $32000 a year - "in 2012, four years into the crisis there were more cell phones *and* cars per person in Spain than in the US". The *indignado* protesters in Spain had lived through the most peaceful period in Europe's history, an almost unprecedented economic boom, and had technologies and luxuries that previous generations could barely dream of. They had cradle-to-grave free health care, university educations, and they were near the top of their society's class pyramids. Yet they were convinced, utterly convinced, that this was the most fraudulent and oppressive government in the history of history, and constantly quoting from a manifesto called *Time For Outrage!*
So what's going on?
**II.**
Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.
Some principles of this system: government management of the economy, under the wise infallible leadership of Alan-Greenspan-style boffins who could prevent recessions and resist "animal spirits". Government sponsorship of science, under the wise infallible leadership of Einstein-style geniuses who could journey to the Platonic Realm and bring back new insights for the rest of us to gawk at. Government management of society, in the form of Wars on Poverty and Wars on Drugs and exciting new centralized forms of public education that would make every child an above-average student. Homelessness getting cleared away by a wave of the city planner's pen, replaced by scientifically-designed heavily optimized efficient public housing like [Cabrini-Green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes).
Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops.
There was a very interesting section on JFK’s failure at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy tried to invade Cuba, but the invasion failed very badly, further cementing Castro’s power and pushing him further into the Soviet camp. Representatives of the media met with Kennedy, Kennedy was very nice to them, and they all agreed to push a line of “look, it’s his first time invading a foreign country, he tried his hardest, give him a break.” This seems to have successfully influenced the American public, so much so that Kennedy’s approval rating *increased* five points, to 83%, after the debacle!
With the beginning of the Internet at the turn of the 21st century, bloggers and social media influencers short-circuited the established hierarchy. America's crimes and failures in Vietnam had percolated slowly and inconsistently through word of mouth, with most people content to believe whatever sanitized version the nightly news told them. But when America had crimes and failures in Iraq, leaked photos of torture in Abu Ghraib spread instantly across the Internet; there was no opportunity for elites in government and media to come to an agreement on how much of it they were going to share or what the narrative should be. The scientific equivalent (Gurri argues) was Climategate, where hackers leaked the emails of top climate scientists and everyone got to see exactly how the sausage got made and decide for themselves whether they trusted it or not. And then there was the 2008 market crash. For the first time, people were able to go on Facebook and the comment sections of their favorite blogs and talk about how everyone involved in finance and government was a crook who needed to be hung from a lamppost. The discussion had a momentum of its own, and people who wouldn't have dared think a heretical thought if they'd been listening to Walter Cronkite found themselves adding to the avalanche.
In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government *could and should be* working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!
So for example, Gurri examines some of the sloganeering where people complain about how eg obesity is the government's fault - surely the government *could* come up with some plan that cured obesity, and since they haven't done so, that proves they're illegitimate and don't care that obesity is killing millions of Americans. Or homelessness - that's the fault of capitalism, right? Because "we" could just give every homeless person a home, but capitalism prevents "us" from doing that. Or if you're a conservative, how come the government hasn't forced the liberal rot out of schools and made everybody pious and patriotic and family-values-having? Doesn't that mean our lack of strong values is the government's fault? The general formula is (1.) take vast social problem that has troubled humanity for millennia (2.) claim that theoretically The System could solve the problem, but in fact hasn't (3.) interpret that as "The System has caused the problem and it is entirely the system's fault" (4.) be outraged that The System is causing obesity and homelessness and postmodernism and homosexuality and yet some people still support it. How could they do that??!
(is all this deeply uncharitable? we'll get back to this question later)
Any system that hasn't solved every problem is illegitimate. Solving problems is easy and just requires pressing the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button. Thus the protests. In 2011, enough dry tinder of anger had built up that everywhere in the world erupted into protest simultaneously, all claiming their respective governments were illegitimate. These protests were necessarily vague and leaderless, because any protest-leader would fall victim to the same crisis of authority and legitimacy that national leaders were suffering from. Any attempt to make specific demands would be pilloried because those specific demands wouldn't unilaterally end homelessness or racism or inequality or whatever else. The only stable state was a sort of omni-nihilism that refused to endorse anything.
(I’m reminded of Tanner Greer’s [claim](https://scholars-stage.org/on-cultures-that-build/) that the great question of modernity is not “what can I accomplish?” or “how do I succeed?” but rather “how do I get management to take my side?”)
Gurri calls our current government a kind of "zombie democracy". The institutions of the 20th century - legislatures, universities, newspapers - continue to exist. But they are hollow shells, stripped of all legitimacy. Nobody likes or trusts them. They lurch forward, mimicking the motions they took in life, but no longer able to change or make plans or accomplish new things.
Not original, but I can’t find the source.
There is no longer a role for leaders *qua* leaders; they would attain office, fail to solve everything immediately, and get torn to pieces. To adapt, leaders have become “protesters-in-chief”. Gurri says that Obama's presidential speeches took an unprecedented turn from "here is why America is great" to "I stand beside you in your conclusion that everything sucks and in your desire to change it". Obama marched with protesters and validated their anger. In the afterword for the second edition, Gurri holds up Trump as a different sort of protester-in-chief, somebody whose very existence sends a message of "I hate the elites and everything they stand for", and who consequently gets a pass on not having solved all problems yet. These leaders portray themselves as outsiders, just as angry and oppositional as any blogger or Occupy denizen or Tea Party sign-waver, but equally powerless in the face of the true elites, who are vague and formless and everywhere and not up for re-election (maybe this is linked to increasing discussion of the Deep State?).
How do we escape this equilibrium? Gurri isn't sure. His 2017 afterword says he thinks we're even more in it now than we were in 2014. But he has two suggestions.
First, cultivate your garden. We got into this mess by believing the government could solve every problem. We're learning it can''t. We're not going to get legitimate institutions again until we unwind the overly high expectations produced by High Modernism, and the best way to do that is to stop expecting government to solve all your problems. So cultivate your garden. If you're concerned about obesity, go on a diet, or volunteer at a local urban vegetable garden, or organize a Fun Run in your community, do *anything* other than start a protest telling the government to end obesity. This is an interesting contrast to eg *[Just Giving](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/24/book-review-just-giving/)*, which I interpret as having the opposite model - if you want to fight obesity, you should work through the democratic system by petitioning the government to do something; trying to figure out a way to fight it on your own would be an undemocratic exercise of raw power. Gurri is recommending that we tear that way of thinking up at the root.
Second, start looking for a new set of elites who can achieve legitimacy. These will have to be genuinely decent and humble people - Gurri gives the example of George Washington. They won't claim to be able to solve everything. They won't claim the scientific-administrative mantle of High Modernism. They'll just be good honorable people who will try to govern wisely for the common good. Haha, yeah right.
**III.**
Speaking of humility, Gurri is nervous about being a false prophet, so he suggests a test to determine whether or not his thesis has stood the test of time:
> [Egyptian dictator Abdel] al-Sisi aspired to the presidency, and his fate will provide a powerful signal with regard to the claims I have made in this book. If he can repress his way into a stable and long-lasting dynasty in the mode of Nasser and Mubarak, my analysis will be falsified. This isn't an impossible outcome. The future...is unknown. But as I observe, from afar, recent events in Egypt - and in Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, Turkey - I confess to many misgivings about the future of democracy, [but] far fewer doubts about the restlessness of the public or the crisis of authority.
As I write this in 2021, al-Sisi remains dictator of Egypt. He's only been in power seven years, so he has a while to go until he matches Nasser's 16, but I get the impression Gurri didn't expect him to last this long.
Gurri divides the world between the Center and the Border. He thinks the Center - politicians, experts, journalists, officials - will be in a constant retreat, and the Border - bloggers, protesters, and randos - on a constant advance. His thesis got a boost when Brexit and Trump - both Border positions - crushed and embarrassed their respective Centers. But since then I'm not sure things have been so clear. The blogosphere [is in retreat](https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/jul/16/blogging-dead-bloggers-digital-content) (maybe Substack is reversing this?), but the biggest and most mainstream of mainstream news organizations, like the *New York Times* are [becoming more trusted](https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/trumpism_media.png) and certainly more profitable. The new President of the US is a boring moderate career politician. The public cheers on elite censorship of social media. There haven't been many big viral protests lately except Black Lives Matter and the 1/6 insurrection, and both seemed to have a perfectly serviceable set of specific demands (defunding the police, decertifying the elections). Maybe I've just grown used to it, but it doesn't really feel like a world where a tiny remnant of elites are being attacked on all sides by a giant mob of entitled nihilists.
And also - consider universal health care. Lots of countries have universal health care. It's not an impossible High Modernist pipe dream that can never be accomplished. Or stopping illegal immigration - many countries manage this just fine, America could do it if it wanted to. Democrats hold protests and get angry demanding things like universal health care, Republicans hold protests and get angry demanding things like an end to illegal immigration, and both sides lose some faith in government when they don't get what they want. But these aren't insane demands which inevitably bleed into nihilist temper tantrums after predestined failures. They're just normal political requests for achievable goals, which various interest groups will fight over and then the government will either do them or not. Yeah, Occupy Wall Street was kind of silly, but most of politics continues to be the struggle for normal potentially achievable stuff. If we admit that, what's left of Gurri's thesis?
At the risk of being premature or missing Gurri's point, I want to try telling a story of how the revolt of the public and the crisis of legitimacy at least partially stalled.
Gurri talks a lot about Center and Border, but barely even mentions Left and Right. Once you reintroduce these, you have a solution to nihilism. The Left can come up with a laundry list of High Modernist plans that they think would solve all their problems, and the Right can do the same. Then one or the other takes control of government, gets thwarted by checks/balances/Mitch McConnell, and nothing happens. No American Democrat was forced to conclude that just because Obama couldn't solve all their problems, the promise of High Modernism was a lie. They just concluded that Obama could have solved all their problems, but the damn Republicans filibustered the bill. Likewise, the Republicans can imagine that Donald Trump would have made America great again if the media and elites and Deep State hadn't been blocking him at every turn. Donald Trump himself tells them this is true!
With this solution in place, you can rebuild trust in institutions. If you're a Republican, Fox News is trustworthy because it tells you the ways Democrats are bad. Some people say it's biased or inaccurate, but those people are Democrats or soft-on-Democrat RINO traitors. And if you're a Democrat, academic experts are completely trustworthy, and if someone challenges them you already know those challenges must be vile Republican lies. Lack of access to opposing views has been replaced with lack of tolerance for opposing views. And so instead of the public having to hate all elites, any given member of the public only needs to hate *half* of the elites.
You could think of this as a mere refinement of Gurri. But it points at a deeper critique. Suppose that US left institutions are able to maintain legitimacy, because US leftists trust them as fellow warriors in the battle against rightism (and vice versa). Why couldn't one make the same argument about the old American institutions? People liked and trusted the President and Walter Cronkite and all the other bipartisan elites because they were American, and fellow warriors in the battle against Communism or terrorism or poverty or Saddam or whatever. If this is true, the change stops looking like the masses suddenly losing faith in the elites and revolting, and more like a stable system of the unified American masses trusting the unified American elites, fissioning into two stable systems of the unified (right/left) masses trusting the unified (right/left) elites. Why did the optimal stable ingroup size change from nation-sized to political-tribe-sized?
Or is this ignoring fundamental asymmetries? The Right can (sometimes) muster up trust in Donald Trump and Fox News, but they still seem pretty Border. Meanwhile, the center-left is celebrating mainstream journalists and universities and experts with a vigor that seems perhaps more desperate, but no less intense, than in the 20th century. Perhaps this will change; the Right could swing back to being Romneycrats, and Bernie and AOC could still take over the left. But so far it doesn't look that way. Maybe the occasional tendency of the US to switch party systems has captured the center-vs-border conflict and subsumed it into the broader left-right one.
**IV.**
Overall, reading this book was a weird experience. Gurri admits in his afterword that he wrote the book to try to describe "subterranean currents" that were on track to invisibly change the world, but that everything went so fast that within a few years after publication those currents were obvious to everyone and the book was kind of pointless. I hoped that Gurri would have some kind of special insight into what was going on, but he really just had the normal insight that everyone has now, only a year or two earlier. So, without meaning any insult to him or his prescience, I wouldn't recommend this book unless you want to read 400 pages of someone going on and on and on about extremely obvious stuff.
The one exception to my disrecommendation is that you might enjoy the book as a physical object. The cover, text, and photographs are exceptionally beautiful; the cover image - of some sort of classical-goddess-looking person (possibly Democracy? I expect if I were more cultured I would know this) holding a cell phone - is spectacularly well done. I understand that Gurri self-published the first edition, and that this second edition is from not-quite-traditional publisher [Stripe Press](https://press.stripe.com/). I appreciate the kabbalistic implications of a book on the effects of democratization of information flow making it big after getting self-published, and I appreciate the irony of a book about the increasing instability of history getting left behind by events within a few years. So buy this beautiful book to put on your coffee table, but don't worry about the content - you are already living in it. | Scott Alexander | 41442728 | Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public | acx |
# Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
**I.**
I have a friend who studied the history of fascism. She gets angry when people call Trump (or some other villain *du jour*) fascist. "Words have meanings! Fascism isn't just any right-winger you dislike!" Maybe she takes this a little too far; by a strict definition, she's not even sure Franco qualifies.
Anyway, I mention this because she says Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, is absolutely, literally, a fascist.
This is a strong claim, but Balakrishna Moonje helped found the precursor to Modi’s party. He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini, decided he had the right idea, and told the Indian papers that [he wanted to](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4408848?seq=1):
> "...imitate the youth movement of Germany and the Balilla and Fascist organisations of Italy. I think they are eminently suited for introduction in India, adapting them to suit the special conditions. I have been very much impressed by these movements and I have seen their activities with my own eyes in all details."
So let's at least say this isn't the *least* fascist-inspired group around. It’s not that there aren’t extenuating circumstances. Indian independence movements of the time were fighting Britain, which made the fascist powers natural allies. And in 1934 when Moonje met Mussolini nobody had seen just how badly fascism could go. Still, not the sort of pedigree you want for your country's ruling party.
So I thought I'd make Modi the next entry in the ACX Dictator Book Club (previously: [Erdogan](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan)). The Internet recommended Andy Marino's *[Modi: A Political Biography](https://www.amazon.com/Narendra-Modi-political-Andy-Marino-ebook/dp/B00JJHGGAI/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=modi+political+biography&qid=1631391565&sr=8-2)*, and it seemed the least overtly hagiographical of the options Amazon gave me:
Alas, M:APB is absolutely a hagiography. The author begins by writing about how Modi let him ride with him in his private helicopter and gave him unprecedented access to have "open-ended conversations" about "every aspect of his life". The cover promises an objective evaluation, but on page 2, the author notes that "Objectivity does not mean flying in the face of incontrovertible evidence”, adding that “Modi has been the subject of the longest, most intense - and probably the most vituperative - campaign of vilification." Marino promises to replace this campaign with "a narrative that is balanced, objective, and fair - but also unsparingly critical of [Modi's] foibles" - which is an interesting construction, given how it contrasts criticism with fairness - and also pre-emptively declares the flaws he will be criticizing "foibles". I'm not sure we ever get around to the criticism anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
I am still going to summarize and review this book, but I recommend thinking of it as Modi's autobiography, ghost-written by Andy Marino. I hope to eventually find another book which presents a different perspective, and an update for the past six years (M:APB ends in 2014, right when Modi was elected PM). Until then, think of M:ABP as a look into how Modi sees himself, and how he wants you to see him.
**II.**
Narendra Modi wants you to see him as a fantasy novel protagonist.
He was born to a poor family in a mud house in a backwater village. As a child, he worked at his father's stall, helping him sell tea. The book says that there were no early signs of greatness. Except: his village had a shrine in the middle of a crocodile-infested lake. On holy days, you had to perform a ritual at the shrine, but one day after a rainstorm the crocodiles were especially angry and nobody could make it. Young Narendra organized the villagers to beat pots and pans to distract the crocodiles, then swam across the lake himself, performed the rituals, and swam back unharmed. Everyone in the village declared that he would one day become a great leader, "or words to that effect".
As a teenager, Modi spontaneously adopted ascetic habits. "First he gave up eating salt, then he gave up eating chilies, and even oil." "No matter what the temperature is, he always takes baths in cold water". He read and fell in love with the works of Swami Vivekananda, although only as "intellectual admiration of an ecumenical figure who made over Hinduism for modern purposes, revealing its kinship to other faiths through his enlightened liberalism", because Narendra Modi Is Certainly Not Some Kind Of Religious Fanatic. He joined Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the aforementioned accused-of-fascism youth organization, because of "a feeling of duty and belonging in the widest sense".
Then he learned his parents had arranged his marriage to a local girl years ago, when they were both children. He wasn't up for this, both because of normal not-up-for-child-marriage reasons and (reading between the lines) because he thought of himself as committed to celibacy. When his parents refused to back down, he gathered all his possessions in a bag and ran off to the Himalayas to find Truth.
According to the book, "exactly what Narendra did between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, where he went and why, remains obscure". Modi himself "smiles and waves away questions about those years of wandering". Marino has done a little research, and finds that Modi asked to join several monasteries, all of which rejected him because he didn't have a college degree (f@$king credentialism! Is there anywhere it hasn't reached?) He visited sites related to Swami Vivekananda, presumably to appreciate how liberal and ecumenical they were. Also, at one point, he:
> ...found himself travelling via Siliguri, as far north-east as Guwahati or even further, and deep in a 'remote jungle'. There, miles from civilization, he stumbled across a hermit or medicant with whom he struct up a friendship. The man was 'very thin, it seemed that he had transparent skin'. There was little sense of urgency in Narendra's journeying, and he spent about a month helping in the ascetic's garden plot, spending time dicussing 'spiritual matters', before he decided to move on.
Finally - and I imagine this happening as the stereotypical scene where a man climbs a Himalayan peak to ask the master one question - one of the monks who Modi met revealed to him that he wasn't destined for the spiritual life. Modi immediately realized this was true and went back to his home village. "[His mother] broke down and almost inarticulate, asked the sort of question a parent whose teenage son had stayed out too late would ask: 'Where have you been?' 'The Himalayas,' responded Narendra laconically."
After spending "barely twenty-four hours" with his family, Modi went back to his local RSS office, where everyone knew him well, and asked if there was anything useful he could do in politics.
They made him an entry-level party apparatchik in the nearby city of Ahmedabad. Modi remembers:
> If I was the person that cleans the car, I made sure to clean the car very nicely, so that even my boss thought: "That is a good boy, teach him to drive, he will be useful for our driving." Then I become a driver. So basically, whichever assignment is given to me, at that point of time, I am totally involved in it. I never think about my past, I never think about my future.
**III.**
In 1975 the Emergency happened.
For thirty years, since its independence, India had been a socialist state. Not the cool kind of socialist where you hold May Day parades and build ten zillion steel mills. The boring kind of socialist where the government makes you get lots of permits, then taxes you really heavily, and nothing really ever gets done. "Even today the Representation of the People Act requires all Indian political parties to pledge allegiance not only to the Constitution but also to socialism." The RSS and its collection of associated right-wing nationalist parties supported Hindu nationalism plus socialism. Their arch-enemy, the center-left-to-confused-mishmash Congress Party, supported secularism plus socialism. Non-socialism was off the table.
In unrelated news, there was a food shortage. Indians took to the streets protesting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi). Gandhi was heavy-handed in crushing the protests, which caused more protests, one thing led to another, and finally Gandhi declared martial law, a period which has gone down in history as the Emergency.
Gandhi immediately moved to arrest all her political enemies and shut down all newspapers that criticized her. The RSS was one of Gandhi's main enemies and had to go underground quickly. Gujarat became a center for the resistance. So Modi, as an official in Gujarat's RSS, ended up right in the middle of this. He remained a paper-pusher, but now he was a paper-pusher *for freedom*, scheduling meetings of resistance leaders, maintaining a master list of safe houses and trusted operatives, and keeping lines of communication open.
During a capital-e Emergency even paper-pushers can have greatness thrust upon them, and Modi ended up with responsibilities way outside his formal job description:
> Chhayanak Mehta tells of how, after Deshmukh's arrest, it was discovered that the papers he was carrying were still with him. These contained plans for the future actions of the [resistance], and it was essential to somehow retrieve them. To this end, Modi planned a distraction with the help of a female swayamsevak from Maningar. They went to the police station where Deshmukh was being held. While she posed as a relative and contrived a meeting with the prisoner, Modi somehow took the documents from under the noses of the police.
Or:
> Modi was also responsible for transportation and travel to Gujarat of those opponents of Indra still at liberty...Modi too, in the course of his duties, was compelled to travel, often with pamphlets that could have got him arrested. To minimize the risk he became a master of disguise, something that came naturally to one who always paid attention to his appearance. On one outing, he would appear as a saffron-robed sanyasi; on another, as a turbaned Sikh. One time he was sitting in a railway carriage, hiding behind a thick black beard, when his old schoolteacher sat down next to the grown-up "urchin". The disguise worked perfectly, but some years afterwards the teacher attested that as Narendra disembarked, he introduced himself and offered a hearty saluation.
Still, the Emergency ground on. One aspect the book doesn't stress, but which I was surprised to read about when Googling the period, was the forced sterilizations. Under [pressure from the US and UN to control exponentially rising populations](https://qz.com/india/1414774/the-legacy-of-indias-quest-to-sterilise-millions-of-men/), Indira had started various population control efforts in the 60s, all ambiguously voluntary. Over time, the level of pressure ratcheted up, and during the Emergency the previously-ambiguous coercion became naked and violent. "In 1976-1977, the programme led to 8.3 million sterilisations, most of them forced".
How did this end? Gandhi called an election - during which she was predictably voted out completely and her party lost more thoroughly than any party has ever lost anything before. Her opponents' campaign was based on things like "she just forceably sterilized 8 million people and you could be next", which is honestly a pretty compelling platform. The real question is why she gave up her emergency dictatorship and called an election at all. According to the book:
> It is more likely that in ending the Emergency Indira was thinking of herself, not India. She was aware of her growing international reputation as a tyrant, the daughter of a great democratic leader whose legacy she had damaged. As the journalist Tavleen Singh points out, the pressure to end the Emergency came simply from Indira Gandhi finding it unbearable that 'the Western media had taken to calling her a dictator.'
(but before you interpret this as too inspiring a story of the victory of good over evil, Indira Gandhi was voted back in as prime minister three years later. We’ll get to that.)
Modi came out of the Emergency a rising star, appreciated by all for his logistical role in the Resistance. In the newly open political climate, the RSS was devoting more attention to their political wing and asked Modi to come on as a sort of campaign-manager-at-large, who would travel all around India and help friendly politicians get elected. He turned out to be really good at this, and rose through the ranks until he was one of the leading lights of the new BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, "Indian People's Party"). He spent the next two decades running campaigns, traveling the country, and getting involved in internal backstabbing (which he had a habit of losing in ways that got him kicked out of the party just before something terrible happened, leaving him as the only person untarnished by the terrible thing when they inevitably invited him back). Finally some of Modi's political enemies failed badly in the leadership of Gujarat - one was expelled for corruption, another suffered several natural disasters which he responded to poorly. Modi had been accepted back into the party. He was beloved by Gujaratis, who still remembered his heroic work during the Resistance. He was the only person untarnished by various terrible things. By the rules of Indian politics, it was the party's choice who would replace the resigning incumbent as Chief Minister of Gujarat, and as Modi tells it, everyone else just kind of agreed he was the natural choice (his enemies say he did various scheming and backstabbing at this point). So on October 7 2001, Narendra Modi was sworn in as Chief Minister of Gujarat, India's fifth-largest state.
**IV.**
The book pauses here to give us Narendra Modi's view of Indian politics.
The Congress Party ruled India essentially as a socialist one-party state from its independence in 1947 to 1977, and then again with brief interruptions until 1996. To hear Modi tell it, they're the essence of everything corrupt, cronyist, colonialist, dynastic, and dictatorial.
The dynastic part, at least, is hard to argue against. Until 1962, it was led by Indian founding father Jawaharlal Nehru. From then until 1984 it was led by his daughter, Indira Gandhi. From then until 1989 it was led by her son, Rajiv Gandhi. From 1999 to 2014 it was led by his (ethnically Italian) wife, Sonia Gandhi. And from 2014 to present, by Rajiv and Sonia’s son, Rahul Gandhi.
Source: [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48391041). I bet Varun has an interesting story.
Modi accuses the Congress Party of being the descendants of those Indians who did well under British colonialism, liked British colonialism a little too much, and basically Europeanized - including a European-style semi-racist contempt for ordinary Indians. They're the kind of people who would happily force-sterilize eight milion of their countrymen because Western powers called India "backwards" for having too high population growth. The sort of people who would declare an Emergency dictatorship, happily kill or imprison hundreds of thousands of Indians without moral compunction, then immediately back down when Western media said they looked bad. They dominate the media, academia, and NGOs (all of which Modi accuses of being sycophantic and complicit in Emergency atrocities and everything else bad that Congress has ever done, while coming up with ways to make the most neutral actions by Congress' opponents look like dastardly acts of villainy). Their policies, insofar as they have any, involve whatever forms of socialism don't really help the poor but do ensure that anything that anyone wants to do requires permission from elites first, eg the "License Raj". According to Modi, the Congress Party hates the average Indian and the average Indian hates them right back. They survived as a democratic party by preventing any real opposition from forming, plus using their media connections to spread fear and division among people, plus occasionally just declaring martial law and imprisoning anyone they didn't like.
But by 1980ish some opposition parties had managed to take hold, and Congress realized they would have to win semi-fair elections. Starting in 1980 - the year Indira Gandhi managed to get herself re-elected - they found a new strategy. They got the media to paint ordinary Indians as evil intolerant racists, then appealed to minority groups, saying they were the only people who could swoop in and save them from this violent hateful majority.
According to Modi, when he was growing up (the 1950s) there was little racial division. Hindus and Muslims lived together and socialized together; Modi's own childhood best friend was a Muslim boy from a few blocks away. He attributes the worst prejudice and division in modern Indian society to the results of this Congress push to get everyone hating each other. Implausible? Kind of. But I remember reading Salman Rushdie, an Indian Muslim (though, uh, not a very good one), who also says there was almost no racial animus in his native Kashmir when he was growing up in the 1940s. And there's a historical pattern where there's decreased ethnic strife during colonial empires (since the colonizers are firmly in control, there's not much to be won in competitions between colonized groups), and then worsening strife after decolonization (different ethnic groups fight for control, or demagogues try to win elections by fanning inter-ethnic hatred). So I am not going to reject it out of hand when Modi says things were better back in the past - though I’m also can’t ignore everyone else’s position that worsening relations are due to Modi and people like him.
Modi's Exhibit A here is [the Shah Bano case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohd._Ahmed_Khan_v._Shah_Bano_Begum). A rich Muslim lawyer divorced his wife after forty years of marriage. She had no source of income and wanted alimony, as per Indian divorce law. Her husband said no, because Muslim divorce law didn't require him to pay anything, and Indian law makes some concessions to Muslim custom. The Indian Supreme Court said huh, what are you talking about, you still have to follow the law regardless of your religion, and ordered him to pay up. Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress Party had just taken power on a pro-Muslim platform, and in order to placate their base they passed a law rescinding the Supreme Court judgment and saying Muslim men didn't have to follow the rules around alimony if they didn't want to.
This kind of thing is why Modi, despite everyone else calling him a Hindu fanatic, insists he is a defender of secularism. He thinks everyone else keeps trying to give special rights based on religion in order to court minority groups and win elections, and he is saying the normal reasonable secular thing of "there are just some nationwide laws, everybody has to follow them, f@#k you if you don't want to". His enemies might point out that those nationwide laws will be instituted by a majority-Hindu populace; he accepts that, but doesn't care. You can't have a modern liberal democracy while constantly giving out special rights to any group you need votes from in this year's election.
But it's not just Muslims. In one incident, he has to defuse anger over Congress' plan to give extra seats at colleges to Adivasis, a group translated into English as "forest-dwellers"; in another, Congress courts the Kshatriyas, "a warrior caste which felt its historical glories were insufficiently supported by its status in modern society". At least US identity politics have the common courtesy to sort everyone by skin color. The Indian version combines all the fun of racial sensitivity training with all the simplicity of one of those D&D expansions that have a bunch of species with names like "Aarakocra" or "Tabaxi" for the special snowflakes too cool to be elves or halflings. As Modi tells it, Congress tries to peel each of these groups off from the majority by promising them special rights and affirmative action, with disastrous results:
> Another commission for improving the lot of sixty-three minorities and backward classes...was formed on 20 April 1982...fourteen months later, Solanki decided to implement its recommendation of an extra 18% reservations, bringing the total quota to 49%. This was inacted immediately prior to the March 1985 Gujarat assembly elections, cynically timed to boost the [minority] vote. Solanki reversed the commission's stress on the definition of [backward castes] by income and instead insisted on caste, ignoring its cut-off limit of an income of 10,000 rupees, probably to lure the relatively prosperous Kshatriyas. The result again was statewide rioting [...]
>
> In the ensuing riots, which began in February 1985 during the assembly election campaign, the anger of the mobs was underlined by the shock that reservations were cumulative, so that if quotas were not filled in one year, they 'rolled over' to the next, adding to the reservations all the way to a possible 100%. 'The thought that they could be effectively barred from all seats of learning was enough for upper-caste people to go berserk', wrote one author. The army was called in, and the prime minister and the Union home minister had to visit Ahmedabad to try and calm the situation. Nevertheless, 23 houses were burnt to ashes in the Dabgarwad neighborhood and 180 people died while 6000 were left homeless.
>
> But backward castes were becoming convinced that Congress was on their side, and the effect was social polarization. As there was a majority of lower-caste voters, this suited the Congress perfectly.
Modi describes spending his years of campaign consultancy trying to figure out a way around this dynamic. You could support more and more affirmative action, stoke more and more community tensions, and get those delicious minority votes while making the majority hate you - or you could roll back affirmative action, doom backward castes and Muslims to irrelevancy, get tarred as a racist, and ruin your electoral chances.
The solution he finally settled on was free market capitalism. As he tells it, as long as the pie is a fixed size, everyone will always fight viciously over their share. If you can get the pie growing, people will calm down and focus on making money. Over the preceding fifty years of Congress-led socialism and the "License Raj", India's GDP had grown at a pathetic 3% / year, which snarky observers called "the Hindu rate of growth". If he could get the market moving again, maybe he could turn India into a genuinely secular state where people had aspirations beyond getting a few more of those sweet affirmative action slots for your own group.
**V.**
Four months after Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, there was a terrible riot. Muslims set a train car full of Hindu pilgrims on fire, and mobs of vengeful Hindus went around murdering Muslims for days, with further outbreaks continuing for weeks. By the time everything was done, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus had died.
Everyone else thinks Modi either caused the riot, encouraged it, and/or at least deliberately avoided sending in enough police to stop it effectively. Modi vociferously denies all of this. He said he did everything he could to stop it but it didn't work. He said that if he is guilty of contributing to or failing to ameliorate the riots in any way, he "should be hanged". He has refused multiple demands to apologize because:
> This blot happened during my tenure and I have to wash it off. People told us Modi never says sorry. I said, what does sorry mean. We have a criminal justice system in this country which does not accept sorry. What will Narendra Modi's sorry mean to us? We will judge his sorry from his actual doing.
The book, to its credit, doesn't in any way gloss over the riots. It spends about 50 pages - a fifth of the whole text - presenting Modi's case for why he is blameless. I don't want to repeat it here, because (although he presents his case well) I think there's a pretty good chance he's lying. I don't want to reprint an apology (or more accurately non-apology) for genocide without fact-checking it, and the complexity of the issue is such that it would take forever to fact-check to an acceptable standard. [Here's](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil-in-narendra-modis-india) an article you can read for the full anti-Modi case, and you can get this book for the pro-Modi one. At some point I may actually go through this with the thoroughness it deserves. For now, I'll just present these facts:
- Modi completely denies responsibility.
- Journalists, NGOs, and foreign experts mostly say Modi is at fault, to the point where the US and various European countries have denied him visas.
- The Indian Supreme Court found him innocent of the specific charges they were reviewing, but the decision was controversial.
Modi claims that after this disaster, he tried to resign a few times and his party wouldn't let him. After that, he decided to dissolve the government and hold new elections, to "let the voters decide my future". Modi won the ensuing election in the biggest landslide in Gujarati history, getting 126 seats to Congress's 51. Why?
> The December 2002 Gujarat state elction was described as 'driven by hatred of Hindus towards Muslims'. More likely it was driven by the media's dislike of Modi and in turn the Gujaratis' dislike of the media. 'Little did they [the media] ralise they were creating a constituency that would later buy into the logic of the Gaurav Yatra that Mr. Narendra Modi so successfully enlisted in the cause of route-mapping his election campaign,' wrote Debraj Mookerjee in his coruscating post-election condemnation of 'pseudo-secularists'. They failed to understand that 'the triumphal march posited Hindu pride only in the derivative. What really was being rallied to a pitch was Gujarati pride.
>
> The net effect of the general hostility directed at Gujarat and its chief minister was to precipitate a voting landslide for the BJP... Dasgupta summed up Modi's triumph concisely: 'He successfully established a direct correlation between demonology and adulation: the more he became a hate figure in cosmopolitan circles, the more his popularity soared in Gujarat...this was only incidentally an election centred on ideology; the real issue was leadership."
>
> For all the fiery speech-making, the election campaign had not been about Hindutva or even about terrorism. Thanks largely to the media, it had been about Modi. With hindsight, Sonia [Gandhi, leader of the Congress Party] had accurately recognized the long-term threat Modi's politics posed to the Congress. Over ten years later, with a barely reduced majority in the Gujarat assembly, Modi was elected for the third time. Few Muslims had voted for him in December 2002. But in December 2012, 31% did...Would the Congress belatedly realize that its tactics had backfired and that for every insult it aimed at Modi it handed him another thousand votes? Or would it double down on its losses and bet more heavily on demonizing him? Time his proved that it would choose to do the latter, with interesting consequences.
In other words, he says the media's attacks on him after the riots were so vicious and baseless that they made ordinary Gujaratis, who didn't like or trust the media, think he was on their side. The part about yatras refers to giant parades that Modi held during his campaign. The media played these up as scary fascist rallies, but as per Modi everyone had a good time and celebrated their shared Gujarati pride. When the papers kept saying that having Gujarati pride was equivalent to being a violent terrorist, all the proud Gujaratis who liked the parades realized the media wasn't on their side, and voted for him out of spite.
There follow approximately ten years of Modi being a popular and constantly-reelected Chief Minister of Gujarat. The general pattern (as per his description) goes: Modi makes some common-sense reform. The media plasters India with claims that it is a violent attempt to oppress minorities. The reform goes fine, everyone including minorities benefits, and Modi's star rises further. Here's a typical page:
> The *New York Times* quoted figures issued by the National Sample Survey Office [that] showed poverty levels for Muslims in Gujarat at 39.4% in 1999-2000 and still 37.6% in 2009-2010...for Gujarat's Muslims not to have improved their fortunes at all - to have experienced by comparison a catastrophic decline as overall poverty in Gujarat fell by 47.8%...was surely a searing indictment of Modi's policies.
>
> In fact, the NSSO had already released a newer set of data for 2011-2012 that showed the number of Gujarati Muslims below the official poverty line at only 11.4% compared with a national average of 25.5%. This was the fifth best performance by a state in India...this proved exactly the opposite of the point made by the *New York Times*...so why had nobody else noticed, and why was the 2009-2010 figure being taken at face value? [...]
>
> The resistance against accepting evidence of progress under Modi's regime, especially progress among Muslims, appears to be linked not to conspiracy so much as to an ingrained impression left in the public mind about the 2002 riots. Many people simply refuse to believe that Modi is capable of benign behavior, especially towards Muslims, and are therefore disinclined to believe good news.
The book spends a long time rebutting claims that Modi's tenure in Gujarat wasn't an amazing economic success story. This one I did look up, and as usual the story is complicated. Going by the raw-est of raw numbers, Modi looks very good here:
Source is [here](https://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/mghatak/EPWModi.pdf). Gujarat does pretty well even pre-Modi (1990-2000), but during Modi’s administration (2000 - 2010) it does really well.
Zoom in a little and you can [make a case that the success was more measured](https://qz.com/171409/gujarat-by-the-numbers/) ; on a lot of metrics, it’s Kerala and not Gujarat that was the real positive outlier. I think this is because Gujarat pursued more free-market policies, Kerala pursued more socialist policies, and both did well by their own standards. If you look at size of the economy, Gujarat does slightly better; if you look at measures of equality or poor people’s ability to access services, Kerala does. Either way, I think the clearest conclusion is that Modi’s administration was pretty successful but didn’t blow everyone else out of the water or anything.
So how did Modi become famous enough to use the position as a springboard to national power? For one thing, he was genuine in his commitment to cut red tape and unwind India's socialist legacy, which made him seem like the only person with a real alternative to the status quo. For another (his preferred explanation), the constant nationwide media attacks on him kept his name in the news: it felt like the elites were saying he was the guy they were afraid of, and everyone who wanted a guy the elites were afraid of was all too happy to take them at their word. For another (Modi self-servingly claims), the media's constant attempts to tar him as far-right gave him a mandate to actually be pretty moderate and (when needed) pro-Muslim, in the "only Nixon can go to China" sense. Finally, he had a reputation as the least corrupt person in Indian government - something his biography, religious views, and sense of personal austerity helped back up. His time in Gujarat was mostly unmarked by corruption scandals, and he made the right noises about fighting corruption in his underlings. This was a special draw after an especially corrupt Congress administration.
Also, Modi had spent most of his career as a campaign manager and was widely considered the best one in India, which probably didn't hurt his own efforts. He was elected Prime Minister with, as usual, a landslide majority - at which point the book ends.
**VI.**
As an entry in the Dictator Book Club, this book leaves a lot to be desired. For one thing, it ends before Modi gets enough national power to really start threatening democratic institutions. For another, even if he did start threatening democratic institutions, I wouldn't trust Andy Marino to tell me about it. I hope to find a more complete and balanced biography later. In the meantime, what can we conclude?
Modi's rise eerily parallels Erdogan's. Both grew up in poor families and got involved early in religious/political organizations. Both were sufficiently committed to their religious/political organization that they joined as junior cadets even though religious parties had never taken power in their country and it seemed like career suicide. Both suffered through genuinely-terrible dictatorships led by secular liberal elites, which soured them on a secular liberal model. Both rose through the ranks of their parties and got elected regional administrators. Both did good jobs as administrators, plus had the PR skills to make it look like they did even better jobs than they did. Both used their religious connections to semi-accurately present themselves as beacons of piety and virtue amid a corrupt establishment. Both tried to shed their party's far-right image in favor of being center-right free market capitalists, and both implemented free-market reforms that helped them get the credit for a good economy. Both were raised to power by a coalition of moderate-rightists who wanted good economic policy and were wowed by their administrative accomplishments, plus far-right religious zealots who expected that it was all a charade and they would govern as far-right religious zealots.
Both are much more similar to each other than either to Trump. Nobody thought Trump was honestly religious, and nobody thought he was a beacon of ascetism and non-corruption. I was going to add that Trump never had any history as a competent regional administrator, but I guess people who believed his reality show persona believed he was an unusually skilled businessman, which maybe ticks that box. He didn't shed a far-right image to appeal to center-right capitalists - he kind of did the reverse - but maybe the fundamental nature of the Republican Party did that balancing act for him.
I was struck by Modi's view of Indian politics: educated elites cynically fanning racial discord so they could force minority groups to flee to them as "protectors". This is probably how Trump would describe the Democrats if he was smart enough to think of it. Of course, Modi's enemies turned it around and called Modi a populist-nationalist leader keeping a veneer of plausible deniability while inciting anger/suspicion/violence against minority groups, which is of course how the Democrats think of the Trump-era Republicans. All the most recent trends in American politics happened in India too, only ten years earlier.
(questions about minorities and racism were less prominent in Erdogan's rise, making him a proof of concept that you can do this without them)
For me the most interesting Modi/Trump parallel was the former's insistence that Gujaratis loved him because they hated the media who hated him. On the one hand, this is a convenient self-serving thing for him to say, because the leading alternative explanation is that they loved him because he was a violent racist and they were pro-violent-racism. On the other, it's hard not to remember the 2016 primary, when this was one of the leading explanations for how Trump suddenly rose to the front of the pack: the media hated him so much that they couldn't stop giving him free airtime.
In [my review](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/19/book-review-the-art-of-the-deal/) of *Art Of The Deal*, I quoted Donald Trump's advice on dealing with reporters:
> One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. It’s in the nature of the job, and I understand that. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you. The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business. [When I announced my plans to build a huge new real estate development to the press], not all of them liked the idea of the world’s tallest building. But the point is that we got a lot of attention, and that alone creates value.
Now Narendra Modi says the same thing - he thinks that the negative press he got from being outrageous paved his road to power. When all these demagogues who succeeded against all odds tell you what strategy they used, maybe you should believe them.
I'm not a far-right demagogue and I don't want to be a head of government. But I did manage to [piss off](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/) the *New York Times* last year, and they [wrote](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article) a retaliatory hit piece against me. It accused me of being racist, sexist, elitist, all kinds of negative things. There was nothing about it that even hinted I was an acceptable person in any way. Here's what happened to my email subscriber numbers after the piece was published:
It took me eight years of blogging to get those first 20,000 readers. The NYT hit piece gave me another 11,000 in a day. Many of them stuck around; some bought subscriptions. At meetups, many fans tell me the hit piece first brought them to the blog. I didn't intend this, and I don't consider it fair compensation for the level of reputational damage they did me.
But if I ever want to become Prime Minister of India, I know what strategy I'm going to use. | Scott Alexander | 41204726 | Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography | acx |
# Open Thread 189
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** I’m away this month visiting meetups, so expect posts here to be slightly lighter and further apart, sorry. Next on my schedule is Lisbon (Saturday 9/18 at 5) and Madrid (very tentatively 9/25 at 11), I’ll continue to provide updates. And check [the master spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml), where new meetups are still coming in (most recently Cebu in the Philippines).
**2:** Effective altruist organization Open Phil is offering scholarships to interested-in-effective-altruism international undergrads applying to top US and UK universities. See [here](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/other-areas/undergraduate-scholarship) for more information. | Scott Alexander | 41203772 | Open Thread 189 | acx |
# Washington DC Meetup This Saturday
**When:** Saturday, September 11th, 5 PM
**Where:** [decent.search.hurls](https://w3w.co/decent.search.hurls), aka the patio and lot around 1002 N St. NW.
**Who:** Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you.
If you’re somewhere other than DC, check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you. | Scott Alexander | 41174836 | Washington DC Meetup This Saturday | acx |
# The Unbearable Semiheaviness Of Being
I hear that Google tests prospective employees with weird vaguely-science-related riddles. If I were in charge of this, here's what I would ask:
You're an American spy in Cuba. The CIA has gotten you a position refilling the water coolers in Castro's presidential palace, hoping you can poison him. But Castro's security is pretty good. Every time you enter the palace, they search you so exhaustively that you're sure you can't smuggle anything in. And you're sure you can't access any poisons within the palace. And every time he drinks water, Castro calls in a chemist to test it for any impurity first; the tests can detect any contaminant at any concentration. On the plus side, you're completely unsupervised within the palace, and have access to a kitchen with all the usual kitchen appliances. And the CIA has given you a time manipulation gizmo, so you can take literally as long as you want, even if it’s thousands of years. How do you kill Castro?
One answer: Start with an amount of water several thousand times Castro's usual daily consumption. Put it in the freezer until it's half frozen. Dump out the unfrozen half, melt the frozen half, then repeat this process with the meltwater. After some very large number of cycles, put the result in Castro's water cooler every day. He'll be dead within a year.
The hydrogen in water is a combination of normal hydrogen (only a proton in the nucleus) and deuterium (a proton and neutron in the nucleus). These have slightly different chemical properties, so you can do various types of distillation to enrich for one or the other, including repeated freezing (realistically [freezing works very slowly](https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/610922); our hypothetical spy would need an unrealistic amount of time, water, and patience). Normal water is about 99.9% H2O, 0.1% HDO, and negligible amounts of D2O. Water with more D2O than normal is called heavy water, water with more HDO than normal is called semiheavy water, and water with more H2O than normal (ie not even the usual tiny amounts of the other two constituents) is called light water.
Heavy or semiheavy water is pretty toxic. It's not radioactive or anything. It's just that your body is 70% water, and if the water has even slightly different chemical properties than usual, that screws up a lot of stuff. It's the perfect poison - except that you need to replace a significant proportion of someone's body water with semiheavy water before they feel any worse; realistically they would have to consume gallons and gallons. Probably beyond the reach of most poisoners, which is why the question specified you're refilling Castro's whole water cooler for months on end.
If heavy water makes you feel worse and eventually kills you, naturally light water should make you feel better and eventually make you immortal. That's how logic works, right?
Maybe! This is actually a real alternative medicine thing. You can [buy light water for about $20/liter](https://preventa.org/products/preventa-products-3/preventa-25-6) (though, like Castro, you would have to drink nothing but light water for months before you replaced enough of your body water to matter).
I love this theory. It's so much better than homeopathy. If you tell the homeopaths that their products are just ordinary water, they'll get pissy. If you tell these people, they'll admit right away that it's even more water than regular water is, the only water which you can be really confident is perfectly normal H2O. I love this theory so much.
But I guess we also have to evaluate the arguments they present, which you can find [here](https://www.nourishmeorganics.com.au/blogs/the-ultimate-guides/the-ultimate-guide-to-deuterium-depletion) and [here](https://www.h2-4you.com/the-science-behind-deuterium-depleted-water/).
Start with the evolutionary argument. During the Ice Age, a lot of the world's water froze. Just as your freezing concentrated deuterium in Castro's freezer, so Ice Age freezing concentrated it in the glaciers. Also, rainwater naturally has less deuterium when it's colder, [because heat preferentially increases the evaporation of heavier water](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-are-past-temperatures/). So drinking water was probably a bit lighter during the Ice Ages, when humans were evolving. The 10,000 years since the last Ice Age wasn't enough time to re-evolve, so human bodies are probably adapted for slightly lighter water than we get.
Move on to the molecular biology argument. The basis of cellular energy generation is the proton pump in the mitochondria, which moves hydrogen nuclei around to create a charge gradient. If the hydrogen nuclei have unexpected neutrons, that could jam the pump or change how the gradient works. I'm not entirely able to follow this, but maybe then there is some kind of cellular signaling cascade? [Basov, Fedulova, Baryshev, and Dzhimak](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6723318/):
> Deuterium reduction in matrix water can regulate not only functional activity of mitochondria, but also speed of other cellular processes caused by transfer deuterium-depleted water to the cytosol, and as result of the foregoing, cell ATP-production [78,79] and interfacial protein interactions are changed and, consequently, cellular rate of growth can be various due to deuterium loaded in molecular structures of living cell.
See also [this paper](https://www.mcponline.org/article/S1535-9476(20)31643-1/fulltext).
Then there's the anthropological argument. The Hunza people of Pakistan drink mostly glacial meltwater. Because its freezing-and-melting cycle replicated Castro's freezer in reverse, their water is naturally lighter than usual. They also seem to be unusually long-lived and healthy.
And there's the oncological argument (that's the St. Anselm thing, right?). You can read [a review paper here](https://www.sysrevpharm.org/fulltext/196-1568985381.pdf), and it's pretty impressive. Light water halves the growth rate of cancer cells in vitro, changes the ratio of mitotic stages in vitro, and seems to help treat cancer in rats. In a human double-blind randomized controlled trial, light water [significantly increased survival rates](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235330235_Deuterium_Depletion_May_Delay_the_Progression_of_Prostate_Cancer). There are case studies of otherwise untreatable cancers [remitting or stabilizing](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18815148/) in the face of light water treatment.
Don't care about cancer? Light water [speeds up plant growth](https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:34021795). It [slows aging in rats](https://sites.kowsarpub.com/jjnpp/articles/83494.html). It [decreases rats' triglycerides and bad cholesterol](https://www.biomed.cas.cz/physiolres/pdf/65%20Suppl%203/65_S401.pdf). It can even [cure depression in rats](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166432814004884).
Is this all bunk?
Well, at least most of it is. For example, the Hunza people of Pakistan were deemed supernaturally long-lived and healthy by the same sort of early British explorers who repeated legends of Shangri-La and the Abominable Snowman. According to [reputable sources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burusho_people#Hunza), the average Hunza life expectancy is fifty-something, same as most other groups in poor parts of Pakistan. So probably light glacial meltwater isn't a very good longevity secret. Also, assuming that we're evolved to Ice Age conditions limits evolution to a pretty specific speed - any faster and we'd evolve to present conditions; any slower and we'd still be pre-Ice Age. I'm not too impressed with the rat studies, and other studies on plants suggest they grow better in *high*-deuterium conditions, eg [this thesis](https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/phyc_etds/5/) suggesting that "deuterium oxide has a stabilizing force on biomolecules". Most of the positive studies were done by the same Hungarian team, or by people with sufficiently-Hungarian-sounding names that I suspect they're affiliated. The anticancer studies are better quality than the others, but some other groups find [deuterium causes less cancer](https://www.dovepress.com/heavy-water-affects-vital-parameters-of-human-melanoma-cells-in-vitro-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-CMAR), so who knows?
This probably sounds like faint condemnation. I don't have good responses to all the arguments in favor. The problem is, every alternative medicine fad has evidence approximately this good. Some are better; there are dozens of positive RCTs for homeopathy. This is why [the replication crisis](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/) sucks so much - just because a few converging lines of evidence support a theory and it has lots of positive studies including an RCT or two, doesn't mean it's any good. Where do you draw the line?
I find myself pretty unconvinced, but I wouldn't mind someone looking through the cancer studies to tell me if I'm missing something. At least a couple of different groups seem interested, and some of the cell line studies seem to show major effects. Not sure what's going on there.
This probably doesn't have enough medical benefits to have been worth my time to research or yours to read. I still find it fascinating. I keep being amazed at how many dimensions things can vary along. You think you know what kind of things medicine has to investigate - how different chemicals interact, the effects of food and smoking and sleep and so on - and unless some weird Hungarians remind you, you would never in a million years remember that there are multiple different isotopes of water and this seems to have some effect on living cells. You would never think to check whether attempts to mine the Martian icecaps for drinkable water will result in dangerous water that could sicken the unfortunate astronauts who drink it (answer: it might! Martian water has five times more deuterium than Earthly water [and seems to kill shrimp](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169296)). You would never think that you could buy something called "deuterium depleted water" on Amazon, or that it would be completely safe to drink. But here we are! | Scott Alexander | 41037583 | The Unbearable Semiheaviness Of Being | acx |
# Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts
**I.**
Seen on Twitter:
In case you find this hard to follow: ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that looked promising against COVID in early studies. Later it started looking less promising, and investigators found that a major supporting study was fraudulent. But by this point it had gotten popular among conspiracy theorists as a suppressed coronavirus cure that They Don’t Want You To Know.
The media has tried to spread the word that the scientific consensus remains skeptical. In the process, they *may* have gone a little overboard and portrayed it as the world’s deadliest toxin that will definitely kill you and it will all somehow be Donald Trump’s fault. It turned into the latest culture war issue, and now there’s a whole discourse on (for example) how supposedly-sober fact-checkers keep calling it "a horse dewormer” (it *is* used to deworm horses, *but* it’s also FDA-approved for humans, *but* lots of the people using it are buying the horse version), and probably this is hypocritical in some way.
Enter the article above. A doctor named Jason McElyea apparently told local broadcaster KFOR that Oklahoma hospitals are “overwhelmed” with ivermectin poisoning cases, so much so that “gunshot victims” are “left waiting”. Some of the world’s biggest news outlets heard the story and ran with it. The tweet mentions [the](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gunshot-victims-horse-dewormer-ivermectin-oklahoma-hospitals-covid-1220608/) *[Rolling Stone](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gunshot-victims-horse-dewormer-ivermectin-oklahoma-hospitals-covid-1220608/)* [version](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gunshot-victims-horse-dewormer-ivermectin-oklahoma-hospitals-covid-1220608/), but the same story, with the same doctor’s testimony, got picked up by *[The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/04/oklahoma-doctor-ivermectin-covid-coronavirus)*, [the BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58449876), [Yahoo News](https://news.yahoo.com/oklahomas-ers-backed-people-overdosing-053822589.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAW1EbXYH62wM61u9Qu4Mj1retjBeLLX0GdPq7etck3cGWuMp4_GeGt0-TA7BXdGitGuv7C7_ebmbI47JBRVAPC2k-X08KIw9ULUfDFe-K1U4q-Grz2mC85cCbkTNWn9ZzlwI397im3erYFRfZTe91Exj6rv01y02ssjoO0clfqM), etc.
Which brings us to the Sequoyah Hospital letter on the right. They released a statement saying that Dr. McElyea hasn’t worked there in two months, they haven’t had any ivermectin overdose cases, and they don’t know what he’s talking about.
In the comments, author Virginia Hume sums up the situation nicely:
I’ve recently been reading *[Scout Mindset](https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=scout+mindset&qid=1630933527&sr=8-1)* (expect a review soon), which is kind of the rationalist movement in book form. It focuses on the difference between how we treat ideas that conform to our biases versus those that contradict them. If they conform, we ask “Are we allowed to accept this?” and wave them through, like a small town police chief dealing with a case involving the mayor’s son. If they contradict, we subject them to the harshest inquisition possible, like a small town police chief dealing with a guy named “Abdullah” with a sinister-looking beard.
The media was already looking to discredit ivermectin. So the report of one doctor - without even a phone call to confirm - was good enough for *Rolling Stone*, *The Guardian*, *BBC*, etc. It was “too good to check”.
**II.**
Did you believe that?
I did, briefly. Then I remembered the Law Of Rationalist Irony: the smugger you feel about having caught a bias in someone else, the more likely you are falling victim to that bias *right now*, in whatever way would be most embarrassing.
So, quick check: am I doing this? I notice this story is exactly tailored to appeal to me and people like me. It discredits the media establishment, who I don’t like. It’s a great argument for why we need more rationality, something I’ve been trying to push. It lets me feel superior to everyone: I am properly skeptical of ivermectin, *but also* I haven’t become a contemptible propagandist who joins in mass media smear campaigns.
And I didn’t even take a second to check if it was true! I’m relying entirely on the word of a Twitter bluecheck I’ve never heard of before, whose profile picture is some kind of dog (an Australian sheepdog? maybe some kind of weird collie?) Forget making a phone call to a hospital, I didn’t even read the original article!
The story was “too good to check”!
So I tried checking, and noticed that the third reply to the original tweet was this:
In case you’re as confused as I am, NHS here = “Northeastern Health System”, an Oklahoma health care group. Britain is not involved.
This…turns out to be completely true. The story never mentions Sequoyah Hospital! Dr. McElyea has worked at Sequoyah in the past, but he’s a traveling doctor and works lots of places. Plausibly Sequoyah just wanted to clarify that they weren’t like the hospitals in the story, they’re not turning away gunshot victims, and if you happen to be a gunshot victim you’re still welcome to go to Sequoyah and can expect timely care.
Apparently I’m not the only person who doesn’t scroll down to the third tweet. The right-wing *Washington Examiner* has an article on how [Rolling Stone’s Ivermectin Fiction Shows Why Republicans Don’t Trust Media](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/rolling-stones-ivermectin-fiction-shows-why-republicans-dont-trust-media). Fox has an article on [Rolling Stone Forced To Issue Update After Viral Ivermectin Story Turns Out To Be False](https://www.foxnews.com/media/rolling-stone-forced-issue-update-after-viral-hospital-ivermectin-story-false). One Redditor [puts it more bluntly](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/pi3t03/dr_jason_mcelyea_who_has_been_claiming_that/): “Dr. Jason McElyea, who has been claiming that emergency rooms have been turning away gunshot victims because of Ivermectin overdoses, is a liar.” None of these sources mentioned that the original article had never claimed Sequoyah Hospital was involved.
Their story was - I guess - too good to check.
**III.**
Did you believe that?
I mean, that’s also a pretty cool story, isn’t it? Right-wing news outlets accuse the so-called “liberal media” of bias, then get hoist on their own petard? Seems a bit too cute. Have you clicked through to any of the links yet? No? Not even after I admitted I’m probably biased here?
Sequoyah Hospital might not be the particular hospital that the doctor in the story was thinking of. But isn’t it suspicious that other hospitals are so packed with ivermectin cases that they have to delay care to gunshot victims, yet Sequoyah says that it “has not treated *any* patients due to complications of treating ivermectin”? Seems weird for there to be that much difference.
Okay, this time I promise I’m not trying to psych you out. Here’s what I’ve actually been able to figure out about this situation:
* *Rolling Stone* seems to think that the Sequoyah Hospital statement casts doubt on their account. They changed the title of their article to “[One Hospital Denies Oklahoma Doctor’s Story](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/gunshot-victims-horse-dewormer-ivermectin-oklahoma-hospitals-covid-1220608/)…” and edited in a long prologue about the hospital’s statement in a way that suggests they feel bad about their reporting. They say that they have reached out to various relevant doctors and hospitals for comments but have not heard back from them - which I guess is good, because if your hospital is so busy that you don’t have time to treat gunshot victims, you really shouldn’t have time to give interviews to *Rolling Stone*.
* In an unrelated issue, the photo on top of their article was previously a bunch of Oklahoman-looking people standing in a long line outside a building. This had a caption, in small print, saying that it was of Oklahomans waiting for the COVID vaccine. Critics pointed out that in context, people would have interpreted it as being a picture of people waiting outside a hospital which had long lines because it was too full of ivermectin victims. Whether or not that criticism was fair, *Rolling Stone* has taken down that photo and replaced it with a photo of ivermectin pills.
* Five days ago, local Oklahoma news reported [this story](https://tulsaworld.com/news/state-and-regional/watch-now-this-is-not-just-covid-domino-effect-backs-up-oklahoma-hospitals-with-no/article_20c0d850-0a62-11ec-a376-e7df03dd09bf.html) about how Oklahoma hospitals were overwhelmed because of the COVID pandemic *(*the title says “it’s not just COVID”, but from the article I think this means that COVID is taking up the space that would usually be used for other conditions, and the combination of COVID and other normal conditions is causing the overcrowding). The local news interviewed lots of doctors and hospital administrators, who all agreed this was true. One of those doctors was Dr. McElyea, who told his story about not being able to find space for a gunshot victim - but here he doesn’t mention ivermectin, and it seems to be just part of the general overcrowding.
* Also five days ago, McElyea gave [this interview](https://kfor.com/news/local/patients-overdosing-on-ivermectin-backing-up-rural-oklahoma-hospitals-ambulances/) on a local news station, where he warned people not to take ivermectin, said he’d seen some ivermectin overdose cases, and mentioned how overcrowded the hospitals were. The flow of the local news report very much implies these two things are connected, but I notice that Dr. McElyea himself doesn’t state this in so many words. There’s just a clip of him saying ivermectin is dangerous, immediately followed by a clip where he talks about how overcrowded the hospitals are. The local report seems to want you to link those two things, but their exact wording is a little weaselly.
* As best I can tell, all the other articles on this subject are downstream of that local news report. Rolling Stone, BBC, Yahoo News - they all quote the stuff Dr. McElyea said on that show, and retain the show’s framing where the ivermectin and overcrowding are connected. Some, including Rolling Stone, openly cite the local news interview as a source. Others, like BBC, said that Dr. McElyea told them directly, but quote the same talking points he used on the show. Maybe they watched the show and then also talked to him to confirm?
* How many people are actually having problems with ivermectin poisoning? Matt Yglesias gets data from the National Poison Data System ([source](https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1434640884734308353)):
Wait, there’s been a National Poison Data System this whole time? Then how come we’re trying to interpret oracular pronouncements by random Oklahoma doctors? Why do we even HAVE a National Poison Data System if we’re not going to use it the one time we as a nation really want systematic data on poison? Is it because of how bad their trend-line-drawing practices are?
It looks like maybe this month there were ~500 reported ivermectin-related incidents nationwide, most of which were pretty mild? I don’t know what percent of incidents get reported, but this seems consistent with the problem being real but minor; even the largest hospitals should only see a handful of cases.
* The AP recently reported that 70% of recent poisoning incidents in Mississippi were related to ivermectin, but later issued [a correction that it was actually 2%](https://www.sfgate.com/news/amp/Health-Dept-Stop-taking-livestock-medicine-to-16405982.php?__twitter_impression=true) (the 70% number was the percent of ivermectin cases who had used the horse version of ivermectin)
I think the most likely scenario is that ivermectin is causing a few hospitalizations, but pretty few. Oklahoma hospitals are overcrowded for unrelated reasons (eg there’s a deadly global pandemic). A doctor talked on the local news about the overcrowding and the occasional ivermectin cases, and someone at some point - either the doctor or the local news people - intentionally or unintentionally recast things so that the ivermectin was causing the overcrowding. Maybe they thought this was fair, because even one case “contributes to” the overcrowding in some sense. Then national and international media picked it up. Then some unrelated Oklahoma hospital put out a bulletin saying they weren’t involved in any of this, and lots of people interpreted this as disproving the whole story. It didn’t really disprove anything, but by happy coincidence the story had been false all along, so whatever.
I’m still not really sure about a lot of this, and I still haven’t done anything *extreme* like call any of the hospitals or doctors involved. It’s just what I think is the most likely picture.
This story doesn’t make me feel smug and superior to everyone else. It makes me feel confused and annoyed. This is how true things usually make me feel, so I think I’ve dodged the Law of Rationalist Irony and might have some chance of being right this time.
(by the Law of Rationalist Irony, I have to be wrong about this in the most embarrassing possible way, so feel free to tell me what it is in the comments)
But I really *am* reading *Scout Mindset*, and it really does have me thinking about the ways our irrationality is polarizing us.
A Democrat reads some fraction of this story, and sees a bunch of idiot conspiracy theorists taking deadly horse medication to cure COVID. A doctor warns people that his hospital is overcrowded with poisoning cases, and the media dutifully reports on this. Then an unrelated hospital puts out a press release saying they’re not involved and - even though this changes nothing - Republicans seize on this to declare the entire media is “fake news” and nobody should trust anything they read and the horse dewormer conspiracists were right all along.
A Republican reads some fraction of this story, and sees the media falsely reporting that ivermectin is overcrowding local hospitals, even though the hospitals themselves are denying this. Also, using a fake photo of something else to imply that lines at local hospitals are stretching out the door. Also, declaring that 70% of poison incidents are due to ivermectin when it’s really 2%.
Both sides end up even more convinced that they are right and the other side is selectively misinterpreting the news to feed their own skewed narrative. Only you, reading this ACX article, are getting the full story and learning more about the world instead of just confirming your biases.
Did you believe that? | Scott Alexander | 40966737 | Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts | acx |
# New York Meetup This Monday
**When:** Monday, 9/6. I’ll be arriving at 5 PM but some other people might get there earlier, around 3.
**Where:** [swung.shape.shows](https://w3w.co/swung.shape.shows), aka Teardrop Park in Lower Manhattan
**Who:** Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you.
The New York organizers have asked me to link their [LW event page](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SYsBqCiZCW72HW7fr/new-york-city-ny-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021) and their meetup group’s [Google Group](https://groups.google.com/g/overcomingbiasnyc) for organizing future events.
If you’re somewhere other than New York, check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you. | Scott Alexander | 40950934 | New York Meetup This Monday | acx |
# Open Thread 188
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
**1:** The Salt Lake City meetup group reports that COVID may have spread at their meetup. A few people there are reporting symptoms, and at least one person tested positive. If you attended, please take actions appropriate to a likely COVID exposure, like self-quarantining or getting tested (MicroCovid says that vaccinated people who attend an outdoor meetup with a known case have [a 2% chance](https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=normal&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=8&riskProfile=hasCovid&scenarioName=custom&setting=outdoor&subLocation=US_49035&theirMask=none&topLocation=US_49&voice=normal&yourMask=none&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=pfizer) of getting sick, but since several people are reporting symptoms maybe it’s higher than that). If anyone knows of any other meetup where COVID might have spread, please let me know. I’ll list any alerts like this on open threads - but since those take a while to get up, I’ll also mention them [on the top of the meetups post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2021-times-and) as soon as I hear about them. Remember, please only attend meetups if you’re fully vaccinated and don’t have any recent COVID exposure or symptoms.
**2:** Boston meetup today (Sunday), see [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/boston-meetup-this-sunday) for details. New York meetup tomorrow (Monday), I’ll make a post soon. If you’re in Boston and can’t make the meetup, but want to be connected to the local rationalist/EA group in your area/university, please fill out the form [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe8JrrZM6oUTJw1wlV3QR91WiEaz1AIx93lT664-uePByO9uA/viewform). | Scott Alexander | 40924635 | Open Thread 188 | acx |
# Boston Meetup This Sunday
**When:** Sunday, 9/5, 5 PM
**Where:** [area.bricks.tribune](https://w3w.co/area.bricks.tribune), aka John F Kennedy Park in Cambridge, near the picnic tables.
**Who:** Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you.
Some rationalist/EA leaders are focusing on Boston right now as a promising place to community-build. They’re especially trying to expand the student groups at Harvard and MIT. If you live in Boston and/or attend either of those colleges, then - whether or not you can make it Sunday - consider giving them your name through [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe8JrrZM6oUTJw1wlV3QR91WiEaz1AIx93lT664-uePByO9uA/viewform) so they can help get you connected.
If you’re somewhere other than Boston, check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you. | Scott Alexander | 40895891 | Boston Meetup This Sunday | acx |
# Long COVID: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Like everyone else, I'm trying to figure out how cautious I should be around COVID. It seems like the most important concern for young vaccinated people like myself is the risk of Long COVID symptoms, so I spent a while trying to figure out what those were.
My basic conclusion is that everyone else is right, that news stories on this phenomenon seem remarkably good, and that there's not much we know for sure beyond the simple summary you've probably already heard. Insofar as anything surprised me, it was how bad the worst-case scenario would be.
Here are some of the basic things I found:
**1. Long COVID is probably a lot of different things, some of which are boring and obvious, others of which are still kind of mysterious.**
First, people with severe COVID that lands them in the ICU have long-lasting symptoms in multiple organ systems. This isn't surprising, and should be considered in the context of [post-ICU syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-intensive_care_syndrome). Basically, if *anything* makes you sick enough to land in the ICU, your body is going to be pretty scarred by the illness (and maybe also by the inevitable side effects of intensive care), and this will last a long time and cause many problems. EG if you’re bedridden for many weeks, your muscles waste away, and then it takes a long time for them to recover and you feel weak and fragile until you do. Or if your lungs stop working and you need mechanical ventilation, your lungs might be pretty weak for a while, and other parts of your body might not get quite the amount of oxygen they’re used to and might get damaged in a way that takes a long time to recover. There’s a similar problem where if you are sufficiently old and frail, any illness will take you down a level of functioning and you might not be able to get up a level again. See for example [this article](https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/919668#vp_2) discussing how about 1/5 of elderly flu patients have “persistent functional decline” and may never regain their pre-flu level of functioning.
Second, even in young people with milder cases, COVID can sometimes [cause lung damage](https://www.news-medical.net/health/What-Does-COVID-19-do-to-the-Lungs.aspx). If you get lung damage, you’ll have at least breathing problems, and maybe other problems. Your lungs will probably heal eventually, but some kinds of lung healing cause [permanent scarring](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7338595/); this can present as shortness of breath on exertion, or become a problem later after other lung injuries.
Third, there’s lots of persistent dysosmia and dysgeusia (inability to smell or taste). I think this one is just damage to the nasal passages, plus maybe [olfactory neurons accidentally over-adjusting to this damage and forgetting to readjust once you’re better](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins).
Fourth, COVID can *probably* cause a post-viral syndrome including fatigue. Post-viral syndromes are poorly understood, but might involve something like the immune system being dysregulated and staying in “fight mode” long after the virus is gone. “Chronic fatigue syndrome” is probably something like this, although this is still really controversial.
Fifth, maybe some long COVID is psychosomatic. People *hate* when doctors bring up the possibility of psychosomatic conditions, and I won’t deny that we tend to overuse the “psychosomatic” diagnosis like it’s going out of style - but some things really are psychosomatic. [Chronic Lyme disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease) (“Long Lyme” rolls off the tongue nicely) is basically universally considered 100% psychosomatic by the medical establishment, although now that I’m thinking about it I wonder if maybe we should be less sure. Lots of people act like psychosomatic = not a real problem. Unfortunately, having a symptom for psychosomatic reasons sucks just as much as having it for any other reason. Sometimes it sucks more, because nobody takes you seriously. I’ll discuss the argument around psychosomatic symptoms more later.
**2. The prevalence of Long COVID after a mild non-hospital-level case is probably somewhere around 20%, but some of this is pretty mild.**
Giving a percent estimate is kind of meaningless, because it requires a binary yes-no decision on whether or not someone’s symptoms qualify as “long COVID”. Studies that ask “do you think you have long COVID?” tend to get low numbers, presumably because people don’t think their (mild) residual symptoms qualify. Studies that ask “do you have any of the following symptoms?” get higher numbers.
Good studies include a control group who test negative for COVID, to see how many of *them* have symptoms that would qualify them as “long COVID” if they’d had the disease. Then they subtract the percent of control patients who have symptoms from the number of COVID patients who have symptoms, and assume the difference is caused by Long COVID. While this is better than *not* doing this, it leaves open the possibility of recall bias, where people who just had COVID are more likely to think a certain symptom is relevant / worth reporting, because they *know* Long COVID is a thing. There’s also the possibility that people who get COVID are sicker in other ways (eg older, more comorbidities) than people who don’t, which would mean they would have more other symptoms regardless of Long COVID. Some of these studies try to control for this; none can control perfectly.
There’s also high risk of selection bias. Some percent of people with COVID (~30%?) don’t know they had it, and will not volunteer for any of these studies. These people are mostly not severe, meaning that studies that exclude them will overestimate COVID severity. Some, but not all of these studies check seroprevalence to avoid this issue.
That having been said:
[Logue et al say](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2776560) that after ~6 months, 33% of outpatients (ie patients who didn't have to go to the hospital for COVID) had at least one persistent symptom, compared to only 5% of people in the control group (what does it mean for the control group to have persistent symptoms? Presumably they had trouble breathing / fatigue / muscle aches / etc for some reason other than COVID - there's a certain base rate of all of these problems and apparently in this study it's 5%).
[The British Office of National Statistics](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/1april2021) looks at people with a confirmed COVID test three months ago, and finds that 14% report having Long COVID symptoms, compared to 2% of a COVID-less control group. This is substantially lower than the earlier study, which found 33% at 6 months. Probably this is because the previous one asked about a bunch of symptoms, whereas this one just asked “Are you having Long COVID?” Lots of people who had some minor symptom or other might not have made the connection, or might have thought that their symptom didn’t qualify for a full diagnosis.
[Haverfall et al in Sweden](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778528) found that 26% of people with previous non-hospital-grade COVID, and 9% of a control group, reported long COVID-esque symptoms after 2 months. After 8 months, this was down to 15% and 3%. I’m not sure why the control group decreased; maybe it was about symptoms that had lasted the whole time, and not point prevalence? Anyway, this was similar methodology to the Logue study, but finds a somewhat lower prevalence. Maybe this is because this study was on healthcare workers, who are generally high-functioning people and who probably did a good job treating their COVID infections? I don’t know, but a lot of these things are really sensitive to how you ask questions and I don’t find the small difference too mysterious.
[Sudre et al](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01292-y) got data from some kind of UK COVID app with four million users. They chose 4,000 who met various criteria and asked them about long COVID symptoms. 13% reported symptoms after a month, and 2% after three months. This is a lot less than the other studies, so what’s up? I’m not sure, but I *think* it might be the exclusion criteria, as shown in [Supplementary Table 2](https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41591-021-01292-y/MediaObjects/41591_2021_1292_MOESM2_ESM.xlsx). When they look at everyone regardless of criteria, they find an estimate centered in the mid 20s, and then the criteria gradually pick away at that. One especially relevant one is that they have no gap in symptom reporting; maybe if you have chronic fatigue, you’re less likely to use an app regularly. But the three month data is still surprising.
[Thompson et al](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.24.21259277v2.full.pdf) get data from a UK longitudinal study. Their headline finding is that between 7.8% and 17% of patients seem to show at least one Long COVID symptom. But they have no control group, so probably it is lower than this. Also, only 1.2% to 4.8% of people say their Long COVID symptoms “impact normal functioning”, which means a lot of people must have some annoying lingering symptoms that don’t really bother them that much.
**3. The most common symptoms are breathing problems, issues with taste/smell, and fatigue + other cognitive problems.**
From Logue; most of these patients were 6 months post-COVID at followup:
From Haverfall:
Just looking at Haverfall, the fatigue looks kind of fake - little worse in the exposures than the controls. Other studies don’t really show this pattern.
And behold the mother of all COVID symptom persistence studies, [Amin-Chowdhury et al](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.18.21253633v2.full.pdf):
AC&E act as if this is reassuring - their conclusion starts with “most persistent symptoms reported following mild COVID-19 were equally common in cases
and controls” - but it really isn’t. Not only does this 8-month-out sample find high levels of the expected problems (fatigue/smell/taste/breathing), but it finds some unexpected ones too. Cases are likelier than controls to have cognitive problems and weird neurological issues. One flaw in this analysis is that it didn’t ask for premorbid functioning, so you can tell a story where unhealthy people are more likely to get COVID than healthy ones (maybe they’re stuck in crowded care homes? Maybe they put less effort into staying healthy in general?) But I don’t think this story is true - how come obviously plausibly COVID linked things (like smell problems) are significant, and obviously-not-COVID-linked things like diarrhea aren’t?
One thing this study *does* reassure me about is mental health. A lot of people claim that long COVID involves various mental health sequelae. This study comes out pretty strongly against it. Sure, lots of COVID patients are depressed - but so are equally many controls. The age of COVID is just a depressing time. In fact, it’s kind of weird that you can get this much fatigue, brain fog, etc without an increase in depression diagnoses.
**4. Sometimes problems go away after a few months, other times they don’t**
([source](https://twitter.com/kamleshkhunti/status/1339595050137763848))
This British graph suggests that almost all symptoms are gone after 100 days, which is a lot more optimistic than our studies above.
This is supposedly . . . also the British Office of National Statistics ([source](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/long-covid-symptoms-research/)). Why are their two graphs so different? My guess is that the top one is a preliminary version without very many patients who had COVID for longer than 12 weeks, and used some sort of model which just assumed numbers there (notice how the confidence intervals widen). The second graph better fits the studies above and is probably the real one.
That’s too bad, because the second graph says that about half of people who have long COVID symptoms after five weeks will still have them after four months. And that graph doesn’t look like it’s planning on falling much further. This kind of matches Haverfall’s study, which found a decrease of a little less than half between two and eight months. There is a very long tail of cases which are not getting better in a reasonable amount of time.
The most likely symptom to last a long time is anosmia, followed by fatigue.
How likely are these to last forever vs. get better in a few years? We’ve only had a year and a half of COVID, but we can make guesses based on other postviral syndromes. Lee et al do this work with [63 patients over three years](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25198029/), and find:
There’s a lot going on here. First of all, how come the severe hyposmia group starts with about the same scores as the mild-to-moderate group? I think because they classified severity objectively, and this is measuring subjective scores? Anyhow, almost everyone improves over this time period, but not everyone reaches normality (defined as a score of 80 or above). This is kind of useless because the study doesn’t tell us how much of this improvement was the first year vs. the second and so on, so we don’t know if improvements petered off or will continue forever. It does mention that people with followup longer than 2 years did better than people with shorter followup than that, but honestly I can’t conclude anything useful from this and there are no better studies.
What about fatigue? It turns out that chronic fatigue syndrome patients care a *lot* about this question and so there are great data. From [ME-Pedia](https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Prognosis_for_myalgic_encephalomyelitis_and_chronic_fatigue_syndrome):
This is terrible. Recovery rates in the single digit percentages over the space of years. You would think at least some patients would get placebo recoveries, or forget how it felt to be well, or otherwise [Lizardman](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/) themselves into fake complacency, but no. This is f@#$ing awful.
Maybe COVID won’t be this bad? One ray of hope comes from [this Australian study](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16950834/), where doctors record the rates of recovery from postviral fatigue after various rare diseases they encounter (Epstein-Barr, Q fever, Ross River virus). They find that 35% of these patients have postviral fatigue after six weeks, but only 12% after six months, and 9% after twelve months. This sounds a lot better than chronic fatigue.
In fact, [these people](https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article/22/4/383/662673) do the kind of weird task of figuring out how bad different diagnostic labels for fatigue are, even though some might argue that all the labels refer to the same underlying reality. They find an official diagnosis of “CFS/ME” (chronic fatigue / myalgic encephalitis) is much worse than “postviral fatigue”. Using the weird measure of “days per year of followup with diagnosis” (I’m not sure I fully understand their reasoning for why this is good), they find a median length of 80 for CFS/ME vs. 0 for PVF (…huh?). Using the more comprehensible measure of percent who still complain of fatigue after 7-12 months, they find it’s 24% vs. 10% (which super contradicts the above study saying that basically nobody with a CFS/ME diagnosis ever recovers). My guess is that this study had much lower criteria for a CFS/ME diagnosis (some doctor diagnosed it and put it on the insurance records) compared to the ones above (some specialist confirmed it by official criteria). The conclusion I draw is that, while *official* CFS/ME is horrible and hopeless, there are a lot of things that unofficially look kind of chronic-fatigue-ish which have pretty good prognoses. Since there’s no good reason to think post-COVID fatigue is official CFS/ME as opposed to just some chronic-ish fatigue-ish thing, probably it will have a better prognosis, more like weird Australian viruses.
…which we still don’t know, because AFAICT nobody has done *any* good studies on postviral fatigue lasting more than a year.
**5. Psychosomatic symptoms probably aren’t the majority of long COVID.**
I mean, I’m not seeing too many people claiming that they are. There are a lot more people worried that someone else might be claiming that, than people actually making the claim. Still, the *Wall Street Journal* opinion section is always up for slathering itself in glue and rolling around in a haystack until it becomes the straw man everyone else warned you about, and they do have an article on [The Dubious Origins Of Long COVID](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dubious-origins-of-long-covid-11616452583).
They point out that long COVID was first thrust into the public consciousness in surveys run by Body Politic, who self-describe as “a queer feminist wellness collective merging the personal and the political”. I agree this is a weird source for something to come from, but Hans Asperger was a Nazi and I still use *his* diagnosis, so I probably have to accept these people’s as well.
More relevantly, WSJ points out that many of the people complaining of Long COVID symptoms test negative for COVID, or at least never tested positive. This complaint conflates the fact that not everyone was able to get a COVID test at all, with the fact that sometimes you get the acute COVID test after you’ve recovered from acute COVID and it’s negative, with the fact that COVID tests don’t have a 100% success rate, with the fact that yeah, okay, some people who didn’t have COVID are probably imagining Long COVID symptoms. I feel like some of the case-control studies above, which clearly show that seropositive people have higher rates of Long COVID than seronegative people, are pretty convincing here.
But also - the people with lung scarring clearly have lung scarring, and most of them have [weird x-rays](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.677934/full) consistent with lung scarring. If you have lung scarring, then you have trouble breathing, you’re fatigued, and you probably have lots of other stuff downstream of that. The people with smell/taste disturbances clearly have smell/taste disturbances, testable with the stupidly named but scientifically venerable [Sniffin Sticks test](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33495704/) - and also, who even cares enough to make up olfactory problems? Fatigue and brain fog are the only symptoms here that can’t be easily objectively confirmed, and, well, do you think those Australians who got infected with Q fever and had twelve months of postviral fatigue are faking? What about all those post-Epstein Barr fatigue people? Lots of viruses cause postviral fatigue, it’s not really surprising that COVID should also.
(WSJ also spends a while arguing that CFS/ME is just a psychiatric disorder, which I think is not really in keeping with the best recent evidence. Also, as a psychiatrist, I’m very against this conclusion, mostly because if it were true, then people would expect me to cure CFS/ME patients.)
One point WSJ didn’t bring up but could have was that most Long COVID patients are women. Probably this is [somewhere between 60 and 80%](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/13/why-are-women-more-prone-to-long-covid) - I suspect on the lower end of this, because I think women are more likely to talk about these kinds of things than men, and much more likely to eg join Facebook groups. This is noteworthy, because women are traditionally more prone to psychosomatic illnesses - so much that the ancients attributed these to the uterus and called them hysteria (note shared root with eg “hysterectomy”). Women are about 2x as likely to get diagnosed with panic disorder, anxiety disorders, phobias, etc, about 2.5x as likely to get chronic Lyme disease, widely regarded as an entirely psychosomatic condition, and 3-5x more likely to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia. So the female preponderance is suspicious.
But women are also [somewhere between 2x and 4x more likely](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7292717/) to get autoimmune disorders than men (it varies by disorder - the ratio for Sjogren’s is as high as 16x). There are some pretty crazy hypotheses for why this is - [for example](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/women-autoimmune-diseases-pregnancy/591901/), maybe women’s immune systems are permanently upregulated to be prepared for attempts by the placenta to secrete immune-downregulating chemicals during pregnancy, as part of [the creepy shadow war between mother and fetus](https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-between-mother-and-baby) to regulate the maternal environment. I don’t know, do you have a better idea? Anyway, women have more autoimmune issues and more upregulated immune systems, so if there was any good way to assess gender ratio in true postviral fatigue excluding all psychosomatic cases, that would probably be female-biased too.
Probably some Long COVID cases are psychosomatic just like some cases of *anything* are psychosomatic, but I don’t see too many signs that this is too important in explaining the phenomenon.
…and please allow me a moment of preachiness here.
Chronic fatigue sounds really fake to anyone who doesn’t have it. I think this is because it’s related to willpower. Willpower itself would sound fake to anyone who didn’t have to worry about it. “Oh, so you can go partying with your friends whenever you want, but as soon as it comes time to write a ten page report, your ‘lack of willpower’ prevents you from doing it? A likely story!” Still, all of us (except [Bryan Caplan](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/15/contra-contra-contra-caplan-on-psych/)) recognize how real and important willpower is - how having more of it is better than having less of it, and how some condition that caused you to have pathologically little of it would be a huge disaster.
In the comments section to the rough draft of this post, CJ [wrote](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-long-covid-much-more/comments#comment-2749742):
> I will say - I was one of those types of men to scoff with skepticism at people claiming to have chronic fatigue and the like. I would have called those people lazy and would have been adamant they were faking it or feeling like crap because of unhealthy lifestyle choices. Unfortunately I have learned the hard way the severity of neurological conditions, what it feels like to have brain fog, what chronic fatigue feels like, and how difficult it can be to communicate neurological symptoms to others. I now start from a position of listening to people who are willing to open up about their symptoms and trust that they are being honest. There are millions of people suffering in silence with untreated and undiagnosed disorders - those people are not all faking it or just dealing with psychosomatic conditions. I would recommend Jennifer Brea's documentary, Unrest. Thank you for shedding some light on the subject.
Heron [added](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-long-covid-much-more/comments#comment-2750530):
> I second the suggestion to watch 'Unrest,' and to consider the many unseen ill whose symptoms are deemed to be imagined. Until this last year, I had little patience with, and doubted, people who I saw as hypochondriacs. Then I became the thing I hated.
>
> Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Long COVID do have similarities from what I've read, since becoming ill in August 2020. At that time, here in Northern Ireland, there was scant availability of COVID tests; after spending three days trying to get hold of one, (by which time I'd stopped teaching my post-grad online classes & I haven't worked since) I became too ill to do anything. I figured if this was COVID I'd gotten off lightly, mostly constant severe headache, inability to think, a new experience of fatigue, high temperature, insomnia, hypersomnia, paresthesia, no smell or taste etc Debilitated but not dead. Except for the fact that I still have the aforementioned symptoms a year on and whilst they fluctuate in type and severity, the fatigue, headaches and cognitive difficulties are real. A brain scan, an appointment for brain and spinal MRIs (waiting lists, even when going private [as NHS has 3-8 yr waiting lists here in NI] are lengthy), rare virtual doctors and neurologists suggest my ailments constitute a post-viral thing, maybe Long C, they can offer nothing but pills for pain. There is no test for ME/CFS yet, nor a Long C test, symptoms and presentation are so varied. Given a widespread lack of knowledge and resources regarding these ailments, you're on your own. Maybe I've developed ME, I certainly have post-exertional malaise which my very prominent neurologist hadn't heard of. Looking at the history of ME/CFS\* and a dearth of research surrounding it, I hope that rather than dismiss the lives of sufferers of this or the long-lasting aftermath of COVID, that those experiencing such difficulties will be heard and learnt from. I only understood when I had no alternative.
I don’t think I ever actively pooh-poohed CFS, but like everyone else who encountered it, I underestimated just how bad it was until I met some patients with the condition. It is real and really bad. For whatever reason it is hard to think about and take seriously, but it really is as bad as people say.
</preachiness>
**6. Long COVID is probably rare in children**
This matters a lot, because children are (currently) ineligible for the vaccine, and also likely to encounter the virus at school. But children usually have mild cases of COVID and don’t die from it, so it’s tempting to just not worry about them. But if they could get Long COVID, that would make it much less tempting.
[Preliminary Evidence On Long COVID In Children](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.23.21250375v1.full) sounds like a good paper to draw conclusions from. It says 42.6% of children with COVID experience long-term follow-up symptoms, which would be higher than the rate for adults. But it has no control group, and most of the symptoms it finds don’t seem very COVID-related (eg rashes, constipation). The most common symptom (20%) is insomnia, which better studies in adults fail to associate with real Long COVID. The rate of known long COVID symptoms (eg taste and smell problems) is only about 3-4%, and no higher or lower than anything else. Probably these kids are just having problems at the usual rate and attributing them to their recent COVID.
[Blankenburg et al](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.11.21257037v1.full.pdf) do the correct thing and ask a thousand children about potential symptoms, then compare the number who say yes vs. no among COVID-seropositive and seronegative subjects. They find no difference between the two groups. Both are reporting a lot of insomnia, etc. They reasonably attribute this to pandemics being a stressful event that it’s natural to lose sleep over. This is really reassuring, but it can’t rule out a somewhat rarer syndrome. The authors say that they might miss symptoms with a prevalence of less than 10%, and [one of them](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7?mc_source=MTEyNjQxNzM4NjMzNDg2MjM3NzEwOjo6ZTU2NTZmYzEzYjBhNDczZWIxMGJhZDU5NzQxMjljNGQ6OnY0OjoxNjI3OTYyMDYwOjox#ref-CR3) gives his own personal guess that it’s 1%.
An [English team says](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.28.21257602v1.full.pdf) there’s a Long COVID rate of 4.6% in kids. But there was a 1.7% rate of similar symptoms in the control group of kids who didn’t have COVID, so I think it would be fair to subtract that and end up with 2.9%. And even though the study started with 5000 children, so few of them got COVID, and so few of *those* got long COVID, that the 2.9% turns out to be about five kids. I don’t really want to update too much based on five kids, especially given the risk of recall bias (ie you might notice / care about your symptoms more if you know you had COVID before getting them).
My overall conclusion here is that long COVID is rarer in children than adults, and may not exist at all. The studies tell us it’s probably somewhere less than 5% of kids, but so far we can’t conclude anything stronger than that.
**7. Vaccination probably doesn’t change the per-symptomatic-case risk of Long COVID much**
[Here’s](https://twitter.com/dianaberrent/status/1415042416340520969) a complicated Twitter thread about this. Of vaccinated people who got symptomatic COVID, about a third ended up with Long COVID symptoms, the same rate as in unvaccinated people.
Of course, vaccinated people are much less likely to get symptomatic COVID. But even conditional on getting it, they’re still much less likely to go to the hospital, die, etc. It would have been nice if the same was true of getting Long COVID. But it doesn’t look that way.
(all this information is from an online poll by a sketchy group of COVID “survivor” activists. But they wrote up their poll in [the scientific paper font](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21261030v1.full.pdf), as a PDF and everything, so I say we count it anyway)
[This NEJM study](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109072) wasn’t exactly designed to look for Long COVID in vaccinated people. But they found it anyway, at a rate of 19% after 6 weeks. This also fits within the (wide) range reported for unvaccinated people. They don’t give a symptom breakdown beyond “prolonged loss of smell, persistent cough, fatigue, weakness, dyspnea, or myalgia”, which sounds like the usual set.
These studies are pretty weak, and you could argue that given that vaccines decrease the average severity of COVID infection, and [infection severity is linked to Long COVID risk](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10875-021-01083-7), we should have a strong prior on vaccines decreasing Long COVID risk. And just before publishing this, someone sent me [this study](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1007511/S1327_Short_Long_COVID_report.pdf), which very preliminarily finds vaccines might decrease Long COVID risk by a factor of 2. I think a factor of 2-3 is believable; one of 10 or 20, less so.
Weirdly, there are some claims that [vaccines can help relieve symptoms of existing long COVID](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01511-z). Sounds kind of like sympathetic magic to me, but the researcher quoted in the linked article said it might “improve symptoms by eliminating any virus or viral remnants left in the body” or by “rebalancing the immune system”. So yeah, sympathetic magic.
**8. Your risk of a terrible long COVID outcome conditional on COVID is probably between a few tenths of a percent and a few percent.**
My original calculation went like this:
About 25% of people who get COVID report long COVID symptoms. About half of those go away after a few months, so 12.5% get persistent symptoms. Suppose that half of those cases (totally made-up number) are very mild and not worth worrying about. Then 6.25% of people who get COVID would have serious long-lasting Long COVID symptoms.
After doing that calculation, I read [this essay](https://www.mattbell.us/delta-and-long-covid/) by Matt Bell, who tries to figure out the same thing. He is much more optimistic. He agrees that about half of long COVID cases go away after a few months, but adds another 50% decrease from “few months” to “lifelong”, kind of on priors, admitting there’s not too much positive evidence for this. Then he adds another factor-of-two decrease from vaccination, based on [very preliminary studies from the UK](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1007511/S1327_Short_Long_COVID_report.pdf). He estimates that someone with my demographics (vaccinated man in his 30s) has a 2% risk of Long COVID conditional on getting COVID at all. Then he divides by five for the true worst case scenario, based on studies showing that a fifth of people with Long COVID report that it affects their daily activities “a lot”. So by his final number, I have an 0.4% chance of getting really terrible long COVID, conditional on getting COVID at all.
My friend AcesoUnderGlass also did [a writeup of this](https://acesounderglass.com/2021/08/30/long-covid-is-not-necessarily-your-biggest-problem/), published after I did my first-draft calculation, which seems to be thinking of this very differently, based entirely on hospitalization rates (which of course are very low in vaccinated people our age). She accordingly concludes that risk is very low. I don’t really understand her reasoning here, but I trust her a lot and am working on trying to converge with her on this.
What’s my yearly risk of getting COVID if I try to live a normal life?
[This site says](https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/covid-19-vaccine-breakthrough-cases-data-from-the-states/) only 0.1% of vaccinated Californians have gotten COVID after their vaccination. But vaccination was pretty new when that survey was done, so we might want to take this as a per one-to-two-months estimate. That would mean a risk of 0.5 - 1 percent per year. But not all these people are living normal lives, so my risk might be higher.
[MicroCOVID](https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=normal&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=20&riskProfile=average&scenarioName=custom&setting=indoor&subLocation=US_06001&theirMask=none&theirVaccine=vaccinated&topLocation=US_06&voice=normal&yourMask=none&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=moderna) gives me a good sense of how careful I’d have to be to stay within a risk budget of 1% COVID risk per year. When I play around with it, I think I am about 5x - 10x less careful than that, which would mean a risk of about 5%/year.
[This tracker](https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/) suggests my area has recently had about 1 new case per thousand people per week, which would imply 5% per year. But most of those people are probably unvaccinated, so my risk would be significantly lower than that.
I’m going to round all of this off to about 1% - 10% per year of getting a breakthrough COVID case (though obviously this could change if the national picture got better or worse). Combined with the 0.4% to 6.25% risk of getting terrible long COVID conditional on getting COVID, that’s between a 1/150 - 1/25,000 chance of terrible long COVID per year.
How does this compare to other risks? My ordinary risk of death per year, just from being a man in his 30s, is about 1/700 (though this includes drug abusers and stunt pilots, so my real risk might be lower, let’s say 1/1000). Here are some other risks, courtesy of [the BMJ](https://bestpractice.bmj.com/info/us/toolkit/practise-ebm/understanding-risk/):
In this context, I find the 1/150 risk pretty scary and the 1/25,000 risk not scary at all, so, darn, I guess there’s not yet enough data to have a strong sense of how concerned I should be.
**9. This is hard to compare to other postviral syndromes**
Going into this, I wondered if we might be able to ignore Long COVID. The argument would go like this: all viral diseases have a risk of postviral syndromes. Colds, flus, mono, lots of stuff that’s going around all the time. Lots of people get those postviral syndromes, and either recover or don’t, but either way we don’t make a big deal out of it. Since COVID’s considered “newsworthy” in a way flu isn’t, we obsess over its postviral syndrome even though it’s no worse than anything else’s.
This wouldn’t make Long COVID any less bad, and maybe we would be *wrong* to not panic more about colds and the flu, but it would at least give us some context and make things feel less scary.
Unfortunately, I can’t find anything supporting or opposing this picture. The only relevant study is [a meta-analysis by Poole-Wright et al](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.04.20244145v2), who (contra nominative determinism) don’t pool the studies by condition, which makes it hard to draw conclusions. I think all of their examples of postviral syndrome after flu are from severe hospitalized cases, so any comparison with COVID would be unfair. Although there do seem to be [scattered reports](https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/articles/2018-02-28/flu-got-you-down-even-after-youve-recovered) of post-flu problems, they’ve never been formally studied or quantified.
Mononucleosis is an infectious disease caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, affecting about 1/2000 people per year in developed countries. It has a famously nasty postviral syndrome, which [this paper](https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/193/5/664/877191) describes as “almost one-half of the group had substantial ongoing symptoms 2 months after onset and… ∼10% had disabling symptoms marked by fatigue lasting ≥ 6 months”.
Flu is as common as COVID, but nobody really talks about it having a significant postviral syndrome so probably it’s not that bad. Mono has a worse postviral syndrome than COVID, but it’s rare enough that it doesn’t cause massive society-wide effects. COVID is right in the middle: more common than mono, and (probably) worse postviral syndrome than flu. I think it’s fair to say that we may not have encountered a condition with this exact combination of risk factors and can’t dismiss it as similar to conditions we currently ignore.
One potential analogue might be the Spanish Flu of 1918. It was an equally widespread pandemic, and seemed to have some kind of [postviral syndrome](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KQQWGX8yRK4J:https://time.com/5915616/long-flu-1918-pandemic/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d). From TIME:
> In what is now Tanzania, to the north, post-viral syndrome has been blamed for triggering the worst famine in a century—the so-called “famine of corms”—after debilitating lethargy prevented flu survivors from planting when the rains came at the end of 1918. “Agriculture suffered particular disruption because, not only did the epidemic coincide with the planting season in some parts of the country, but in others it came at the time for harvesting and sheep-shearing.” Kathleen Brant, who lived on a farm in Taranaki, New Zealand, told Rice, the historian, about the “legion” problems farmers in her district encountered following the pandemic, even though all patients survived: “The effects of loss of production were felt for a long time.”
The 1918 flu seemed to have lots of psychiatric effects: “Norwegian demographer Svenn-Erik Mamelund provided such evidence when he combed the records of psychiatric institutions in his country to show that the average number of admissions showed a seven-fold increase in each of the six years following the pandemic, compared to earlier, non-pandemic years.” Coronavirus doesn’t - the excellent Amin-Chowdhury study above finds nothing. Still, this is the scale of thing I’m worried about.
The worst case scenario here is really really bad. If a few percent of COVID patients get long-term unremitting genuine CFS/ME, that has the potential to overwhelm government welfare budgets and long-term depress the economy. I think there’s a 90% chance the real situation isn’t that bad, but it’s scary that we can’t entirely rule it out. Aside from the somewhat different 1918 case, I don’t think we have any historical experience of dealing with postviral syndromes at this scale.
The medium case scenario is something more like “a few percent of infected people get moderate fatigue, which doesn’t really prevent them from working, and goes away after a few years”. I don’t know whether the level of media attention paid to this would converge on “boring and nobody notices” or “giant disaster”, and I think it would be compatible with either.
**10. Conclusions**
1. Long COVID is many different issues without a common mechanism.
2. Some of these are straightforward and not surprising, eg lung scarring and post-ICU syndrome from severe infection, and would happen in any disease of this severity. Others seem to be more like the poorly-understood postviral syndromes associated with several other diseases. While some symptoms may be psychosomatic, most are probably organic.
3 The three major categories of symptoms are straightforward cardiovascular-pulmonary issues, straightforward smell and taste issues, and more mysterious neurological issues.
4 Although these get better with time in some people, in a significant number (maybe ~50% of people who had them at six weeks) they persist for as long as anyone has been able to measure them (a few months in the case of COVID, a year or two in the case of comparable syndromes).
5. Post-COVID fatigue is particularly concerning. This would be very bad if we analogized it to CFS/ME, and still pretty bad if we analogized it to other known postviral syndromes. There is no proof that this always gets better over the long term, although no study has looked at them for more than a few years. Facing postviral fatigue on this scale is a new problem.
6 . Children probably get Long COVID less than adults, probably at a rate of less than 5% of symptomatic cases. But we don’t know how much less, and we can’t rule out that some children get pretty severe symptoms.
7. Although vaccination decreases the risk of symptomatic COVID, it probably doesn’t decrease the risk of Long COVID per symptomatic COVID case by very much, though it might decrease it by a factor of 2-3.
8. Your chance of really bad debilitating lifelong Long COVID, conditional on getting COVID, is probably somewhere between a few tenths of a percent, and a few percent. Your chance per year of getting it by living a normal lifestyle depends on what you consider a normal lifestyle and on the future course of the pandemic. For me, under reasonable assumptions, it’s probably well below one percent.
**EDIT:** Here are some other people who tried to do this same analysis. I learned about all of these after I wrote the first draft of this, so you can consider the basic thought process here to be independent of them - but I edited some things to account for what I learned from them before writing the final version.
* AcesoUnderGlass: [Long COVID Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem](https://acesounderglass.com/2021/08/30/long-covid-is-not-necessarily-your-biggest-problem/)
* Matt Bell: [If You’re Vaccinated, Your Main Risk From The Delta Variant Is Probably Long-Haul COVID](https://www.mattbell.us/delta-and-long-covid/)
* 1DaySooner: [FAQ: Long-Term Effects of COVID-19](https://www.1daysooner.org/long-term-risks-faq) | Scott Alexander | 40790820 | Long COVID: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | acx |
# On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
Jason Hreha’s article on [The Death Of Behavioral Economics](https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-death-of-behavioral-economics) has been going around lately, after an experiment by behavioral econ guru Dan Ariely was discovered to be fraudulent. The article argues that this is the tip of the iceberg - looking back on the last few years of replication crisis, behavioral economics has been undermined almost to the point of irrelevance.
The article itself mostly just urges behavioral economists to do better, which is always good advice for everyone. But as usual, it’s the inflammatory title that’s gone viral. I think a strong interpretation of behavioral economics as dead or debunked is unjustified.
**I.**
My medical school had final exams made of true-false questions, with an option to answer “don’t know”. They were scored like so: if you got it right, +1 point; wrong, -0.5 points; don’t know, 0. You can easily confirm that it’s always worth guessing even if you genuinely don’t know the answer (+0.25 points on average instead of 0). On average people probably had to guess on ~30% of questions (don’t ask; it’s an Irish education system thing), so you could increase your test score 7.5% with the right strategy here.
I knew all this, but it was still really hard to guess. I did it, but I had to fight my natural inclinations. And when I talked about this with friends - smart people, the sort of people who got into medical school! - none of them guessed, and no matter how much I argued with them [they refused to start.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/znBJwbuT3f5eWgM4E/shut-up-and-guess) The average medical student would sell their soul for 7.5% higher grades on standardized tests - but *this* was a step too far.
This is Behavioral Econ 101 stuff - [risk aversion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion), [loss aversion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion), and [prospect theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory). If it’s true, the core of behavioral economics is salvageable. There might be some bad studies built on top of that core, but the basic insights are right.
One more example: every time I order food from GrubHub, I get a menu like this:
And every time I order food from UberEats, I get a menu like this:
I find I usually click the third box on both. I want to tip generously, but giving the *maximum possible* tip seems profligate. Surely the third box is the right compromise.
I recently noticed that this is insane. For a $35 meal, I’m giving GrubHub drivers $3 and UberEats drivers $7 for the same service (or maybe there’s some difference between their services which makes UberEats suggest the higher tip - but if there is, I don’t know about it and it doesn’t affect my decision).
Again, this is Behavioral Economics 101 - in particular, one of the many biases lumped together under [menu effects](https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/course-homepage/2015-04-08/lecture-notes/lecture11menupers_2015.pdf). Instead of being a rational economic actor who values food delivery at a certain price, I’m trying to be a third-box-of-four kind of guy. That means that whoever is in charge of this menu has lots of power over the specific dollar amount I give. Not infinite power - if the third box said $1000 I would notice and refuse. But enough power that “nudging” seems like a fair description.
Nobody believes studies anymore, which is fair. I trust in a salvageable core of behavioral economics and “nudgenomics” because I can feel in my bones that they’re true for me and the people around me.
Let’s move on to Hreha’s article and see if we can square it with my belief in a “salvageable core”.
**II. Yechaim’s Historical Detective Story**
Hreha writes:
> The biggest replication failures relate to the field's most important idea: loss aversion.
>
> To be honest, this was a finding that I lost faith in well before the most recent revelations (from 2018-2020). Why? Because I've run studies looking at its impact in the real world—especially in marketing campaigns.
>
> If you read anything about this body of research, you'll get the idea that losses are such powerful motivators that they'll turn otherwise uninterested customers into enthusiastic purchasers.
>
> The truth of the matter is that losses and benefits are equally effective in driving conversion. In fact, in many circumstances, losses are actually \*worse\* at driving results.
>
> Why?
>
> Because loss-focused messaging often comes across as gimmicky and spammy. It makes you, the advertiser, look desperate. It makes you seem untrustworthy, and trust is the foundation of sales, conversion, and retention.
>
> "So is loss aversion completely bogus?"
>
> Not quite.
>
> It turns out that loss aversion does exist, but only for large losses. This makes sense. We \*should\* be particularly wary of decisions that can wipe us out. That's not a so-called "cognitive bias". It's not irrational. In fact, it's completely sensical. If a decision can destroy you and/or your family, it's sane to be cautious.
>
> "So when did we discover that loss aversion exists only for large losses?"
>
> Well, actually, it looks like Kahneman and Tversky, winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, knew about this unfortunate fact when they were developing Prospect Theory—their grand theory with loss aversion at its center. Unfortunately, the findings rebutting their view of loss aversion were carefully omitted from their papers, and other findings that went against their model were misrepresented so that they would instead support their pet theory. In short: any data that didn't fit Prospect Theory was dismissed or distorted.
>
> I don't know what you'd call this behavior... but it's not science.
>
> This shady behavior by the two titans of the field was brought to light in a paper published in 2018: "[Acceptable Losses: The Debatable Origins of Loss Aversion](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1013-8)".
>
> I encourage you to read the paper. It's shocking. This line from the abstract sums things up pretty well: "...the early studies of utility functions have shown that while very large losses are overweighted, smaller losses are often not. In addition, the findings of some of these studies have been systematically misrepresented to reflect loss aversion, though they did not find it."
>
> When the two biggest scientists in your field are accused of "systemic misrepresentation", you know you've got a serious problem.
>
> Which leads us to another paper, published in 2018, entitled "[The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain?](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1047)".
>
> The paper's authors did a comprehensive review of the loss aversion literature and came to the following conclusion: "current evidence does not support that losses, on balance, tend to be any more impactful than gains."
>
> Yikes.
>
> But given the questionable origins of the field, it's not surprising that its foundational finding is \*also\* dubious.
>
> If loss aversion can't be trusted, then no other idea in the field can be trusted.
This argument relies on two papers - Yechaim’s [Acceptable Losses](https://sci-hub.st/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1013-8) and Gal & Rucker’s [Loss Of Loss Aversion](https://sci-hub.st/https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1047).
Yechaim’s paper is a historical detective story. It looks at how Kahneman and Tversky first “discovered” and popularized the idea of loss aversion from earlier 1950s and 1960s research. It concludes they did a bad job summarizing this earlier research; looked at carefully, it doesn’t support the strong conclusions they drew.
From one perspective, nobody should care about this. All the 1950s and 1960s research was terrible - one of the most important studies it discusses had n = 7. Since then, we’ve had much more rigorous studies of tens of thousands of people. All that hinges on Yechaim’s paperis whether Kahneman and Tversky were personally bad people.
Hreha thinks they were. He calls their behavior “shady”, “shocking”, and says they “systematically misrepresented findings to support their pet theory…I don't know what you'd call this behavior... but it's not science.” Again, nothing important really hinges on this, but I feel like fighting about it, so let’s look deeper anyway.
Here’s how Yechaim summarizes his accusation against K&T:
> In addition, the results of several studies seem to have been misrepresented by Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) and Kahneman and Tversky (1979). **Galenter and Pliner (1974)** were wrongly cited as showing loss aversion, whereas, in fact, they did not observe an asymmetry in the pleasantness ratings of gains and losses. Likewise, in **Green (1963)**, the results were argued to show loss aversion, even though this study did not involve any losses. In addition, the objective outcomes for some of the participants in **Grayson (1960)** were transformed by Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) so as to better support a model assuming different curvatures for gains and losses (see Table 1). Finally, studies showing no loss aversion or suggesting aversion to large losses were not cited in Fishburn and Kochenberger (1979) or in Kahneman and Tversky (1979).
Yechaim bases his argument on three sets of early studies of loss aversion: Galenter and Plinter (1974), Fishburn and Kochenberger’s review (1979) and miscellaneous others.
**—Galenter and Plinter—** is actually really neat! It explores “cross-modal” perceptions of gains versus losses. That is, if you ask how much a certain loss hurt, people will probably just say something like “I dunno, a little?” and then it will be hard to turn that into a p-value. G&P solve this by making people listen to loud noises, and asking questions like “is the difference between how much loss A and loss B hurt greater or lesser than the difference between the volume of noise 1 and noise 2?” The idea is that the brain uses a bunch of weird non-numerical scales for everything, and we understand its weird-non-numerical scale for noise volume pretty well, and so maybe we can compare it to how people think about gains or losses. I don’t know why people in 1974 were doing anything this complicated instead of inventing the basic theory of loss aversion the way Kahneman and Tversky would five years later, but here we are.
Anyway, Yechaim concludes that this study failed to find loss aversion:
> Summing up their findings, Galenter and Pliner (1974) reported as follows: “We now turn to the question of the possible asymmetry of the positive and negative limbs of the utility function. On the basis of intuition and anecdote, one would expect the negative limb of the utility function to decrease more sharply than the positive limb increases... what we have observed if anything is an asymmetry of much less magnitude than would have been expected ... the curvature of the function does not change in going from positive to negative” (p. 75). Thus, our search for the historical foundations of loss aversion turns into a dead end on this particular branch: Galenter and Pliner (1974) did not observe such an asymmetry; and their study was quoted erroneously [by Kahneman and Tversky].
I looked for the full text of Galenter and Pliner, but could not find it. I was however able to find [the first two pages](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-010-2245-3_6), including the abstract. The way Galenter and Pliner summarize their own research is:
> Cross-modality matching of hypothetical increments of money against loudness recover the previously proposed exponent of the utility function for money within a few percent. Similar cross-modality matching experiments for decrements **give a disutility exponent of 0.59, larger than the utility exponent for increments**. This disutility exponent was checked by an additional cross-modality matching experiment against the disutility of drinking various concentrations of a bitter solution. The parameter estimated in this fashion was 0.63.
If I understand the bolded part right, the abstract seems to be saying that they *did* find loss aversion!
I was also able to find the Google Books listing for the book that the study was published in. Its summary is:
> Three experiments were conducted in which monetary increments and decrements were matched to either the loudness of a tone or the bitterness of various concentrations of sucrose octa-acetate. An additional experiment involving ratio estimates of monetary loss is also reported. Results confirm that the utility function for both monetary increments and decrements is a power function with exponents less than one. **The data further suggest that the exponent of the disutility function is larger than that of the utility function, i.e., the rate of change of 'unhappiness' caused by monetary losses is greater than the comparable rate of 'happiness' produced by monetary gains.** (Author).
Again, the way the book is summarized (apparently by the author) says this study does prove loss aversion.
Without being able to access the full study, I’m not sure what’s going on. Possibly the study found loss aversion, but it was less than expected? Still, I feel like Yechaim should have mentioned this. At the very least, it decreases Kahneman and Tversky’s crime from “lied about a study to support their pet theory” to “credulously believed the authors’ own summary of their results and didn’t dig deeper”. But also, why did the authors believe their study showed loss aversion? Why does Yechaim disagree? Without being able to access the full paper, I’m not sure.
**—Green 1963—** is the second study that Yechaim accuses K&T of misrepresenting. Here’s how K&T cite this study in their paper:
> It is of interest that the main properties ascribed to the value function have been observed in a detailed analysis of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions for changes of wealth (Fishburn and Kochenberger [14]). The functions had been obtained from thirty decision makers in various fields of business, in five independent studies [5, 18, 19, 21, 40]. Most utility functions for gains were concave, most functions for losses were convex, and only three individuals exhibited risk aversion for both gains and losses. With a single exception, utility functions were considerably steeper for losses than for gains.
Green 1963 is footnote 19. So K&T don’t even mention it by name. They mention it as one of several studies that a review article called Fishburn and Kochenberger analyzes.
F&K are reviewing a bunch of studies of executives. In each study, a very small number of executives (usually about 5-10 per study) make a hypothetical business decision comparing gains and losses, for example:
> Suppose your company is being sued for patent infringement. Your lawyer’s best judgement is that your chances of winning the suit are 50–50; if you win, you will lose nothing, but if you lose, it will cost the company $1,000,000. Your opponent has offered to settle out of court for $200,000. Would you fight or settle?
Then they ask the same question with a bunch of other numbers, and plot implied utility functions for each executive based on the answer.
Green is one of these five studies, and it does superficially find loss aversion. But Fishburn and Kochenberger have done something weird. They argue that “loss” and “gain” aren’t necessarily objective, and usually correspond to “loss relative to some reference frame” (so far, so good). In order to figure out where the reference frame is, they assume that the neutral point is wherever “something unusual happens to the individual’s utility function” (F&K’s words). So they shift the zero point separating losses and gains to wherever the utility function looks most interesting!
After doing this, they find “loss aversion”, ie the utility curve changes its slope at the transition between the loss side and the gain side. But since the transition was deliberately shifted to wherever the utility curve changed slope, this is almost tautological. It isn’t *quite* tautological: it’s interesting that most of the utility curves had a sharp transition zone, and it’s interesting that the transition was in the direction of loss-aversion rather than gain-seeking. But it’s tautological enough to be embarrassing.
Still, this is Fishburn and Kochenberger’s embarrassment, not Kahneman and Tversky’s. And Fishburn and Kochenberger included this study in their review alongside several other studies that didn’t do this to the same degree. Kahneman and Tversky just cited the review article. I don’t think citing a review article that does weird things to a study really qualifies as “systematic misrepresentation.”
I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how angry to be, because everything about Fishburn and Kochenberger is terrible. The average study in F&K includes results from 5-10 executives. But the studies are pretty open about the fact that they interviewed more executives than this, threw away the ones who gave boring answers, and just published results from the interesting ones. Then they moved the axes to wherever looked most interesting. Then they used all this to draw sweeping generalizations about human behavior. Then F&K combined five studies that did this into a review article, without protesting any of it. And then K&T cited the review article, again without protesting.
I have to imagine that all of this was normal by the standards of the time. I have looked up all these people and they were all esteemed scientists in their own day. And I believe the evidence shows K&T summarized F&K faithfully. Shouldn’t they have avoided citing F&K at all? Seems like the same kind of question as “Shouldn’t Pythagoras have published his theorem in a peer-reviewed journal, instead of moving to Italy, starting a cult, and exposing his thigh at the Olympic Games as part of a scheme to convince people he was the god Apollo?” Yes, but the past was a weird place.
As best I can tell, K&T’s citation of G&P agrees with the authors’ own assessment of their results. Their citation of F&K agrees with the reviewers’ assessment and with a charitable reading of most of the studies involved, although those studies are terrible in many ways which are obvious to modern readers. I would urge people interested in the whodunit question to read [Kahneman and Tversky’s original paper](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185). I think it paints the picture of a team very interested in their own results and in theory, and citing other people only incidentally, and in accordance with the scientific standards of their time. I don’t feel a need to tar them as “misrepresenters”.
**III. Okay, But Is Loss Aversion Real?**
Remember, all that is about the personal deficiencies of Kahneman and Tversky. Realistically there have been hundreds of much better studies on loss aversion in the forty years since they wrote their article, so we should be looking at those.
Here Hreha cites Gal & Rucker: [The Loss Of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain](https://sci-hub.st/https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1047)? It’s a great 2018 paper that looks at recent evidence and concludes that loss aversion doesn’t exist. But it’s a very specific, interesting type of nonexistence, which I think the Hreha article fails to capture.
G&R are happy to admit that in many, many cases, people behave in loss-averse ways, including most of the classic examples given by Kahneman and Tversky. They just think that this is because of other cognitive biases, not a specific cognitive bias called “loss aversion”. They especially emphasize Status Quo Bias and the Endowment Effect.
Status Quo Bias is where you prefer inaction to action. Suppose you ask someone “Would you bet on a coin flip, where you get $60 if heads and lose $40 if tails?”. They say no. This deviates from rational expectations, and one way to think of this is loss aversion; the prospect of losing $40 feels “bigger” than the prospect of gaining $60. But another way to think of it is as a bias towards inaction - all else being equal, people prefer not to make bets, and you’d need a higher payoff to overcome their inertia.
Endowment Effect is where you value something you already have more than something you don’t. Suppose someone would pay $5 to prevent their coffee mug from being taken away from them, but (in an alternative universe where they lack a coffee mug) would only pay $3 to buy one. You can think of this as loss aversion (the grief of losing a coffee mug feels “bigger” than the joy of gaining one). Or you can think of it as endowment (once you have the coffee mug, it’s yours and you feel like defending it).
These are really fine distinctions; I had to read the section a few times before the difference between loss aversion and endowment effect really made sense to me. Kahneman and Tversky just sort of threw all all this stuff out and saw what stuck and didn’t necessarily try super hard to make sure none of the biases they discovered were entirely explainable as combinations of some of the others. G&R think maybe loss aversion is. They do some clever work setting up situations that test loss aversion but not status quo or endowment - for example, offering a risky bet vs. a safer bet. Here they find no evidence for loss aversion as a separate force from the other two biases.
Somewhere in this process, they did an experiment where they gave participants a quarter minted in Denver and asked them if they wanted to exchange it for a quarter minted in Philadelphia. 60% of people very reasonably didn’t care, but another 35% had grown attached to their Denver quarter, with only 5% actively seeking the novelty of Philadelphia. Psychology is weird.
I understand why some people would summarize this paper as “loss aversion doesn’t exist”. But it’s very different from “power posing doesn’t exist” or “stereotype threat doesn’t exist”, where it was found that the effect people were trying to study just *didn’t happen*, and all the studies saying it did were because of p-hacking or publication bias or something. People are very often averse to losses. This paper just argues that this isn’t caused by a specific “loss aversion” force. It’s caused by other forces which are not exactly loss aversion. We could compare it to centrifugal force in physics: real, but not fundamental.
Also, you can’t use this paper to argue that “behavioral economics is dead”. At best, the paper proves that loss aversion is better explained by other behavioral economic concepts. But you can’t get rid of behavioral econ entirely! The stuff you have to explain is still there! It’s just a question of which parts of behavioral econ you use to explain it.
Complicating this even further is Mrkva et al, [Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated](https://sci-hub.st/https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1156) (h/t [Alex Imas](https://twitter.com/alexoimas/status/1431709168520638464), who has a great Twitter thread about this). This is an even newer paper, 2019, which argues that Gal and Rucker are wrong, and loss aversion does have an independent existence as a real force.
There are many things to like about this paper. Previous criticisms of loss aversion argue that most experiments are performed on undergrads, who are so poor that even small amounts of money might have unusual emotional meaning. Mrkva collects a sample of thousands of millionaires (!) and demonstrates that they show loss aversion for sums of money as small as $20. On the other hand, I’m not sure they’re *quite* as careful as G&R at ruling out *every other possible* bias (although I don’t have a great understanding of where the borders between biases are and I can’t say this for sure).
The main point I want to make is that all the scientists in this debate seem smart, thoughtful, and impressive. This isn’t like social priming experiments where one person says a crazy thing, nobody ever replicates it at scale, and as soon as someone tries the whole thing collapses. These have been replicated hundreds of times, with the remaining arguments being complicated semantic and philosophical ones about how to distinguish one theory from a very slightly different theory. If that takes replicating your result on a sample of thousands of millionaires, people will gather a sample of thousands of millionaires and get busy on the replication. Just overall really impressive work. I don’t feel qualified to take a side in the G&R vs. Mkrva debate, but both teams make me really happy that there are smart and careful people considering these questions.
And this is just a drop in the bucket. Alex Imas also links [Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0886-x?proof=t), which says:
> Though substantial evidence supports prospect theory, many presumed canonical theories have drawn scrutiny for recent replication failures. In response, we directly test the original methods in a multinational study (*n* = 4,098 participants, 19 countries, 13 languages), adjusting only for current and local currencies while requiring all participants to respond to all items. The results replicated for 94% of items, with some attenuation. Twelve of 13 theoretical contrasts replicated, with 100% replication in some countries. Heterogeneity between countries and intra-individual variation highlight meaningful avenues for future theorizing and applications. We conclude that the empirical foundations for prospect theory replicate beyond any reasonable thresholds.
Beyond any reasonable thresholds!
**IV. Do Nudges Work? or, How Small Is Small?**
Continuing through the Hreha article:
> For a number of years, I've been beating the anti-nudge drum. Since 2011, I've been running behavioral experiments in the wild, and have always been struck by how weak nudges tend to be.
>
> In my experience, nudges usually fail to have \*any\* recognizable impact at all.
>
> This is supported by a paper that was recently published by a couple of researchers from UC Berkeley. [They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials](https://eml.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/NudgeToScale2020-03-20.pdf) run by two "nudge units" here in the United States.
>
> I want you to guess how large of an impact these nudges had on average...
>
> 30%? 20%? 10%? 5%? 3%? 1.5%? 1%? 0%?
>
> If you said 1.5%, you'd be right (the actual number is 1.4%, but if I had written that out you would have chosen it because of its specificity).
>
> According to the academic papers these nudges were based upon, these nudges should have had an average impact of 8.7%. But, as you probably understand by now, behavioral economics is not a particularly trustworthy field.
>
> I actually emailed the authors of this paper, and they thought the ~1% effect size of these interventions was something to be applauded—especially if the intervention was cheap & easy.
>
> Unfortunately, no intervention is truly cheap or easy. Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it.
Uber infamously had a team of behavioral economists working on its product, trying to “nudge” people in the right direction.
Relatedly, Uber makes $10 billion in yearly revenue. If they can “nudge” people to spend 1% more, that’s $100 million. That’s not much relative to revenue, but it’s a lot in absolute terms. In particular, it pays the salary of a *lot* of behavioral economists. If you can hire 10 behavioral economists for $100,000 a year and make $100 million, that’s $99 million in profit.
Or what if you’re a government agency, trying to nudge people to do prosocial things? There are about 90 million eligible Americans who haven’t gotten their COVID vaccine, and although some of them are hard-core conspiracy theorists, [others](https://www.vox.com/22587443/covid-19-vaccine-refusal-hesitancy-variant-delta-cases-rate) are just lazy or nervous or feel safe already.
([source](https://www.vox.com/22587443/covid-19-vaccine-refusal-hesitancy-variant-delta-cases-rate))
Whoever decided on that grocery gift card scheme was nudging, whether or not they have an economics degree - and apparently they were pretty good at it. If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved.
Hreha says that:
> Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it.
This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives!
A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real. I’m ready to be forgiving here because behavioral economics is so well-replicated and common-sensically true, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who steers clear.
Second, Hreha says:
> To be honest, you can probably use your creativity to brainstorm an idea that will get you a 3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics "science" required.
>
> Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated.
>
> The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems.
>
> Figuring out how to increase sales of your product is hard. You need to figure out which variables are responsible for the lackluster interest.
>
> Is the price the issue? Is the product too hard to use? Is the design tacky? Is the sales organization incompetent? Is the refund/return policy lacking? etc.
>
> Exploring these questions can take months (or years) of hard work, and there's no guarantee that you'll succeed.
>
> If, however, a behavioral economist tells you that there are nudges that will increase your sales by 10%, 20%, or 30% without much effort on your part...
>
> Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's salvation.
>
> Thus, it's no surprise that governments and companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behavioral "nudge" units.
>
> Unfortunately, as we've seen, these nudges are woefully ineffective.
>
> Specific problems require specific solutions. They don't require boilerplate solutions based on general principles that someone discovered by studying a bunch of 19 year old college students.
>
> However, the social sciences have done a good job of convincing people that general principles are better solutions for problems than creative, situation-specific solutions.
>
> In my experience, creative solutions that are tailor-made for the situation at hand \*always\* perform better than generic solutions based on one study or another.
Hreha is a professional in this field, so presumably he’s right. Still, compare to medicine. A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon.
(also, at some point your customers might want to check your creative solution to see whether it *actually* gives a “3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics required”, and that would be at least vaguely study-shaped.)
Third, everyone who said nudging had vast effects is still bad and wrong. Many of them were bad and wrong *and* making fortunes consulting for companies about how to implement the policies they were claiming were super-powerful. This is suspicious and we should lower our opinion of them accordingly. In [a previous discussion of growth mindset](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/05/links-4-18-siter-plate/), I wrote:
> Imagine I claimed our next-door neighbor was a billionaire oil sheik who kept thousands of boxes of gold and diamonds hidden in his basement. Later we meet the neighbor, and he is the manager of a small bookstore and has a salary 10% above the US average... Should we describe this as “we have confirmed the Wealthy Neighbor Hypothesis, though the effect size was smaller than expected”? Or as “I made up a completely crazy story, and in unrelated news there was an irrelevant deviation from literally-zero in the same space”?
All the people talking about oil sheiks deserve to get asked some really uncomfortable questions. And a lot of these will be the most famous researchers - the Dan Arielys of the world - because *of course* the people who successfully hyped their results a lot are the ones the public knows about.
Still, the neighbor seems like a neat guy, and maybe he’ll give you a job at his bookstore.
**V. Conclusion: Musings On The Identifiable Victim Effect**
I actually skipped the very beginning of Hreha’s article. I want to come back to it now. It begins:
> The last few years have been particularly bad for behavioral economics. A number of frequently cited findings have failed to replicate.
>
> Here are a couple of high profile examples:
>
> * The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in [the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014](https://amzn.to/3kzebue))
> * [Priming](https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/) (featured in [Nudge](https://amzn.to/33KfcK5), [Cialdini's](https://amzn.to/2F1w3xF)[books](https://amzn.to/3ktw11P), and [Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow](https://amzn.to/31HupZK))
One place you could go with this is to point out that this all seems more like social psych than like behavioral economics. I agree that there’s a thin line at times, but I think these are clearly on the other side of it. It’s weird that this should matter, but if you’re claiming a field stands or falls together, then getting the boundaries of that field right is important.
But more important - what does it mean to say that the Identifiable Victim Effect has “failed to replicate”?
The Identifiable Victim Effect is a thing where people care more about harm done to an identifiable victim (eg “John the cute orphan”) than a broad class of people (eg “inhabitants of Ethiopia”). Hreha’s article doesn’t link to the purported failed replications, but plausibly it’s [Hart, Lane, and Chinn: The elusive power of the individual victim: Failure to find a difference in the effectiveness of charitable appeals focused on one compared to many victims](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6051573/). If I understand right, it compared simulated charity ads:
**Ad A:** A map of the USA. Text describing how millions of single mothers across the country are working hard to support their children, and you should help them.
**Ad B:** A picture of a woman. Text describing how this is Mary, a single mother who is working hard to support her children, and you should help her.
All subjects were entered into a raffle to win a gift certificate for participating in the study, and they were offered the opportunity to choose to donate some of it to single mothers. Subjects who saw Ad B didn’t donate any more of their gift certificate than those who saw Ad A. This is a good study. I’m mildly surprised by the result, but I don’t see anything wrong with it.
But also: there are several giant murals of George Floyd within walking distance of my house. It sure seems people cared a lot when George Floyd (and Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, and…) got victimized. There are lots of statistics, like “US police kill about 1000 people a year, and about 10 of those are black, unarmed, and not in the process of doing anything unsympathetic like charging at the cops”. But somehow those statistics don’t start riots, and George Floyd does. You can publish 100 studies showing how “the Identifiable Victim Effect fails to replicate”, but I will still be convinced that George Floyd’s death affected America more than aggregate statistics about police shootings.
It feels kind of unvirtuous to say this. Isn’t this like saying “I saw homeopathy cure my Uncle Bob with my own eyes, so I don’t care how many high-falutin’ randomized controlled trials say it doesn’t work?” Yeah, kind of. So what do we do?
The usual tactic here is to look for “moderators”, ie factors that make something true in one case but false in others. Maybe identifiable victims are better at provoking outrage, but not at increasing charitable donations. Maybe identifiable victims work better in a social context where different people are talking about and reblogging stories to everyone else, but not in a one-shot laboratory game. Maybe people interpret obvious charity ads as manipulation and deliberately shut down any emotions they produce.
This kind of moderator analysis has gotten some bad press lately, because whenever a replication attempt fails, the original scientist usually says there must be moderators. “Oh, you would have gotten the same results as me, except that I wore a blue shirt while doing the experiment and you wore a red shirt and that changed everything. If only the replication team had been a bit smarter, they would have realized they had to be more careful with clothing color. *True* replication of my results has never been tried!” I want to make fun of these people, but something like this has to be true with the George Floyd vs. Mary The Single Mother problem.
Maybe the real problem here is that we’ve all gotten paranoid. We hear “identifiable victim effect fails to replicate”, and it brings up this whole package of things - power posing, stereotype threat, Dan Ariely, maybe the whole Identifiable Victim industry is a grift, maybe the data is fraudulent, maybe…
I’m reminded of Gal and Rucker’s study on loss aversion. Hreha summed it up as “loss aversion doesn’t exist”, and I immediately jumped to “Oh, so it doesn’t replicate and the whole field is fraudulent and Daniel Kahneman was a witch?” But actually, this was the completely normal scientific process of noticing a phenomenon, doing some experiments to figure out what caused the phenomenon, and then arguing a bunch about how to interpret them, with new experiments being the tiebreaker. Again, loss aversion is real, but not fundamental, like centrifugal force in physics. The person who discovered centrifugal force wasn’t doing anything wrong, and it wouldn’t be fair to say that his experiments “failed to replicate”. Something we thought was an ontological primitive just turned out to be made of smaller parts, which is the story of science since Democritus.
I recommend Section 3 of Gal & Rucker, which gets into some philosophy of science here, including the difference between normal science and a paradigm shift. Part of paradigm shifting is interpreting old results in a new way. This often involves finding out that things don’t exist (eg the crystal spheres supporting the planets). It’s not that the observation (the planets spin round and round) are wrong, just that the hypothesized structures and forces we drew in as explanations weren’t quite right, and we need different structures and forces instead.
Somewhere there’s an answer to the George Floyd vs. Mary The Single Mother problem. This doesn’t look like “Scientists have proven that a thing called the Identifiable Victim Effect exists and applies in all situations with p < 0.00001”, nor does it look like “this scientist DESTROYS the Identifiable Victim Effect with FACTS and LOGIC”. Probably at the beginning it will look like a lot of annoying stuff about “moderators”, and if we are very lucky in the end it will look like a new paradigm that compresses all of this in an intuitive way and makes it drop-down obvious why these two cases would differ.
“Behavioral economics” as a set of mysteries that need to be explained is as real as it ever was. You didn’t need Kahneman and Tversky to tell you that people sometimes make irrational decisions, and you don’t need me to tell you that people making irrational decisions hasn’t “failed to replicate”.
“Behavioral economics” as the current contingent group of people investigating these mysteries seems overall healthy to me, a few Dan Arielys not withstanding. They seem to be working really hard to replicate their findings and understand where and why they disagree.
“Behavioral economics” as the particular paradigm these people have invented to explain these mysteries seems…well, Thomas Kuhn says you’re not allowed to judge paradigms as good or bad, but [Thomas Kuhn was kind of silly](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/08/book-review-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/). I think it’s better than we had fifty years ago, and hopefully worse than what we’ll have fifty years from now. | Scott Alexander | 40639720 | On Hreha On Behavioral Economics | acx |
# Open Thread 187
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who came to the Berkeley meetup yesterday (~125 people!) and especially to the organizers (Mingyuan, Miranda, Ruby, Oli, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone). Here’s [a Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/566160007909175/) if you want to stay in touch about future Bay Area meetups. And I have some updates to conversations I had with people yesterday which I put in [a comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-187/comments#comment-2729763) below.
**2:** Since the last post, meetups have been added in Bangalore, Tokyo, and Ife (Nigeria), and a lot of existing meetups have changed times/dates/places, so please [check the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to make sure the last thing you read about meetups is still up to date.
**3:** If you’re an organizer, Mingyuan will probably be sending you a survey sometime after your meetup date. It will ask how many people came to your meetup, so please try to get a rough count.
**4:**
This one is an image to hide it from prying AIs - I still don’t know what does or doesn’t make Google send people to W\*\*\*ipeg. | Scott Alexander | 40637193 | Open Thread 187 | acx |
# Berkeley Meetup This Saturday
**When:** Saturday, August 28, at 1 PM
**Where:** [deflection.jump.puppy](https://what3words.com/deflection.jump.puppy), aka the lawn where West Circle meets Free Speech Bikeway near the UC Berkeley parking lot.
**Who:** Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me!I’m starting my meetups tour there. I’ll be announcing the meetups on the tour (about 15 of them) on this blog a day or two before they happen. Sorry for the potential spam emails if none of them are relevant to you.
If you’re somewhere other than Berkeley, check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml) to find the closest meetup to you. | Scott Alexander | 40543215 | Berkeley Meetup This Saturday | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Missing School
*[Original article: [Kids Can Recover From Missing Even A Lot Of School](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even)]*
**I.**
Many commenters shared their own stories of missing lots of school and bouncing back from it. For example, [Rachel E](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638093):
> I was unschooled until I was 15, I'm pursuing a PhD now. Catching up on the basics wasn't easy but only took a few months. There are still a bunch of random general knowledge things I don't know, but at most it's caused a moment of embarrassment in social situations (e.g., when I genuinely thought dinosaurs were mythical creatures). BUT I was motivated to catch up, which I think makes a big difference. I'd say most kids probably don't care too much about their education, so for them, missing school might matter more
And [ral](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638156):
> Hear, hear. I had serious medical problems in grade 5, needed a major surgery in grade 6, and was told I'd have to miss a year. My parents tried homeschooling, rigorously followed a bunch of curricula, and discovered I could finish \*all\* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day and spend the rest of the time reading my favorite books. We were so unimpressed by the time wasted in "regular school" that we kept homeschooling another 2 years. I now have a PhD, but those were among the best days of my life.
And [Pepe](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2640398):
> If you are interested in an anecdote: I did not go to high school (well, attended for two or three months) and now I have a PhD from a very good university. Not receiving any formal education between the ages of 16 and 23 does not seem to have affected my ability to do college (and later grad school) level work.
And [Magus](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2641253):
> I'm homeschooling 6 kids, with the oldest two in college now, having started when they were 13-14. So far they're doing well, better GPA than school educated me at an equally good college. This is in spite of a total of 6-10 hours per week of instruction before college. They all proceed at their own pace, but I predict the rest of them will follow their elder siblings in starting college early and finishing in 4-5 years. This tells me that smart kids don't get much at all from school. I remember it mostly as busywork and a waste of time, and I'm happy that I get a chance to spare my children that misery.
I’m including Magus’ story for the “6-10 hours per week of instruction” comment, which is about 20% of what a normal student gets and should probably count as some of the way to unschooling. This seemed to be a popular theme among these kinds of comments, second only to the inevitable “…and now I have a PhD”.
I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?
**II.**
Another common theme was that I underestimate how bad missing school could be for poorer children. From [David Roberts](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638144):
> For the at risk kids, school closing is a disaster. Imagine a kid living in a homeless shelter or a kid whose parents are terrible role models or, worse, abusive, or a kid who doesn't have enough to eat. For those kids, school may be their only oasis of normalcy. Without school, they will at minimum suffer and might permanently lose a chance at a decent life. This has little to do with test scores and everything to do with socialization and having adults in their lives who care.
And [Dan](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2642694):
> Yeah, came here to say this. I remember articles from last spring talking about how all the rich kids would be fine, and the high school kids would survive (education-wise), but things could turn out really bad in the long term for elementary school kids from families with non-helicopter parents.
>
> (Of course, to the extent that this article is “Contra Helicopter Parents on Educational Outcomes” it would still be correct, but it might be missing other real problems while disproving their fake ones.)
And [Emily](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638151):
> A lot of kids in DC missed nearly a year and a half of in-person school, and we don't know how many of them also had very little involvement with virtual school. We have some data on learning loss already, and the real story is probably worse because we're not tracking anything for the kids who weren't present enough to take tests. I agree with the conclusion of this, which is that if you're the kind of parent who is an SSC reader, your young kids are probably not going to permanently academically affected in any way by not having school for awhile.
>
> But from the perspective of 'should we keep schools closed this year' - which is the perspective I am personally terrified of right now - this is a disaster on a number of levels. We see the kids who were already the worst-off losing the most learning. We don't know how many kids just aren't going to come back at all. (Chronic truancy already having been a major issue, it's not like we're great at making teenagers go to school if they don't want to.) Our teen (and tween) carjacking sprees certainly aren't being helped by not having kids in school. And the message that our city government has sent parents who do think it's important kids be in school is so negative for trust in institutions.
And from a slightly different direction, [Argentus](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2650904 ):
> I think there's a few places where missing school would have outsize effects. One is if the kid had some kind of treatable problem (say ADHD) that the parents are not equipped to identify but that possibly somebody at school might recommend taking the kid in for testing. Granted this could still be identified once the kid goes back to school, but if you assume the parent will fail to notice it forever but some teacher/counselor/whoever \*might\* notice it, then less exposure to the people who might notice will reduce the chance it ever gets noticed. For people who don't find this plausible, do not underestimate the inability of many low income or rural parents to think in these terms. My sister was not diagnosed with ADHD until she was in late high school and was prescribed Ritalin. It was literally life changing for her. It never occurred to my parents to think of her various behavioral problems in terms of anything except childish defiance they could fix with rules.
One thing I gather from all of these comments, especially David’s, is the idea of school as being covert social services for poor children.
It would be hard to openly have social services for poor children. Partly this is because Americans don’t like paying for anything that’s too openly a social service aimed at the poor, which means a lot of social service work gets picked up by other systems in roundabout inefficient ways.
And partly it’s because a lot of the service being provided is (taking David’s description seriously) something like “your home environment sucks, we are going to make you spend time with normal people in a normal environment in the hopes that some of it rubs off on you”. Framed that way, it sounds pretty offensive, kind of adjacent to “you are unqualified to raise this kid, so please turn them over to the government”. If you openly asked parents in dysfunctional families to do this, they would probably revolt. But forcing *everybody* get your social service, even the people from functional families who don’t need it, is a pretty neat trick for looking less sinister.
**III.**
The points above argued that closing school might increase inequality (I think all the cool people are calling it “inequity” these days, but I am not that cool). But a few commenters thought that actually, Zoom school is worse than nothing on that front. For example, [DasKlaus](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638814):
> My mother, a teacher at a regional school in Germany (regional schools being the type of school that doesn't qualify you for university, it's grades 5-10) (in a bad neighbourhood, if it matters), has observed that [in online school] about half the students did their homework assignments and tried to keep up (or their parents made them) whereas the other half didn't really do anything at all - some of the kids don't have (enough) access to the internet, no room for themselves, siblings they had to care for while the parents used the family computer for work etc, so this is not surprising. (I have heard from other classes in secondary schools where all kids attended Zoom meetings - I expect these are socioeconomic differences).
And to make things even more complicated, here’s [eccdogg](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2643510):
> For some kids zoom school was better than in person as far as learning. I think that was definitely the case for my 11 year old. In regular school there are lots of disruptive kids that get in the way of learning. In zoom school those kids just completely checked out, which was bad for them but actually good for my daughter because they were no longer disruptive.
**IV.**
Some random strong critiques of my post that I admit I missed or didn’t integrate well enough, starting with [neill\_here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2640002):
> NOLA lost about 1/2 its population after Katrina. Also, Case studies of neighborhood recovery show that more-advantaged neighborhoods before Katrina have higher rates of return, and even gain new residents, while disadvantaged neighborhoods remain sparsely populated (Elliott et al. 2009).”
…this being a rebuttal of my point that New Orleans kids seemed to do well (compared to their previous baseline) after missing a lot of school post-Katrina.
And [SKNC](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638228):
> [This article](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-students-left-behind-by-remote-learning) cites a number of studies about various incidents that disrupted education, including Hurricane Katrina, the bombing of German cities during WWII, the Blitz, and the closing of the public school system in Prince Edward County, Virginia after Brown v. Board, that claim to have found long-lasting effects though I’m sure some of them suffer from the problems you mentioned.
I acknowledge that there are always more studies. I tried to find all of them (or at least a good cross-section of the most relevant ones) before posting, but I guess I missed these. I haven’t looked at them yet, but I’ll try to do so if I post about this topic again.
And [Josh Winslow](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638056):
> Something that was missing from almost all of those studies is a measurement of resources required for catching the students back up. Almost all systems have some stabilizing mechanisms to help bring up students who e.g. got cancer back up to grade level (extra attention by classroom teachers, special ed, social workers, etc). Even disasters come with extra resources in the US to help support the students. Just because a system kept results within it's normal parameters during normal times doesn't imply it can do so during abnormal times. Looked at from this lens the Pakistan study looks much worse.
I predict that even without too many extra resources kids will catch up eventually, but I admit this is a plausible alternate explanation for the phenomenon of kids catching up.
**V.**
Another common category of post was “even if missing school doesn’t harm test scores, it probably affects some more complicated form of learning or understanding or academic engagement”. So, for example, [Shawn](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2637891):
> I think that test scores are the wrong thing to look at. I suspect the main benefits of grade school come from getting improved socialization and developing better strategies for general learning/problem solving. Like in your Spanish example, I also don't remember the majority of my second-language education from grade school, but I feel like the experience alone let me explore a lot of new ways of thinking.
And [Carl Pham](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638338):
> You also learn a great deal of categorization and existence knowledge. For example, while Scott does not remember Guassian elimination, he knows something called that actually exists, that it's relevant in math, probably algebra. That means if he hears "Gaussian elimination" in some context later on, he knows enough to roughly place the idea -- it has something to do with algebra -- which means he's about 80% of the way to being able to use the idea, all he needs now is some decent google-fu.
>
> This is a very important part of education, which naive people often overlook when they contemplate how much factual knowledge has evaporated from memory over time. Learning sets of facts brings with it some additional meta-factual knowledge, including about the existence and categorization of facts, which usually sticks around long after the facts have evaporated, and which allows the human mind to recover the knowledge much faster than someone who never learned the facts at all (especially in this era of search-at-your-fingertips).
And [Mr. Doolittle](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2644749):
> I certainly agree with this, but there is value in learning culturally relevant things that others will also learn. It amazes me when my kids come home from school having learned the same folk story cultural things (like Johnny Appleseed, but including songs, anecdotal stories, patriotism, etc.) that I did. There's a baseline for communal living that helps groups of people who have very little reason to ever meet still have shared values and understandings. If we all just do our own thing, then we might be better individuals in a worse society.
And [Ivan Fyodorovich](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2639941):
> Sure, I'm a molecular biologist and I don't use much beyond biology and general literacy. But to figure out I wanted to be a biologist I had to learn a lot of stuff. I figured out that I liked traveling but had no faculty for languages. I learned that I loved reading history but disliked doing historical research. I was good at math by normal human standards but not future mathematician/physicist standards. I liked devising chemical syntheses on paper but not doing them in the lab. But I really liked and had an aptitude for molecular bio, and that's what I do.
And [Phil H](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2643120):
> One further reflection: I think Scott's "we forget most of what we get taught in school" is not such an important point as he suggests. Because in that process, you learn something massively important: that you can pick up skills as needed. We never need long division after school, but we remember perfectly well that we learned it in 5th grade or whatever, and so we know we can learn it again. All of that learned-and-forgotten stuff does two things: (1) it maps out the sphere of knowledge, so we are aware that there's stuff beyond the things that we use in our day-to-day; (2) it gives us experience of learning stuff as required, so we have confidence to learn new stuff later.
And [Matt H](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2647812):
> The argument "because we forget much of what we learn in school, school isn't important" proves too much. I forget the content of most books I read years later. Is it not important to read books? No, I say -- those books affected me and had some small impact on my character and thinking. I have forgotten a lot of math since college, but learning the mathematics was still valuable because it taught me how to think mathematically. Same applies to sports. Most kids won't end up playing professional sports, so should they not bother playing while young? I actually think that competition is important -- kids learn what they can and cannot do.
And [dorsophilia](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2644066):
> During the pandemic a lot of kids sat at home bored out of their minds, wasting away on their laptops, melting into twitter and facebook, eating bonbons, and getting fat. They missed badmouthing their teachers and playing jokes on their friends, having tween relationships, and playing sports. No chess club, robotics, jazz band, or lacrosse. Many parents saw their kids wasting away so they ponied up the big bucks for private schools that stayed open. One of my elementary-age daughters got into Finnish hobbyhorsing through school. The school does expose kids to things they would not see at home. None of this is measured on tests...
It sure is lucky that this institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic, coincidentally ended up having all of these totally different benefits, any one of which would be sufficient justification for keeping it around!
Eliezer Yudkowsky [tells a parable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-seem-and-be-deep) about a society where people hit themselves on the head with a baseball bat eight hours a day for some reason. Maybe they believe it drives out demons or something. Then they learn that it does not, in fact, drive out demons. But everyone has great reasons why they need to keep doing it.
“It’s a great way to increase your pain tolerance so that the little things in life don’t bother you as much.”
“It builds character!”
“Every hour you’re hitting yourself on the head with a bat is an hour you’re not out on the street, doing drugs and committing crime.”
“It increases the demand for bats, which stimulates the lumber industry, which means we’ll have surplus lumber available in case of a disaster.”
“It improves strength and hand-eye coordination.”
“It may not literally drive out demons, but it’s a powerful social reminder of our shared commitment for demons to be driven out.”
“It’s one of the few things that everyone, rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, all do together, which means it crosses boundaries and builds a shared identity.”
“It binds us to our forefathers, who hit their own heads with bats eight hours a day.”
“If we stopped forcing everyone to do it, better-informed rich people would probably be the first to abandon the practice. And then they would have fewer concussions than poor people, which would promote inequality.”
“It creates jobs for bat-makers, bat-sellers, and the overseers who watch us to make sure we bang for a full eight hours.”
“Sometimes people collapse of exhaustion after only six hours, and that’s the first sign that they have a serious disease, and then they’re able to get diagnosed and treated. If we didn’t make them bang bats into their heads for eight hours, it would take much longer to catch their condition.”
“Chesterton’s fence!”
None of these are false per se. Banging a bat against your head for eight hours a day does have lots of advantages. They’re just not advantages that would cause us to want to take up the practice if we weren’t already used to it.
Eliezer brings this up as part of his project of teaching rationality, and it’s a great example. What do you do in a world where people can easily generate superficially-plausible reasons for hitting your head with a bat for eight hours? Abandon reason entirely? But then you’re left with social convention, which in this case is hitting your head with a bat. Some kind of really rigorous cost-benefit analysis? I don’t want to say this is impossible, but it would be pretty hard, and I would hate for anything important to hinge on getting it right.
I don’t think we have a great solution yet, which is why we always talk about “the rationalist project” and not “the rationalist solved problem”. But I get nervous when I see a giant institution with lots of really legible costs, whose legible benefits don’t withstand scrutiny, and people proposing a bunch of very diverse, kind of flaky sounding illegible benefits that mean we should still force everyone to participate in it.
That’s my general objection. I also have a more specific objection, which is that everyone seems to think school has some sort of special ability to produce these illegible benefits - if we weren’t exposing kids to new things and new ideas at school, it would just never happen. Let me pick on the last comment in particular. Just to jog your memory, it was:
> During the pandemic a lot of kids sat at home bored out of their minds, wasting away on their laptops, melting into twitter and Facebook, eating bonbons, and getting fat. They missed badmouthing their teachers and playing jokes on their friends, having tween relationships, and playing sports. No chess club, robotics, jazz band, or lacrosse. Many parents saw their kids wasting away so they ponied up the big bucks for private schools that stayed open. One of my elementary-age daughters got into Finnish hobbyhorsing through school. The school does expose kids to things they would not see at home. None of this is measured on tests.
I always distrust adults who talk about how “bored out of their mind” kids are, because my mother would accuse me of being this person. “Oh, you say you hate school now, but once summer vacation starts, you’ll be bored out of your mind.” Then summer vacation would start and I would have an amazing time, and catch up on all the cool things I had wanted to learn about that I hadn’t been able to during the school year, and do lots of great activities. And then school would start again and I would be sitting in a mind-numbing classroom all day, stuck doing review worksheets for material we had learned five times before. And I would complain, and *again* my mother would say “Oh, but last time you were off school I’m pretty sure you hated it.” I’m pretty sure I eventually learned to telegraph how much fun I was having so frequently and obnoxiously that my mother gave up.
But also - I looked up [what Finnish hobbyhorsing is](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/world/europe/finland-hobbyhorse-girls.html). It’s a thing where you ride toy horses on sticks as if they were real horses, and pretend that you are galloping and cantering and breeding important Arabian thoroughbreds and stuff. I don’t want to make fun of this; it seems fun and imaginative, and it’s a harmless hobby that a lot of people enjoy. But it doesn’t seem so *obviously* non-make-fun-of-able that it should get to go around making fun of *everyone else*. If you are going to go around pretending that your toy horse is real, I feel like you owe it to other people to accept that their preferences might be valid too.
When I was young, a lot of these kids who were “wasting away on their laptops” after school were *learning to code*, something which - back in the dark days of 2000 - got pooh-poohed by adults. “My son is so addicted to videogames that he doesn’t just play them, he even spends all day reading tutorials on the Internet so he can make mods for them. If only he was at school for longer so they could make him do something cool, like Finnish hobbyhorsing!”
Obligatory xkcd ([source](https://xkcd.com/519/))
There’s this weird trap a lot of adults fall into where anything a kid does on their own, however interesting, is “wasting away”, and anything they do at school, however ridiculous, is Exciting Prosocial Learning Fun Glowing Childhood Memories. I think this might be entirely a function of whether the parents can spectate and take pictures that look good on a mantlepiece: easy with hobbyhorsing, harder with learning C++.
My neighbors have a four year old kid, and *every day* she comes up with games at least as imaginative as riding a toy horse and pretending that it’s real. The hobbyhorsing comment gets dangerously close to the idea that kids need adults to force them to play pretend, according to predetermined adult-made rules, or else they’ll never learn to have imagination. But if you just stop forcing kids to be sitting in school, or sitting in their room doing homework, during the time when they would otherwise be inventing these things, they will come up with things so much more brilliant than this. My own [teenage hobbies](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spending-five-thousand-years-in-an-alternate-universe/) looked to all the world like me sitting on a laptop, but I will put them up against hobbyhorsing on any axis you might care about, and I remain deeply grateful that I had enough time off from school and its stupid forced fake fun to develop them.
…sorry for getting so animated here, but this topic is *my* hobbyhorse. On another level, I 100% get where this stuff is coming from. I don’t have kids yet, but even now I’m scared that my future kid might be an Internet addict. Or wander into the wrong part of social media and become alt-right, or dirtbag left, or one of those people who quote-tweet Vox articles with the comment “This”. I laughed at my parents for having these kinds of fears, and my parents’ fears ended up completely wrong, and now I have those same dumb fears in turn. I don’t plan to fully unschool my children. I do plan to make them “try new things”, maybe even including Finnish hobbyhorsing. If they seem too relaxed all the time, I will have the usual parental worries that they’re getting soft and flabby and will not survive the winter. We just know so little about child-rearing that any deviation from the norm is scary, and there does seem to be a norm of “make sure your kids have some really tough experiences”. I’ve written about this before [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/). This kind of parent-child conflict is inevitable. Maybe the best I can do is try to avoid the very specific problems that traumatized me personally.
Though I also wonder if we could do what Nassim Taleb calls a barbell strategy. Let kids have fun some of the time, then do something crazy and challenging some other time - instead of forcing them to sit at a desk for 20,000 hours filling in worksheets with a few forced quirky hobbies thrown in here and there.
**VI.**
From the Twitter comments:
I got a lot of comments like these, and they kind of concerned me.
Yeah, I have some anti-school positions. But I was trying not to show them in the post. The post was aimed at generally pro-school people who were freaking out over the possibility of their kids missing a few months of school because of COVID, and I tried to meet them on their level. The fact that you can miss a few months of school and still do well academically, is no different in principle from that fact that you can miss a few months of training, and still become a world-class athlete. Great athletes miss a few months of training all the time, for injuries or something, and nobody ever says “oh, she missed six months of training, now she’ll never catch up to all those other athletes who have six months more training than she does”.
(this is actually kind of surprising, and I’d love to have a deeper model of what’s going on here)
But this is compatible with “training is valuable for athletes.” So my post wasn’t, in and of itself, meant to be an argument that school was valueless. Just that school had the same property as athletic training, where even though it might be valuable, missing a few months doesn’t hurt. Separately, not expressed in the post, I believed that school wasn’t that valuable for a lot of people. But I tried not to express it! But everyone acted as if I expressed it anyway!
I’m wondering whether people who knew my opinions elsewhere used them as context, or whether I failed to restrain myself and stick to the topic as well as I’d hoped.
There’s also an ethical issue here: is it okay to make the weaker point “you can recover from missing some school” and convince a lot of nice conventional-minded people that I’m on their side, when secretly I believe the much stronger claim that school itself might not be too valuable for a lot of people? I hadn’t thought of this as an ethical question at all, but at some point I saw someone refer to one of my stronger claims as “the mask comes off”, eg “he previously said he just wanted common-sense drug regulation, but now the mask comes off and you learn he actually wants to destroy the FDA” (I don’t endorse the word “destroy” here).
I think it’s generally fair to endorse a weaker claim even if you hold a stronger one. For example, a lot of people who want to defund the police, who think all cops are bastards, etc, probably also want to fight police brutality. Suppose one of these people writes an article successfully convincing others that police brutality is bad, and they don’t add “also we should disband policing as an institution”. Or suppose someone whose end goal is a full communist revolution is currently fighting for Medicare For All. Has anything gone wrong here? I would say no. We all have weak claims that we can defend easily and stronger claims that would take more argument, and it’s fair to decide how strongly you want to come off at any given time (as long as you’re not lying and denying you hold the stronger claim).
Maybe this is silly,and I’m defending myself against an attack no real person is making. Serves me right for checking Twitter.
**VII.**
Elsewhere in the world of Twitter takes I probably shouldn’t be reading - an epidemiologist wrote this tweet:
…and everyone roasted it harder than anyone had ever roasted anything before. EG Nate Silver:
Even the usually-restrained Tyler Cowen [got in on it](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/sunday-assorted-links-328.html):
> I really don’t view **MR** or links as a chance to dunk on people, but [this is so, so wrong](https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1429201199618797570), and so indicative of the problems with public health “experts.” More [here](https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1429156161614405634). That is an example, and in my view an instructive one, but really not interested in making this about any particular person. It was in turn taught by someone else, and it is believed by many in the field. The actual reality is that even very poorly educated Americans, on the whole, hold more sensible views than that.
I’m grateful that people aren’t as angry at me as they are with this person, but I’m not sure why - I feel like I was making a pretty similar point. Granted, I don’t care too much about closing schools - I guess I want parents/kids who want to go to school to be allowed to (and feel socially sanctioned to), and those who don’t want to etc. I still feel like she deserved better.
**VIII.**
The most charming part of the comments was the subthread on CS Lewis, starting [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2638156). I’ll just quote [FLWAB’s comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even/comments#comment-2639390):
> In "Prince Caspian" when Aslan goes around freeing the kingdom from Telmarine tyranny one of the first places he stops is a school building, which he magically turns into a forest glade. C. S. Lewis didn't like school, and for good reason. He was tutored by his mother until she died of cancer while he was young. Then he was sent to an awful boarding school in Britain, where the headmaster was suffering from some kind of mental disorder and only taught geometry: the rest of the "lessons" consisted of him randomly choosing kids to answer questions on various topics and beating them with a cane if they got it wrong. After the school folded (due to not teaching anything and having a crazy headmaster) he was sent to a much better boarding school where he didn't have a great time. Quoting from his autobiography: "Never, except in the front line trenches (and not always there) do I remember such aching and continuous weariness as at (school). Oh, the implacable day, the horror of waking, the endless desert of hours that separated one from bed-time! And remember...a school day contains hardly any leisure for a boy who does not like games. For him, to pass from the form-room to the playing field is simply to exchange work in which he can take some interest for work in which he can take none, in which failure is more severely punished, and in which (worst of all) he must feign an interest...Consciousness itself was becoming the supreme evil; sleep, the prime good. To lie down, to be out of the sound of voices, to pretend and grimace and evade and slink no more, that was the object of all desire--if only there were not another morning ahead--if only sleep could last for ever!"
>
> Then after a couple years of this his father took him out of school to be educated by a private tutor. He writes about how his father tried to prepare him for the change: "He did his best to put all the risks before me: the dangers of solitude, the sudden change from the life and bustle of a great school (which change I might not like so much as I anticipated), the possibly deadening effect of living with only an old man and his old wife for company. Should I really be happy with no companions of my own age? I tried to look very grave at these questions. But it was all imposture. My heart laughed. Happy without other boys? Happy without toothache, without chilblains, happy without pebbles in my shoes? And so the arrangement was made. If it had had nothing else to recommend it, the mere thought, 'Never, never, never, shall I have to play games again,' was enough to transport me. If you want to know how I felt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find that income tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world."
>
> So yeah, C. S. Lewis hated school big time. | Scott Alexander | 40487327 | Highlights From The Comments On Missing School | acx |
# If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Governor Of California?
Californians love long-shot bets. Actors trying to make it big in LA, tech founders chasing unicorns in San Francisco, cult leaders trying to found religions in Pasadena. In Silicon Valley, VCs turn the long-shot bet into an art: if some new startup has a 5% chance of making a billion, that's $50 million in expectation. Just a whole state full of people looking for weird opportunities.
...which makes it extra funny that the biggest opportunity of all came by a few months ago, and they all missed it.
My claim is that basically anyone with the slightest amount of fame or money - any B-list actor, any second-tier tech CEO, any successful blogger or influencer, maybe me, maybe even you - could have maneuvered themselves into a position where they had a 5-10% chance of becoming Governor of California.
Let's start at the beginning.
Governor Gavin Newsom had a bad year. First he pissed off Republicans with his strong response to COVID. Then he pissed off the people who wanted strong responses to COVID by attending an unvaccinated unmasked dinner. Also, taxes are still high, homelessness is still high, rents are still (too damn) high, and parts of the state are literally on fire. Gavin Newsom didn't cause most of this, but he also hasn't announced any particularly inspired plans to fight it. Just a really, really bad year.
(also, his ex-wife is [dating Donald Trump Jr](https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/15/gavin-newsom-muses-on-kimberly-guilfoyle-dating-donald-trump-jr/), which has to hurt)
California has a long tradition of direct democracy. Citizens can circulate petitions, and if they get enough signatures, everyone has to vote on them. After several tries, Republicans finally got enough signatures on a “recall Newsom” petition to trigger an election. The way the election works is: there are two questions on the ballot. First, should Newsom be removed as governor? Second, if he is removed, who replaces him? Everyone gets to vote on both questions, so even if you want to keep Newsom you can still vote on who replaces him if he loses.
Several top California Republicans signed up as replacement candidates. But top California Democrats didn't. The state party [officially recommends](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/20/democrats-nightmare-recall-newsom/) voters say no to recalling Newsom (obviously), but also that they leave the question about his replacement blank. In keeping with this policy, no important Democrat has signed up as a potential replacement candidate. A few randos with (D)s next to their name signed up for vanity campaigns, but that's it.
Maybe at some point this seemed like a defensible position? California is a deep blue state, so maybe Democrats thought they could just...not dignify the recall with a response? [EDIT: Commenters bring up that [in the 2003 recall election](https://www.kqed.org/news/11870960/should-a-democrat-run-in-the-newsom-recall-we-asked-cruz-bustamante), Democrats fielded a great replacement candidate, lots of Democrats who disliked the governor voted yes on recall because it was costless with such a good replacement, and then the governor got recalled and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger won the replacement election. Now they want to try the opposite strategy of forcing Democratic voters to oppose the recall entirely.] But the mask mandates are lasting longer than expected, the wildfires are pretty bad this year, and Newsom supporters lack all conviction while his opponents are full of passionate intensity. For whatever reason, [polls show](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/california-recall-polls/) the recall-Newsom question is 50-50 to pass right now.
That left Democrats under increasing pressure to unite around a Democratic replacement candidate. This wouldn't mean abandoning Newsom - just telling voters "Please vote no on the recall, but in case the recall wins anyway, please vote for so-and-so as the replacement." But since no real Democrats are on the ballot, they need one of the randos who ran a vanity campaign.
Right now the leading rando is Kevin Paffrath, a "YouTube landlord influencer". I didn’t even know this was a thing, but apparently it is, and Kevin Paffrath does it. Also, at one point he was [charged with disorderly conduct for running through a rival YouTube personality's offices while dressed as a Christmas elf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Paffrath#Legal_issues). Kevin isn't anyone's first choice for a Democratic standard-bearer. But apparently the other randos are even worse. So here we are:
Source [here](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7214/Who-will-be-the-governor-of-California-on-Dec-31). It sums to more than 100% because of usual prediction market issues like fees, transaction costs, etc.
The markets give Paffrath about a 10% chance of becoming Governor of California.
I think this makes sense. Republicans might turn out to vote in higher numbers than Democrats, which would mean the recall passes. But they might split their votes among the many interesting Republican candidates, the Democrats might all vote straight Paffrath, and Paffrath might win. This isn’t the most likely scenario, but, again, 10% chance.
So my claim is: if you (or I or whoever else) had been thinking clearly six months ago when candidacy applications were open, you could have done what Kevin did. Sign up as a candidate to replace Newsom. Put a D after your name. Campaign under a banner of "Keep Newsom, but choose me as a backup". If you didn’t have a history of elf-related misadventures, maybe the Democrats would have united around you instead of Paffrath. And then you'd have the 10% chance of becoming CA governor instead of him.
Are there any strong arguments against this claim?
Maybe it was impossible to realize things would be this close back when applications to become a candidate were open? But those didn’t close until July, and in July the prediction markets were already giving Paffrath a 10% chance. Granted, the argument was a little different (Newsom was looking stronger, and popular Republican talk show host Larry Elder hadn’t declared his candidacy yet), but 10% is 10%, right?
Maybe Paffrath is a stronger candidate than I think? His YouTube has 1.9 million subscribers, compared to (eg) only 35,000 ACX subscribers, so maybe he’s actually a really big Internet celebrity, such that minor Internet celebrities can’t compete? But I think YouTube subscribers are just really easy to get. Google Trends shows pre-campaign Paffrath gets about 5-10x times higher search volume than I do, which I guess is a lot. But I have infinity times fewer elf-related misadventures than he does, so I still think it’s pretty even. There is another Democratic candidate named Patrick Kilpatrick who doesn’t seem clearly worse than Paffrath but hasn’t gotten the same level of name recognition; maybe you would end up in the same place? I’m not sure. My guess is Kilpatrick just didn’t spend enough money.
Maybe in fact Paffrath is rich and able to outspend everyone else? But here’s the graph of campaign spending this cycle…
Source is [here](https://calmatters.org/politics/2021/08/newsom-recall-campaign-spending/). I know he’s a dark horse, but I think it would be kind of fitting if ERROR got elected California governor.
…and it shows Paffrath spending $250,000 or so. There are 1.1 million millionaires in California, any of whom could presumably outspend him if they wanted.
Maybe if you joined the race after Paffrath, you and Paffrath would split the Democratic vote and a Republican would win? I think this is the strongest objection. But Paffrath isn’t getting lots of attention because he’s organically running a great campaign. He’s getting attention because the media is looking for some Democrat to tell people to vote for, and he’s the best they can find. If you had been around as an elf-related-misadventure-less Democrat for the media to unite around, maybe you could have just trounced him.
Maybe you should actually be scared of the California Democratic Party and its demand that no Democrat stand as a replacement for Governor Newsom? I think this makes sense if you want a future career in California state politics; probably they can blacklist you forever if you cross them. But I wasn’t expecting to have a future career in California state politics, neither were you, and probably neither was Kevin Paffrath. That’s why we would have been able to take this weird opportunity that all the real politicians turned down. Also, given the level of competence they’ve shown here, having the California state Democratic Party out for your head is probably the surest path to a long and healthy life.
Maybe becoming governor isn’t as cool as it sounds, because you’d only get to serve out the last year of Newsom’s term, then get replaced in 2022? But in 2022, you’d be the Democratic incumbent, and even if the rest of the party tried to remove you, you’d have a strong platform to fight back from. Also, even if you didn’t care at all about governing California, it would be a heck of a way to shape the national conversation. I would never have heard of Paffrath if not for all this. How many more landlords do you think are watching his videos now?
Maybe subjecting yourself to the misery of a campaign for a mere 10% chance of becoming governor isn’t worth it? I think this is true for a lot of people. But I’m reminded of [this profile](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-profile-085444366.html) of billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, which says:
> Though it may sound like a stretch — lots of billionaires have boundless ambition — both Singh and Barbara Fried firmly believe that Bankman-Fried’s risk-tolerance stems from his effective altruism.
>
> Barbara Fried puts it this way. “If you’re earning money for personal consumption, there is a very steep, declining marginal utility of income. After your fifth Porsche, do you really need a sixth? . . . But if you’re earning money to give it away to charity, there’s no diminishing marginal utility to money. The last life you save is worth as much as the first life you save.”
In the same way, if you don't have diminishing marginal utility to power, a 10% chance at the California governorship looks fantastic. The point of VC funds is to help people who do have declining marginal utility to money act as if they don't. The point of movements and ideologies ought to be to do something similar with power. But this time, nobody bit.
My conclusions are:
1. A lot of people in California like to think that we are Very Smart, but in this case a YouTube celebrity landlord beat all of us.
2. There have been a lot of fights around here about whether you can really get power just by being intelligent, able to predict things accurately, etc. I think this is a point in favor - sometimes there are big opportunities just waiting for someone to notice them. But also a point against - intelligence did not, in fact, help anyone notice this opportunity. Overall kind of a wash.
3. Californians are lucky Peter Thiel isn't a Democrat, because his mind is minmaxed for spotting opportunities like this, and you can bet he would have gotten involved here if he could have. The rest of us should keep re-reading *[Zero To One](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-one/)* until it penetrates our thick skulls.
4. The most likely outcome is still that Newsom manages a razor-thin victory and all of this stays hypothetical. | Scott Alexander | 40430745 | If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Governor Of California? | acx |
# Carbon Costs Quantified
This post tries to quantify how much carbon is produced by various activities, lifestyle changes, and actors.
I can’t stress enough how approximate and unreliable these numbers are. The reason I made this chart and other people didn’t isn’t because I’m smarter or harder-working than they are. It’s because I’m less responsible, and more willing to use numbers that are kind of grounded in wild guesses, and technically shouldn’t be compared to each other. My defense is they’re probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct, and [I believe](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/) having probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct estimates is better than having no estimates at all.
Explanations below:
Check the sources for explanations of how I calculated some of these.
**Lbs CO2** is self-explanatory - except that in a few cases, especially those involving beef, it also includes other greenhouse gases, converted to CO2 at equivalent levels of global warming contribution.
**Avg US person-years** is what fraction of the average American's yearly carbon emissions that much CO2 represents. So for example 0.25 means it's one-quarter of the average American's yearly emissions, and 50 means it emits 50 times as much CO2 as the average American.
**$ offset** is how much money it would cost to offset that much carbon, by eg planting trees. Offset cost is controversial, so I've included two numbers - optimistic and pessimistic.
“Optimistic” is closest to the existing consensus, and is the price at which most companies will sell you offsets. I took [Native Energy](https://native.eco)'s $15/ton as my guide, but there are lots of places with more or less the same price. They usually work by paying people in Third World countries not to cut down trees; since trees remove carbon from the atmosphere, this ought to offset emissions. But there are [a lot of ways this can go wrong](https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/). The Third World people can accept the money, then cut down the trees anyway. Or they can take money for not cutting down trees that they never intended to cut down. Or they can take money from multiple people for not cutting down the same tree. Or they can lie and there were never any trees at all. Offset companies try to watch for these failure modes, but a lot of people are skeptical. Also, even when this represents the true price of offsetting the marginal unit of carbon, it might not scale. You will run out of trees to protect long before you run out of carbon to offset.
“Pessimistic” comes from [Climeworks](https://climeworks.com/), a company that builds giant reverse-factories which take carbon out of the air. If you’re maximally skeptical about any charity's ability to offset CO2, these are the people for you - they can literally hand you a bottle full of the carbon they removed, so you don't need to take anything on faith. But they charge as much as $1000/ton (I think other places charge less, more like $250-500/ton, but they’re still kind of experimental and you personally cannot buy offsets there). You’ll notice there’s more than a whole order of magnitude between the optimistic and pessimistic estimates - welcome to climate economics.
**Cost or value** is kind of hand-wavey. For some things, it's the price of the item - for example, for "train trip LA -> NYC", it's the cost of a cross-country train ticket; for "eat a cheeseburger", it's the price of a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds. Other times it's about making money - for "mine one Bitcoin", it's the value of one Bitcoin (which may be wildly different now than when I wrote this, sorry). For corporations, it's their yearly revenue; for countries, it's their yearly GDP. This isn't very principled and I'm sorry. I included this so I could calculate the %Cost statistic below.
**%Cost** is what percent of the cost/value of something it would take to offset its carbon (I used the geometric mean of the optimistic and pessimistic offset estimates for this, so a little over $100/ton; people could reasonably complain that if you believe normal offsets work, these numbers are all an order of magnitude too pessimistic). A lower number is “better”. If something’s %Cost is 10, it means that it would take 10% of the cost of item to offset the carbon produced. I gave various things whose cost is entirely based on electricity a %Cost of 45, which is the general %Cost of electricity - it will be less in places with more renewables, and higher in places with more fossil fuels. Some of these numbers are kind of arbitrary, and the whole category has weird implications - for example, if the airline company doubled the price of every ticket, their %Cost would go down, and they would look more carbon-efficient. I wouldn't make too much out of these numbers, and I’ve left them in grey to emphasize this.
**Sources** are listed at the bottom of this post.
This table can’t tell you what your ethical duties are. I'm concerned it will make some people feel like whatever they do is just a drop in the bucket - all you have to do is spend 11,000 hours without air conditioning, and you'll have saved the same amount of carbon an F-35 burns on one airstrike! But I think the most important thing it could convince you of is that if you were previously planning on letting yourself be miserable to save carbon, you should buy carbon offsets instead. Instead of boiling yourself alive all summer, spend between $0.04 and $2.50 an hour to offset your air conditioning use.
But you may not want to literally offset your carbon. I use “offset” here to mean a donation that removes a linear and quantifiable amount of carbon from the atmosphere per dollar. But this is probably a less effective use of money than donating the same amount to a generic anti-climate-change charity. [Clean Air Task Force](https://www.catf.us/) is the one I’ve heard a lot of smart people recommend, though I also donate to speculative carbon removal work like [Project Vesta](https://www.projectvesta.org/). Depending on your philosophy of what offsetting means and when it’s acceptable, you might want to calculate how much it *would* take to offset your carbon use, then donate it somewhere else instead.
What are the responsibilities of an ordinary citizen facing the threat of climate change? I support [light yokes](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/16/the-economic-perspective-on-moral-standards/); if I had to advise people based on what I learned making this table, I would suggest:
* Try to stay informed.
* Elect politicians who take the problem seriously, especially ones who support carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, vehicle emission standards, nuclear and renewable power, closing coal plants as soon as practically possible, and (when ethical) encouraging other countries to do the same.
* If you’re otherwise ambivalent between companies (eg Coke vs. Pepsi), patronize ones that try hard to reduce or offset their carbon footprint.
* Offset your carbon emissions if you can afford it
* Consider donating 10% of your income to effective charities, which might include effective climate-related charities like Clean Air Task Force.
I think if you're doing these things, you don't need to obsess too much about which new technology or activity is secretly a Climate Villain, or give up too many of the things that you enjoy. I’ll try to have some more posts soon fleshing out why I think this.
**Sources**
**1.** https://www.science20.com/science\_mom/i\_wanna\_go\_green\_so\_show\_me\_the\_math
**2.** https://www.igs.com/energy-resource-center/energy-101/how-much-electricity-do-my-home-appliances-use
**3.** https://www.energuide.be/en/questions-answers/how-much-power-does-a-computer-use-and-how-much-co2-does-that-represent/54/
**4.** https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/546289/easy-ways-to-reduce-your-carbon-footprint
**5.** http://www.openthefuture.com/cheeseburger\_CF.html
**6.** https://native.eco/for-individuals/calculators/#Travel
**7.** https://www.sabaparking.co.uk/news/blog/planes-trains-and-automobiles-the-carbon-most-efficient-way-to-travel
**8.** https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoins-are-there/, https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-renewable-china . Like everything else that uses electricity, this is much worse in areas that use fossil fuels and much better in areas that use renewables.
I’d originally included a line for the carbon price of a single Bitcoin transaction, but this was too controversial and philosophically complicated. Individual Bitcoin transactions don’t themselves release carbon, but the Bitcoin network as a whole does, and it exists to support transactions, so in theory you can divide the network cost by the number of transactions to get a per-transaction carbon number, which is something like 1,000 lbs - half the emission cost of a cross-country flight. But many Bitcoin users now use something called the Lightning Network, which is different from the regular blockchain and doesn’t consume much more carbon than other Internet transactions. So one way to look at this is that on-chain transactions are carbon-expensive, and Lightning transactions are cheap. But since neither of them actually costs carbon, I felt weird asserting this, and I just dropped the whole category.
**9.** https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-dirtier-than-high-performance-pick-up-trucks-says-edmunds-insidelinecom.html
**10.** https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/4/2/024008/pdf . I'm using their on-peak time because I'm assuming the average 20 mile bus trip is a commute. The paper claims that under some reasonable ways of thinking about things, taking the bus off-peak is actually more polluting than taking a car, because we're imagining eg an entire bus with you as the only passenger, which requires more carbon than an entire car with you as the only passenger. This seems a little hokey, because the bus is going to run its route whether you're on it or not, but it's a natural consequence of dividing the carbon cost of the bus by number of passengers and assigning you your "share", which seems like the right way to handle peak times. Since I've used their peak numbers, this methodological dispute doesn't affect my table.
**11.** https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-on-netflix
**12.** https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/04/gpt3\_carbon\_footprint\_estimate/
**13.** https://www.statista.com/statistics/531531/carbon-emissions-worldwide-walmart/, https://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-locations. Divide ~20 million tons per year by ~10,000 stores.
**14.** https://www.treehugger.com/spacex-launch-puts-out-much-co-flying-people-across-atlantic-4857958
**15**. https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-many-cars-equal-the-co2-emissions-of-one-plane/
**16.** https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/co2-challenge-that-towers-over-tall-buildings-9x3jzn5s3
**17.** [removed]
**18.** https://grist.org/article/the-department-of-defense-wants-to-protect-itself-from-climate-change-threats-its-helping-to-spur/, https://paullaherty.com/2015/01/10/calculating-aircraft-co2-emissions/ . I am assuming a mission involves using all the fuel in the fuel tank.
**19.** http://www3.cec.org/islandora/en/item/2165-north-american-power-plant-air-emissions-en.pdf . The coal number is from Bowen, the largest coal plant in the US. The natural gas number is from Martin, a comparably-sized natural gas plant.
**20.** https://www.vox.com/2014/7/2/5865109/study-going-vegetarian-could-cut-your-food-carbon-footprint-in-half. I rounded up quite a bit to adjust for Americans eating more meat than British people.
**21.** https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change, https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a32880477/average-mileage-per-year/
**22.** https://native.eco/for-individuals/calculators/, where SUV is "light truck" and generic car is "medium gasoline automobile", using the 13500 mile/year number.
**23.** https://www.ccfpd.org/Portals/0/Assets/PDF/Facts\_Chart.pdf
**24.** Sources conflict a lot here, probably because a lot depends on what you hold constant (eg if you move from the suburbs to the city while keeping the same sized house and car, you might not save much carbon, but realistically city-dwellers have smaller houses and cars). The extreme low estimate is represented by https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-22/suburbs-might-be-just-as-green-as-cities , which is not sure suburbanites emit any more carbon at all, because suburban households are larger and so their carbon expenses (like heating, cars, etc) are divided over more people when producing a per capita estimate. But a very literal estimate - taking the average carbon output of an urbanite vs. a suburbanite - produces high numbers more like the one I listed. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_U.S.\_states\_and\_territories\_by\_carbon\_dioxide\_emissions claims that Washington DC inhabitants produce only 4 tons of carbon yearly, much less than the US standard of 16; NYC claims its residents only produce 6 tons. I've backed off slightly from these estimates to reflect uncertainty and the fact that most cities are less dense than NYC and DC.
**25.** Most media treatments of this question say that having a child produces 60 tons extra carbon per year, which is strange - the average adult produces only 20, so why would children be three times as polluting as adults? I eventually tracked down the source of this estimate to https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378008001003 , which is a paper arguing that your children will someday have children of their own, and those children will have children of *their* own, and so on, and all of this should be counted against you personally for deciding to have the first child in the chain. If the chain continued indefinitely, it would cost infinite carbon, but the authors conveniently assume that fertility rates will gradually decline, and everything will converge to some large but finite number of people. Then they calculate how much carbon all those people will produce under various implausible assumptions about the far future, divide it by your 80-something year lifespan, and say having a child produces 60 tons extra carbon per year of your life.
I can see reasons you might want to think that way, but I can see much better reasons you *wouldn't* want to think that way, so I will be trying to figure out the actual amount of carbon produced by an actual child in an actual year. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231105 suggests households with children produce about 1500 lbs more carbon than those without. Each child-having household has on average two children, so even though it's probably not completely linear let's say 750 lbs/kid. Americans produce about 3x as much carbon as Swedes, so assuming this stays constant I would expect US children to produce 2250 lbs. That matches the numbers on the graph at https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/if-you-act-your-age-whats-your-carbon-footprint/ . So I think the amount of carbon emitted by a child is around 2250 lbs on average.
Is it unfair to make this our final number? After all, eventually that child will grow up and produce more carbon, and it will still be your fault for giving birth to them. I am optimistic that in 2040 when your children are grown up enough to produce normal adult levels of carbon, normal adult levels of carbon will be much lower and offset prices will be much cheaper. If, when your child is an adult, average carbon emissions are 7.5 tons/person (half of today), and direct air capture carbon offsets cost $50/ton (5% as much as today, see [here](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652619307772) for source of prediction that this will happen) then when your child is an adult, the offset should cost if anything less than it does now. Also, when your child is an adult, they will be making money themselves and you can at least hope they will offset their own carbon.
**26.** https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-05/exxon-carbon-emissions-and-climate-leaked-plans-reveal-rising-co2-output
**27.** https://apnews.com/article/95986c4ba779f1d35ac4ca2afdd745c3
**28.** https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/google\_2019-environmental-report.pdf
**29.** https://grist.org/article/u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-most-countries/
**30.** https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/ford-hits-carbon-emissions-reduction-target-eight-years-early-2018-07-27/rep\_id:4136 . Good information on Ford was hard to find, but I'm calculating this based on their claim that they reduced emissions by 3.2 million metric tons and this corresponds to reaching their goal of decreasing emissions by 32%. That suggests their original emission level was 10 million tons and so their remaining level is 6.8 million tons. This is just their manufacturing emissions - it doesn't count emissions from the cars they make.
**31.** https://www.tesla.com/ns\_videos/tesla-impact-report-2019.pdf . This seems bizarrely low, but https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-17/tesla-s-first-impact-report-puts-hard-number-on-co2-emissions seems to confirm that it's much less than other companies'.
**32.** https://apnews.com/article/384fdb5ee7654667b53ddb49efce8023
**33.** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_carbon\_dioxide\_emissions
**34.** https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190613104533.htm
**35.** https://www.mta.info/press-release/mta-headquarters/mta-prevents-greenhouse-gases-17-million-metric-tons-annually
**36.** https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
**37.** https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines
**38.** [removed]
**39.** https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/19/billionaires-space-tourism-environment-emissions , https://www.space.com/virgin-galactic-raises-space-ticket-price
**40:** https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle | Scott Alexander | 40347952 | Carbon Costs Quantified | acx |
# Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
***[Meetup COVID alerts**: I’ve been informed that someone at the Salt Lake City meetup may have had COVID. Please let me know if you have any other information about COVID at meetups and I will list it here.]*
Thanks to everyone who responded to my [request for](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/outdoor-careful-meetups-everywhere) ACX outdoor meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 170 cities around the world, including beautiful Lusk, Wyoming (population: 1,526). [You can see the full list here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTsSMKpBkT5y4yOIcUYqKGzuyZ7jdZTKSrp-bASqY6Y5VV0ta6_hNwVWWMI2wQDzj21TaA4lMS-KSio/pubhtml), and I’ll also have it below in case you can’t access the spreadsheet for some reason.
I’ll be trying to attend ~15 of the 170 meetups. Since I focused on the US last time, I’m going to focus on Europe this year (plus a few US cities on the way). My *very provisional* itinerary (all dates in US month/day format) is:
**Berkeley:** Saturday 8/28, 1 PM **Boston:** Sunday 9/5, 5 PM **New York:** Monday 9/6, 5 PM **Washington DC:** Saturday 9/11, 5 PM **Lisbon:** Saturday 9/18, 5 PM **Madrid:** Saturday 9/25, 11 AM **Zurich:** Sunday 9/26, 5 PM **Vienna:** Saturday 10/2, 1 PM **Prague:** Sunday 10/3, 5 PM **Berlin:** Saturday 10/9, 1 PM **Paris:** Sunday 10/10, 5 PM **London:** Saturday 10/16, 1 PM
**Oxford:** Sunday 10/17, 5 PM **Cambridge:** Saturday 10/23, 1 PM **Edinburgh:** Sunday 10/24, 5 PM
Again, this is very provisional; I don’t want to make confident predictions about how quickly I can travel through Europe. Also, if COVID or something else comes up, I might have to drop some cities from my list, in which case I’ll let you know and you can have a normal meetup at whatever time works for you.
**Extra Info For Potential Attendees**
**1.** If you’re reading this, you’re invited. Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate ACX and everything it stands for. You’ll be fine!
**2.** Please re-check [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QFbM5B9KfsiwqO6DvJ4D05dQitBtZ6kYDwXZ3Hj6SEc/edit#gid=1585750313) the day of/before the meetup. Some organizers might have to reschedule, updates are more likely to make it on the spreadsheet than to make it here, and the spreadsheet will be the canonical version if anything differs.
**3**. You don’t have to RSVP or contact the organizer if you don’t want to (unless the event description says otherwise); the RSVP links are just there to give organizers a better sense of how many people might show up. I’ve also given email addresses for all organizers in case you have a question.
**4.** Last time I went traveling, some people gave me very nice gifts. I’m very grateful, but please don’t do that this time – I’ll be going a long way with no extra room in my suitcase.
**Extra Info For Meetup Organizers:
1.** If you’re the host, bring a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” and prop it up somewhere (or otherwise be identifiable).
**2.** Bring blank labels and pens for nametags.
**3.** Pass around a sign-up sheet where everyone gives their name and email address, so you can start a mailing list to make organizing future meetups easier.
**4.** If it’s the first meetup, people are probably just going to want to talk, and if you try to organize some kind of “fun” “event” it’ll probably just be annoying.
**5.** It’s easier to schedule a followup meetup while you’re having the first, compared to trying to do it later on by email.
**6.** In case people want to get to know each other better outside the meetup, you might want to mention [reciprocity.io](https://www.reciprocity.io/), the rationalist friend-finder/dating site.
**7.** To enable the RSVP system and send you email notifications for new RSVPs to your event, the LessWrong team created events and accounts for all the meetup organizers. You can claim your event and account by sending a message via the Intercom support chat in the bottom right corner of LessWrong, or by resetting your password with the email that you provided in the meetup organizer form.
If you have any questions about any of this, contact ACX Meetup Czar Mingyuan (meetupsmingyuan@gmail.com). And without further ado, here are the meetups you can attend (version below is less canonical than [the spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QFbM5B9KfsiwqO6DvJ4D05dQitBtZ6kYDwXZ3Hj6SEc/edit#gid=1585750313), trust the latter if anything differs):
## ONLINE
**ONLINE**
Contact: Joshua Fox, joshua[at]joshuafox[dot]com
Time: 5:30 PM GMT, Sunday, September 19
Location: See <https://joshuafox.com/acx-online-meetups/>
Notes: The time given is GMT. Meetups include a speaker and then mingling. The listed meetup is one that can serve as a Schelling point for newcomers, but all are welcome to come to any sessions. We would be glad to get other organizers onboard.
## CANADA
**CALGARY, AB ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KfmCteKKBTw26qjnL/calgary-ab-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: David Piepgrass, qwertie256[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Pearce Estate Park: parking on 17a St SE, one of the 10 picnic tables northeast of the parking area, unless full. Look for a red-shirt guy and "ACX".
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/readily.rosette.pools>
**EDMONTON, AB ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tyRpuKtBfuDrri8Ta/edmonton-ab-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: JS, ta1hynp09[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Friday, September 3
Location: Hawrelak Park - 9330 Groat Rd NW, Edmonton, AB T6G 2A8. We will be at one of the tables near the north parking lot with a (small) ACX sign for at least the first 30 minutes. I am a long-haired, bearded man with a black/navy baseball cap. If you arrive later or cannot find us, please email - I will keep my phone handy all evening.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/interval.solid.globe>
**VANCOUVER, BC ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/wXDtWfhyfGsq2nERu/vancouver-bc-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Tom Ash, acxmeetup2021[at]philosofiles[dot]com, [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/1761606774039305/)
Time: 2:30 PM, Sunday, September 26
Location: We'll be at the covered area of Trout Lake, near Nanaimo skytrain station. We'll have a sign saying 'ACX Meetup', or put one up pointing elsewhere if another group has claimed it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/wardrobe.admires.gourmet>
**WINNIPEG, MB ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ByWwpDtpSxGwdiCjB/winnipeg-mb-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Rory, rorykaufmann[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Thursday, September 9
Location: The Forks, outside on the patio (or in the main building if the weather is bad). Look for the tall guy with a yellow sweater.
**KITCHENER-WATERLOO, ON ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/hAk5WLdBAtB7vc6cJ/kitchener-waterloo-on-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: JC, blxxia[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Waterloo Park, under the Wonders of Winter sign (it's an archway over a trail near the LRT station). I will be in scuffed white doc martens.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/flopped.uses.cherub>
**OTTAWA, ON ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pzzGTBRzrrpqmNRJP/ottawa-on-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Tess, rationalottawa[at]gmail[dot]com; [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalottawa); [LessWrong group](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PB4YL2K54CzmQDtC4)
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Lansdowne Park, on the curved benches/bleachers near the tall geometric statue/fountain. We will have a prominent sign that says ACX.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/trees.library.along>
**TORONTO, ON ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TXqT4Fe5GiprHgYi4/toronto-on-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Sean Aubin, seanaubin[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Sunday, September 12
Location: The Bentway, near big red art installation
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/tuxedos.issued.office>
Notes: Note the location has changed to the Bentway, which is underneath the Gardiner Expressway, due to forecasted rain. Despite being underneath a highway, it is still quite easy to have conversations in this setting and it is well ventilated. I apologize for the last minute change and will send people to Norway Park to collect anyone confused.
**MONTREAL, QC ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/QmcakqftZu526rMHo/montreal-qc-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: DS, sdaria375[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Jeanne-Mance park on the corner of Duluth and Esplanade
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/apples.fevered.gasping>
## EUROPE
**VIENNA, AUSTRIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jfgieQsx5PxgEJycT/vienna-austria-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Alexej Gerstmaier, alexej[dot]gerstmaier[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, October 2
Location: Wiener Stadtpark at the Strauss Monument; will have an ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/informal.courage.courage>
**BRUSSELS, BELGIUM ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/64ueQSvsWfmw3j2Q3/brussels-belgium-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Bruno D., bruno[dot]astral[dot]codex[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 12
Location: Parc du Cinquantenaire at Guinguette Maurice, I'll be wearing a watermelon shirt.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/badly.deliver.ducks>
**VELDWEZELT, BELGIUM**
*See Maastricht, Netherlands*
**SOFIA, BULGARIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/H33reTkAkMtwvtbeG/sofia-bulgaria-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Anastasia, sofia[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: NDK park, the benches behind (south of) the Pillars / Пилоните; I'll be wearing a blue shirt and carrying a sheet of paper with ACX MEETUP on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/noise.bridges.outpost>
Notes: I am not certain that there's even one other ACX person in the city/country, so if potential attendees could RSVP, that would be grand.
**PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/evcNyyteFKiKLPKah/prague-czech-republic-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Jiri Nadvornik, jiri[dot]nadvornik[at]efektivni-altruismus[dot]cz
Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, October 3
Location: Garden of Dharmasala teahouse
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/magnets.hurry.charm>
Notes: There is CFAR rEUnion on 24-27 September. I hope some people will attend both events.
**AARHUS, DENMARK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/HKxKyjSMdCHPaXHjC/aarhus-denmark-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Jonas, proz[at]c[dot]dk
Time: 10:00 AM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Outside entrance of the Greenhouses in Aarhus Botanical Garden. I will be wearing a red shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Nearby parking lot: Poppelpladsen 2, 8000 Aarhus.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/bicker.rise.parts>
**COPENHAGEN, DENMARK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Hserzb3coCAFpiYPY/copenhagen-denmark-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Søren Elverlin, soeren[dot]elverlin[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Rundholtsvej 10, 2300 København S. My roof terrace can accommodate us unless we are twice as many as last time. In that case, we will move to the green area in front of the house
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/halvdel.kviste.synger>
**HELSINKI, FINLAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zmRh93LnYhdHbnaQM/helsinki-finland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Joe Nash, joenash499[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Restaurant Töölönranta, Helsinginkatu 56; we'll put out a notepad that says "ACX".
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/earliest.adopt.verse>
**BORDEAUX, FRANCE ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/gqjhWFi4hy5PHJeX9/bordeaux-france-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Tom R, trth[at]fastmail[dot]fm
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Jardin Public, under the large trees next to the main entrance (Cours de Verdun). There will be an ACX sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/prelude.rails.glades>
Notes: French/English bilingual
**NANTES, FRANCE ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vLuwowwnAufpGFaEC/nantes-france-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Carado, carado[at]carado[dot]moe
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Parc de Procé, southwest entrance (Place Paul Doumer)
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/consumed.pass.scans>
Notes: French/English bilingual
**PARIS, FRANCE ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vakKWxSjocrCXgSwm/paris-france-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Jules, jules[dot]lt[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, October 10 (Scott expected to arrive at 5 PM)
Location: At the top of the Trocadero park, West of Musée de l'Homme, near the pond: <https://goo.gl/maps/e6x139yMRQyMBa5p8>. I'll have a Spinoza T-Shirt, pink pants, and a big ACX sign!
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/rotonde.tartiner.éloigner>
Notes: French/English bilingual. You can join our Discord here: [https://discord.gg/JUHTZRYp3k](https://discord.gg/JUHTZRYp3k )
**TOULOUSE, FRANCE ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/54qrAom6FkJj5K2v8/toulouse-france-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Loïc, acx[dot]tls[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 12
Location: Jardin des Plantes, northwest part
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/promises.sentences.lance>
Notes: I can change the time, date, and/or location if needed.
**BERLIN, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KEnZqCoqBWAbRDDmF/berlin-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Ruben, ssc[at]alphabattle[dot]xyz
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, October 9
Location: [Südplateau](https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?whereami=1&query=52.52759%2C13.35787#map=19/52.52759/13.35788) Fritz-Schloss-Park
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/directly.packing.pardon>
**BONN, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/XJ8QojeF9dqXCeWT4/bonn-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Anton, acx-bonn[at]posteo[dot]de
Time: 7:00 PM, Saturday, October 2
Location: Hofgartenwiese an der Statue von August Macke. Look out for [this statue](https://images.app.goo.gl/nAiCey6eLnRdgHCv5) and a small sign saying 'ACX'. If you are late or bad weather is forecast please email me.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/snooty.sings.both>
**COLOGNE (KÖLN), GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/AWCettwv6BpTSSz67/cologne-koeln-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Elias, minus42cgn[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Park, Hill towards Aachener Weiher. I will put up a sign with "ACX MEETUP" on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/benötigen.getränken.quadrat>
Notes: German/English bilingual
**ERLANGEN, BAVARIA, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8Yn8hMc6YsKdQuJkr/erlangen-bavaria-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: AA, burn\_adi[at]yahoo[dot]de
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Röthelheimpark (Martin-Luther-King-Weg), at the big stone head
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/läufer.lindwurm.anderem>
Notes: This date is after the school summer holidays (13.9.), but before university semester starts (18.10.). If a lot of students sign up, I am amenable to organizing another meetup at a later date.
**FRANKFURT, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/soZsxsh4TQoSXtTfN/frankfurt-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Jan, kirchner[dot]jan[at]icloud[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Wednesday, August 25
Location: Grüneburgpark (4MF6+R4 Frankfurt), southwest part
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/staple.buzzer.lance>
Notes: This will overlap with the first iteration of a EA Frankfurt meetup, so lots of potentially positive synergies!
**FREIBERG, SACHSEN, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zvYWuB6kekdt4vJ7C/freiberg-sachsen-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Alexander, act[dot]meets[dot]freiberg[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: At the central fountain in the city park just west of the city wall. I'll wear a bright shirt and will put up a sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/salt.diamonds.huddle>
Notes: English/German bilingual.
**GÖTTINGEN, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/wc8nL3owHHc7DET2p/goettingen-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Nikos, nikosbosse[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:30 PM, Wednesday, September 15
Location: Schillerwiese, near Jérôme Pavillon
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/smoothly.magma.wicket>
**HAMBURG, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ZFHJA9z6c7MSHdYuj/hamburg-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Gunnar Zarncke, g[dot]zarncke[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Kleine Wallanlagen on the lawn near Memorial Holstenglacis. Look for pink blankets; I will also have an ACX sign. [Here](https://routing.openstreetmap.de/?z=19¢er=53.556806%2C9.980004&loc=53.556804%2C9.980006&loc=53.556817%2C9.977528&hl=de&alt=0&srv=1) is an Open Street Map Link which also shows the short-cut tunnel from the subway station.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/cove.wider.solves>
**KARLSRUHE, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SYjhvRWKDMXueB7ci/karlsruhe-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Markus Toran, acxmeetup[at]toranm[dot]me
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Schlossgarten, we will meet where the blue tiles cross with the train tracks.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/canines.dame.sounding>
**MUNICH, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/h9ey6pny52ynAig6n/munich-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Sable, sablegm[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: English Garden, within 50 meters of the given coordinates, wherever is shade and not many people. I will be wearing a "Just buy a clock" white T-shirt.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/same.exacted.hears>
Notes: Anyone who wants to contact me without sacrificing their privacy can use a service like guerrillamail.com or temp-mail.org to send me an email from a temporary address. I promise to check my inbox several times from 20:00 to 21:00 German time every day, so you should have ample time to send me an email, get a reply, and read it before your temp email removes the reply. If you want to do that multiple times over a span of time larger than your address remains alive, just generate a random alphanumeric string (look up password generators online), put it somewhere in the first email, and include it in subsequent ones, that way I could figure out same person is talking to me from multiple addresses.
**TÜBINGEN, GERMANY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jyTSufJMEALHDbbug/tuebingen-germany-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Laurenz Hemmen, laurenz[dot]hemmen[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Friday, September 3
Location: We will meet at the stairs of the Neckarbrücke to the Neckarinsel. I will carry an "ACX meetup” sign. If its' raining we will go to a nearby cafe/restaurant from there.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/crust.polished.informed>
**ATHENS, GREECE ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iQs9pNPiHBLraBfwk/athens-greece-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Spyros Dovas, acx[dot]meetup[dot]athens[dot]greece[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Sunday, September 26
Location: Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, at the tables by the main entrance to the Library ([360 view](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.93977,23.692146,3a,75y,308.31h,96.22t/data=!3m11!1e1!3m9!1sAF1QipOjZJkhWMCZrQONrhC_rhdUne3LnBd7jmY_yJoM!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOjZJkhWMCZrQONrhC_rhdUne3LnBd7jmY_yJoM%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya316.4674-ro-0-fo100!7i10240!8i5120!9m2!1b1!2i23)), I will have a red balloon marking the exact table(s). If it rains we will move under the big "roof" upstairs.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/sued.scouts.slows>
Notes: It will be really great if we manage to establish a small community of people that enjoy and get inspired reading ACX in Athens.
**BUDAPEST, HUNGARY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TuSAquqcBtj4fHgMK/budapest-hungary-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Timothy Underwood, timunderwood9[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: We'll meet on Margit Island at Gulliver Park, which is a grassy area behind the bars that are past the fountain. I'll bring a green blanket like thing to sit on and have a purple hard cover copy of one of Richard Dawkins' books. We'll also have an open blue umbrella to mark who we are. If it is raining we'll go to champs sziget bar which is the first big bar on the right past the fountain.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/sticking.flipping.solid>
**DUBLIN, IRELAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/D5TXNsxMf9RkpujHg/dublin-ireland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Laplace, bayesianconspirator[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Stephen's Green playground
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/steep.beside.veal>
**FOLIGNO, ITALY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SecMYguK2QBpN6Tva/foligno-italy-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Orfino Dottorsi, orfino[at]yandex[dot]com
Time: 4:30 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Parco dei Canapé, at the open air cafe, ask the barista
Notes: This is a long shot: I am not aware of such a meeting in central Italy. Foligno is the middle point of the entire area and it is very well connected, the goal is to attract ACX fans throughout the nearby regions. The park is only 800 meters from the train station so that public transport would be an excellent choice.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/nitrate.merchant.carry>
**PADOVA, ITALY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/wuaRxfWMsdqmSDSkx/padova-italy-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Carlo (CM), 04doqkba[at]ciarlibraun[dot]anonaddy[dot]me
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Obelisco in Prato della Valle. I will have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/capacity.saucepan.servers>
Notes: Padova can be a good meeting city for most people living in the north/north-east of Italy, but I'm more than happy to move to another (close) city if it is a better alternative for 1+ other people. I’m also co-organizing with someone from Udine.
**ROMA, ITALY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Ru5MBFAzPdz7nkJpG/roma-italy-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Christian, lambiguo[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Città Universitaria Sapienza in front of the Philosophy building.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/lizards.free.crunch>
**RĪGA, LATVIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Jx5nD5RaKiiJJ59am/riga-latvia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Valts K, valtskr[at]inbox[dot]lv
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Bastejkalns (on top of the hill)
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/number.presume.gurgled>
**LUXEMBOURG, LUXEMBOURG ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fqcrWhm3hMqpyECdb/luxembourg-luxembourg-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Mathieu Putz, mathieuputz[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:30 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Parc Kinnekswiss near Glacis, on the big open lawn in the North-East. (The park is near Glacis, which is where the "Schueberfouer" will be held at the time of the meetup.) I'll be wearing a burgundy shirt and carrying a sign with "ACX Meetup" on it. I'm 1.93m tall, 22 years old and male, with blonde-brownish short hair. If you email me in advance, I'm happy to send you my phone number. That way, in case you don't find us, you can just call me. I'll also check my email regularly during the meetup.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/pockets.serve.annoys>
**SKOPJE, MACEDONIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KJSSGatMpw4fzQnJD/skopje-macedonia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Qantarot, info[at]kantarot[dot]mk
Time: 5:00 PM, Wednesday, December 22
Location: Rooftop of the Intertec building in Skopje (outdoor but heated and covered in case of rain). Since you'll need to be let in, RSVPing is encouraged. You can also contact me the day of the meetup at +389 seven one 890 497.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/libraries.describe.fresh>
Notes: I run [a blog](https://qantarot.blogspot.com/) that recently spun off [a foundation](https://qantarot.substack.com/). In Skopje we have a small but passionate rationality community that gravitates around my blog/foundation and we would love to grow the community and raise awareness about EA / ACX.
**AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/J9cHwBAcgQDKrXvRj/amsterdam-netherlands-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Pierre, pierreavdb[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Westerpark, in front of ijscuypje
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/count.laptops.factor>
**EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/gMnK3eJrtGYaD5eMf/eindhoven-netherlands-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: RH, silvery[dot]swift[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Outside "Het Ketelhuis" (Ketelhuisplein 1 in Eindhoven), I'll be wearing a red shirt and reading a book.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/level.dreams.partner>
**MAASTRICHT, NETHERLANDS ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iFeeFrie9mZPoCrwo/maastricht-netherlands-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Laurens, laurensk90[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: 2e Carabinierslaan 128, in the backyard. There is a green gate which is unlocked, and it will have an orange-white scarf tied to it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/paraded.progress.score>
Notes: I'm fully vaccinated and stats indicate the majority of Dutch adults are too. My address is technically in Belgium but it's practically touching the border, and quickly and easily reachable through all conventional modes of transport.
**WARSAW, POLAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/p5pqS7zDnxhFhjSj5/warsaw-poland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: MK, lesswrongpoland[at]freelists[dot]org, [Meetup.com event](https://www.meetup.com/LessWrongWarsaw/events/280036893/)
Time: 6:00 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: Bar Studio, Plac Defilad 1, outdoor tables
**GDAŃSK, POLAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/takgmMqBmAjJMM9Tv/gdansk-poland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Frank, frankastralcodexten[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Park Akademicki opposite the Opera Bałtycka
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/flood.gangway.scans>
**LISBON, PORTUGAL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/CjoXwD2i93hTNfZrg/lisbon-portugal-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Thor, thorck[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Parque da Pedra at Monsanto Park, I’ll be the tall white guy in pink pants. There's an adjacent road with street parking, and a clearing at that point that opens onto a trail that leads to the park.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/guitars.record.caps>
**BUCHAREST, ROMANIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/FBDWFhrjLGodT8tss/bucharest-romania-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Alen, alen3000[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Cișmigiu Park, center of Rotonda Scriitorilor
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/cool.bells.balanced>
**MOSCOW, RUSSIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/d6jB5mpKm5AfAkivh/moscow-russia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: A³MS, mike[dot]yagudin[at]gmail[dot]com, [Telegram chat](https://t.me/joinchat/lAu3wxmE9vgzMThi)
Time: 5:30 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Muzeon park, in front of the entry to the New Tretyakov Gallery; [join our chat](https://t.me/joinchat/lAu3wxmE9vgzMThi) for the updates
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/sectors.toffee.sweeten>
**ROSTOV-ON-DON, RUSSIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/v7Bnz2ErDhonCfKLz/rostov-on-don-russia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Nadia, nadia[dot]s[dot]1024[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: Food court "Leto" near Don State Public Library (Pushkinskaya, 175). We'll have an ACX sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/chew.message.green>
**SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/GGoseABKggoNspxs8/saint-petersburg-russia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Vit, imbarus[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Aleksandrovskiy Park near Gorkovskaya if the weather allows it, near Bolshe Coffee. Look for a huge guy with a moustache and a hat.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/logged.kitchens.lined>
**LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/G5gufXwuHhJuoDoLi/ljubljana-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: demjan[dot]vester[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: We can meet in Tivoli, near the promenade, weather permitting. I'll try to be obvious, by having a sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/downhill.respects.oath>
Notes: I have no idea how many people might be interested, so please RSVP if you can.
**MADRID, SPAIN ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gECjwasPyiHEDmLZh/madrid-spain-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**Contact: t[at]tripu[dot]info
Time: 11:00 AM, Saturday, September 25
Location: "El Retiro" Park, puppet theater (<https://www.esmadrid.com/en/tourist-information/teatro-de-titeres-de-el-retiro>)
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/pictures.proceeds.turned>
Notes: Setting this date because a few members of the EA/rationality community in Madrid have already settled on that date and said that that would work for most of us. I'm open to changing the date and time to accommodate more people (and Scott himself).
**LUND, SWEDEN ([RSVP](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdR-Rb1nbYKWFm2uu6jbqGW1x8OU8KUESt1fqQiOS-J019KfQ/viewform))**
Contact: Markus, ms[dot]salmela[at]gmail[dot]com
Notes: Please fill out [this interest form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdR-Rb1nbYKWFm2uu6jbqGW1x8OU8KUESt1fqQiOS-J019KfQ/viewform) to be updated when we choose a time and date.
**STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jF36LdqKRxh8ouoYo/stockholm-sweden-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Sal, sallat[at]protonmail[dot]com, [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/Stockholm.Rationalists)
Time: 3:30 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have "ACX meetup" sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/glow.fracture.retire>
Notes: We have an existing group that has been organizing regular SSC meetups for a while. I only recently took over as organizer, but the group has existed for several years.
**BASEL, SWITZERLAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/hREoSgWkipZnhcjgC/basel-switzerland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Julian, julian[dot]sscmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:30 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: At Wettepark, near the patio.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/wharfs.addicted.bubbles>
**BERN, SWITZERLAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/9ifCiHcngiqmgDikp/bern-switzerland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Daniel, dd14214[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Marzili, at the main entrance vis-a-vis the Gelateria di Berna
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/softest.eagle.gangway>
**GENEVA, SWITZERLAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/i7x2q2TrfMBZgEGdv/geneva-switzerland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Konrad Seifert, seifert[dot]konrad[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:30 PM, Friday, September 17
Location: We will meet in Parc de la Grange, near the entrance to the Orangerie, next to the Monkey Puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). I will be wearing a green t-shirt/sweater and carrying a sign with ACX Meetup on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/soucieux.préparer.appeler>
**ZURICH, SWITZERLAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SeG8vDRDLBL9XvZyF/zurich-switzerland-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: SSC\_Zurich, ssczurich[at]gmx[dot]ch
Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, September 26
Location: TBD
Notes: People can email the address given to be added to the mailing list.
**BIRMINGHAM, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/XG9ufQ6sAdtiBDxkW/birmingham-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Tom A, askew[dot]thomas[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Cathedral Square, AKA Pigeon Park. Benches to the rear (east) of the Cathedral. There will be an A3 sign showing "ACX Meetup". The site is ~400 yards from New Street Station, making it accessible for anyone in the greater West Midlands area.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/oldest.preoccupied.kind>
**BRISTOL, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pXvDy6xDysdnrQqDp/bristol-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Nick Lowry, bristoleffectivealtruism[at]gmail[dot]com; [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismBristol/events/); [WhatsApp group](https://chat.whatsapp.com/FVPPyUv7nggFPZVC3SGcpC)
Time: 11:30 AM, Sunday, September 26
Location: Brandon Hill, near Cabot Tower
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/excuse.intro.soft>
Notes: Join the FB page or the WhatsApp group for updates.
**CAMBRIDGE, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/MYPizotq6LN3iEvEM/cambridge-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Theodore Ehrenborg, jtae2[at]cam[dot]ac[dot]uk
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, October 23
Location: I'll be near the Jesus Green Skatepark, wearing a blue shirt and holding an ACX MEETUP sign
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/proper.event.wiring>
Notes: If you want to attend but can't because of the time/date, email me.
**EDINBURGH, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JMKXTgHCFiXe6nqjJ/edinburgh-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Sam, s[dot]enright[at]sms[dot]ed[dot]ac[dot]uk
Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, October 24
Location: The Meadows, picnic tables next to the playground. I will be wearing a navy jumper
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/boxing.branch.appeal>
**FALMOUTH, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jbFEor8W5dyAxD2SK/falmouth-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: mini t, tminns[at]btinternet[dot]com
Time: 12:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Gyllyngvase Beach
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/seats.reef.manual>
**LINCOLN, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Q3nDrCcHMHnmSidms/lincoln-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Tobias, tobias[dot]showan[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Beer garden of the Horse and Groom, Carholme Rd, Lincoln LN1 1RH
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/vanish.burn.copy>
**LONDON, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BBWrnswpGu6Dq32Ee/london-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Edward Saperia, edsaperia[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, October 16
Location: Barbican Lakeside Terrace
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/drums.decide.secret>
**MANCHESTER, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/7xK26ay6FATPGGgKk/manchester-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: OK, osnatkatz[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: Whitworth Park, Oxford Road, Manchester, M14 4PW. We'll be gathered by the picnic tables on Oxford Road side.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/tigers.wasp.union>
Notes: Transport information: The 15/18/42/43/111/142/143/147 buses all stop right outside Whitworth Park, and all take cash or contactless. If you're not in Greater Manchester, you can get to Manchester Piccadilly train station pretty easily (most trains stop here) and walk up from there to the Piccadilly Gardens bus station, where buses to South Manchester depart at least once every 10 minutes. The closest parking place is the Q-Park Wilmslow Park on Hathersage Road, about 10 minutes' walk away. Free parking is somewhere between difficult and impossible to find.
**NEWCASTLE, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/dCezzHTbzpgmiExm8/newcastle-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Chris G, wardle[at]live[dot]fr
Time: 11:00 AM, Saturday, October 9
Location: Old Eldon Square (Hippie Green), northwest quadrant. I'll be wearing a suit jacket and Hawaiian shirt.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/arena.steps.burst>
**OXFORD, UK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/QhsforZ4tWQQQsyrL/oxford-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Sam, ssc[at]sambrown[dot]eu, [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1221768638031684)
Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, October 17
Location: South Park, near the Divinity Road entrance
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/nobody.joined.friend>
Notes: As an organiser I'm a bit of a bottleneck, and I'm open to be joined/replaced by someone more diligent.
**DNIPRO, UKRAINE ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/GmxucgQ99NSDtWqgt/dnipro-ukraine-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Vlad Sitalo, root[at]stvad[dot]org
Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Shevchenko Park, near entrance to the bridge crossing to the Monastyrsky island
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/things.walls.proofs>
## ASIA & OCEANIA
**PERTH, AUSTRALIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/faDZE9BAGzHq6Drek/perth-western-australia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Madge, madgech[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Russell Square, Northbridge, corner of Shenton and Aberdeen St. There will be some sort of ACX meetup sign. If it is raining, we will go to San Churro Northbridge instead.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/kept.locate.dose>
Notes: If there is an indoor mask mandate in place, consider that a proxy for the COVID situation being bad enough to cancel the meetup.
**SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA**
Contact: Eliot, redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Wednesday, September 1
Location: Sydney is in lockdown for the next month at least, so probably on [Zoom](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2310802810).
Notes: I would change to in person if lockdown rules change.
**HONG KONG ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SGpCJCmEEzi8e8zhA/hong-kong-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Aldrin, aldrin[dot]cheung[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 12:30 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: TusPark Workhub Causeway Bay, 23/F, Island Beverley, 1 Great George Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/director.crossings.outs>
**BANGALORE, INDIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/GYWFyoWk9z9maFTuN/bangalore-india-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Nihal M, m[dot]nihalmohan[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: ONLINE (due to COVID)
**MUMBAI, INDIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8mEKJuHKm8YxsoqNZ/mumbai-india-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Nitin Nair, nairnitin2424[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:30 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: BMC Park, Mindspace Landscape Garden, Malad West. Outside the main entrance/gate.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/contents.anthems.foresight>
**NEW DELHI, INDIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ahh5Pgp84xeNhaRZ3/new-delhi-india-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: SK, nevakanezzar[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Thursday, September 9
Location: Regional Park near NFC market. Straight up the path towards the back where the little hill is.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/haunt.defeat.knocking>
**JAKARTA, INDONESIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TZRiawE5SKerdY5jB/jakarta-indonesia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Jaticarta, goomilar[dot]setya[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: Arborea Café, Senayan, DKI Jakarta
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/uptake.harmony.conclude>
**TOKYO, JAPAN ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fNqxdho7zynmZRHqF/tokyo-japan-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**Contact: Harold, hgodsoe[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 9:00 AM, Saturday, September 4
Location: The Deck Coffee & Pie (open air terrace)
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/vanish.exhaled.command>
**AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pu36jHQXCjq8RzMJT/auckland-new-zealand-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Mako Yass, marcus[dot]yass[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 12
Location: If the current COVID alert level allows indoor meetings, and the temperature listed [here](https://www.metservice.com/towns-cities/locations/auckland) is at or below 18°C at 4pm, we will gather in Lim Chhour food court and asian supermarket on Karangahape Road. Otherwise (if either of those conditions are false), if the lockdown level permits small outdoor gatherings, we will try to meet in Albert Park, in the Gazebo [here](https://what3words.com/jump.trial.films); or if someone else is using the gazebo we will meet beside it somewhere around [here](https://what3words.com/view.level.sushi). You will be able to recognise us by the reflective silvery orb about the size of a rockmelon positioned in the center of the gathering.
Coordinates: [https://w3w.co/jump.trial.films](http:// https://w3w.co/jump.trial.films)
Notes: Date is September 12th OR whichever Sunday first comes after the alert level once again permits gatherings
**WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/yvoMcLN4qbt3apDBS/wellington-new-zealand-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Ben W, benwve[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Sunday, September 26 (NOTE: postponed from the 5th due to Level 3 lockdown)
Location: Waitangi Park. Main grassy area, west-most corner.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/jets.drank.fits>
**CEBU CITY, PHILIPPINES ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/qZLYfnBpgafkMTdBG/cebu-city-philippines-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021))**Contact: Hampton, hampton[dot]moseley[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:30 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in IT park, across the street from The Walk. I will have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/single.wisely.altitude>
**SINGAPORE ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SC4pgAdz6aQQ2YDTA/singapore-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: DG, druidgetafix91[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: BQ Bar, 39 Boat Quay. Outdoor Seating area, with a ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/units.jelly.chain>
Notes: Currently in Singapore there is a group size restriction of 5 fully vaccinated (2nd dose +14 days) people. To get into the bar you must show proof of full vaccination, a negative PET result that's valid for the dine-in duration, or proof of recovery from COVID-19.
**TAIPEI, TAIWAN ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/74wGm2Bb5cWEFzYmi/taipei-taiwan-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**Contact: KZ, kz[dot]acx[at]co[dot]sent[dot]com
Time: 12:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Inside the Nanmen Park Museum's cafe, look for the "ACX" sign. Coordinates point to the entrance.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/notice.chills.perform>
**BANGKOK, THAILAND ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/yKRTsSaiXdoqWRaZC/bangkok-thailand-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021))**
Contact: Robert Hoglund, robert[dot]d[dot]hoglund[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, October 2
Location: Benjasiri Park, Phrom Phong. By the skatepark. I will be wearing a blue shirt and carrying a sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/oavsett.havsstrand.magiker>
Notes: Since this is being added very late, I would strongly recommend RSVPing so I know if anyone plans to show up.
## LATIN AMERICA
**BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/gs3mYskDfkZocDmaD/buenos-aires-argentina-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Juan, juan[dot]acxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: The location will be Parque Centenario, which is located in the geographic center of the City of Buenos Aires. I will be seating at one of the benches by the central lake of the park, carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/activo.rápida.amistad>
**SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Wotj9Gm7BAmKTWbXi/sao-paulo-sao-paulo-brazil-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Fernando, fdesmello[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Ibirapuera Park, in front of the entrance to the Planetarium. I will be carrying a sign with 'ACX MEETUP' on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/refrain.hacking.workforce>
**BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/K5pJEjkezhrpqHegF/bogota-colombia-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Dan, shorty[dot]george[dot]productions+acx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: We'll meet at Cafe Illy Kr 15, #87-94 (by Parque Virrey). I'll wear a green T-shirt saying "I went to theodicy-con 2017..." and have a sign with "ACX MEETUP"
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/dull.biked.debate>
**MEXICO CITY, MEXICO ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vKkpnTfPa9abb3ALN/mexico-city-mexico-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Fornicad Cigarros, fagarrido[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Bosque de Chapultepec by the Canadian Totem
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/spoiled.given.waving>
## MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA
**BE'ER SHEVA, ISRAEL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/quqPw9tfJYyjt68EW/be-er-sheva-israel-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Oren, oren-acxmeetup[at]opayq[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Thursday, September 9
Location: רגע, מקום בפארק
פארק הסופרים שכונה ב'
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/couple.answers.herb>
**TEL AVIV, ISRAEL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4d986xaJpzEZ6BL9N/tel-aviv-israel-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Inbar, inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Thursday, September 23
Location: Sarona market park, between the Magnum bar and Sarona beer garden. I'll have an ACX sign and some red balloons.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/market.coherent.muddle>
**IFE, OSUN STATE, NIGERIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SsvBkKbnDpDBzn8hj/ife-nigeria-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**Contact: Matteo Di Bernardo, md3498[at]columbia[dot]edu
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Obafemi Awolowo Campus, Main Square
**LAGOS, NIGERIA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/YeR3WWp34RxYvKGmR/lagos-nigeria-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Damola, social[at]damolamorenikeji[dot]com
Time: 3:35 PM, Sunday, September 26
Location: TBD
**JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BdWSMNtxDimxfPDMg/johannesburg-south-africa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: DS, 87robertjames[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Delta Park, within 100m of the parking area on the west. I will be wearing a red shirt or jacket, carrying a sign that says ACX MEETUP.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/holiday.crashing.custom>
**DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/XCHByXHfD9niuLpr8/dubai-uae-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: RS, xyxyxz[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Friday, October 1
Location: Starbucks behind Jumeirah Creekside Hotel
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/themes.seasonal.salsa>
Notes: This is probably going to be a tiny group, so I'm open to change time or location to accommodate anyone if they get in touch.
## UNITED STATES
**PHOENIX, AZ ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cJ4pH4KHyntSgqp8o/phoenix-az-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Ben Morin & aK, benjamin[dot]j[dot]morin[at]gmail[dot]com & sareenyoga[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Cactus Park, 7202 E Cactus Rd, Scottsdale, AZ 85260. We will meet under the east ramada closest to the parking lot. aK will be wearing a red t-shirt.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/wages.putty.ground>
**BELMONT, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ApvkiHP4bhFnJBuGM/belmont-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: SS, ss4417[at]columbia[dot]edu
Time: 4:00 PM, Friday, August 27
Location: Twin Pines Park, near Buckeye Picnic Area (see [park map](https://www.belmont.gov/Home/Components/FacilityDirectory/FacilityDirectory/208/334))
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/prices.shut.basket>
**BERKELEY, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xtXtrN4H73qiRj2in/berkeley-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Mingyuan, meetupsmingyuan[at]gmail[dot]com, [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/1055279395277875/)
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Lawn of Valley Life Sciences Building, UC Berkeley campus
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/deflection.jump.puppy>
**GRASS VALLEY, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pBy5ktAcfKktBJNtq/grass-valley-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Max Harms, raelifin[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Condon Park near Dogs Run Free
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/punch.power.hatch>
**HARBOR CITY, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/33RNvegNBLmevNrmD/harbor-city-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Eric, eric[dot]l[dot]fore[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Ken Malloy Harbor Regional Park, on the lakeside, on the same latitude as the fork in the road where Vermont splits into Normandie.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/test.obliges.paces>
Notes: I am doing this primarily because I am bringing my chess set and want to go a few rounds. If there is also ACX themed discussions going on around us, icing on the cake.
**IRVINE, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Gr5yfhSkgLRjffgWE/irvine-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Nick, cohenskijanuary1[at]mail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, October 2
Location: William R Mason Regional Park. Look for ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/peanut.shuts.elevate>
**MONTEREY, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/FBHTKzQeuKufGomNP/monterey-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Andrew, ajsmitha7[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Veterans Memorial Park, on the grass, I'll have an orange frisbee
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/retail.poetic.gets>
**OAKLAND, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/y6fGxjtyjjCQsbysu/oakland-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Max, paxperplexus[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Thursday, September 9
Location: Marina Lawn, Jack London Square, we’ll be on the grass (you can bring blankets or chairs if you want) at the northwest corner. I’ll be wearing a blue and white stovepipe hat. For food there is pizza, Thai, burgers and salads very nearby.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/softly.finishing.risks>
Notes: I hope someone uses this chance to start a public weekend meetup in the East Bay — but if not I hope my weeknight meetup can suffice.
**PASADENA, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ExAAuLuDXGXFZpQyr/pasadena-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: SG, sgord512[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: Central Park in Pasadena; we'll be in the southeast corner and there will be a sign that says ACX on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/piper.calculating.harp>
**SACRAMENTO, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/p9aQCWa9k2ysE7oDh/sacramento-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Andrew, justsomerandomguy[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Backyard of private home, near the intersection of Garfield and Marconi — address will be provided by email.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/transfers.easy.anyway>
**SAN DIEGO, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/NEdmtp3CBHkxNtkqF/san-diego-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Julius, julius[dot]simonelli[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 11:00 AM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Bird Park; I'll be wear a red shirt and a baseball cap
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/deed.rift.people>
**SAN FRANCISCO, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8ztsWLMEw4eAgFMam/san-francisco-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Derek Pankaew, derekpankaew[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Dolores Park, San Francisco | On the grass, near the tennis courts, I'll hold up an ACX sign
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/skips.turned.action>
**SAN RAFAEL, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/sku97vu2X3xRiC38q/san-rafael-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Sridhar Prasad, sridhar\_90033[at]yahoo[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Friday, September 24
Location: Freitas Water Park. I will be wearing scrubs and I’ll bring a sign. I’ll have a cooler with some sparkling water as well.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/code.salads.issue>
Notes: Kids play in the park and I don’t want to displace them. Still, it should be quite possible for us to have space to hang out and chat, etc.
**SANTA CRUZ, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/aoarssE8jmSvTHNXf/santa-cruz-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Maxwell, maxwelljoslyn[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 11:00 AM, Saturday, October 2
Location: Ocean View Park. I will wear a magenta shirt and carry a balloon.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/racing.piles.swan>
Notes: I am open to hosting a regular meetup if there is sufficient interest.
**SUNNYVALE, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ntuDDGNnHJpF59WCN/sunnyvale-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: IS, svmeetup[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: On the roundish grassy area in the northeast corner of Washington Park, 840 W Washington Ave. We'll have a dark blue picnic blanket and a ACX Meetup sign attached to a red camping chair.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/island.economies.coach>
**THOUSAND OAKS, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/EQ3zhBD7Y2tgeNQmT/thousand-oaks-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Mike, martoca[at]live[dot]com, [Meetup.com group](https://www.meetup.com/lesson-learn-rationally/)
Time: 12:01 PM, Sunday, October 17
Location: Picnic tables at Lynn Oaks Park, 359 Capitan St, Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/massing.comfort.pace>
**WEST LOS ANGELES, CA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/anavXtEB6dRrpwPv3/west-los-angeles-ca-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Robert, bobert[dot]mushky[at]gmail[dot]com, [Google group](https://groups.google.com/g/LW-SoCal-Announce), [LessWrong group](https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/GSN7BypgiJcjEiRRS), [Discord server](https://discord.gg/TaYjsvN)
Time: 7:00 PM, Wednesday, October 6
Location: 3266 Inglewood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90066
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/labs.motion.cherry>
Notes: Location is subject to change; join the Google Group for updates. Meetups are every Wednesday at 7 pm.
**BOULDER, CO ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mdj3eAvHaiRrstxsr/boulder-co-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Josh Sacks, josh[dot]sacks+acx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 26
Location: 9191 Tahoe Ln, Boulder, CO 80301
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/complex.politicians.appointing>
Notes: We have a large landscaped outdoor area near the house + 55 acres in case folks \*really\* want to social distance. Also happy to cater with pizza/BBQ if that will bring more peeps.
**DENVER, CO ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/PmAxKM5rNQ7zP5fAe/denver-co-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Ian, iansphilips[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Washington Park northwest corner
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/serves.spends.minds>
**LAKEWOOD, CO ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/AcKBiGRffsgvwfkiE/lakewood-co-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Eneasz Brodski, embrodski[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Wednesday, September 1
Location: 2800 S Estes St, Lakewood, CO 80227. It's a park, walk just a bit into it from the parking lot and you'll find a few picnic tables under a roof. We're meeting there.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/chances.envisaged.ruffle>
Notes: We have a regular crew of 8-10 people that come to most of these meetups, and we'd love to meet other rationalist-adjacent people in the Denver area. We meet the first Wednesday of every month.
**FAIRFIELD, CT ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4HMw62iwegfRaFPj7/fairfield-ct-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Justin Barclay, barclay[dot]justin[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 10:00 AM, Saturday, August 28
Location: South Pine Creek Beach near the lifeguard chair
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/visual.fading.internal>
**STORRS, CT ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/3FigWnzWqDpq3FYEu/storrs-ct-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Isadore J, isadore[dot]johnson[at]uconn[dot]edu, 202-four-nine-five-1332
Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: We'll meet outside Mirror Lake
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/songbird.practically.laundry>
**WASHINGTON, DC ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/y3izDmvMrdSTPnSYG/washington-dc-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: John Bennett, johnofcharleston[at]gmail[dot]com; [Google group](https://groups.google.com/g/dc-slatestarcodex), [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595)
Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Gathering point is outside 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001. Follow the sign for "Free Utility" to the patio. Once a crowd gathers, we've also rented a nearby parking lot, where we'll have tents and food.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/decent.search.hurls>
**FORT LAUDERDALE, FL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cyhMQkPKedF4E9pk3/fort-lauderdale-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Vlad, vovaplombir[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Starbucks at 2519 E Sunrise Blvd, outdoor seating area
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/training.today.surreal>
**GAINESVILLE, FL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/R5TAEhAK3RkhKeN6T/gainesville-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: ZachH, zachary[dot]hamaker[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:30 PM, Tuesday, September 7
Location: 4th Ave Food Park, I’ll be wearing a maroon shirt
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/briefer.releases.loyal>
Notes: Will consider delaying if the COVID situation in FL doesn’t improve
**GULF BREEZE, FL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TrshwMpQmtdksSGhB/gulf-breeze-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Christian, christian[dot]h[dot]williams[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:30 PM, Sunday, August 29
Location: The outdoor deck at The Grey Taproom. I'll be wearing a blue t-shirt with a crudely drawn wizard on it that says Pavement Ist Rad. It's a band shirt fyi.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/legroom.trustees.feather>
Notes: If no one emails me saying they'll be there, I won't be there.
**MIAMI, FL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/huJsQZaFTyegg9rvp/miami-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Eric, eric135033 at gmail
Time: 5:00 PM, Saturday, October 9
Location: Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33134 --- We'll be seated in the outdoor patio area with an ACX MEETUP sign on the table.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/delivers.trading.season>
**ORLANDO, FL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/G8hD8DhX7CBKbGfZB/orlando-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Noah Topper, noah[dot]topper[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Friday, October 8
Location: University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL 32816. We'll meet at a small pavilion on campus. [Here's a UCF map](https://map.ucf.edu/). If you start from Garage A or I and walk toward the center of campus, you'll walk by a small gazebo-looking place; that's where we'll meet. Other nearby landmarks include the campus library, the reflection pond, and the Foxtail Cafe. I'll try to have something identifying.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/trading.undergraduate.verbs>
**TAMPA, FL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TwMRyNSkAEKZLg99f/tampa-fl-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: A.D., aka[dot]eden[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:30 PM, Saturday, October 2
Location: Water Works Park, in front of Ulele
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/smarter.slice.chef>
**ATHENS, GA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/yQwY4XtHSEPeo4bow/athens-ga-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: TW, ttaskward[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Sunday, September 26
Location: State Botanical Garden, outside the Garden Club of Georgia. I will be in a red shirt at the front fountain closest to the greenhouse.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/pouts.succeeds.quilting>
**ATLANTA, GA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ohL56zmrAhb8LvdQk/atlanta-ga-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Steve French, steve[at]digitaltoolfactory[dot]net
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: The Beltline on Memorial Drive, near Muchacho Coffeehouse - I will have a large sign that says "ACX Meetup"
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/cheered.marker.recipient>
Notes: Please RSVP! We will be on grass, so lawn chairs, blankets, towels, etc might be a good idea
**HONOLULU, HI ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/e6h2rm8YaLecaJAXZ/honolulu-hi-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: James, jglamine[at]gmail[dot]com, [Google group](https://groups.google.com/g/acx-meetup-honolulu)
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Magic Island, on the grass under a tree by [this drop pin](https://goo.gl/maps/PJ7dJjgZusNsjVd7A).
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/tingled.steer.tricky>
Notes: Look for the ACX sign. We will be sitting on the grass so you may want to bring a blanket, towel, or beach chair to sit on. Consider bringing water and sunscreen. It would be helpful if you RSVP in the google group.
**CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, IL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SWFfLvBy3mcocAJBh/champaign-urbana-il-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021))**
Contact: nk, nmkiahrne[at]outlook[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: UIUC main quad, south end. I will wear a red t-shirt and have an ACX meetup sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/saying.music.rust>
**CHICAGO, IL ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8y6guRqhWycaaSEh4/chicago-il-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Todd, todd[at]southloopsc[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Ping Tom Park. The Cermak Red Line stop is reasonably close, and there's usually free parking at the main Ping Tom complex [here](https://goo.gl/maps/a346wrwukm7KRQgc7).
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/pink.longer.diary>
**BLOOMINGTON, IN ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/CgombfwuKQDf5vBd9/bloomington-in-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: AC, acxbloomington[at]fastmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Switchyard Park. Will be at one of the tables near the Rogers Street parking lot. I will bring a paper that says “ACX”
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/tell.store.dish>
Note: I’d appreciate if you RSVP’d, but I’ll show up regardless!
**LOUISVILLE, KY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/GopifrKCZvKNbcqJv/louisville-ky-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: KWT, kris[at]ipocandy[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Tom Sawyer State Park - Shelter #3
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/natural.louder.underground>
**NEW ORLEANS, LA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/wbD2CZc3BJjyFk8x6/new-orleans-la-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Noah , snugstarling[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Saturday, October 23 (rescheduled due to hurricane)
Location: Audubon Riverview Park (AKA "the Fly") at the Butterfly Pavilion
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/rattler.mediate.promote>
**ANN ARBOR, MI ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/PXoj6exi8DeJwwrdX/ann-arbor-mi-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Sam, samrossini9[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Island Park Shelter A, Ann Arbor, MI. Shelter A is the first shelter when you enter the park, closest to the foot bridge to the island.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/slices.zealous.launch>
**BOSTON/CAMBRIDGE, MA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cCfaistszx9BDkZL3/boston-cambridge-ma-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Dan Elton, Robi Rahman, bostonacx[at]gmail[dot]com, [Facebook event](https://www.facebook.com/events/1016385435773515), [Google group](https://groups.google.com/g/ssc-boston), [Facebook group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1023018131571906)
Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: John F Kennedy Park in Cambridge, near the picnic tables.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/area.bricks.tribune>
**NORTHAMPTON, MA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/a7dtifepX8RxY3Aoe/northampton-ma-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021-1?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Alex, alex[at]alexliebowitz[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Friday, September 10
Location: The Platform Sports Bar 125A Pleasant St, Northampton, MA 01060. The official address is bizarre and inaccurate; this is part of a group of bars & restaurants in a former rail station... a whole block away from Pleasant St. The simplest way to find it is the foot entrance around 36 Strong Ave. (see coordinates; make sure to look at street view). Go inside and ask them to show you to the outdoor seating area. We'll have a sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/soda.frosted.props>
**BALTIMORE, MD ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DiZXDhGZb7RvJvxAB/baltimore-md-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Rivka, rivka[at]adrusi[dot]com
Time: 7:00 PM, Sunday, September 19
Location: UMBC campus, outside the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. We'll be by the arches, and I will have a sign that says ACX. If you're having trouble finding us, you can email me. Parking is free on the weekends.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/lasted.slide.skip>
**DETROIT, MI ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/KAXsMAzRwGJwetHiA/detroit-mi-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Matt Arnold, matt[dot]mattarn[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 8:00 PM, Saturday, October 9
Location: Outdoor seating area, Tenacity Craft, 8517 2nd Ave, Detroit, MI 48202.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/helps.volunteered.ankle>
Notes: I might be the only potential attendee here. I will cancel if there is not at least 1 RSVP.
**ROCHESTER, MN ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Prt8qSHwwDnbysRL7/rochester-mn-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Brandon, brandoninrochester[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 4:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Essex Park @ the picnic tables. We'll have a sign with "ACX MEETUP" on it!
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/basic.sings.wisely>
Notes: Kids are welcome! There are spooky woods nearby that are well worth exploring, for kids who like that sort of thing.
**KANSAS CITY, MO ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/6Ehyq4peF99JcveGB/kansas-city-mo-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Maryana Pinchuk, justdandy[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 11:00 AM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Outdoor courtyard of Brookside51 (5100 Oak Street). Will have runners at the entrance on the Oak Street side to let people into the building.
**ST. LOUIS, MO ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/yA5wiZcxunbuvH5Ew/st-louis-mo-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: JohnBuridan, littlejohnburidan[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Tower Grove Park. Chinese Pavilion.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/fields.flank.feed>
Notes: All vaguely connected rationalsphere types welcome. I'm not connected to Wash U or SLU. If anyone in the ACX world is, they should do us a favor by promoting the event on campus.
**DURHAM, NC ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Xekex22cqBNreY4ce/durham-nc-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Will Jarvis, willdjarvis[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 7:30 PM, Thursday, August 26
Location: Ponysaurus Brewing, 219 Hood St, Durham, NC 27701, outdoor seating area. I will have a sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/verbs.clock.finest>
**WILMINGTON, NC ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8RXQeHg4gN4S4zkJE/wilmington-nc-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Todd, twoc[at]hardboot[dot]org
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Long Leaf Park, south of splash pad
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/warping.chapels.solder>
**OMAHA, NE ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/LKnwkN2mcJ8e3KLX7/omaha-ne-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: TracingWoodgrains, tracingwoodgrains[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Memorial Park - We will be near the white stone monument at the center of the park. I'll be wearing jeans and a black polo, carrying a sign with ACX meetup on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/ashes.salt.green>
Notes: I've arranged a meetup before, but never in Omaha, and to be frank I don't know if there are more than one or two other ACX readers there, so this meetup is an experimental roll of the dice to see if anyone will show. I encourage interested parties to email me so I can get a sense of how many people to expect.
**CONCORD, NH ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4bJHef7fEohYpGhT6/concord-nh-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Lincoln, lincoln[at]techhouse[dot]org
Time: 11:00 AM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Marjory Swope Park, specifically the bench and vista point overlooking Penacook Lake. Accessible via a 15 minute hike (some uphill) from [the Marjory Swope Park trailhead](https://w3w.co/spurring.declare.towards) on Long Pond Road. You can see the trail on [this map](https://www.concordnh.gov/DocumentCenter/View/9159/Map-25-Swope-Park-Trails). Bring a lunch!
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/scenic.bowls.unfounded>
**LAKEWOOD, NJ ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/FX6otAeCvGxNxStoQ/lakewood-nj-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Ben L, mywebdev3[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 11:00 AM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Ocean County Park. East end of the first big parking lot. I'll be the tall guy wearing a yarmulke.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/novel.stick.meals>
**LAS VEGAS, NV ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/RFhSYqsa5FkBe8GoL/las-vegas-nv-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: JWR, ray[dot]jonathan[dot]w[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 10:00 AM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Silverado Ranch Park at one of the south pavilions with a big ACX sign
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/compiles.graduating.logged>
Notes: The last time I tried to organize a meetup.com event a few RSVPed but none of them showed up. I would appreciate it if people RSVP and pinky swear that they'll actually show up if they do RSVP.
**RENO, NV ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Q96zBZz5htPN3NQms/reno-nv-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Steven Lee, stevenbrycelee[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Friday, September 17
Location: Idlewild Park, by the workout station near the western entrance of the park. I'll be the tall person in a pink shirt.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/island.normal.agents>
Notes: This is an outdoor park by a river, but there have been smoke problems recently. I might cancel if the air quality is too bad and reschedule later, but let me know if you’d be interested in coming and I’ll let you know the new date.
**ALBANY, NY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Hi7rKKtGtKPdFpxje/albany-ny-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021))**
Contact: Steve, plexluthor[at]yahoo[dot]com
Time: 10:00 AM, Sunday, September 19
Location: Professor Java's Coffee Sanctuary on Wolf Rd
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/hillside.spark.weaving>
Notes: We may also do a second meetup outdoors, possibly on a Albany Pine Bush trail once the leaves are changing, date/time TBD
**BUFFALO, NY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/bAzKiwFCF42TBcDgq/buffalo-ny-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: George Herold, ggherold[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Private home at 932 Welch Rd., Java Center (half-hour drive from Buffalo)
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/witnessing.balanced.stand>
Notes: I live in the country, woods, trails, a stream with waterfalls. Walking the creek is a great way to cool off it it's hot, so bring 'creek shoes' if you might be so inclined. I also have two or three dogs if that would be a problem. I'll cook up some hamburgers, hot dogs along with local sweet corn... Yum!
**ITHACA, NY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/C5NqZfqQoCMSFiszD/ithaca-ny-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Russ Nelson, russnelson[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 12:00 PM, Sunday, September 12
Location: Ithaca Commons "Child of Ithaca" statue
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/slices.bonus.deflection>
**NEW YORK CITY, NY**
Contact: Jasmine, Shaked & Tristan, jasminermj[at]gmail[dot]com; shaked[dot]koplewitz[at]gmail[dot]com; trishume[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:00 PM, Monday, September 6
Location: Teardrop Park
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/swung.shape.shows>
**COLUMBUS, OH ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/sXfL3weQskWQia3GX/columbus-oh-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Jim Hays, james[dot]thomas[dot]hays[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Clifton Park Shelterhouse (this is in the SW corner of Jeffrey Park). We will have a sign that says ACX Meetup.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/appeal.august.post>
**TOLEDO, OH ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/5MWrXXcSfT8YFzste/toledo-oh-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Luke Zhao, lukezhao9[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Toledo Botanical Garden. We will meet at the cluster of picnic tables near the north parking lot, a bathroom, and a water fountain. We will likely have a sign or a red balloon.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/citizenship.walnuts.preserves>
**OKLAHOMA CITY, OK ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/hEay3KKKmWJbLry4g/oklahoma-city-ok-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: bean, battleshipbean[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: 45th Infantry Division Museum. The picnic shelter next to the planes. I will be wearing a hat that says USS Iowa on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/direct.angle.flank>
**PORTLAND, OR ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/bMv3ctGQth8zA8c8Y/portland-or-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Rachel Shu, Sam Celarek, Jeff Freyley, hello[at]rachelshu[dot]com; [Meetup.com group](https://www.meetup.com/Portland-Effective-Altruists-and-Rationalists/), [Google group](https://groups.google.com/g/lesswrong-portland)
Time: 5:00 PM, Sunday, September 12
Location: Oregon Park, outdoors at southeast picnic tables, will have large banner
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/mining.skills.mess>
Notes: RSVP encouraged but not required, check Meetup group or Google group for weather-dependent location changes.
**ASHLAND, OR ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JBLYkwcczxEjWwjZP/ashland-or-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: David, ashland[dot]acx[dot]meetup[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 10:00 AM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Lithia Park, in the meadow at the main (north) entrance, across the street from Skout Taphouse. I'll have a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/chances.shelter.group>
**HARRISBURG, PA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Q5wCptAjQCGzmFcfh/harrisburg-pa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Eric, harrisburgeric[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Fort Hunter Park, northwest corner, on the grass
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/refrigerate.boomers.riverbank>
**PHILADELPHIA, PA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/i7tkGaY6di8PuW3fJ/philadelphia-pa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Majuscule, dmcbriggs[at]gmail[dot]com, wfenza[at]gmail[com] [Google group](https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia/c/4KNfSEa0lWM)
Time: 7:00 PM, Thursday, September 30
Location: 210 Ardmore Avenue, Ardmore PA. We’ll be meeting on the spacious covered front porch.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/heap.tracks.fantastic>
Notes: We've been doing meetups since 2018, join our Google Group for updates and announcements. RSVP encouraged but not required.
**PITTSBURGH, PA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/WuujoHuouahnsHTd7/pittsburgh-pa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Matthew Marks, matthewfmarks[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 12:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Outside [the Frick Park gate](https://goo.gl/maps/q3T7iMmp6HGQnoTv9)
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/pulse.cubes.admiral>
Notes: Location may be updated, so (1) email to confirm, (2) thanks in advance for any suggestions.
**STATE COLLEGE, PA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ZtXSb3z4aibk5xeFH/state-college-pa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: John Slow, auk480[at]psu[dot]edu
Time: 4:00 PM, Sunday, September 5
Location: Sunset Park. I will be wearing a blue hat.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/highs.cooks.later>
**PROVIDENCE, RI ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/9QCPCJRuZFb2Ekx6d/providence-ri-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: James Bailey, feanor1600[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 12:00 PM, Tuesday, September 21
Location: Prospect Terrace Park. I'll be near the 2nd bench to the right of the Roger Williams statue.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/serve.free.mostly>
**GREENVILLE, SC ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tThnDgPvmw8bdp2yK/greenville-sc-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Steve S, gvilleacxmeetup[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 12:00 PM, Sunday, October 3
Location: McPherson Park, 120 E. Park Avenue, Greenville, SC 29601 at the shelter nearest the putt-putt course.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/hotel.knee.copper>
Notes: Please fill out [this form](https://forms.gle/9cy659xzSfvzi7Mx5) if interested in attending!
**SIOUX FALLS, SD ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cuwMvbF9vqt7cHiA5/sioux-falls-sd-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: S. C., villainsplus[at]protonmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Monday, September 27
Location: McKennan Park, near the stone circle in the center of the park
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/aura.escape.buddy>
**CHATTANOOGA, TN ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/oumjFfsntEFf4cahx/chattanooga-tn-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: JBS, smijer[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 4
Location: Miller Park, M.L. King Blvd and Market St, near fountains. I'll have a sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/traded.looked.overnight>
**MEMPHIS, TN ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tkq4yMXeB529LfyaT/memphis-tn-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Michael, michael19571202[at]outlook[dot]com, [Google group](https://groups.google.com/g/memphis-ssclw)
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: French Truck Coffee at Crosstown Concourse, Central Atrium, 1350 Concourse Ave, Memphis, TN 38104. Will have a sign that says "SSC Meetup".
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/smiled.limbs.oiled>
Notes: We're a pre-existing meetup, we use Google groups to send emails.
**AUSTIN, TX ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/AYDK7s6gtLfeYiatp/austin-tx-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Silas Barta, sbarta[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 1:30 PM, Saturday, October 2
Location: Tables in the park area by pond behind Central Market 4001 N. Lamar
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/loosed.balloons.elastic>
**DALLAS, TX ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/i8mR2guja2NYrvhut/dallas-tx-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Ethan Morse, ethan[dot]morse97[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 2:00 PM, Sunday, September 12
Location: We'll be at the Reverchon Park picnic tables next to the playground with a sign that says "ACX Meetup" on it. Free parking is available at the Reverchon Park Baseball Field. There are no public bathrooms available.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/rent.award.forms>
**HOUSTON, TX ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/3EptQ74coWNJGr5pc/houston-tx-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Tripp, trippsapientae[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:00 PM, Friday, September 17
Location: Hermann Park Conservancy
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/stray.planet.gold>
**SAN ANTONIO, TX ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BohJDPSTJHoF4oT3B/san-antonio-tx-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Derek Sky, intothestarrynightsky[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 12:30 PM, Saturday, October 9
Location: The Friendly Spot Ice House, 943 S Alamo St, San Antonio, TX 78206
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/enter.flap.novel>
**BRYAN/COLLEGE STATION, TX ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zvJGfXztKmqBsLe2d/bryan-college-station-tx-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Kenny, easwaran[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:00 PM, Friday, September 10
Location: Patio behind Torchy's Tacos on Texas Ave. I'll have a yellow umbrella (even if it's not raining) and purple hair.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/musical.airship.viewers>
**SALT LAKE CITY, UT ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ydykiu2wpa3XjBJ6k/salt-lake-city-ut-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Ross Richey, wearenotsaved[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, August 28
Location: Liberty Park, open area NE of Chargepoint Station
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/origin.reader.decks>
**RICHMOND, VA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tJmEJRuE7C7bvQESj/richmond-va-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Cal, cbilenkin[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 25
Location: Monroe Park: Near the fountain in the middle of the park, and I'll bring an "ACX Meetup" sign. (Don't worry, it's not that big of a park anyway.)
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/panels.above.cases>
Notes: RSVPs encouraged; Richmond isn't that big of a city, but if there are even just a handful of interested people, I would still be happy to meet up and talk.
**BURLINGTON, VT ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Hx2JdGtWqXJABbGka/burlington-vt-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Jaspar, fjabujaber[at]icloud[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Tuesday, September 7
Location: Battery park, near the cannons. I’ll be wearing a bright yellow floral button up shirt.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/nurse.slim.shade>
**BELLINGHAM, WA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/duefJb7D4cTNGjDrF/bellingham-wa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Alex Ellis, bellinghamacx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 5:00 PM, Wednesday, September 8
Location: Lake Padden Park, in the field just east of the southeast corner of the lake. Space permitting, we'll try to be close to the water. Look for a sign that says "ACX MEETUP". Alternate location in case of rain: [the picnic shelter in Fairhaven Park](https://w3w.co/vibes.spent.drag).
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/refine.tissue.daily>
**SEATTLE, WA ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/aeDRWk5N22nLrGMKW/seattle-wa-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Spencer, speeze[dot]pearson+acx[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: 6:00 PM, Wednesday, September 15
Location: Volunteer Park, near the amphitheater just north of the reservoir. I'll have an "ACX MEETUP" sign.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/value.shapes.tracks>
**MADISON, WI ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vhFA3QvDtoduucmRE/madison-wi-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Mary, mmwang[at]wisc[dot]edu
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 11
Location: Backyard of private home at 1022 High St, Madison. If it's raining we'll just go into the garage.
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/volume.eagles.tiles>
**MILWAUKEE, WI ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/RfmXkuGEr7KsLtoCc/milwaukee-wi-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Bernie Brewer, acxmke[at]mailbox[dot]org
Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Cathedral Square Park
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/dining.harp.hero>
Notes: Time and date are very flexible.
**LUSK, WY ([RSVP](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/nSnsASctpxuCsdmsw/lusk-wy-acx-meetups-everywhere-2021?rsvpDialog=true))**
Contact: Michael Hendricks, m[dot]acx[at]ndrix[dot]org
Time: 1:00 PM, Saturday, September 18
Location: Washington Park, 325 S Barrett Blvd, Lusk, WY 82225 (covered picnic benches in the center of the park)
Coordinates: <https://w3w.co/keys.besides.sprinkle> | mingyuan | 40351354 | Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places | acx |
# Open Thread 186
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. | Scott Alexander | 40346181 | Open Thread 186 | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
These are highlights from the comments of [Adumbrations Of Aducanumab](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab), [Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story), and discussion of those posts elsewhere.
**C\_B** [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2538221):
> I agree with this post's overall point that the FDA is not, on average, too lax, and that the Atlantic article's take that the aducanumab approval is a sign of them being too lax is a bad take.
>
> That said, I think the beginning of this article really undersells how uniquely bad the aducanumab approval is. It's not just "pretty unclear whether it actually treats Alzheimers." Nobody in the field thinks there's any serious possibility that it treats Alzheimers.
>
> - Here's Derek Lowe talking about it: <https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/the-aducanumab-approval>
>
> - The FDA's advisory committee doesn't think it treats Alzheimers: <https://alzheimersnewstoday.com/2020/11/11/fda-committee-votes-aducanumab-trial-data-fail-support-alzhimers-treatment-benefit/>
>
> - The trial was halted for futility: <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G>
>
> - The details of the "positive results" are textbook p-hacking of exactly the sort that the whole replication crisis has been about. It's a post-hoc subgroup analysis where the subgroup was selected based on similarity to the patients who had the most positive results; i.e., trivially guaranteed to show "positive" results via group selection. You can read more details in the statistical reviewer's comments in the advisory committee's document (PDF, starting on p. 174): <https://www.fda.gov/media/143502/download>
>
> - Anecdotally, as someone who used to work in the Alzheimer's research space, nobody in the field seriously thinks the amyloid hypothesis is true. It's been tried, over and over again, every drug that's ever aimed at that mechanism has failed, it's busted.
>
> It's fair to use this Atlantic article as a jumping-off point about how the FDA's approvals system is bad and lots of things get held up there for bad reasons. But I think you're really not engaging with just how bad the aducanumab approval is, and why.
This is completely fair! I used noncommital language like “aducanumab might not work” because I hadn’t studied this specific drug in depth. I was getting my impression of a consensus that it was ineffective from the media. And since I’m part of the media, if I were to condemn it based on the media, this would snowball into a sort of false consensus effect. Readers could be left with the impression that 100 different trustworthy media sources think aducanumab doesn’t work, whereas in fact maybe one trustworthy media source came to that conclusion and 99 others thought “well that seems trustworthy” and repeated it.
But enough commenters whom I trust berated me for this that I edited some of the language to much more strongly suggest that aducanumab really *really* doesn’t work. Bio blogger and ACX commenter **Metacelsus** makes the full argument [here](https://denovo.substack.com/p/a-travesty-at-the-fda), starting with:
> Yesterday the FDA approved aducanumab, an anti-amyloid antibody developed by Biogen, for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. This was based on *post hoc* interpretation of clinical trials that were **stopped early due to futility**, and against the strong recommendation of the FDA’s own advisory committee. Aducanumab will be priced at $56,000 per patient per year. Since Alzheimer’s patients are usually covered by Medicare, this cost will be paid by the American public. I estimate that it could be over **$100 billion per year**.[1](https://denovo.substack.com/p/a-travesty-at-the-fda#footnote-1) This is excluding indirect costs, such as those of monitoring for brain swelling that is a known effect of this drug.
>
> Putting this in context, for $56,000/year you could hire a graduate student or postdoc to work on Alzheimer’s research full-time. Imagine the opportunity cost!
>
> Writing at *In the Pipeline*, Derek Lowe called this a tragedy.[3](https://denovo.substack.com/p/a-travesty-at-the-fda#footnote-3) I want to go further. This is not just a tragedy, but a travesty. The FDA has become a sadistically distorted mockery of what medical regulation should look like. There can be no excuses for the level of statistical incompetence required to approve aducanumab based on the flimsy efficacy data from the trials.
But tell us what you really think! (he does, at great length, in the rest of [his post](https://denovo.substack.com/p/a-travesty-at-the-fda))
I hadn’t seen the number “$100 billion/year” before, and it’s pretty crazy. For context, there are about a million doctors in the US, and if each one makes on average $200K/year, that’s $200 billion. So Metacelsus is claiming aducanumab might cost the US health system half as much money as all doctors combined. This is based on his calculation that ~30% of 6 million Alzheimers patients get the drug for $56K each, which sounds like all reasonable assumptions, but I still bet somebody stops this *long* before it goes that far.
But **Chebky** is willing to go on record [defending aducanumab](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2537755) (sort of):
> I want to add another point: IMO, Aducanumab isn't shit, it's just that Alzheimer's is really really hard.
>
> Personal background: We spent a couple of lectures in a molecular neuroscience class I took in the spring to review the clinical trials of aducanumab, including the latest trials (EMERGE and something else, iirc), so I dove quite deeply into them.
>
> Aducanumab is not only excellent at doing its direct job - removing amyloid plaques - but also pretty good at reducing secondary biomarkers like amyloid PET signals and ARIAs (small hemorrhages and edemas that show up in an MRI). The problem is with the final proof of slowing cognitive decline, where most cognitive tests in the different trials failed to show statistically significant difference from placebo.
>
> It is also worth noting that amab has an \*excellent\* safety profile with a wide therapeutic window and few side effects even given the age of the target population.
>
> So what's going on? You can say that amab IS actually completely useless in slowing cognitive decline, but then you need to explain why the different biomarkers, all with well-established connections to neurodegeneration, fail to predict the (non)effect. The amyloid model is not the only one out there, but it's a central one for very good reasons.
>
> Explaining away this connection is not impossible - you can say that by the time these biomarkers are fixed the neurodegeneration is already well underway and irreversible - but it adds a layer of improbability (and would mean that the drug may work as a prophylactic).
>
> What is more likely in my opinion (specifically intuition from what I learned and going over the clinical data) is that Alzheimer's is pretty wide combination of different and very entangled neurodegenerative processes, with different contributions in different patients. Thus, the drug only works well on a subset of patients (maybe, like I mentioned, only those at the very onset of degeneration), but we don't know enough to predict which, so for the entire population of patients you fail to reach significance. Scott shows repeatedly how we see this in psychiatric drugs, which sometimes only barely squeeze by placebo in global trials but doctors have good experience in finding the one that works for a specific patient (and not knowing why).
>
> This approval will mean (a) Biogen, previously on the cusp of failure, now have a lifeline to investigate which kinds of patients the drug is good for, (b) it is released into the market, which means we will soon be getting efficacy data in big numbers, combined with genetic data.
>
> Other avenues are now also more easy to explore - maybe you need combinations with other treatments, maybe the cognitive tests we use aren't the best (it's not like we had a positive control of a perfect treatment to benchmark them against!).
>
> Overall, the scientific advisory committee was absolutely right in saying the clinical evidence is kinda crappy. But the cost-benefit analysis is still heavily in favor of the drug, as it is very safe, molecularly effective, and with no alternatives, in a very widespread and destructive disease. The only cost being some people paying money for a drug that won't help them, and the benefits are huge both short term (for the people which it will help) and long term (for better understanding and getting closer to more global treatments).
>
> In class we placed bets on what would happen. I said the committee will say no, and the FDA won't approve. I've rarely been so glad to be wrong.
**Will** [counters](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2538048):
> Strong disagree. There are 10 anti-amyloid drugs that failed clinical trials in the past, some of which succeeded in removing amyloid. There should be a presumption that amyloid reduction does NOT cause a clinical benefit.
>
> Your hypothesis that the drug will help a subsection of patients is plausible, but Biogen had 2 trials to find that group and failed to do so. They had every motivation to. To me, that signals the couldn't find a biologically plausible sub-group that had good results, that they were confident would replicate.
>
> And "final proof of slowing cognitive decline" should be the only thing that matters. I don't care if a AD patient dies with a brain entirely free of amyloid. I (and you and taxpayers and doctors) care about cognitive performance. If Biogen, with billions on the line, couldn't devise a rigorous cognitive test that found evidence of clinical benefit, it isn't there.
>
> The true tragedy of Aduhelm will be that the Alzheimer's Disease research space, which had begun to move away from the amyloid-centric hypothesis, is being effectively redirected to amyloid once again. Research $$ and healthcare $$ will be redirected towards a drug target that has done nothing but fail in clinical trials for 20+ years. The amount of wasted research and pharma money will be mindboggling.
Magic9Mushroom [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2538890):
> If this were the first time someone had tried amyloid-reduction as a therapy for amyloid diseases, I might be on your side. It's not. This has been tried a lot of times before with identical results - less amyloid, same Alzheimer's. Indeed, even outside Alzheimer's they tried this with Huntington's and got "less amyloid, worse Huntington's" for their trouble (the disease effects of Huntington's are from free huntingtin; the amyloid lumps are the brain's partially-successful attempt to sequester it).
The debate goes on another couple of iterations, [click here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2537755) for the whole subthread.
**Hook** [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2550133):
> The FDA is forbidden from considering price during the approval process. They don't exactly say this in <https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-research-cder/frequently-asked-questions-about-cder#16> but they strongly hint at the fact that price doesn't enter into the evaluation.
>
> That said, individuals at the FDA have their own opinions about drug pricing, and if they think something is just a copycat of another drug with a 100x mark up, that can have an influence on the approval process, largely through making more demands on the approval seeker.
Not sure if this is good or bad. It seems good that the FDA is only considering the science of a drug and not the economics/politics (eg “sell this for the half the price or we won’t approve you”). But it’s also awkward that they can’t consider price when making a decision which will effectively force the government to buy something.
---
**nuclearspaceheater** on Tumblr [writes](https://nuclearspaceheater.tumblr.com/post/659819669973286912/poipoipoi-2016-first-greg-abbott-received-a):
> *> [Texas Governor] Greg Abbott received a third booster dose of the vaccine, something not yet available to the public. Now he’s receiving monoclonal antibody treatment, something the FDA has only authorized for those with “high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.” Must be nice.*
>
> It occurs to me that thinking of this as a privileged depends in part on thinking of the FDA process as very excessively long, which many people here do.
>
> But take the perspective of most people, who think of the FDA process as good and justified - and using politicians as test subjects for experimental drugs actually sounds cool as hell.
This is an interesting point. We sometimes see politicians “cutting in line” and managing to get advanced drugs that the FDA hasn’t yet made available to the general public. We usually interpret this as unfair privilege, and I think that’s a completely accurate interpretation. But that requires a sort of covert acknowledgment that these drugs are probably being delayed too long - otherwise, these politicians are heroes for taking potentially-dangerous substances and testing them out for the rest of us.
---
**Peter** [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2537541):
> I think the lawsuit happy legal environment in the US should get a lot of blame for this also. There are many useless and wasteful things that I have to do in medicine mostly because of the fear of getting sued. I believe many guidelines are developed with this as a background threat also and tend to trigger too many follow-up tests and exams.
That’s fair. I’ve seen some studies by economists saying that “defensive medicine” and fear of malpractice lawsuits doesn’t seem to raise costs too much in the US - but every doctor I know (including myself) feels like they do. Edward Scizorhands [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2546143):
> HMOs were extremely effective at keeping costs down by saying "no, that's not worth it." They gradually lost the ability to say "no" by lawsuit after lawsuit.
I don’t know enough history to know how true this is, but I’d like to learn more about it. I think “legislation via lawsuit” is a huge deal in health care and probably everywhere else, and I don’t write about mostly because I don’t know much law and also am in despair about whether it could ever possibly be solved.
---
**Fallon** [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2538655):
> Strongly agree with most of this article. Work at a biopharma and it's so annoying how expensive and slow the process for bringing anything to market it. What's most shocking is always how much the doctors and even internal employees internalize the FDA mentality that you'd let 10,000 people die from approval delays vs one person go to the hospital from an unintended side effect.
>
> It's not true that insurance companies cover everything. There's some spaces like obesity where they cover next to nothing (I think semalgutide will be different) and very often they won't cover new medications when there is a cheaper older medication esp if it's generic. Lots of times people also need prior authorization for treatments and insurers can just say this isn't serious enough. I think you could see that happen here. The big issue is though that everyone 65+ qualifies for Medicare, most of those people buy Medicare part D (prescription plan) and Medicare does legally have to cover everything at any price because the pharma lobby owns half of the Democrats and every Republican. This means the government will end up paying biogen billions per year. Also since there aren't really any Alzheimer's drugs it's very hard for an insurer to refuse to cover the only treatment available.
>
> The issue here though isn't the FDA. It does do an amazing job at getting rid of amyloid and it's safe. In an ideal world we should be okay saying doctors are allowed to prescribe medications that are safe and possibly effective. It's actually quite dystopian to say we should be arresting people or banning them from their professional for giving people treatments that are definitely safe and may be effective. Maybe then we should just stop giving out research grants because not every project is successful. The problem isn't with the FDA it's with doctors and moreso insurance companies being spineless and covering everything, which is really a problem with the legal system. No doctor wants to be hung out to dry for not prescribing a well publicized approved medications just because he had some skepticism and then the family goes after you for malpractice. And insurance companies can't afford to be evil boogeymen for refusing to pay $50,000 a year for a drug that may not work and even if it did work have very modest benefit.
The one part of this I want to ask about is the “aren’t really any [other] Alzheimers drugs”. There’s galantamine, rivastigmine, donepezil, and maybe some others I’m forgetting. These don’t work very well (or maybe at all). But aducanumab also doesn’t work very well or maybe at all, so why is everyone treating it as so unprecedented?
---
**The NLRG** [writes](https://sci-hub.st/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2641547):
> *“I think the current state of the art is something like Isakov, Lo, and Monterhozedjat , which finds that there are a tiny few disease categories where the FDA might be slightly too aggressive, but that overall the FDA is still much too conservative."*
>
> I might have missed something but I think this is a misinterpretation. They say that for severe diseases the FDA is too conservative, but for for more minor ones it's too lax. Since they only ran estimates for the 30 leading causes of premature mortality it shouldn't be surprising that, for most conditions they studied, the FDA is too conservative, because most of those are pretty severe diseases. But I'm not sure you can generalize that to say that there's only a tiny few disease categories where the FDA is too aggressive.
Thanks for this correction. I remember there being an older paper doing cost-benefit analysis on the FDA, does anyone remember what I’m thinking of?
---
**Milt** [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2546042):
> No discussion of FDA intransigence would be complete without a look at the life of John Nestor, <https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/05/medicines-missing-measure/257901/>. I’m surprised he hasn’t been mentioned yet. He spent his spare time causing massive traffic jams on DC-area highways by insisting on driving 55 in the left lane. If an author tried to create an obstinate bureaucrat character based on his life, he would be panned for being too on-the-nose.
And **Ian Argent** [finishes the story](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab/comments#comment-2546679):
> Please note: Nestor was transferred to a different role (effectively fired) for not approving ANYTHING in a 4 or 6 year period.
>
> He [sued](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1999/02/28/nestoring-revisited/798322d2-ee85-48ac-ad5b-3e6fca6dd145/) and was restored "[with apologies](https://timeline.com/this-man-pulled-into-the-fast-lane-to-drive-55-mph-and-he-pissed-off-all-of-washington-d-c-a55596ca165d)":
>
> "At the FDA, he was a friend and supporter of his colleague Frances Kelsey as she exposed the side effects of the dangerous drug thalidomide. Informed by her experience, Nestor’s tenure at the FDA was marked by obstructionism. In a four-year stretch from 1968 to 1972, he approved zero new drugs for use by the public, viewing the risks and uncertainties still too great. As a result, he was moved to a do-nothing job within the administration. He protested, and was later reinstated and given an apology by the agency."
---
The willyreads.substack.com blog has its own take on this, [Contra SSC On Aduhelm](https://willyreads.substack.com/p/slightly-contra-ssc-on-aduhelm). He summarizes as:
> Even though I’m arguing against Scott’s [recent post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab), I want to preface this by saying I don’t really disagree with his broad conclusion all that much, which is that if you could *only* increase or decrease the strictness of the FDA, broadly defined, you should probably decrease the strictness. However, I think the story is complicated and if you want the best reforms, you need a better sense of where the FDA has gone right and wrong in the past. Also, I completely agree that regarding COVID-19, the FDA has been far too slow on approving testing, vaccines, etc.
>
> **Tl;DR**: Aduhelm sucks, biomarkers often suck, approving/paying based on biomarkers creates bad incentives, confirmatory trials often don’t take place, skeptical tiered healthcare will remain tiered in the long-run
A lot of the argument focuses on surrogate endpoints, This is a kind of reasoning where you say “we want fewer heart attacks, we know cholesterol causes heart attacks, so we’ll design a drug that decreases cholesterol, do the easy work of making sure it actually decreases cholesterol, but not do the hard work of making sure it actually prevents heart attacks”. The advantage of this is that it’s much easier to check that a drug decreases cholesterol (which it might do in nearly everyone over a few months) than to check that it prevent heart attacks (which might take years or decades, since most people won’t get heart attacks or will only get them after a long time). The disadvantage is that the drug might just decrease cholesterol but not prevent heart attacks. In theory that shouldn’t happen, assuming that your “cholesterol causes heart attacks” theory is airtight. In practice, this kind of reasoning often fails. Either cholesterol doesn’t cause heart attacks (maybe it was merely correlated with them) or there’s some other disconnect (imagine that total cholesterol is the sum of hitherto unknown Type A and Type B which get lumped together in all our measurements, the drug decreases Type A, and Type B causes heart attacks). Doctors get warned against trusting surrogate endpoints, and the gold standard is always to study what you actually care about.
Still, like every other good idea, doctors are prone to following this one off a cliff. Suppose a study proves that mask mandates decrease coronavirus cases. Can we assume that they also prevent coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths? Seems pretty obvious that they should - but this is the dreaded surrogate endpoint, so purists will insist we continue the study for months longer to get a big enough sample of COVID hospitalizations/deaths to reach significance. Supposing that we prove that mask mandates prevent COVID deaths, can we be sure that the people who die will still be dead next year? Isn’t “dead now” technically just a surrogate endpoint for “dead over the long-term”, which is really what we care about? At *some point* you have to have faith in Bayes, don’t you? So in the general case I’m kind of split on this. Still, in the specific case of aducanumab we actually have *specific, positive evidence* that the surrogate endpoint doesn’t capture the real endpoint, so obviously this is bad.
---
**Charlie** [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story/comments#comment-2554750):
> It sounds like your qualm is with how American healthcare law is written, not with how the laws are administered by the FDA.
>
> As an example, who are you more mad at: judges who upheld disparate sentencing guidelines created during the war on drugs, or the legislators who wrote the laws?
This is sort of fair, but I think in this example, you would summarize your position as “I am against disparate sentencing guidelines”, not “I am against legislators”. Saying “I am against nearly everything about the way the FDA works” is easily elided into “I am against the FDA”, even though maybe this is unvirtuous. I’ll try to think about if there’s a better way to frame this.
I’m half-flirting with trying a YIMBY analogy by dubbing my position YIMCS (“Yes In My Circulatory System”). It seems to be basically the same problem - governments that overtrained on a history of real abuses made it so easy to veto new developments that nothing ever gets done, and when things do get done they’re by big corporations with enough money and lobbyists to survive a harrowing approval process. But I think my personal credibility with the YIMBYs is pretty low, plus I probably shouldn’t choose an acronym that nobody will understand until I explain it to them.
---
On the infant fish oil post, **Tyler G** [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story/comments#comment-2565035):
> Huge fan, but I think Scott's being too easy on himself here. This was THE example that the rest of his initial FDA takedown hung on - the implication was "throw a dart at the FDA and here's what you'll find, it represents a thousand other stories just like it." It turned out to be substantially wrong. Like, AT LEAST as factually wrong than the crappy NYT story about Scott which he (correctly) didn't excuse.
>
> Scott's charging for content now, and is doing important, high profile investigatory journalism. It's not OK to get so many relevant facts wrong. "This story is directionally and emotionally accurate, so don't worry that my supporting arguments were wrong" is exactly the kind of BS I want to see ACT/SSC as fighting against in the rest of media.
>
> I would've liked to see a full retraction here, and most importantly, I'd like to see some of the subscriber money go to an intern who can help fact-check.
I acknowledge I got a lot of the story pretty wrong here, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do about this.
The immediate things I’ve done are
* Write a paragraph on my Mistakes page admitting the things I uncontroversially got wrong, explaining that some people think I got more things wrong than that, linking to Kevin Drum’s post as an example, and explaining my thought process on the things I think weren’t wrong.
* Italicize the paragraph in the original post and add underneath it that there are issues with the italicized paragraph, with links to the two subsequent posts explaining/debating the issues, and to the Mistakes page entry.
Things I need to do in the future are . . . man, I don’t know. I wrote the aducanumab post when I was really angry. I don’t want to never write posts when I’m angry, because those tend to be the posts people like the most, and I think they get things done in terms of convincing people of important things. But it does make me cut corners in terms of writing down things I half-remember without checking them. I think in the future, I try more carefully to follow the old “write drunk, edit sober” advice, with emphasis on the sober editing.
When you start writing, you always think “Unlike everyone else who writes stupid false things taken out of context, I will write good true things with lots of context”. But there are obviously reasons why this is so hard for everyone else. I think a big one is that when you get really mad about something, you become pretty desperate to prove that it’s true and worth being mad about, the story grows as you retell it to yourself, and you do the thing where you look for evidence that confirms you rather than disproves you. This is something I warn against in others, and I need to be better at avoiding it myself.
I feel least good about myself when trying to do the pundit thing (where I think I make mistakes comparable to those which other pundits make), and best about myself when I’m trying to figure out better institutions and theories for what rationality, updating, and bias are, and how everyone can do them better. I think one of those institutions is having a great comment section which catches my mistakes and keeps me honest, so thanks.
I’m not going to hire an intern right now because I hate communicating with other people, especially about my work, but if this starts happens more often, I’ll keep the option in mind.
---
Trevor Klee writes a blog post of his own: [From A Small Biotech Startup’s Perspective, the FDA Is Terrifying](https://trevorklee.com/what-the-fda-is-really-like-from-a-small-biotechs-perspective-hint-theyre-terrifying/).
> I’ve been following the discussions around the FDA recently with great interest. COVID has made everyone a lot more aware of the FDA, which I think is why Scott Alexander’s recent post about [the FDA](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab) prompted so much furious discussion.
>
> I wanted to add a different voice to the mix: the voice of small biotech. When people think about who interacts with the FDA, they often think about large biotech, like Biogen and Pfizer. But, as with any industry, there are many more small players than there are large players. And, as with any industry, it is much more intimidating dealing with regulators as a small player than as a large player.
>
> As the president of a very small, very early stage biotech company, this is a matter of personal interest to me. (Side note: if you’re interested in the mission of treating autoimmune diseases by repurposing generics, [drop me a line](mailto:trevor@highwaypharm.com)!)
>
> But, this is isn’t about me or my company. This is about a much larger (but still small), much later stage biotech: [Axsome Therapeutics](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiY96OUl6nyAhVUCc0KHeMjBm8QFnoECAQQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.axsome.com%2F&usg=AOvVaw0o0iEvstMs8EYHUOyqY5D2). They have a market cap that, until 3 days ago, was hovering around $2 billion, and a drug that, until 3 days ago, looked to be approved very soon for treating major depressive disorder.
>
> What happened 3 days ago? The FDA happened. To put it bluntly, the FDA wrecked their shit.
>
> You see, Axsome thought they were in a good place, as did the stock market. Axome had a drug, bupropion-dextromethorphan, which had [done well in their phase 3 trials for major depressive disorder](https://www.globenewswire.com/fr/news-release/2020/12/01/2137234/33090/en/Axsome-Therapeutics-Announces-Positive-Efficacy-and-Safety-Results-from-Phase-3-COMET-Long-Term-Trial-and-COMET-AU-Trial-of-AXS-05-in-Major-Depressive-Disorder.html). The next step after that is to submit the drug for approval to the FDA, which, when there are such clear indications of improvement, is usually a layup. An annoying layup, filled with lots of paperwork, but a layup.
>
> But that’s not what happened. Instead, [the FDA sent Axsome a letter on July 30 saying that they found “deficiencies” that prevented them from moving forward with the approval](https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fda-finds-fault-axsome-s-depression-filing-sinking-stock). What are those deficiencies? Oh, the FDA doesn’t say. They don’t even give a hint. They just told them to hang tight until August 22.
>
> It’s impossible to overstate how devastating a letter like that can be for a biotech. At this point, Axsome has undoubtedly sunk millions of dollars and around 9 years into this drug. Even worse, in preparation for a commercial launch, Axsome has undoubtedly hired dozens of sales people, marketers, and people who are experienced navigating the incredibly complicated landscape of insurance reimbursement. Every month that those people are on the payroll is probably at least another million burned.
The word “deficiencies” rings a bell, because I remember the FDA rejected an EpiPen competitor for “certain major deficiencies” without giving more information (at least not to the public). EpiPen took advantage of this to quadruple their prices, although the FDA did eventually approve the competitor a few years later. I was never able to figure out what the “deficiencies” were, which is too bad, because there seems to be something of an epidemic of “deficiencies” at the FDA these days.
Bupropion-dextromethorphan is an interesting case, because both bupropion and dextromethorphan alone are FDA-approved medications (bupropion as an antidepressant, DXM as a cough syrup). Then someone (maybe Axsome) did some preliminary studies suggesting that both of them together worked much better for depression than bupropion alone.
In theory, basically anyone can prescribe these two medications to a depressed person right now. We would have to prescribe them separately, but the patient could just take both at the same time. In practice, everyone (including me) wants to wait for more evidence that the combination is really as good as preliminary results say (I’m not worried about safety, since, again, these are both commonly-used drugs - in theory they could interact, but not enough that anyone would worry about giving them both to a depression patient who also had a cough). Nobody will gather that evidence without a financial incentive, and right now the financial incentive is getting the combination FDA-approved as a special combo medication.
It’s actually weirder than that, because probably Axsome will have to charge really high prices for their combo drug to recoup the cost of the FDA approval process. Doctors will still have the alternative option of prescribing (very cheap) bupropion and dextromethorphan separately and telling the patient to take one of each. And yet Axsome is full of smart businesspeople who have assured their CEO that nobody will do this, and I’m sure those businesspeople are right. Why make patients take *two* cheap pills instead of *one* convenient super-expensive pill, when Yagmuk is paying the bills either way?
I plan to make fun of doctors who prescribe this, and maybe to rib on Axsome *a little*. But realistically they’re doing good work by exploring this potentially promising drug combination.
---
**Dausuul**, a commenter on Kevin Drum’s blog, [writes](https://jabberwocking.com/a-3-part-story-about-short-bowel-syndrome-and-the-fda/comment-page-2/#comment-24369):
> I have to say, I start giving a lot of side-eye to anybody who criticizes a scientific organization (which the FDA is) with talk about "common sense" and "the average guy on the street." Whoever said "common sense is merely the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18" was dead-on, and the average guy on the street knows f\*\*k-all about science and medicine.
I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. The claim isn't that the man on the street is smarter than some individual scientist or administrator at the FDA. It's that the kind of normal knowledge that normal people use is better than the kind of institutional knowledge the FDA uses.
By analogy, consider criminal trials. Sometimes everybody knows some guy (eg Al Capone) is a crime boss. But the justice system can't arrest or punish him, because the common knowledge doesn't work the same way as institutional knowledge (eg it's hard to bring Capone to trial and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed a specific crime). So even though we men-on-the-street all know he should be in prison, and even though justice system officials like police/prosecutors/detectives are smarter and more expert than we are, the justice system itself is unable to put him in prison, and its decision (keep him free) is stupider than our common-sense one (lock him up).
In this case, there's a really good reason we make the justice system very conservative. We want to have a very strong bias against locking up innocent people: "better ten guilty men go free than one innocent person get convicted." We also want to make it harder for the government/police to lock up people just because they don't like them. All of this is right and virtuous.
The problem is that the FDA uses similar logic. And contra the criminal justice system, where imprisoning an innocent person is a huge rights violation, the FDA is erring on the side of denying people rights, and making us unable to respond to pandemics and diseases. When everyone knows a certain treatment would save lots of babies / prevent COVID, and the FDA bans them from getting it, that imposes a lot of cost without a counterbalancing human-rights-based motive on the other side.
To return to my original point, just as detectives are smarter than you, but the justice system can still fail to implement plans that every common person knows are correct, so FDA doctors are smarter than you, but the FDA can still fail to implement plans that every common person knows are correct. I think it’s good that the justice system stays super-over-cautious. But the FDA could stand to loosen up. | Scott Alexander | 40054518 | Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab | acx |
# Links For August
*[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** Ever wonder what happened to the Borgias after the Renaissance? Apparently they’re still around, and one of them - [Rodrigo Borja Cevallos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Borja_Cevallos\) - was president of Ecuador back in the 90s. A lot of the Spanish branch of the family (who spell their name “Borja”) seem to have ended up in Latin America, which makes me curious whether Cuban-American immigration economist George Borjas is related too.
**2:** It’s long been a YIMBY talking point that building more luxury or market-rate houses will indirectly free up affordable housing, as richer people move out of cheaper houses into costlier ones. [A new paper confirms and quantifies](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119021000656) this effect: “Constructing a new market-rate building that houses 100 people ultimately leads 45 to 70 people to move out of below-median income neighborhoods, with most of the effect occurring within three years.”
**3:** This is a bit Twitter drama-y:
…but I’m including it because I’m increasingly taking Nate’s position literally. I’ll admit that my recent collection of FDA rants wasn’t as sober as I’d like, and that my nod to cost-benefit analysis was briefly pointing to the existence of one cost-benefit analysis paper that supported my point. But a lot of people just never seem to consider it at all, and I’m starting to notice this more and more everywhere, kind of like a [missing developmental milestone thing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-milestones-are-you-missing/). I realize I sound arrogant and annoying here, but I guess I’m just urging people to notice when there’s a big hole at the point in an argument where a cost-benefit analysis should be.
**4:** The First and Second Amendments to the US Constitution are big deals, while the Third Amendment (the government can’t make people quarter soldiers in their houses) languishes in obscurity. Until now! ÞALA (Third Amendment Lawyers Association) [has filed a brief against the eviction moratorium](https://reason.com/2021/08/10/is-the-cdcs-eviction-moratorium-a-third-amendment-violation/). They argue that an eviction moratorium means the government is making landlords quarter people nonconsensually, and "given the size of the population at issue, some of these tenants are bound to be soldiers", so the moratorium is a Third Amendment violation. This is interesting because as far as I can tell ÞALA started out as (still is?) a joke group of lawyers making fun of the powerful First Amendment and Second Amendment lobbies. So as best I can tell these are real lawyers in a joke organization filing a joke brief in a real case. Indeed do many things come to pass.
**5:** I talk a lot about predictions on here, so here’s the projected results of the 2060 presidential election ([source](https://twitter.com/notkavi/status/1413894417664991245)):
Related: [“the metacontextual hyperamericas to which we have never not owed our allegiance”](https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1414389198803636225)
**6:** Researchers at Oxford and Aalto study where people think it’s appropriate for other people to touch them; at some point, this got [transformed into terrible maps](https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/659064097336328192/tuesdayisfordancing-paratactician-so-oxford) that serve as a parable against…overfitting, maybe?…I don’t even know…definitely a parable against something. “As a man, you are tentatively okay with your hands being touched by your mother, father, sister, or brother. You actually quite like your hands being touched by your uncle. You are implacably opposed to your hands being touched by your aunt.” And so on.
**7:** Fiiine, I’ll link to the [creativity test](https://www.datcreativity.com/task) that’s gone viral on Twitter recently. You choose ten words, and it grades you as more creative the more different all ten are from each other on some measure of semantic distance. And in case you’re looking for a way to cheat, you can always do something like this:
**8:** H/T Stephan Guyenet: [meta-meta-analysis finds that](https://academic.oup.com/advances/advance-article/doi/10.1093/advances/nmab093/6342518) “there is scant scientific evidence that low-[glycaemic index] diets are superior to high-[glycaemic index] diets for weight loss and obesity prevention.”
**9:** *Quillette* has [a kind of snarky autopsy of the “insect apocalypse” idea](https://quillette.com/2021/07/25/the-insect-apocalypse-that-never-was/), ie the concern that insect populations had been dropping precipitously over the past few years for some kind of environmental reason and maybe portended some larger collapse. Some more recent surveys have found about the same number of insects as ever, and I think the current consensus is that we are not generally running out of bugs. The article makes a pretty predictable case about “alarmism” and the media treating this irresponsibly. I’m prejudiced against listening, because I believed this was worth worrying about when the first round of studies came in, but this is still a great into-the-weeds description of a scientific controversy and how it eventually got (mostly) resolved.
**10:** [Why are there only two sizes of sand dune?](https://etirabys.tumblr.com/post/659180358327255040/houses-built-on-sand)
**11:** Noah Smith on [why China is smashing its tech industry](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-is-china-smashing-its-tech-industry) (where “tech” means “consumer software”). The two leading theories seem to be “the government is concerned that tech could become an alternate power center and wants to kill it” and “the government thinks it’s better to have a normal industrial economy that manufactures products, instead of whatever sort of app-and-social-network-based monstrosity we seem to be getting here in the US, and it’s gambling that it can prevent this transition without also stopping the beneficial type of techno-economic growth”. The second theory is at least a little sympathetic, but I can’t help but be reminded of some of the discussion of how planned economies are great at catchup growth and terrible at frontier growth because the government can’t pick winners or losers very well without knowing what it’s going for (see eg [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) and [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works)) - I guess China isn’t very concerned about this.
**12:** Kelsey [against degrowth](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22408556/save-planet-shrink-economy-degrowth). Some strong Matt Yglesias “actually, good things are good” energy here. This isn’t meant as a criticism. So many journalists are limited to “what if bad things were good” that the “actually, good things are good” articles are a breath of fresh air.
**13:** This month in wacky Chinese propaganda ([source)](https://twitter.com/XHNews/status/1421102166358388739):
**14:** “[Massive new employment discrimination study](https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf)” tries to quantify levels of gender and race discrimination by industry. IIUC it finds no overall gender discrimination (some industries/firms favor one gender over another, but it tends to cancel out). People with distinctively black names are about 10% less likely to get callbacks overall than people with white names, eg 22% vs. 20% (though remember that distinctively black names - eg “Antuan”, “Lakisha”, etc - [might be a poor proxy for](http://datacolada.org/36) the experience of the average black person). Some firms seem clearly more racist than others. All these numbers seem lower than some other studies (eg [here](https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873)) and I haven’t looked into them enough to figure out why.
**15:** Seen on Twitter:
Also, someone [replied](https://twitter.com/HistoryNed/status/1422651616927363079) with an urban legend that Russian revolutionaries who were asked to pledge allegiance to the Constitution believed that “Constitution was the wife of Constantine”.
**16:** Michael Tracey is the only person I’ve seen do anything that could almost sort of be described as [supporting Cuomo](https://mtracey.substack.com/p/what-the-media-hasnt-told-you-about) in all this, so I guess give him a read.
**17:** Is it true that, as GK Chesterton claimed, people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything? IE that Christianity fills a useful religion-shaped-hole in people’s heads, and so non-religious people are easy prey for cults, conspiracy theories, etc? I hear this a lot, but [here’s a study finding that](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/27/what-drives-belief-in-conspiracy-theories-a-lack-of-religion-or-too-much) church-goers were more likely to believe in QAnon, even after “adjusting for confounders” (remember, this is hard and doesn’t always work). The same article notes that “white evangelicals” are more likely to believe in vaccine-autism connections, moon landing fraud, etc - although I find this less convincing than I would if they just gave me the church attendance statistics without bringing race and denomination into it.
**18:** [The Fantastic Art Of Vsevolod Ivanov](https://weirdrussia.com/2014/06/08/fantastic-art-of-vsevolod-ivanov/), a conspiracy theorist who paints pictures of his imagined Russian Atlantis:
**19:** [Here is an unsourced claim that](https://sites.google.com/view/microdosingpsychedelics/faq-on-microdosing) “people with colorblindness report lasting visual disturbances from microdosing [psychedelics]” - does anyone know more about this or why it would be true?
**20:** [How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nws5pai9AB6dCQqxq/how-are-resources-in-ea-allocated-across-issues) Most of the money goes to normal causes (eg global health) but most of the people go into meta-level concerns and weird causes (eg AI risk). Probably makes sense in the context of which problems are money-constrained vs. people-constrained and what the rest of the world is doing. Total amount of resources is probably on the order of $400 million/year and 2,000 highly engaged people.
**21:** Claim: Harvard has a quota on smart people. Not a very high quota, either:
Source is [here](https://prospect.org/education/privileging-privileged-harvard-s-real-problem/); the article talks about how Harvard could become more equitable, though I’m confused by some of its thought process. For example, it says that Harvard is more than 10x more likely to admit students from families in the top quintile of the wealth distribution than the bottom quintile and this is “*not* because there are too few low-SES students who qualify academically” - but then suggests the solution is affirmative action for poorer students, which seems worse than trying to identify and eliminate whatever biases favor the rich. While Harvard admissions reform would be welcome and important, it’s a sideshow to the more important task of de-emphasizing the college system more generally. Why should admission to a handful of private institutions that admit people for stupid reasons determine everyone’s future life course, anyway?
**22:** From Unherd: [are PhDs really the demographic least likely to get vaccines](https://unherd.com/thepost/the-most-vaccine-hesitant-education-group-of-all-phds/)?
One strong criticism: this was a Facebook survey where people selected their education level. Only 2% of Americans have PhDs, so if another 2% of Americans are trolls who pretend to be PhDs on Facebook, that could swamp any real signal (see the third section [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/) for more). But I’m tempted to accept this at face value because of this table (Table 3 in the document):
It looks like in January, PhDs were one of the more pro-vaccine demographics, and then this shifted very gradually as everyone warmed up to vaccines. This suggests that it’s not that PhDs are wrong-er than everyone else, just that the ones who are wrong are more stubborn about it - which fits *my* impression of PhDs just fine.
**23:** Related, I guess: Philippe Lemoine [criticizes more lockdown studies](https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/lockdowns-econometrics-and-the-art-of-putting-lipstick-on-a-pig/).
**24:** A picture of Baghdad as it looked c. 800 AD ([source](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/16/story-cities-day-3-baghdad-iraq-world-civilisation)):
**25:** More Twitter drama that I nevertheless think is genuinely important:
Mason’s objection is fair, but I have a deeper one. The usual public health MO is to ban everything until there are studies proving it’s okay (eg [Omegaven](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story), [COVID testing](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab)). But when something is popular enough, then the burden of proof shifts to opponents - are there any studies *absolutely proving* it’s bad? (Mason was able to find one [weakly suggesting it was bad in animals](https://twitter.com/webdevMason/status/1425933900094730243), but of course this isn’t *proof*).
One of the most important things I got from the Rationalist Sequences was what Eliezer describes as:
> …a fact of life that we hold ideas we would like to believe, to a lower standard of proof than ideas we would like to disbelieve. In the former case we ask "Am I allowed to believe it?" and in the latter case ask "Am I forced to believe it?"
The medical establishment held Omegaven to an “am I forced to accept this?” standard, and infant caregiver masking to an “am I allowed to accept this?” standard. Both are “evidence-based” only in the sense that some theoretical overwhelming level of evidence could change them. I support letting the infant caregivers mask based on a standard of “we’re sometimes allowed to use common sense to say that things are okay even if we don’t have studies proving this” - but I feel like most of our other health regulations are still using the opposite decision process.
**26:** The [Cox-Zucker machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine) is an algorithm for determining "if a given set of sections provides a basis for the Mordell–Weil group of a [certain type of] elliptic surface". It’s a real mathematical finding - but it owes its genesis to Professor Cox and Professor Zucker meeting during grad school, realizing that any result with both their names on it would be “remarkably obscene”, and deliberately working together on unsolved problems until they found something. H/T [Jadagul](https://jadagul.tumblr.com/post/658452253856907264/unreasonably-pleased-to-have-my-first) (click on his name for a related story)
**27:** Several people sent me links to [a study](https://www.pnas.org/content/118/30/e2102061118.full) claiming that depressive cognitive distortions in literature have shot up ~10 years ago, maybe suggesting that depression is becoming more common. I am currently very skeptical because it looks like [the Google corpus of books that they used](https://twitter.com/YAppelbaum/status/1419483512776835077) switches from mostly non-fiction to mostly-fiction ~10 years ago, and this change in topics is sufficient to explain the change in depressive cognitive distortions.
**28:** Seen for sale on [redbubble.com](https://www.redbubble.com/i/mask/The-Yellow-King-No-Mask-Mask-by-kinchdedalus/48245820.F8Y4C): | Scott Alexander | 40034615 | Links For August | acx |
# Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot Of School
**I. Introduction**
Back when the public schools were closed or online, someone I know burned themselves out working overtime to get the money to send their kid to a private school. They figured that all the other parents would do it, their kid would fall hopelessly behind, and then they’d be doomed to whatever sort of horrible fate awaits people who don’t get into the right colleges.
I hear this is happening again now, with more school closures, more frantic parents, and more people asking awful questions like “should I accept the risk of [sending my immunocompromised kid to school](https://cbsaustin.com/news/coronavirus/parents-with-immunocompromised-kids-facing-tough-school-decision), or should I accept him falling behind and never amounting to anything?”
(see also [this story](https://citylimits.org/2021/08/16/as-nyc-students-head-back-to-school-immunocompromised-families-push-for-remote-learning/))
You can probably predict what side I’m on here. Like everyone else, I took a year of Spanish in middle school; like everyone else who did that, the sum total of what I remember is “no hablo Espanol” - and even there I’m pretty sure I forgot a curly thing over at least one of the letters. Like everyone else, I learned advanced math in high school; like everyone else, I can do up to basic algebra, the specific math I need for my job, and nothing else (my entire memory of Algebra II is that there is a thing called “Gaussian Elimination”). Like everyone else, I once knew the names and dates of many important Civil War battles; like everyone else - okay, fine, I remember all of these, but only because the Civil War is objectively fascinating.
And that’s the whole point. We learn lots of things in school. Then we forget everything except the things that our interests, jobs, and society give us constant exposure/practice to. If I lived in Spain, I would remember Spanish; if I worked in math, I would remember what Gaussian Elimination was. If you’re exposed to and interested in the material, you’ll learn it anyway if you’re curious enough. If you’re not, it will go in one ear and out the other, hopefully spending just enough time in between to let you pass the standardized test.
Even beyond this, school is repetitive. I learned the same Civil War facts in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade. I read *The Giver* in multiple English classes. And this is just the stuff it’s embarrassing to have repeated. The actually important skills - how to write essays, how to cite sources - get deliberately repeated year after year.
(I still don’t know how to cite a source properly, except a vague memory that something called “MLA Format” was very important, and that there might have been another thing called “Chicago Style” unless I am confusing it with pizza. When I need to cite something in real life, I hit the “Cite” button on the top right of PubMed and do whatever it says.)
So my prediction is that an average student could miss a year or two of school without major long-term effects. Their standardized test score would be lower at the end of the two years they missed than some other student who had been in school the whole time. But after a short period they would equalize again. I don’t think you need to burn yourself out working overtime to send your kid to a private school, I don’t think you need to risk your immunocompromised kid’s health to send her to the classroom, I think you can just chill.
Here is some of the evidence that makes me think this.
**II. Evidence In Favor From Various Unusual Situations**
In [the Benezet experiment](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-school), a school district taught no math at all before 6th grade (around age 10-11). Then in sixth grade, they started teaching math, and by the end of the year the students were just as good at math as traditionally-educated children with five years of preceding math education. I interpret this to mean that a lot of education involves cramming things into the heads of very young students who would be able to learn it very quickly anyway when they were older. Certainly it doesn’t seem like a child missing math class in grades 1-5 should have much of a long-term effect.
*[**update:** commenters make a strong argument I am misunderstanding the Benezet experiment; please ignore this paragraph for now]*
After Hurricane Katrina, many New Orleans students had missed a year or two of school (because their school had been destroyed, or they’d had to evacuate the city and live with relatives, etc). After the hurricane, New Orleans switched to a charter-school-based system and test scores went up, with New Orleans students generally outperforming their peers. There’s a lot of discussion about whether this does or doesn’t mean that charter schools are great, but either way doesn’t seem like missing a year or two of school hurt the New Orleanians very much.
[Source](https://educatenow.net/2015/07/16/2015-act-scores-new-orleans-improves-more-than-state/). New Orleans’ ACT scores improved from pre-Katrina to post-Katrina, even though the post-Katrina kids missed a year or two of school. I don’t want to trivialize the hard work that educators and school reformers probably put in to catch them up - but given that hard work, they caught up. I think educators will also put a lot of work into catching up kids who have to miss school because of COVID.
Some parents "unschool" their children. That is, they object to schooling as traditionally understood, so they register themselves as home schooling but don't formally teach much, limiting themselves to answering kids' questions as they come up. When adjusted for confounders (ie usually these parents are rich and well-educated), their young children [lag one grade level behind](http://zoleerjemeer.nl/files/1313/9109/4391/The_Impact_of_Schooling_on_Academic_Achievement_-_onderzoek_effecten_unschooling_en_gestructureerd_onderwijs_sept_2011.pdf) public school students on average - but only one (though these students were pretty young and they might have lagged further behind with time). By the time these unschooled kids are applying for college, [they seem to know a decent amount](https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/37091/how-do-unschoolers-turn-out), get into college at relatively high rates, and do well in their college courses. I think there’s some evidence that not getting any school at all harms these children’s performance on some traditional measures. But it doesn’t harm them very much. Given how little effect there is from absolutely zero school ever, I think missing a year or two of school isn’t going to matter a lot.
[This study](https://www.nature.com/articles/bjc2016438) tracks the grades of kids with various childhood cancers. It finds that if you have a cancer of the nervous system, a cancer that involves radiation treatment, or a cancer during very early childhood before you start school, you’ll do worse in school over the long term - this seems to be a purely biological result of the cancer or of side effects from the treatment. But other kinds of cancers, especially cancers that develop during school age, don’t seem to decrease grades at all. I assume having cancer as a kid involves missing a lot of school - a kid I knew had cancer and was out of school for months. But this doesn’t seem to affect long-term educational prospects.
Different countries make their kids spend very different amounts of time in school. This has no effect on how much they learn.
[Hours in the secondary school year](https://www.oecd.org/education/eag2013%20(eng)--FINAL%2020%20June%202013.pdf) (horizontal) vs. [PISA math scores](https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf) (vertical). The relationship is significant and negative, potentially because countries that do worse try to extend the school year to catch up. This does not work at all. Even aside from this hastily-thrown-together graph, there’s a large literature on the effect of school length across different schools, US states, and countries. It mostly converges on zero effect - see the introduction [here](https://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/spischke/ksj_EJ_final.pdf) for a run-through.
The evidence suggests that [homework has minimal to no effect on learning](https://www.readingrockets.org/article/key-lessons-what-research-says-about-value-homework). If time in school has the same effect as homework, that suggests it’s also pretty low. This also serves as a proof of concept that educators have no idea whether anything they do educates children or not, and there’s no particular reason to draw a connection between “you are turning your children’s time over to these people” and “your children are learning more”.
Before the 1960s, Germany had a very non-standardized school year where different areas would start in all different months. In the 1960s, the government decided to standardize to have the school year everywhere start in autumn. During the transition, some German students got only half a year in a given grade; others got one and a half years. Pischke [studies the results](https://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/spischke/ksj_EJ_final.pdf), and although he’s able to find immediate effects, there are no long-term effects on outcomes like earnings.
And Potochnik (2018) [looks at immigrants](https://sci-hub.st/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0002831218761026) who missed school (at least one grade level) during the immigration process. After adjusting for confounders, immigrants who miss a grade during primary school (ie below age ~11) do just as well on tenth-grade (ie age ~15) tests as immigrants who didn’t miss a grade. Immigrants who miss a grade during secondary school (ie after age ~11) do the same on reading, but worse on math, as other immigrants on tenth-grade tests. I interpret this to mean that effects from early school missing wash out after a few years, but that if you miss a grade close enough to when you’re being tested, it won’t have enough time to wash out before the test (especially with math). One caveat is that school-missing immigrants, even the ones who did academically just as well as everyone else, were more likely to drop out. This could potentially be either non-academic effects, or (more likely) undetected confounders.
**III. Supposed Counterevidence From Absences, And Why I Am Pretty Sure It’s Wrong**
What about everyone saying that “research shows” that being absent from school is terrible for children? There is “research” that “shows” this, but it is mostly terrible. [This](https://www.attendanceworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Attendance-in-the-Early-Grades.pdf) is a typical example. It finds that increased absences are heavily correlated with worse grades and test scores.
This would not pass a freshman experimental methods course. Obviously this is correlational rather than causal. Kids who are very poor, delinquent, have parents who don’t care enough to force them to go to school, etc - miss more school than rich kids with helicopter parents. These kids are also at more risk of having reading problems. The alternative is to believe that (as these people apparently do) missing two weeks of school makes you 33% less likely to be able to read two years later. Come *on*!
The only study of this sort that I will grudgingly tolerate is [this one](http://mep.wceruw.org/documents/Attendance-Research-Brief.pdf), which adjusts for some confounders like poverty (remember, you can never adjust for all confounders!) and also breaks absences down by “excused” vs. “unexcused”. Excused absences are things like “the kid is sick and has a doctor’s note”, and probably don’t differ as much based on class and parental investment. Here’s what they find:
Look at Figure 6, bottom half. If you don’t adjust for confounders, someone with lots of unexcused absences goes from the 50th percentile to the 12th percentile. Once you do adjust, they go from the 50th percentile to the . . . 47th percentile, and even that three-point difference is plausibly just unaccounted-for confounders. As for excused absences, they have pretty much no effect whether you adjust for confounders or not. The kids missing 18+ days, ie more than a tenth of the entire school year, do the same or better as kids with zero absences.
Figure 7 is a little more pessimistic. It finds some evidence that children who miss lots of school do worse on math tests, although even here missing 10% of the school year only brings you down from the 50th to 46th percentile. I think this is plausible. If you miss the week that your teacher was teaching eg Gaussian Elimination, you just might not learn how to eliminate Gausses that year (all of these are based on tests at the end of the year where the students were absent). I would still be surprised if, five years later, there is a difference between these two groups. If it’s something important like basic multiplication, the absent kids will pick it up some other time; if it’s something obscure like Gaussian Elimination, the non-absent kids will forget all about it. Remember, in the Benezet experiment students missed five whole years of math instruction, and a single normal year was enough to get them back on track.
**IV. Supposed Counterevidence From Disasters and Strikes, And Why I Think It Is Most Likely Wrong**
The strongest counterevidence to my position comes from a body of literature on the effect of other long-term school closures, mostly from disasters but occasionally from teacher strikes.
I’m inherently skeptical of these, because education researchers love finding that education has huge effects, that any disruption to education is a disaster, and that kids should be in school much more. This is in addition to the usual bias for positive results. Still, the studies exist and we should look at them.
One strain of this literature focuses on snow days. In years where there are more snow days, do children learn less? Often studies find this is true, for example [here](https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/34654/1/557545692.pdf). But an important caveat - this study finds only that snow days late in the winter (eg February) affect test scores. Early snow (eg November) has no effect. Probably this is because the test they’re using to measure effects is administered in March.
To me this fits with a sort of “teaching to the test” model. There’s no effect on some deep abstract long-term construct of “education” or “knowledge”. But if you’re having Test Review Day a week before the test, and then you can’t do that, that has a big effect. Clearly this won’t affect next year’s test - it doesn’t even affect a test three months out! Claiming that snow days are bad for education is just Goodharting on “scores on the test immediately after the snow day”.
(my own experience with these standardized tests is that eg my school’s social studies courses would move leisurely through the Native American and colonial era, get distracted talking about How Bad Slavery Was, and then a week before the standardized test go into “ohmigod we’re supposed to be at the 1950s now fuck fuck fuck Grant Hayes Garfield Arthur Cleveland Harrison Cleveland McKinley World War One World War Two labor unions Japanese internment ok good luck!” mode. If the day you miss is during that period, I can definitely believe you do worse on test questions about the McKinley administration one week later.)
Also of note, a study by Joshua Goodman finds that snow day closures [do not have any noticeable effect on test scores in Massachusetts](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/01/snow-days-dont-subtract-from-learning/). Nobody has officially made this connection, but I suspect this is because Massachusetts’ standardized test is in May, when there won’t have been snow days close enough to make a difference.
Another strain of literature focuses on big Third World disasters, like [an earthquake in Pakistan](https://www.the74million.org/article/aldeman-what-a-2005-earthquake-in-pakistan-can-teach-american-educators-about-learning-loss-after-a-disaster/). These disasters usually destroy schools and give students a few years’ gap in learning, and studies do find that the students do worse just after the disaster. But importantly, they are doing more worse than the schooling gap can account for - eg if they miss school for a year, they’re two or three years below grade level. Most studies I read attribute this to some combination of malnutrition and PTSD. The grade losses *worsen* even after the students are back in school (ie they might start two years behind, and after two more years of schooling they’re four years behind). The commentators attribute this to “being promoted too quickly”, but I interpret this as further evidence that something beyond just missing school is affecting this. Given that the Hurricane Katrina study didn’t find this, I suspect that in a First World environment where malnutrition is less of a risk, there’s less need to worry about this.
Then there are [teacher strike studies](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/10/how-teacher-strikes-hurt-student-achievement/). These generally find that teachers going on strike have large negative effects. I don’t entirely understand their methodology, so I can’t critique them very well, but I have to admit I’m skeptical of them anyway. [This one](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16846/w16846.pdf) is the classic, but its pattern of effects seems kind of suspicious - a teacher strike in fifth grade is bad for boys’ (but not girls’) sixth grade math scores, but a teacher strike in sixth grade is bad for girls’ (but not boys’) sixth grade reading scores? A strike is four times worse in fifth grade than in sixth grade for reading, but about the same for writing? Possibly I’m misunderstanding this methodology, but otherwise I’m not sure what to think.
On the other hand, [this one from Argentina](http://barrett.dyson.cornell.edu/NEUDC/paper_179.pdf) has very robust effect sizes. Being exposed to ten days more Argentine teacher strike doesn’t just decrease test scores, doesn’t just hurt employment and earnings decades later, but even (if I’m understanding it correctly) causes intergenerational effects that decrease the school performance of the *children* of the students who underwent the teachers’ strike.
I can’t find any specific problems with this study. It just seems extreme to me. We know from the absence data above that missing eighteen days of school doesn’t even decrease your score on that year’s reading test - but missing ten days means you’ll get a worse job as an adult and even rubs off on your children and your children’s children unto the n-th generation? Benezet just didn’t teach math at all for five years and everyone did fine, but if you miss even ten days of your math class you’ll never recover?
(also, compare the second-generation effects of experiencing a 10 day long teacher strike vs. [experiencing the Holocaust](https://sci-hub.st/10.1007/bf02967975) - the results might surprise you!)
If I had to try to reconcile this study with the others, I might refer to the work on non-academic effects of school - a lot of school-related interventions (like pre-school) don’t improve test scores or any meaningful measure of knowledge, but do seem to help through something like behavioral stability and conscientiousness. This might explain why it’s hard to find effects on test scores, but possible to find effects on earnings years later.
**V. Trying To Steelman The Case Against Missing School**
Since I’m writing this from a position of bias, I’m going to try to pretend I have the opposite bias, and see what that comes up with.
There are many studies that show that various seemingly-good educational interventions don’t necessarily increase test scores, but do improve graduation rates, decrease youth crime, and achieve other “moral character” type goals. For example, preschool programs like Head Start don’t raise test scores, but do seem to probably prevent dropouts.
Maybe missing school is also like this? There seems to be some hint of this in the study on immigrant children, who were usually able to recover test scores over time, but still dropped out more even after their test scores were fine. This could also explain why the Argentine children in teacher strikes had decreased earnings years later; a lot of the studies linking educational effects to earnings find that connections aren’t mediated by test scores.
Is there any reason to think that missing school might have effects on test scores more than a few years out? Most studies done on primary school students missing school find they eventually catch up; some studies done on secondary school students find they don’t. I previously assumed this was because the secondary school students don’t have enough time to catch up before they stop taking standardized tests and getting counted in these studies (usually 10th - 12th grade), but the evidence doesn’t rule out a scenario where secondary school is actually very important and if you miss it you’ll never catch up. Even if this is not true in a fundamental sense, it could be true in a sense where if you miss (eg) 11th grade, you don’t have enough time to catch up before you apply for college, you get into a worse college than you otherwise would have, and that stays on your resume for life.
I think some of these points are stronger for poor/minority/at-risk kids, and weaker for comfortable/Eurasian/not-at-risk kids. Concerns about dropping out or getting involved in criminal activity only make sense if your kid was on the border of doing these sorts of things, and I suspect the reason school prevents them is that if you come from a really bad household school is the only place you can learn expected values and behaviors - if your household is not that bad, I wouldn’t expect you to have these effects. And evidence suggests (see [section 5 here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competitive-college-admissions-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/)) that getting a good college on your resume is long-term important for disadvantaged children (maybe because otherwise employers would overlook them), but doesn’t have a permanent effect on more advantaged kids.
**VI. Conclusions And Open Questions**
I don’t want to do the thing where I say some edgy stuff but never commit to anything, so here’s what I think, given with confidence levels even though I’m not sure how you would ever check them. I’m not claiming that these conclusions are the clear conclusion of all the studies above that would be shared by any honest person who understood them - just that they’re my guesses, informed by those studies.
> 1. A kid who misses a year of primary school will, by high school graduation age, on average be less than 5 percentile rank points behind where they would otherwise have been (85%)
>
> 2. …less than 1 percentile rank point (35%)
>
> 3. A kid who misses all of 9th grade will, by high school graduation, be less than 5 percentile points behind in reading (60%)
>
> 4. …and math (30%)
>
> 5. The lowest performing kids might do slightly worse than this on average, and the highest-performing kids slightly better (???%)
If these claims are right, then ten years from now, we won’t find a huge effect of COVID lockdowns on student learning.
This will be hard to measure, because standardized tests generally measure students’ percentile rank relative to their peers, and since everyone was affected by COVID we won’t expect standardized test scores to change even if COVID had severe effects on learning.
I’m sure lots of people will do studies aiming to show that school districts / private school chains / nations that maintained more in-person learning have relatively better test scores than ones that closed for longer periods. I intend to be skeptical of these, because they’re going to end up as really complicated adjust-for-lots-of-confounder multilevel regressions that all find that Model #478 shows that closing schools was worse than the Holocaust so surely that one must be true. I would be much happier if there was some specific large difference we could look at - for example, between some nation that kept its schools completely open vs. some other that locked down all year - but I don’t think the differences are that extreme.
Might we be able to test the effect of COVID school closures on income? If there’s a discontinuity where people who graduated in 2019 make noticeably more money ten years from now than people who graduated in 2021, that might be helpful. But there are a lot of possible confounders there.
What I would really like is some consistent absolute test (ie your score is how many questions you get right, not how well you do relative to others) that all schoolchildren take yearly. I don’t know what this would be. If there was one, I would expect a medium-sized drop for students who take it this year, gradually decreasing to zero after two or three years.
Until then, I think parents should be more relaxed about the risk of their child missing school, especially if it’s relatively early in their school career. They should do whatever makes them, their child, and their family happiest and safest, without losing too much sleep over the educational consequences. | Scott Alexander | 38612249 | Kids Can Recover From Missing Even Quite A Lot Of School | acx |
# Open Thread 185
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who [volunteered to organize a local meetup](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/outdoor-careful-meetups-everywhere). You have about one more day to sign up if you haven’t already.
**2:** Comment of the Week probably has to be [Richard Hanania’s response to my critique of his theory](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-on-partisanship/comments#comment-2599663), though I’m not convinced for the reasons explored in the thread underneath. | Scott Alexander | 40048399 | Open Thread 185 | acx |
# Blindness, Schizophrenia, and Autism
**Update (8/29/22):** All of this might be false, see [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9Syf3pGffpvHwfr4/i-m-mildly-skeptical-that-blindness-prevents-schizophrenia) for more.
Some weird psychiatric trivia: no congenitally blind person ever gets schizophrenia ([journal article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4246684/), [popular article](https://www.psycom.net/blindness-and-schizophrenia/)). “Trivia” is exactly the right word for this fact; it’s undeniably interesting, but what do you do with it? So far nobody has done anything, other than remark “hmm, that’s funny”.
I was thinking about this recently in the context of the diametrical model of autism vs. schizophrenia. This is itself pretty close to psychiatric trivia - a lot of features of schizophrenia and autism seem to be opposites of each other. As I put it [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-autism-and-schizophrenia/):
> Many [of the genes](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18226-autism-and-schizophrenia-could-be-genetic-opposites/) that increase risk of autism decrease risk of schizophrenia, and vice versa. Autists have a smaller-than-normal corpus callosum; schizophrenics have a larger-than-normal one. Schizophrenics smoke [so often](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoking-gun/) that some researchers believe they have some kind of nicotine deficiency; autists have [unusually low](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12860373) smoking rates. Schizophrenics are more susceptible to the [rubber hand illusion](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201611/the-diametrics-personal-space-autism-vs-schizophrenia) and have weaker self-other boundaries in general; autists seem less susceptible and have stronger self-other boundaries. Autists can be pathologically rational but tend to be uncreative; schizophrenics can be pathologically creative but tend to be irrational. The list goes on.
In theory you could use this kind of thing to help figure out what causes both conditions. In practice, it’s a lot more complicated. Autism and schizophrenia also resemble each other in a lot of ways, a lot of the genes for one also increase risk for the other, and some people even get diagnosed with both. I try to make sense of this conflicting information by speculating that autism has at least two components, which are correlated and anticorrelated with schizophrenia respectively ([see here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-653) for guesses about what these might be), but still - all speculation and trivia.
Anyway, [here’s a study](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26408327/) showing that congenitally blind people are about fifty times more likely to get autism than everyone else.
A full 50% of the blind children in the sample met criteria for an autism diagnosis, compared to about 1% of sighted children in the same area. And even blind children who don’t meet full autism criteria seem to have [somewhat more autistic features](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693122/pdf/12639331.pdf) than usual.
Maybe blindness makes children seem more autistic in some boring, mechanical sense? Like maybe if you can’t read other people’s body language or even consistently know where they are, it’s hard to be social and so you don’t interact with other people and that seems autistic to people trying to diagnose you? The researchers tried pretty hard to avoid that problem, getting really careful experts to do the diagnosis and asking about lots of different autism symptoms like mental disability, motor disability, and echolalia. Still, it’s easy to think of ways blindness could make you mentally disabled (eg you’re less likely to learn to read so you never exercise whatever cognitive functions are involved in reading) and motor disabled (I don’t know what’s up with the echolalia). Still, as far as we can tell that’s not it.
Maybe blindness something something interpersonal relationships? That’s the position of [Hobson and Bishop](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693122/pdf/12639331.pdf), who use these kinds of studies to argue that autism is an “interpersonal disease” about how different people interact with each other, rather than being located in a single brain. It sounds a little too TED-talk-bait-y to me, and I don’t feel like I got a great grasp of their theory from the paper (maybe I should wait for the TED talk). Not even sure how I’d evaluate this.
I’m most sympathetic to the idea that some kind of neural hyperparameters are sensitive to the overall amount of sensation you’re getting, and if you lose a really important sense like vision, that shifts the hyperparameter values a bit. If some parameter goes from schizophrenia at one end to autism at the other, and blindness shifts it a bit towards the autism end, that would explain why no blind children get schizophrenia, lots of blind children get autism, and even the ones who seem neurotypical have unusually many subclinical autistic features.
I wish I could say more than “some hyperparameter or something”, but I’m not quite there yet. Probably the next step would be a very careful re-reading of [Corlett, Frith, and Fletcher](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755113/), who think they understand why sensory deprivation seems to treat schizophrenia (something something predictive coding), though before we get too excited we should remember that the sensory deprivation people [also claim](https://blog.theautismsite.greatergood.com/float-therapy/) deprivation is helpful in autism. | Scott Alexander | 39139730 | Blindness, Schizophrenia, and Autism | acx |
# Contra Hanania On Partisanship
Richard Hanania of the [Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology](https://cspicenter.org/) asks "[why is everything liberal](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal)?" Given that there are approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden voters in elections, how come we have "woke capital" celebrating Pride Month, instead of unwoke capital celebrating some conservative cause (as might have happened fifty years ago)? How come conservatives worry about censorship by liberal tech companies instead of vice versa? How come conservatives worry about college turning their kids liberal instead of vice versa?
*Source: [Hanania’s post](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal)*
He concludes that "liberals win because they care about politics more". This may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Fox News, YouTube, Twitter, or the federal government, but he has lots of data in support (and note that Hanania himself is conservative, so this isn't a cheap attack). Liberals donate more, even though both sides control about equal pools of money. Liberal protests attract orders of magnitude more protests than conservative ones. Liberals express more willingness to shun people for being conservative than vice versa. And liberals are more willing to take low-paying (but important-for-gaining-power) activist jobs. He writes:
> There’s a great irony here. Conservatives tend to be more skeptical of pure democracy, and believe in individuals coming together and forming civil society organizations away from government. Yet conservatives are extremely bad at gaining or maintaining control of institutions relative to liberals. It’s not because they are poorer or the party of the working class – again, I can’t stress enough how little economics predicts people’s political preferences – but because they are the party of those who simply care less about the future of their country.
I don't want to argue with his data showing that conservatives care less. But even if it’s true, I don't think it's the root issue. The reason everything is liberal is because of the stuff Thomas Piketty keeps trying to tell us about our shifting coalition system.
**II.**
You can find this in Piketty’s new book [Capital And Ideology](https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Ideology-Thomas-Piketty/dp/0674980824/), or if you don't have the attention span to get through a 1104 page book, his more recent paper [Brahmin Left Vs. Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies 1948-2020](https://wid.world/document/brahmin-left-versus-merchant-right-changing-political-cleavages-in-21-western-democracies-1948-2020-world-inequality-lab-wp-2021-15/). Or, if even a 32 page paper is pushing it, here are three graphs:
In the 1950s, most western democracies had an elite party (right-wing) vs. an anti-elite party (left-wing), and the elite party captured both the richest and the best-educated segments of the population. Over time, this shifted to democracies having a multi-elite system: a financial-elite party vs. an educational-elite party (realistically, educated people are more likely to be rich and vice versa, so this is more of a relative thing - are you more rich than education, or vice versa?) The United States is a bit of an outlier, and its party cleavage seems to be entirely around education, with wealth having little predictive power.
Here are some other graphs about the American situation in particular, from [an earlier Piketty paper](http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2018.pdf):
Remember when I said there would only be three graphs? I lied.
In 2016, for the first time, the richest 1% were more likely to support Democrats than Republicans. This may have reversed in 2020 - I can't find the vote broken down by income percentile, but there was [a general trend](https://www.ft.com/content/69f3206f-37a7-4561-bebf-5929e7df850d) for rich people to be somewhat more likely to support Trump than in 2016. If this is real and continued, it might bring the US closer to the European mainstream.
Why has elite/common polarization switched to wealth/education polarization? Piketty and his commenters raise a couple of possibilities. First, more people have college degrees - in 1948, it was only 6% of Americans; today it's 32%. Although there's always a most-educated half of the population, college forms a bright line dividing people into two groups, and a group of 32% of people makes a better coalition nucleus than a group of 6% of people. Also, everyone could aspire to become a high school graduate, whereas not many people expect everyone to go to college, and nobody (?) wants everyone to get a PhD. That means the college-educated feel more like a special elite.
But also, countries are getting more diverse. In 1950, the US was 90% white; today it's more like 70%. Racial conflicts make it hard to keep poor whites and poor minorities together in a "grand coalition of the poor". That naturally lends itself to a multi-elite system, where one faction of elites wins the allegiance of poor minorities and the other of poor whites. Piketty thinks the same process might be happening in other countries with eg Muslim immigrants, and says he's working on analyzing data from ethnically homogenous countries to see if they're having less educational polarization shift than elsewhere.
Piketty's also not sure if the process stops here:
> The difficult question – a question that I am unable to fully answer in the present paper – is to understand where this evolution comes from, and whether this is a stable equilibrium or not. To the extent that high education commands high income in the long-run, one might argue that a “multiple-elite” party system is inherently unstable. That is, one might expect that the gap in left vote between top 10% and bottom 90% income voters will also come structurally positive in the future, just like the gap in left vote between top 10% and bottom 90% education voters. If this was to happen, this would correspond to a complete realignment of the party system: the former “left” (which used to be associated to low-income, low-education voters) would now be associated to high-income, high-education voters; whereas the former “right” (which used to be associated to high-income, high-education voters) would now be associated to low-income, low-education voters. In effect, such a party system would have little to do with the “left” vs “right” party system of the 1950s-1960s. Maybe it should better be described as an opposition with the “globalists” (high-income, high-education) and the “nativists” (low-income, low-education). This is roughly the way in which the new political actors themselves [in France] – e.g. Macron and Le Pen during the 2017 presidential election – tend to describe what they perceive to be the central political cleavage of our time (and indeed the second round of the French presidential election of 2017 is a perfect illustration of this). It is unclear however at this stage whether this complete realignment will take place.
In other words, remember that four-quadrant plot? Maybe for some reason it's like a giant Ferris wheel that spins on the scale of centuries, realigning our parties each time. Or something.
Wheeeeeeee!
As of 2016, the US is further along this realignment than anywhere else: both educated voters (by a large margin) and rich voters (by a small margin) are more likely to vote Democrat (although the latter may have reversed in 2020).
Does this explain why so many institutions are so liberal? Because they draw from mostly educated people, and educated = liberal these days?
It feels like it has to, but it’s hard to make the numbers work out. The vast majority of [eg journalists](https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/journalist/education/) have bachelors degrees, but not postgraduate degrees. Piketty tells us that 51% of bachelors-but-not-postgraduate degree holders vote Democrat, which isn't enough to explain any noticeable lean. I'm guessing, though I can't find the data to back it up, that there's a gradient with quality as well as quantity of education - the more selective your school, the more liberal you're likely to be - and then a second effect where people become even more liberal to fit in with mostly-liberal careers.
Hanania uses this graphic to show that Democrats donate more than Republicans. But it's also worth noting that top Democratic donor groups include professors, educators, and nonprofit employees, and top Republican donor groups include (\*squints really hard\*) homemakers, welders, and disabled people. Which coalition do \*you\* expect to end up with more power?
In this model, we end up with Woke Capital because Apple and Amazon are run by programmers, by managers who used to be programmers, and by MBA finance people - and all of those groups are highly educated and therefore liberal. In the past it might have also mattered that Apple and Amazon are run by rich people, but in the US that's stopped predicting anything.
This is from [this commentary on Piketty](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.12834). ML stands for Mainstream Left. All of these are artificially low because they're from Europe and exclude the non-mainstream left, here used to mean Greens. Ignore the exact numbers and pay attention to the relative propotions, eg for sociocultural professionals.
So if you rephrase Hanania’s question as "how come the party of highly-educated people has more power over academia, tech, and media than the party of less-educated people?", it kind of answers itself.
My overall model of this is that the US two party system forces everyone to divide into two coalitions with equal number of voters (slightly modulated by structural issues like the Republican electoral advantage in eg the Senate). For some reason - maybe the one Piketty mentioned - a lot of this sorting is now being done by education. If you have two coalitions with equal numbers of people, but all the educated people on one side, that side is going to control more institutions. Then those institutions will support the interests and values of the people in that coalition (including people in the coalition for reasons other than education) and be against the opposite coalition. This will be a self-perpetuating cycle as those institutions start selecting for people who share their values, both explicitly ("we don't like this person because they have bad values") and implicitly (networking, "bad culture fit", etc). This is partly worsened by, and partly another way of describing, the class gap between educated and uneducated people, where they end up with different aesthetics, dialects, social norms, etc - which transmutes fear of transgressing class norms into fear of having the wrong opinion.
**III.**
This is a little more pressing than it might otherwise be, because I get the feeling Hanania is using his own explanation (liberals care more) as an apology for dictatorship. After quoting some of [my piece on Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan), he writes:
> To steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.
>
> I’m not suggesting this is the path conservatives should take; they might feel that a stronger, more centralized and powerful government is too contrary to their own ideals. In that case, however, they’ll have to reconcile themselves to continue to lose the culture into the foreseeable future, at least until they are able to inspire a critical mass to do more than just vote its preferences.
I’m against dictatorship, but I agree that Hanania has given a good explanation of why it might feel attractive to conservatives. If my explanation is right and his is wrong, does that defuse the case?
It’s hard to say. We’re both coming from a position of wondering why liberals are dominating institutions more these days. But Piketty’s theory doesn’t naturally explain this. He describes the shift from a 1950s coalition system (educational/financial elites vs. commoners) to a 2020s coalition system (educational elites vs. financial elites with some commoners on both sides - or, in America, educational elites + some financial elites + commoners vs. other financial elites + commoners). Surely the 1950s system should have had the elites dominate institutions even more, given that the financial and educational elites were on the same side and could combine their powers to do this? Conservatives did dominate institutions somewhat in the 1950s, though there were still a lot of socialist professors and newspapers. Maybe there’s a natural tendency for some of these organizations to lean left wing (eg colleges are heavily exposed to the opinions of young people, who lean left), and in the 1950s system this was counterbalancing elite pressure, whereas now it’s exacerbating it? Maybe it’s just that there was less partisanship full stop in the 1950s so this didn’t matter as much? I think you could tell a story where this was true, then we went through a shift in the eg 1980s where educated people weren’t disproportionately on one side or the other, and now that we’ve completed the shift to educated people on the left, in a much higher partisanship environment, it’s hitting us really hard.
If that’s true, then I think this is a slightly rosier and less-dictatorship-suggesting situation than the one Hanania describes. But it still sucks. If one ethnic group is Democrat and another is Republican, this is only bad in the usual ways. But if one education level / professional group is Democrat and another is Republican, you get different ones capturing different institutions and then all the institutions are fighting against each other. Also, institutions lose viewpoint diversity and become monocultures. Also, people become suspicious of institutions that have been captured by people of the other political party and stop trusting them, and then society can’t reach a normal epistemic consensus.
Instead of requiring dictatorship, this just requires…man, I have no idea. Applying some sort of brake (or accelerator) to Piketty’s Ferris wheel? How would you even start doing such a thing?
I think I would go with the same recommendations in my post on Republicans and class - try to decrease the salience of college in society, so that not every smart person needs to get a college degree, and not every important job is degree-gated. Probably solving racism would help shake up political coalitions, so somebody should do that too.
But this raises the question - what coalition system would we rather have? Maybe a genuine multi-elite one with financial elites fighting educational elites would work better? At least financial elites usually have some education, are competent enough to prevent their party from getting too embarrassing, and can exercise some control over institutions. Maybe going back to the all elites vs. all people would work better (even though it seems like it should work worse?) Maybe this is the wrong axis and we need to focus on decreasing partisanship somehow?
Piketty’s paper includes a great 1925 quote by John Maynard Keynes on why he would never vote Labour: “I do not believe that the intellectual elements in the Labour Party will ever exercise adequate control; too much will always be decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about.” Right now I think a lot of people feel the same way about the Republicans. The Labour Party managed to change its ways - all we can do is hope the Republicans can too. | Scott Alexander | 37799371 | Contra Hanania On Partisanship | acx |
# Classifieds Thread 8/2021
By popular demand, here’s a classifieds thread. Advertise your blog, product, resume, dating preferences, etc.
I’ll probably have one of these every month or two, and be more strict about pruning ads from the regular open threads from now on. | Scott Alexander | 39899822 | Classifieds Thread 8/2021 | acx |
# (Outdoor, Careful) Meetups Everywhere 2021 - Seeking Organizers
There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog once annually, and it's that time of year again.
Given the COVID situation, I debated whether or not I should hold the meetups this year. I've decided yes, for a few reasons:
* According to the recent surveys, 97% of ACX readers in the US are vaccinated. Other developed countries have roughly similar numbers (except for Australia, where I am recommending no meetups for now). I will request that only vaccinated people attend these meetups - but knowing that I can’t enforce this, it makes me reassured to learn that almost everyone is vaccinated anyway.
* Everyone liked outdoor meetups better last time, so we can just hold the meetups outdoors. My state (California) currently says small to medium outdoor gatherings are okay, with light restrictions starting once they have 10,000 people.
* Social consensus seems to be in favor of continuing to hold events for vaccinated people. For example, where I live you can attend baseball games in stadiums, go to rock concerts, et cetera.
* [MicroCovid.org](https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=normal&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=20&riskProfile=average&scenarioName=custom&setting=outdoor&theirMask=none&theirVaccine=vaccinated&topLocation=US_06&voice=normal&yourMask=none&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=moderna) says that 2-hour outdoor meetings of vaccinated people [give](https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=normal&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=20&riskProfile=average&scenarioName=custom&setting=outdoor&theirMask=none&theirVaccine=vaccinated&topLocation=US_06&voice=normal&yourMask=none&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=pfizer) between a 1/2500 to 1/5000 chance per person of getting COVID, depending on which vaccine people got and where they are. Since I expect between 500 and 1000 people around the world to participate, this event should cause fewer than one COVID case total. Note that MicroCovid still classifies this as “high-risk” per individual, based on a “risk budget” of 200 microcovids per week, and you will have to decide whether or not it’s worth it given your personal budget.
I would still urge people in specific risk categories (unvaccinated, immunocompromised, taking care of at-risk family members) to think carefully about whether they want to attend.
Otherwise, let’s do this. If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please [fill in the organizer form](https://forms.gle/mvueraFmq2hSqdH27).
The form will ask you to pick a location, time, and date, and to provide an email address where people can reach you for questions. I'll publicize your meetup on the blog, and people will either get in touch with you, or just show up at the relevant place/time. You should show up at the relevant place/time with a sign saying "ACX Meetup" or some other rallying flag, but you don't necessarily need to have any plans or discussion topics or ability to control the conversation. If you want to make the experience better for people, you can bring nice things like nametags/markers, food/drinks, or games, but I would warn against trying to have "set activities" (eg "now we're all going to sit together and play Monopoly"). You may also want to bring a sign-up sheet where people can add their names/emails to get information on future meetups.
Here’s a short FAQ for potential meetup organizers:
**1. How do I know if I would be a good meetup organizer?**
If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city, and I would recommend you sign up.
Don't worry, you signing up won't take the job away from someone more deserving. The form will ask people how excited/qualified they are about being an organizer, and if there are many options, I'll choose whoever says they're excited and qualified. But a lot of cities might not have an excited/qualified person, in which case I would rather the unexcited/unqualified people sign up, than have nobody available at all.
**2. How will people hear about the meetup?**
You give me the information, and on August 23 (or so), I post it all on my blog, including your meetup and its date and time. I'll also post some tips for how to organize meetups then.
**3. When should I plan the meetup for?**
Since I will post the list of meetup times and dates around August 23, please choose sometime after that. I recommend a weekend since it's when most people are available. Late August, September, or early October would all be fine - some people have mentioned the weather doesn’t get bearable in their city until October, so they might want to hold off until then. If you're in the US, be careful around Labor Day weekend since a lot of people will be away. If you’re in a college town, maybe wait until school starts.
**4. How many people should I expect?**
The last time we tried this, meetups ranged from 1 person (Medellin, Columbia) to 140 people (Boston, MA). Meetups in big US cities (especially ones with universities or tech hubs) had the most people; meetups in non-English-speaking countries had the fewest. You can see a list of every city and how many people it got last time [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MmRNJVvnRNJ-jDVGQj1fI-eCuibn1PdipMxqC3nK-KQ/edit#gid=0). Plan accordingly.
**5. Where should I hold the meetup?**
I would prefer meetups be outdoors this year. I recommend a quiet and centrally-located public park, university quad, or city square. You can hold it at your house if you have a big backyard, but remember that this will involve me posting your address on the Internet.
**6. What if there's rain or more lockdowns or some other unexpected event?**
I’m going to figure out some system that lets organizers communicate with potential attendees. Probably this will be a spreadsheet they can edit that I direct blog readers to. You can use this to change the location or reschedule in case of weather or changes in the COVID situation.
**7. What if it’s too hot to hold an outdoor meetup where I live?**
I would prefer you either schedule for the evening / night-time, or schedule for the next time when it’s not too hot, even if that’s a few months out. Sorry, I don’t have a great solution here.
**7.1. What if I absolutely cannot hold an outdoor meetup for some reason?**
Someone mentioned in the comments that outdoor meetups are banned in Hong Kong. If this is you, fine, hold an indoor meetup, and attendees can decide what level of risk they’re comfortable with.
**8. What if my country has a worse COVID situation than the United States?**
Please don't volunteer to host a meetup if it's illegal in your country, or a terrible idea. I’m going to try to go over the list of meetup cities and countries and delete ones where meeting is illegal or a terrible idea, but I don't know as much as people on the ground in those countries. and you’re responsible for double-checking the COVID situation in your area.
**9. Is it okay if I already have an existing meetup group?**
Yes. If you run an existing ACX meetup group, just choose one of your meetings which you'd like me to advertise on my blog as the official meetup for your city, and be prepared to have a larger-than-normal attendance who might want to do generic-new-people things that day.
If you're a LW, EA, or other affiliated community meetup group, consider carefully whether you want to be affiliated with ACX. If you decide yes, that's fine, but I might still choose an ACX-specific meetup over you, if I find one. I guess this would depend on whether you're primarily a social group (good for this purpose) vs. a practical group that does rationality/altruism/etc activism (good for you, but not really appropriate for what I'm trying to do here). I'll ask about this on the form.
**10. If this works, am I committing to continuing to organize meetup groups forever for my city?**
The short answer is no.
The long answer is no, but it seems like the sort of thing somebody should do. Many cities already have permanent meetup groups. For the others, I'll prioritize would-be organizers who are interested in starting one. If you end up organizing one meetup but not being interested in starting a longer-term group, see if you can find someone at the meetup who you can hand this responsibility off to.
I know it sounds weird, but due to the way human psychology works, once you're the meetup organizer people are going to respect you, coordinate around you, and be wary of doing anything on their own initiative lest they step on your toes. If you can just bang something loudly at the meetup, get everyone's attention, and say "HEY, ANYONE WANT TO BECOME A PERMANENT MEETUP ORGANIZER?", somebody might say yes, even if they would never dream of asking you on their own.
**11. Are you (Scott) going to come to some of the meetups?**
I did this in 2019 and it was a lot of fun. I'm hoping to do it again this year, but I still have to figure out my plans. For now, assume I'm not doing this, and if it turns out I am, then I'll get in touch with the people involved in those cities and sort it out, and give everyone an update around 8/23 when I post the final list of cities and people.
Again, [you can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here](https://forms.gle/mvueraFmq2hSqdH27). Everyone else, just wait until 8/23 and I'll give you more information on where to go then. | Scott Alexander | 39745502 | (Outdoor, Careful) Meetups Everywhere 2021 - Seeking Organizers | acx |
# Eight Hundred Slightly Poisoned Word Games
In 2012, a Berkeley team found that indoor carbon dioxide had dramatic negative effects on cognition ([paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3548274/), [popular article](https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2016-welcome-there/your-brain-carbon-dioxide-research-finds-even-low)). Subjects in poorly ventilated environments did up to 50% worse on a test of reasoning and decision-making. This is potentially pretty important, because lots of office buildings (and private houses) count as poorly-ventilated environments, so a lot of decision-making might be happening while severely impaired.
Since then people have debated this on and off, with [some studies](https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27662232/4892924.pdf?sequence=1) confirming the effect and [others](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ina.12284) failing to find it. I personally am skeptical, partly because the effect is so big I would expect someone to have noticed, but also because submarines, spaceships, etc have orders of magnitude more carbon dioxide than any civilian environment, but people still seem to do pretty hard work in them pretty effectively.
As part of my continuing effort to test this theory in my own life, I played a word game eight hundred times under varying ventilation conditions.
…okay, fine, no, I admit it, I played a word game eight hundred times because I’m addicted to it. But since I was playing the word game eight hundred times anyway, I varied the ventilation conditions to see what would happen.
The game was WordTwist, which you can find [here](https://wordtwist.puzzlebaron.com/init5.php) (warning: potentially addictive). You get a 5x5 square of letters and you have to find as many words as possible (of four letters or more) within three minutes. You can move up, down, right, left, or diagonal, and get more points for harder words. A typical board looks like this:
Did you spot “lace”? What about “intrapsychically”?
I played this game about 5-10x/day over three months. During this time, the carbon dioxide monitor in my room recorded levels between 445 ppm (with all windows open and the fan on) and 3208 ppm (with all windows closed and several people crammed into the room for several hours). I discounted a stray reading of 285 as an outlier, since this is climatologically impossible (I’m not claiming my monitor is perfectly calibrated, just that it clearly shows higher levels when my room is less well ventilated). CO2 445 is basically the same as outdoors; 3208 is considered extremely poor air quality, likely to cause headaches, nausea, and other minor ailments. The Berkeley study looked at levels between 600 and 2500, so my range was comparable to theirs.
I correlated my adjusted score (my score as a percent of the average score for that board) for each game with the CO2 level in my room when I was playing it. R was 0.001, p = 0.97 - there was absolutely no correlation.
Why might these results not be valid? Well, CO2 level in my room wasn’t randomly determined - I just played a game when I felt like it and recorded whatever the ambient CO2 level was at the time. CO2 level was lower if I had the window open or air conditioning on, higher if I’d been in the room for a long time, and highest if I’d just woken up after being asleep in the room all night. It was also higher when other people were in my room. In theory things like this could confound the results. For example, if CO2 really did affect performance, but I performed better when I was hot, then turning the air conditioning on might improve performance (by decreasing CO2) but also hurt performance (by making it colder), and those effects could cancel out. Or if I performed worse after exercise, and I often went out of my room to exercise, then I might perform worse when I had just come back into my room (which was often when CO2 was lowest).
In practice I’m skeptical this mattered. For one thing, the studies found huge positive effects - so for me to find zero effect would require a huge negative effect of the *exact* right size to cancel out the huge positive one. For another thing, I checked if temperature had any effect, and it didn’t (r = -0.008, p = 0.83). For another, I ran a few controlled experiments to see if they got the same results as the naturalistic ones, and they did. For another, I did get to test an exogenous shock - about halfway through the experiment, I moved to a new house with better ventilation. The difference in average CO2 reading between the old and new houses was significant (p < 0.001), but the difference in score wasn’t (p = 0.15). Although it was in the expected direction (new house > old), I attribute this to me improving on the word game with practice, and I didn’t improve any more during the month when I switched houses than in an average month.
I consider this to be very strong evidence that at least for me, on this specific task, carbon dioxide has zero effect on cognition. To rescue the hypothesis that it matters, you’d either have to find that it affects other people more than it does me (why would it?) or that it affects other aspects of cognition more than it affects the skills associated with this particular word game. This second one is moderately plausible - I don’t think the word game tests “decision-making” per se. But it would be surprising for this not to be a general health effect, and would potentially be important in the study of intelligence and neuroscience to explore which skills do or don’t suffer under carbon dioxide poisoning.
I was excited to read the Less Wrong post [Chess and cheap ways to check day to day variance in cognition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nvRauqCD3u5hdkLm9/chess-and-cheap-ways-to-check-day-to-day-variance-in) by KPier, who does something similar with chess instead of a word game; they haven’t checked carbon dioxide levels yet, but I’d be excited for them to try. I’m also interested in hearing from anyone else who often repeats some objectively-scoreable cognitive task, to see how they do. A CO2 monitor [costs about $100 on Amazon](https://amzn.to/2UWhbbM), but if money is the only reason you’re not going to do some really good experiment, please let me know and I’ll buy it for you.
If you’re planning on testing this, please post about it below as a form of preregistration. | Scott Alexander | 38917186 | Eight Hundred Slightly Poisoned Word Games | acx |
# Open Thread 184
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
**1:** A correction to [my post about Sasha’s LSD experience](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins): I wrote that neurogenesis “probably doesn’t happen in adult humans, or if it does it’s rare and limited to specific areas”. Commenters found [some](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4071289/) [studies](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968158/) showing that, at the very least, it does happen in the olfactory bulb, which would be relevant for smell. I still don’t think it happens quickly enough to explain Chapin recovering.I’ve [added this to my Mistakes page](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mistakes).
**2:** A lot of people reading that post overestimated whether psychedelics could help them with their own weird issues. Psychedelics are pretty well-tested (albeit informally) for things like chronic pain. They seem to work okay but not miraculously, kind of like everything else. I don’t think this necessarily means the mechanism doesn’t work - if you chose a random antibiotic and took one dose of it to prevent random sinus problems, that would probably also only work “okay”, since it would mix infective causes with non-infective causes, appropriate antibiotics with inappropriate antibiotics, and a single dose of antibiotic isn’t very effective anyway. I think psychedelics as treatment for things like chronic pain are at the “we should figure out the mechanism” stage and not the “patients can use this as a miracle cure” stage.
**3:** I’m pretty annoyed by comments that say just things like “This is a bad post” or “You are clearly misinformed” without any elaboration. This is true whether it’s responding to me or to a commenter. I’m going to start banning these if I see them from now on. Feel free to challenge or criticize anything, but please share your reasoning. I will grudgingly allow things of the form “I’m an expert in this field and I just want to warn people this is wrong, though I don’t have enough time to explain how”. But if it’s just “u suck”, that’s a banning. | Scott Alexander | 39768119 | Open Thread 184 | acx |
# Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story
**I.**
Kevin Drum [questions my interpretation of the infant fish oil story](https://jabberwocking.com/a-3-part-story-about-short-bowel-syndrome-and-the-fda/).
(it's actually more complicated - I posted a shorter version, later corrected it with a longer version based on the account of one of the doctors involved but said it basically supported my shorter version, he also found the longer version and was about to publish an article saying he had debunked my shorter version, then noticed I had seen the same article and thought it supported me, and he thinks I was wrong to believe this)
He writes:
> This is headshakingly dense. As a hit on the FDA, his post wasn't right at all — not its basic structure and not anything else about it. He even admits that although Gura criticizes plenty of other actors, the FDA isn't one of them...I have no idea how you can write "they usually carry out their mandate well" in one place and then, in your main post, just go ahead and repeat your original belief—backed by an example you know is wrong—that the FDA does stupid and destructive things on practically a daily basis. This is why I'm automatically skeptical of anything on the web that's excessively critical of the FDA.
Kevin is one of my favorite bloggers and I usually appreciate his commentary. But in this case, I still think I was right.
Let's go over the exact phrasing I used (at this point I admit I'm more in defending-myself mode than making-an-important-point-about-the-FDA mode). An early version of the post included a false claim that the fish oil helped the nervous system; I later edited it to a correct claim that fish oil helped the liver. Drum quotes the corrected version where I talk about the liver, so I'll use that here. I wrote:
> *The FDA approved one version of the nutrient fluid, but it caused some problems, especially liver damage.*
This is straightforwardly true.
> *Drawing on European research, some scientists suggested that a version with fish oil would cause less liver damage — but the fish oil version wasn’t FDA-approved.*
Also straightforwardly true.
> *A bunch of babies kept getting liver damage, and everyone knew how to stop it, but if anyone did the FDA would take away their licenses and shut them down.*
Am I exaggerating when I say “everyone”? Reading Dr. Gura’s notes, you could imagine a story where this knowledge was limited to a couple of world experts in Boston, and it took them a long time to make a convincing case, and once they did the FDA approved it.
That story would be wrong. In 2013, NBC ran an article called [Drug Treatment Omegaven That Could Save Infant Lives Not Yet Approved By FDA](https://web.archive.org/web/20130612022529/http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/07/18833434-drug-treatment-omegaven-that-could-save-infants-lives-not-yet-approved-by-fda). In 2014, libertarian blogs were using it as an example of excessive FDA delay - [here’s one of them](https://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/everyone-deserves-right-try-empowering-terminally/) (search for “Bureaucratic Delay Endangers Lives”). Also in 2014, I personally learned about this for the first time, when writing [my review of](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/04/book-review-the-perfect-health-diet/) *The Perfect Health Diet (*I thought the book was generally bad, but it did alert me to this issue and the evidence supporting Omegaven). In 2016, my friend Eliezer Yudkowsky started writing a book about bureaucratic inefficiency that used the FDA failure to approve Omegaven as one of its central cases; in 2017, he published it as *Inadequate Equilibria* and I reviewed it [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-equilibria/), including a mention of the Omegaven story. In January 2018, my friend Kelsey Piper [also blogged about](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/170087044411/source-for-your-fda-claim) the FDA’s failure to approve Omegaven. Finally, in July 2018, the FDA finally approved the drug. I’ve been hearing about this story for so long that I thought I could recite it from memory (I was wrong, which is why I screwed up so many details in the original).
I think this history might be one of the reasons Drum and I interpret this story so differently. Drum hears about Omegaven, checks and sees that it’s FDA approved, and thinks “well, things worked out well in the end, what’s he complaining about?” I heard about it years ago, saw it *wasn’t* FDA approved, was able to confirm that it was revolutionary and life-saving, thought “well, I guess a lot of people are going to die from not being able to get this”, and read a gradual stream of articles over the next few years confirming that babies were still dying. Then, long afterwards, the FDA approved it. I guarantee you this is less fun and more enraging than hearing about it after the fact.
I worry that people are going to assume I got lucky, that maybe I’ve been spouting a bunch of crap about “the FDA needs to approve drug X! the FDA needs to approve drug Y!” for years, and most of those drugs were unsafe or ineffective, but just by coincidence I got this one right and now I’ll never shut up about it. One answer to this might be to look at my past work and see if this is true (I don’t think it is). But a better answer might be to remember that, if you believe coronavirus vaccines work, you’re in this same situation right now. That is, the media, general public, scientific community, etc all know that they work and are safe, but the FDA still has not fully approved them. This isn’t an unusual situation to be in! Most of the time, the FDA lags the general consensus of people paying attention, usually by quite a lot. I think people worry that I want the FDA to auto-approve insane drugs nobody knows anything about, whereas I’d honestly be pretty happy if they just showed the same level of common sense as an average member of the general public.
> *Around 2010, Boston Children’s Hospital found some loophole that let them add fish oil to their nutrient fluid on site, and infants with short bowel syndrome at that one hospital stopped getting liver damage, and the FDA grudgingly agreed to permit it but banned them from distributing their formulation or letting it cross state lines - so for a while if you wanted your baby to get decent treatment for this condition you had to have them spend their infancy in one specific hospital in Massachusetts.*
I was wrong in calling this a "loophole" - they filed an IND with the FDA and got permission to do it as a study (although I don’t know if they were really doing it as a study). Otherwise, as far as I can tell this is true. Some other hospitals also got INDs at a later point.
> *Around 2015 the FDA said that if your doctor applied for a special exemption, they would let you import the fish-oil nutritional fluid from Europe, but you were only able to apply after your baby was getting liver damage, and the FDA might just say no.*
I got this from a book and haven’t been able to figure out exactly what it’s referring to - there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding entry in Dr. Gura’s notes. I suspect it’s true, since I find a lot of “compassionate use of Omegaven” studies from around this time, but I can’t find the actual FDA document involved. In any case, if true it slightly exonerates the FDA, so it’s probably not one of my points of contention with Drum.
> *Finally in 2018 the FDA got around to approving the corrected nutritional fluid and now babies with short bowel syndrome do fine, after twenty years of easily preventable state-mandated damage and death.*
More like ten years - six if you want to date from the Hong Kong study, five from the NBC article, four if you want to date from me personally knowing about it - but otherwise true.
So the mistakes I see are - I overestimated how long it took - more like five to ten years than twenty. And I called Boston's unique ability to prescribe it a "loophole", when it was an accepted part of the regular system. I think it’s fair to summarize this (as I did) as “I got some details wrong but it was substantially correct”.
So how come Drum (and some other people!) think that the real story proves me wrong?
**II.**
Drum says it’s because Gura was very positive about the FDA, and even I (when reviewing Gura’s story) mentioned that the FDA seemed to have performed its mandate pretty well here and I was impressed with everyone involved. How is this positive portrayal compatible with my outrage?
I tried really hard to explain this in the original post, but it seems not to have worked. So let's compare this to a situation Drum and I know well: blogging. Imagine there's a censorship board with a mandate to prevent misinformation. We can call them the False Data Administration. Before you publish a news article, blog post, or any other act of reporting/assertion/argument, you need to get FDA approval. FDA approval still takes ten years and $100 million.
And suppose that there's some important story that ought to be broken soon. I'll randomly choose the Flint water lead crisis. Some intrepid reporter discovers high lead levels in Flint’s water system. She can't just report it unapproved, or she would be arrested. She can't immediately apply get FDA approval, because she doesn't have enough money to fund the studies it would take to prove that this isn't misinformation. So she shops around for a few years, trying to find a media company who will sponsor her studies. The whole time, she's checking in with the FDA, and the FDA is giving her helpful advice - "Yeah, try Washington Post, they sometimes fund things like this" - and sometimes they’re even helping her directly. She gets into a couple of fights with the Mayor of Flint about whether she's even allowed to conduct the study there at all, and for a while it seems like she’ll never be able to publish her report, and maybe the FDA helps walk her through this too. But eventually, five years after she learns about the crisis, some funder takes pity on her, the political stars align, she fills out her pile of paperwork, does her study, and submits her article for FDA approval. The FDA takes a few years to think about it, makes the right decision, and approves the article. Ten years after she first discovered the crisis, she is given permission to inform the public, and politicians and other actors can leap into action to solve it (haha, yeah right).
All of the following things are true of this story:
* Everyone at the False Data Administration followed their mandate well. All individual FDA employees performed admirably and deserve our praise.
* In a society where this kind of censorship was accepted and normal, nobody would associate the ten-year delay between discovery and publication with any failure on the FDA's part. They would interpret the problem as "funders didn't fund the study as quickly as they should" or "the Mayor of Flint was obstructionist". All these interpretations would be completely valid.
* The reporter who discovered the crisis would probably end up with a good impression of the FDA. They helped her along every step of the way, gave her money when she needed it, and approved her story in the end. When she accepted an award, her acceptance speech would be just as positive about her FDA as Dr. Gura's was to our FDA.
But, also:
* It took ten years between the discovery of the lead crisis and it being publicized to the world
* Lots of kids died of preventable lead poisoning during that time
* From our perspective, where we haven’t accepted the False Data Administration as natural, this is 100% the fault of the FDA. Not any particular FDA employee making a bad decision. But the general social decision to make everyone wait ten years and pay a bureaucracy hundreds of millions of dollars before they're allowed to publish an article.
If Bizarro-World Scott tried to protest the FDA by saying "hey, the delay between discovery of the Flint lead crisis and publication probably killed lots of kids, and this is the FDA's fault, shouldn't we do something about this?", then Bizarro-World Kevin could publish his same article: "Actually, you'll see the reporter wrote that she was *happy* with the FDA's actions, and it performed its mandate well in this situation, your story is full of lies”. Bizarro-Scott’s story wouldn’t have any *particular* lies in it. It would just feel like the sort of thing that *must be* full of lies, because it said bad things about the FDA, whereas a normal person would see the same situation and say *good* things about the FDA.
I’ve tried to stress, throughout, that the problem I’m trying to address here isn’t that the FDA fails at its mandate or makes bad decisions. It’s that the FDA *by design* makes it hard to do things that save lives, prevent pandemics, and improve the world. By design, it makes there a several year gap between when everyone including random bloggers knows that something saves lives, and when anyone can actually use it for life-saving.
**III.**
People keep asking whether I’m saying the FDA should be abolished. Let me deflect that question with a discussion on the indications for use of doxepin hydrochloride.
There’s an antidepressant called Sinequan. It comes in pills of various sizes, starting at 10 mg. It’s not a very good antidepressant, but it does tend to make people very sleepy after they take it. Sinequan is extremely cheap, about $10 per patient per month.
And there’s a sleeping pill called Silenor. It comes in pills of various sizes up to 6 mg. It’s a pretty good sleeping pill, and weirdly enough if you take a high enough dose of it you might also feel less depressed. Silenor is extremely expensive, about $250 per patient per month.
Both Sinequan and Silenor are the exact same chemical, doxepin hydrochloride. Basically any dose of doxepin will make you sleepy, and higher doses also decrease depression. Maximum recommended dose is 300 mg/day, so both the 6 mg Silenor dose and the 10 mg Sinequan dose are nowhere near it.
You might wonder: given that these are the same chemical, why don’t people who need sleeping pills use Sinequan instead of Silenor and save $240/month? The answer is: the FDA has approved the Silenor brand for sleep, but not the Sinequan brand. Nobody really knows if we are supposed to be pretending that the 6 mg vs. 10 mg dose matters (it doesn’t) or whether we’re just supposed to lie back and not trouble ourselves with such questions.
There’s no mystery about how we got into this situation: the Silenor brand paid $100 million to get the FDA to classify them as a sleeping pill, and the Sinequan brand didn’t. This means Silenor has a monopoly on doxepin for sleep, and they know this, so they charge $250/patient/month, ie $3000/year.
At any time, a doctor could just prescribe Sinequan for sleep. In fact, I do this all the time and it works great. But this is an “off label” prescription, and there are various regulations that make off label prescriptions less convenient than the usual type, so most people stick with Silenor, which makes between $10 million and $25 million per year for its parent company.
I want a world where if there is a $250 version of a drug, and a $10 version of the same drug, people are encouraged to get the $10 version even though the manufacturer did not give the FDA $100 million dollars.
I want a world where if Europeans have been giving fish oil based nutrient fluids to babies for years, and everybody from NBC News to random bloggers know that the babies are much less likely to die on fish-oil based fluids, and a study confirms it, you are allowed to give those babies the fish oil based fluids without waiting another five years for an FDA approval.
I want a world where, if a patient is in a race against time to get the treatment that might save their lives, and after a lot of dithering the FDA unanimously agrees that the medicine is safe and effective, it doesn’t [hold up approval for an additional five months arguing about the wording of the warning label](https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/the-fda-almost-killed-me), by which time the patient telling the story ended up in the ICU, lost his large intestine, and barely survived
I want a world where if everyone knows ketamine is a great depression treatment, if I’ve been blogging about the intricacies of ketamine depression treatment for years - then ketamine eventually gets approved for use as a depression treatment (it still isn’t - if you think it is, [you’re probably thinking of esketamine](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/11/ketamine-now-by-prescription/), which is worse and costs 25x as much).
I want a world where, if everyone knows COVID vaccines are safe and effective, if we’re banning YouTube videos saying that COVID vaccines aren’t safe/effective as misinformation, if we’ve banished COVID vaccine safety/effectiveness denialism to the same outer darkness as 9/11 trutherism or Kennedy conspiracy theories - then the government will have approved COVID vaccines as safe and effective.
Does this world require abolishing the FDA? I think it only requires making the FDA *no worse than the average guy on the street*. I think this is a low bar. If somehow it can’t clear that bar then I guess abolishing it is the only option, but I’m perfectly happy to give it a lot of chances at reform before we go that far, and I still plan to write more about exactly what that reform might look like later. I just wanted to respond to Drum’s article in particular first.
Drum ends with:
> This is why I'm automatically skeptical of anything on the web that's excessively critical of the FDA. It's not that I think the FDA is above reproach. It's because of the existence of the "anti-FDA blogosphere" that Alexander mentions. There is indeed an active clique of FDA critics in the blogosphere, mostly of a libertarian bent, who are willing to accept and pass around the most egregious stories imaginable of FDA incompetence. Occasionally they're true, but most often they're very highly exaggerated, like this one. Other times they're little more than urban legends.
There is also an anti-police blogosphere, an anti-Trump blogosphere, and an anti-North-Korea blogosphere. Sometimes people form a blogosphere against a thing because it is bad. One of the people in the anti-FDA blogosphere is that guy who lost his intestine because the FDA delayed his drug for five months arguing about a warning label. People get angry when the FDA almost kills them. Then they write pieces about their anger. I’ve never had the FDA almost kill me personally, but I have had it hobble my efforts to help some really desperate patients who I’ve grown kind of attached to over the years, and yeah, that also makes me angry. If your response is “this comes from an angry person so I can ignore it”, I think you will miss a lot of important stories, not just FDA-related ones.
I know anger looks bad, and I try hard not to sound angry, and I think I succeed really amazingly well. You have no idea how non-angry I can sound about malaria killing millions of people, or climate change killing millions of people, or Donald Trump, or Xi Jinping, or all sorts of other terrible things and people. Overall given how enraging the world is, I think I’m doing a really commendable job of not sounding angry all the time. But everyone fails on something and for me it’s this.
Drum continues:
> The FDA has plenty of problems, and their critics have performed a useful service by pushing them to improve. That said, the FDA doesn't screw up every hour of every day on practically every useful drug ever presented to them. Even taking normal human frustration into account, that's inexcusable.
The FDA screws up every hour of every day, in the same way our hypothetical False Data Administration screws up every hour of every day. Not because they’re constantly making stupid, minor mistakes. But because their whole mandate / philosophy / modus operandi is mistaken.
(and then sometimes they make some extra stupid minor mistakes, like with aducanumab. But that’s not really my point here)
Maybe a really harsh way to say this would be that Drum feels like it’s unfair to treat this story as a condemnation of the FDA, because it was a perfectly ordinary example of everything going as expected. I think it’s absolutely a condemnation of the FDA, for the same reason. | Scott Alexander | 39760335 | Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story | acx |
# Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story
**I.**
In [my recent post on the](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab) FDA, I mentioned a story about a fish-oil-based infant nutritional fluid called Omegaven. The FDA took too long to approve it, and lots of infants died.
I plucked that from the anti-FDA blogosphere, where it had been floating around for a while in various incarnations. I tried to check it before publishing, but only enough to confirm the basic outline. A concerned reader sent me a [Cochrane paper](https://www.cochrane.org/CD013163/NEONATAL_systematic-review-lipid-emulsions-intravenous-nutrition-preterm-infants?fbclid=IwAR1ubtRkAbK4FZvK_u9QDA-fhYz2ZpkFD8sa9ad6yWqVrmKhonoW_z7nGlo) suggesting that the fluid was no better than previous treatments, which would potentially exonerate the FDA. This was concerning enough that I decided spend a longer time trying to figure out the specifics.
After more research, I’ve concluded that the story I told is basically true, although I got a few details wrong. I want to go over it at more length here to set the record straight and see what we can learn from it. My main source will be Dr. Kathleen Gura, the pharmacist most responsible for getting Omegaven approved. She won an award for her work, she gave a very long acceptance speech describing her adventure, and [the transcript of her speech](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7671012/) is where I’m getting most of this information.
**II.**
Omegaven is a fluid for parenteral nutrition. If your digestive tract doesn’t work (a problem frequently associated with newborn babies), then you risk starving to death. Doctors can avert this by pumping nutrients directly into your veins through an IV. This is notoriously hard, because food has lots of nutrients, and if you try to put together a complete replacement for food you will probably miss something. The US standard is a nutrient fluid called Intralipid, which uses soybean oil as its main fat. Because of [the usual random cross-national differences in medicine](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-descended-upon-psychopharmacology/), Europe used a formulation with fish oil as the main fat (though I’m not sure whether they used it along with soybean or on its own). In the early 2000s, nobody thought there was any interesting difference between these.
Parenteral nutrition is notoriously tricky. Food has lots of different chemicals in it - vitamins, minerals, etc. Scientists haven’t discovered exactly which ones are biologically necessary, and if you forget one in your fluid then your patient will get some kind of inexplicable disease. One of these diseases is called PNALD - Parenteral Nutrition Associated Liver Disease. Lots of people on parenteral nutrition get PNALD. Some need liver transplants. Others die. Doctors assumed there was something they were missing, but they weren’t sure what.
In 2002, Boston Children’s Hospital needed to give IV nutrition to a kid with a soy allergy. The hospital only had soybean-based fluid, and tasked our hero Dr. Gura with finding a solution. She asked a bunch of experts and “put the question on various nutrition listserves”, and finally some nutritionist who attended European conferences mentioned that Europe had a fish-oil based fluid, Omegaven. If they could get permission to import Omegaven from Europe, they could maybe save this kid. They asked the FDA for permission, filled out the relevant forms, and (to its credit) the got approved within 48 hours. They were able to get an emergency shipment of Omegaven from Europe and the kid got better.
Meanwhile, a team of researchers at the same hospital, including a certain Dr. Puder, were trying to figure out what was going on with PNALD. They pumped lab rats full of various combinations of nutritional fluid, trying to see which rats got liver disease and which ones didn’t. Dr. Gura was helping this team get their IV nutrients, and on a whim:
> I asked Dr Puder to humor me and use the leftover Omegaven in my office for the mouse model.
The Omegaven turned out prevent liver disease! (in rats). She continues:
> We were confident we were onto something and began to discuss our findings with others at BCH. The response was not what we expected. We were told “Everyone knows it's not the lipids because liver disease happened with them and without them.” Some individuals would even pull me aside to ask “Are the results real?” Dr Folkman was totally supportive of our research methodology and our findings and said we should ignore the naysayers and needed to expand our research to other animal models.
>
> We wrote almost 20 different grant proposals to a variety of funding sources including ASPEN, American College of Clinical Pharmacy, and the Gerber Foundation. The response was always the same…. “Everyone knows it's not the lipids.” Even Fresenius, who held the rights to Omegaven, was not interested in sponsoring our research. One rejection letter from a pharmacy organization noted that I wasn't qualified to do translational research, Dr Folkman (the father of angiogenesis) was not a suitable mentor, and Harvard was not the proper place to train a pharmacist in scientific research!
>
> Luckily, BCH, the Departments of Pharmacy and Surgery, and the Vascular Biology Program (Dr Folkman's' lab) saw value in our work and funded us when no one else would. That is one of the reasons BCH is so special and why I believe that this discovery could not have happened anywhere else.
So they plodded on, testing the Omegaven in more and more kinds of animals, getting great results each time.
In 2004, the children’s hospital got an patient named Charlie, a newborn baby with a condition called gastroschisis which required IV nutrition. They gave him the nutritional fluids, he developed liver disease, and they were stuck - he would die if they took him off the IV, but he would also die if the liver disease continued. They were super out of options. So:
> [Charlie’s surgeon], Dr Rusty Jennings, isn't one to follow the status quo. Some may call him a “cowboy,” but he is one of those guys who just won't give up. He came to Dr Puder and me one afternoon and asked us to do the mouse experiment using our “fish squeezings” on his patient Charlie. It was during this time that we couldn't get funding for additional animal studies. In fact, in our last submission, we stated, “if these experiments prove to be successful, they will provide additional evidence to translate this work into clinical studies in humans.” It was our hope to buy Charlie time to gain the necessary weight to make him eligible to undergo a multivisceral transplant.
>
> Although Dr Puder was hesitant about doing this, because the only other case of fish oil monotherapy was that of my soy allergy patient 2 years' prior, he agreed. I retrieved all of my old soy allergy paperwork and began the process of developing a protocol that included informed consent. I also began to prepare the required FDA materials. Additionally, I contacted [pharma company] Fresenius and spoke with Dr Schlotzer, the inventor of Omegaven. Although initially hesitant, they ultimately agreed to provide a new supply of Omegaven, especially for Charlie for as long as he should need it. Charlie's parents understood that this was a long shot, but they felt they had no other options. They knew Charlie was the first baby, and the first patient with liver disease, to receive Omegaven. The only request they made was that if it worked we would offer it to other children just like Charlie.
Since you’re hearing this story, you can guess how it ended. Charlie made a miraculous recovery.
After this, Boston Children’s Hospital and the FDA kind of became pen pals - every time BCH got a new PNALD patient, they would ask the FDA for permission to import Omegaven from Europe, the FDA would grant it, and the patient would make a miraculous recovery. Eventually they worked together with the FDA to get something called an IND, which meant their hospital only was allowed to use Omegaven in the context of investigating and studying it.
But studying things is hard. The BCH team tried submitting case reports to journals, but none of the journals were really interested, and they didn’t have the funding for anything bigger. In 2006, the FDA itself donated enough money to do [one small weak randomized trial](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19661785/), which found that Omegaven cut mortality by a factor of four. But this got them stuck in a rut. One small weak randomized trial wasn’t enough evidence for anyone else to care. But it *was* enough evidence that BCH refused to do larger studies, because that would require putting some babies in the control group, and obviously those babies were going to die, and that would be unethical. Someone else in Hong Kong tried to do a randomized controlled trial, but ran into the same problem - halfway through, the parents figured out what was going on, demanded their babies be put in the Omegaven group, and nobody had the heart to say no to them.
(This is where the *Cochrane* paper that my reader sent me comes in. It evaluates fish oil-based nutritional fluids on a lot of different dimensions, and this is one of them. Its only conclusion is that there was only one weak study showing it worked, so formal evidence is poor.)
People started yelling at the FDA to maybe start the process to approve Omegaven anyway. The FDA very reasonably protested that nobody had asked them to. Usually a pharma company would submit an application to the FDA, pay the fees, and do the paperwork. But Fresenius, the European pharma company that made Omegaven, had no interest. PNALD was rare, Omegaven was cheap, the FDA approval process was expensive, and this just wasn’t a winning business proposition for them.
Dr. Gura and her team, by her own description, started a “media war” to “encourage” (her quotation marks) Fresenius to change their mind. In 2012, they finally agreed and submitted their application. In 2018, the FDA finally approved it.
There still have not really been any great large-scale studies proving that Omegaven works better than older nutrient fluids, though my impression is that everyone who uses it believes it does.
UpToDate, the US gold standard medical evidence aggregator, [says](https://www.uptodate.com/contents/intestinal-failure-associated-liver-disease-in-infants?source=history_widget#H22):
> Accumulating evidence suggests that changing from a conventional soybean oil-based lipid emulsion to a fish oil-based lipid emulsion helps to reverse IFALD [another name for PNALD] in infants who require ongoing parenteral nutrition. The proposed mechanism is that soybean-based emulsions are thought to promote hepatic triglyceride synthesis and inflammation because of their high content of omega-6 fatty acids and phytosterols, compared with fish oil, which is rich in omega-3 fatty acids and contains no phytosterols...
>
> For infants with marked progressive IFALD (direct or conjugated bilirubin >2 mg/dL), despite optimization of the general measures described above, and who are predicted to require PN for at least an additional 30 days, we suggest changing the lipid source to a fish oil-based lipid emulsion (Omegaven). As of 2018, this lipid emulsion was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use in pediatric patients with IFALD (defined by a direct bilirubin level >2 mg/dL after exclusion of other causes of cholestasis). This preparation is also available in many countries outside of the United States.
So although this is couched in the appropriate level of uncertainty, they do seem to believe it works better and they do recommend the new product.
**III.**
My earlier version of the story made at least the following mistakes:
* It discussed adding fish oil to nutritional fluids, whereas the real advance was switching to a different fish-oil-based nutritional fluid.
* It said that the problem was that fish oil was necessary for infant development, whereas it actually has to do with this which fats cause this specific liver problem. I can’t find good sources about whether the issue is that soybean oil causes the liver problem, or that fish oil prevents the liver problem.
* It didn’t mention some potentially exculpatory factors, like that there weren’t that many studies in favor (also, although I didn’t get into this above, some people thought the fish oil based fluid might cause bleeding, although this turned out not to be true).
I’m sorry for these errors and will add a link to this post on my [Mistakes page](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mistakes).
Still, I think the basic structure was right - the new fluid was better than the old fluid, this was pretty clear in terms of miraculous recoveries, and it took 14 years between the first patient saved and full FDA approval.
You’ll notice that in Dr. Gura’s story (whose tone I tried to reproduce in Part II) it’s not obvious that this is an anti-FDA morality tale at all. Dr. Gura gently criticizes other doctors and hospitals for not realizing the value of Omegaven fast enough. She criticizes funding agencies for refusing to fund Omegaven studies, and journals for refusing to publish Omegaven articles. She even criticizes Fresenius, the pharma company behind Omegaven, for failing to advocate hard enough for its own product.
The FDA, in comparison, comes out looking pretty good. They approved the first few original single-patient exemptions to import Omegaven from Europe. They (eventually, after a lot of work) approved the Investigational New Drug application that let Boston Children’s Hospital keep using it (I’m still unclear whether any other hospitals got INDs for this). They even contributed a little funding to get one small study done. It wasn’t enough, but the FDA is not primarily a funding body, actual funding bodies dropped the ball on this one, and so it’s really impressive that the FDA went above and beyond to try to move Omegaven through the pipeline. Dr. Gura seems to have been left with the impression that the FDA was one of her few allies during this fight, which I think is fair.
I mentioned in a section of my recent post, “Sympathy For The Devil”, that I think the FDA *as an agency* is often quite good. They’re smart, caring people, and they usually carry out their mandate well - so well that the few exceptions, like aducanumab, are highly newsworthy. I have no objection to Dr. Gura’s mostly-positive portrayal of them.
My problem is: doing anything in medicine is illegal until you clear a giant hurdle. To clear the hurdle, you have to pay millions (sometimes billions) of dollars, fill in thousands of pages of forms, conduct a bunch of studies that can be sabotaged for reasons like “this drug is too good so it would be unethical to have a control group”, and wait approximately ten years. You have to clear this hurdle to do anything, even the most obviously correct actions. Everything starts out illegal, and then a tiny set of possible actions is exempted from the general illegality. The easiest name for this hurdle is “the FDA”, since they’re the agency charged with enforcing it.
*Given the existence of the hurdle*, various people come off looking like villains, eg:
Yes, funding agencies look bad, insofar as they refused to provide enough millions of dollars to clear the hurdle. But there’s no funding agency so rich that they can can give hurdle-clearing amounts of money to every promising new treatment.
Yes, the pharma company involved looks bad, insofar as it balked at the time and expense involved in starting the approval process for its product. But who made the hurdle so high that even a pharma company - one with a great drug and the chance to make millions of dollars off it - took one look at the amount of time/energy/expense involved and said “no thanks”? And if pharma companies are intimidated by the process, what hope does anyone else have?
Yes, the other doctors who didn’t really care about this potentially life-saving treatment look bad. But in their defense, they would have had to go through the FDA special-exemption import process to even begin testing this on their own patients. I once had a patient who needed an unusual European drug not available in this country. briefly considered the FDA special-exemption import process, and decided to do the reasonable thing and walk my patient through the process of ordering it illegally on the Internet. I am not super proud of this, but at least the patient got their drug, which is more than you can say about most of the times this kind of thing happens.
…and given the existence of the hurdle, the FDA (as an agency) comes off looking good. They helped coach Dr. Gura through the process of filling out forms. They helped fund Dr. Gura’s study. They worked extra hard to process the Omegaven application as fast as they could. Good for them.
But as long as this giant hurdle sits in the path of medical practice, lots of people will inevitably be villains, and lots of other people will need to display an unusual and not-fair-to-expect-of-them level of heroism to get anything approved at all.
Partly this is about Dr. Gura having to move heaven and earth (and become something of a political activist) to gather the coalition that eventually got Omegaven approved. But partly it’s about - did you notice how unlikely the discovery of Omegaven was? It required:
* Dr. Baker, a BCH nutritionist, was in touch with the European medical establishment and had learned about their alternative nutritional fluid.
* Dr. Gura, a BCH pharmacist, had a patient with a soy allergy and needed some solution.
* Dr. Puder, a researcher, was doing mouse studies on the causes of PNALD
* Dr. Jennings, a surgeon, had a patient with such a severe case of PNALD that they would obviously die without a miracle, and might as well just try a random thing that seemed to work in mice.
…all to be in the same place around the same time.
And I was tickled to hear Dr. Gura describe Dr. Jennings as a “cowboy”, because I’ve been trying to make the case that the point where “cowboy” (used metaphorically, to mean someone who is willing to take initiative) went from complimentary to pejorative marked the beginning of the end for our civilization, and we need to make it a compliment again. All four of these doctors needed to at least kind of be “cowboys”, willing to try crazy things that weren’t the standard of care. If you imagine there’s a 10% chance of each link in this chain being around in any given situation and being able to do their cowboying successfully, the chance of an Omegaven-level discovery is 10% \* 10% \* 10% \* 10% = 0.01%. This is one of the reasons science is so hard.
But the hurdle makes it harder. Dr. Gura didn’t just need to have a patient with a deadly soy allergy. She had to fill in a bunch of forms begging the FDA for the right to import something from Europe. Dr. Jennings didn’t just need to be a “cowboy”, he needed to have the right combination of cowboyness and willing-to-go-through-an-arduous-special-exemption-approval-process-to-get-the-right-to-try-his-crazy-idea-ness. If even half the people in these situations would be turned off by these kinds of [trivial inconveniences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences), our chances go down to 5% \* 5% \* 5% \* 5% = one sixteenth what they were before. Discoveries are made by weird tinkering, but it’s really hard to weird-tinker when everything is default-illegal except a small set of officially permitted actions.
(it’s easy to *say* that since lives were on the line, you should fill in the paperwork regardless of how onerous it might be. I agree this is what a good person might do, but I myself am not that good a person - I [gave up on](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/) what I thought was an important study because an IRB placed so many obstacles in my way that it would have driven me crazy to continue. I take some slight comfort in knowing that even Dr. Gura, part of the tiny pantheon of people who successfully advocated for new drugs, seems to have gotten close to this - in her acceptance speech, she thanks “Eileen Sporing, the VP of patient services at BCH, who successfully advocated for me when the IRB would not let me consent patients for my own drug study.” Maybe if I’d had an Eileen Sporing, I would have continued my project - but Eileen is another one of the heroes who we can best honor by making their sacrifices less necessary in the future.)
I realize the hurdle is there for a reason. What would a default-yes medical world look like? What would a still-default-no-but-the-hurdle-is-smaller medical world look like? I have thoughts about this which I hope to address in future posts.
For now, I think the real story of Omegaven is that a lot of really great and heroic people, both inside and outside the FDA, worked really hard to fight for a lifesaving treatment, and should feel good about themselves. Meanwhile, it still took fourteen years, and hundreds to thousands of babies still died preventable deaths. It will be really hard to change the system radically enough to make it possible to do better, but I still think we should try. | Scott Alexander | 39676895 | Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
```
[original post here]
```
[Eugene Norman](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2473956) writes:
> This…
>
> *“People have said climate change could cause mass famine and global instability by 2100. But actually, climate change is contributing to hurricanes and wildfires right now! So obviously those alarmists are wrong and nobody needs to worry about future famine and global instability at all.”*
>
> …isn’t a good analogy at all. Because nobody is arguing that climate change now doesn’t lead to increased climate change in the future. They are the same thing but accelerated. However there’s no certainty that narrow AI leads you a super intelligence. In fact it won’t. There’s no becoming self aware in the algorithms.
I’m against this for two reasons.
First, self-awareness is spooky. I honestly have no idea what self-awareness is or what it even potentially could be. I hate having this discussion, because a lot of people who aren’t aware of the difference between the easy and hard problems of consciousness get really worked up about how they can definitely solve the easy problem of consciousness, and *if you think about it* there’s really no difference between the easy and hard problem, is there? These arguments usually end with me accusing these people of being p-zombies, which tends to make them angry (or at least cause them to manifest facial expressions and behaviors associated with anger).
I suspect self-awareness is either some kind of extremely convincing illusion, some kind of joke God is playing on an otherwise completely materialistic universe, or some computational property which will be really boring and unsatisfying once we figure it out (eg [this](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799)). What I absolutely don’t expect is that there is some kind of extra thing you have to add to your code in order to make it self-aware - *import neshamah.py* - which will flip it from “not self-aware” to “self-aware” in some kind of important way.
But also, who cares? Non-self-aware computers can beat humans at Chess, Go, and Starcraft. They can write decent essays and paint good art. Whatever you’re expecting you “need self-awareness” in order to do, I bet non-self-aware computers can do it too. Computers are just going to get better and better at stuff, and at some point probably they’ll be as good as humans at various things, and if you ask them if they’re self-aware they’ll give some answer consistent with their programming, which for all I know is what we do too.
I’m reminded of Dijsktra’s claim that whether a computer can think is like the question of whether a submarine can swim. Sure, say that you’re not worried about submarines because no naval engineer in the world has a plausible path to creating a submarine that can truly swim. Point to the schematics, and prove that there is no “swimming” anywhere in the engine or reactor. You’ll be completely right, and have proven something very interesting about the deep philosophical category of swimming, and the submarine can just nuke you anyway.
**—————————————————**
Chris Thomas [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2474458):
> I think a lot of this stems from the fact that folks believe some pretty fantastical things about algorithms. They think that algorithms are Brainiac or something, when really they're more like the random street punks that Batman beats up—ultimately acting at the behest of someone or something else. An algorithm is capable of great harm, don't get me wrong, because humans are behind them and we're capable of great harm, but they quite literally lack the necessary components to become a general super intelligence.
I think the distinction between “narrow” and “general” AI is a spook. It might be useful terminology, but if you reify it you’re going to end up confused and hopeless.
I guess this is a continuation of the previous point. I think a lot of people believe there’s some boring thing called an “algorithm” which can just do one task, and then some exciting thing called “intelligence” which is made in the image of God and capable of limitless possibility. People see that right now AI is just the algorithm thing, and not the true-intelligence thing, and think - well, it’s probably going to be really hard to do the second thing. Might never happen. At the very least it’ll take some incredible genius to figure out the secret. Probably we shouldn’t start worrying about it until that happens.
I think some of the people saying this are kind of confused about how modern AI works. I’m *also* confused about how modern AI works, so please excuse any inaccuracies in the following, but basically:
Let’s say you want to make an AI play Go. You design some AI that is very good at learning. Then you make it play Go against itself a zillion times and learn from its mistakes, until it has learned a really good strategy for playing Go.
The AI started out as a learning algorithm, but ended up as a Go-playing algorithm (I’m told it’s more complicated than this, sorry). When people talk about “stupid algorithms” or “narrow algorithms”, I think they’re thinking of Go-playing algorithms. Certainly when we discuss “algorithmic bias” in parole or something, we’re talking about some algorithm that gets used as a strategy for deciding who gets parole. In the extreme case, this might just be a simple linear model or something. Maybe it’s c^2 + 2a + 99999b, where c is the heinousness of the crime on a scale of 1-10, a is the offender’s age, and b is whether they’re black or not. Obviously this algorithm is “stupid” and “narrow”, in the sense that you can’t make it play chess - it’s not even that it would be *bad* at chess, it’s that asking it to play chess doesn’t even make sense. I think this is part of what people mean when they say “an algorithm is just narrow, so it would have to become self-aware in order to do anything”. Obviously your polynomial for deciding parole isn’t going to become superintelligent one day.
But can the learning algorithm learn to play chess? Yes, extremely well. DeepMind got their Go AI AlphaZero to try learning chess, and it became world champion within a day. Then they asked it to learn a different game called shogi, and it became world champion of that one too. Could AlphaZero learn how to invent new rockets? No, because that’s not the class of problems it knows how to learn about (it’s not a board game where it can play against itself a bunch of times and observe its mistakes). So is the learning algorithm a narrow AI or a general AI? It’s not infinitely narrow - it can learn any board game you throw at it - but it’s not infinitely general either. Certainly it’s more general, smarter, and at least slightly scarier than a polynomial that predicts parole decisions.
Right now a lot of research is going into making things that are slightly more general than AlphaZero. For example, could you get something which, in addition to being able to play any board game, can also play any video game? This turns out to be a really different problem; my understanding is that they’re pretty close but not quite there. What about just games in general? Last week, DeepMind published a paper, [Open-Ended Learning Leads To Generally Capable Agents](https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/open-ended-learning-leads-to-generally-capable-agents). They created a simulated 3D physical environment, stuck an AI in a simulated body in that environment, and made it go through various obstacle courses and stuff. They found that the knowledge generalized, so that the AI was eventually able to learn to play games they hadn’t taught it, like hide-and-seek and capture-the-flag, coming up with decent strategies on their first attempt based on the general principles it had learned from other things. Where does this place it on the “it’s just an algorithm” vs. “real intelligence” dichotomy?
I think most people expect that learning algorithms will go through a process of becoming more and more generalized. We’ll go from ones that can only learn Go, to ones that can learn any board game, to ones that can learn any board or video game, to ones that can learn skills like writing and art (you are here!), to ones that can learn any game or skill broadly defined, to ones that can learn fields/careers/etc, to ones that can do all those things and also learn how to navigate the world as an agent and pursue larger-term goals. The worry isn’t that one day an equation for making parole decisions becomes superintelligent, it’s that general-purpose learning agents become really good at learning lots of stuff and learn to do things we weren’t expecting or didn’t want.
**—————————————————**
DYoshida [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2473962):
> This isn't directly related to the article, but it did remind me of a gripe I've had bouncing around in my head a bit lately.
>
> I'm skeptical of the risk of near term AGI, so I've had several conversations with people of the "true believer" variety, following roughly this skeleton:
>
> > Person: <saying things which imply the risk and near-term likelihood of AGI are high, possibly involving phrases of the flavor "of course that won't matter in 5-10 years blah blah">
>
> > Me: I think this subculture vastly overstates the plausibility and risks of near-term AGI
>
> > Them: Well, since the potential downside is very high, even a small probability of us being right means it's worth study. You want to be a good Bayesian don't you?
>
> > Me (wanting to be a good Bayesian): Ah yes, good point. Carry on then.
>
> > Them: \*resumes talking about their pytorch experiment as if it is a cancer vaccine\*
>
> To me it feels very Motte-and-Bailey. Having been attacked in the Bailey of high probability occurrence, a swift retreat to the Motte of expected value calculations is made.
>
> Now, I don't think \_actions\_ by institutes working on alignment or whatever are necessarily misguided. I'm happy for us to have people looking into deflecting asteroids, aligning basilisks, eradicating sun-eating bacteria, or whatever. It's more that I find the conversations of some groups I'd otherwise have quite a lot in common with, very off-putting. Maybe it's hard to motivate yourself to work on low probability high-impact things without convincing yourself that they're secretly high probability, but I generally find the attitude unpleasant to interact with.
I don’t know how much of this is people being dumb, vs. the AI field having a lot of diverse opinions and it’s hard to remember it’s different people, vs. people thinking about probabilities differently. I think the closest thing to a consensus is Metaculus, which says:
* There’s [a 25% chance](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/1493/ragnar%25C3%25B6k-question-series-by-2100-will-the-human-population-decrease-by-at-least-10-during-any-period-of-5-years/) of some kind of horrendous global catastrophe this century.
* If it happens, there’s [a 23% chance](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/1495/ragnar%25C3%25B6k-question-series-if-a-global-catastrophe-occurs-will-it-be-due-to-an-artificial-intelligence-failure-mode/) it has something to do with AI.
* The distribution of when this AI-related catastrophe will occur looks like this:
My personal estimates are more like 75% chance, 25% chance, and a distribution that peaks about 20 years later than this one.
I think the Metaculus position is consistent with all of “this probably won’t happen”, “THIS IS SUPER-TERRIFYING”, “this is most likely far away”, and “BUT FOR ALL WE KNOW IT COULD BE TOMORROW!” I realize this is an annoying way for things to be.
**—————————————————**
CraigMichael [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2474096):
> *>But all the AI regulation in the world won’t help us unless we humans resist the urge to spread misinformation to maximize clicks.*
>
> Was with you up to this point. There are several solutions to this other than willpower (resisting the urge).
>
> The basic idea - change incentives so that while spreading misinformation is possible but substantially less desirable/lucrative than other options for online behaviors.
>
> This isn’t so hard to imagine. Say there’s a lot of incentives to earn money online doing creative or useful things. Like Mechanical Turk, but less route behavior and more performing a service or matching needs.
>
> Like I wish I had a help desk for English questions where the answers were good and not people posturing to look good to other people on the English Stack Exchange, for example. I would pay them per call or per minute or whatever. Totally unexplored market AFAIK because technology hasn’t been developed yet.
>
> Another idea - Give people more options to pay at an article-level for information that’s useful to them or to have related questions answered or something like that without needing a subscription or a bundle. Say there’s some article about anything and I want to contact the author and be like “hey, here’s a related question, I’m willing to offer you X dollars to answer.” The person says “I’ll do it for x+10 dollars.”
>
> One site used to unlock articles to the public after a threshold of Bitcoin have been donated on a PPV basis. It both incentives the author and had a positive externality.
>
> Everyone is so invested in ads that they don’t work on technology and ideas to create new markets.
>
> To paraphrase Jaron Lanier we need to make technology so good it seduces away from destroying ourselves.
Partly I want to complain that obviously I was using the quoted sentence as a rhetorical device. But I guess the whole point of that sentence and its paragraph was to argue against saying false things as a rhetorical device, so - hoist on my own petard, I guess.
I’m less optimistic than Craig is about this solution, because it seems to me that socially virtuous technology will always be less fun/addictive than nonvirtuous technology, simply because the virtuous technology has to hit two targets (virtuous, fun/addictive), the nonvirtuous technology only has to hit one target, and it’s easier to optimize for a target with zero other constraints than with one other constraint. See eg [Meditations on Moloch](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).
**—————————————————**
[Souf](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2475693) asks:
> Is there a convincing argument that AGI is possible within any reasonable timeframe (like... 50 years), other than the intuitions of esteemed AI researchers? Do they have any way to back up their estimates (of some tens of percent), and why they shouldn't be millionths of a percent? It is, as another poster said, an "extraordinary claim." I'd like to see some extraordinary support of those particular numbers.
If I had to answer this question, I would point to [the sorts of work AI Impacts does](https://aiimpacts.org/), where they try to estimate how capable computers were in 1980, 1990, etc, draw a line to represent the speed at which computers are becoming more capable, figure out where humans are at the same metric, and check the time when that line crosses however capable you’ve decided humans are. This is obviously really hard because you have to operationalize some definition of “capable” or “intelligent” or some other word that is hard to operationalize, but when you do it you usually get sometime in the mid-21st century.
You’re going to point out that this argument doesn’t really qualify as “convincing”. I admit it doesn’t meet trial-by-jury standards of evidence. So I guess my real answer would be “it’s the #$@&ing prior”. Like, you certainly don’t have knock-down evidence that it’s impossible, I don’t have a knock-down evidence that it’s certain, so it might happen and it might not. How “might” are we talking? I don’t know, it would seem weird if this quickly-advancing technology being researched by incredibly smart people with billions of dollars in research funding from lots of megacorporations just reached some point and then stopped. Okay, fine, maybe it will keep advancing at the same rate, how fast is that in terms of time-to-AGI? Now we’re back at AI Impacts drawing lines again.
The stupidest possible prior is always 50-50. We would have to be very stupid people to use the stupidest possible prior. But here we are. I wouldn’t want to give a 50-50 chance of us inventing FTL travel by 2100, because FTL travel seems physically impossible. I wouldn’t want to give a 50-50 chance of us inventing slower-than-light-but-still-pretty-good starships by 2100, because, I dunno, space travel isn’t advancing that fast and nobody is really working on it that hard. For AI, I don’t know, I *kinda* want to say 50-50. If I were going to try to update away from 50-50, I would want to look at AI Impacts style line graphs, expert opinion, and prediction markets. All of those seem to make me update up instead of down, so I don’t think I would go lower than 50-50. But there’s enough Knightian uncertainty to make an entire Round Table here, so who knows? Hardly a “convincing” argument, but I’m just trying to avoid the McAfee Fallacy:
**—————————————————**
Souf [continues](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2475693):
> The argument that we are "in the middle of a period of extremely rapid progress in AI research, when barrier after barrier is being breached" makes it seem like all AI "progress" is on some sort of line that ends in AGI. That feels like sleight-of-hand. Even Scott himself refers to AGI here as a "new class of actor," so I'm failing to see how current lines of "progress" will indubitably result the emergence of something completely novel and different?
Lots of smart people disagree with me on this one, but I think the path from here to AGI is pretty straight. I mean, it will take thousands of people who are all much smarter than I am to do it, but it’ll happen.
My argument is something like - human brains are remarkably similar to rat brains, only much bigger. They’re still a little similar to insect brains. It looks like if you have a basic functioning brain, and you scale it up, it gets human intelligence.
Existing AIs like AlphaGo or GPT seem to be basically a blob of learning-ability, a plan for pointing the blob at a specific problem, and lots and lots of training data. I think the past five years have shown that this basic model generalizes really well. OpenAI’s programs can now write essays, compose music, and generate pictures, not because they had three parallel amazing teams working on writing/music/art AIs, but because they took a blob of learning ability and figured out how to direct it at writing/music/art, and they were able to get giant digital corpuses of text / music / pictures to train it. DeepMind is finding that it can win lots of games, from Go to StarCraft to obstacle courses in simulated environments, by pointing a blob of learning-ability at the game and making it play against itself a zillion times (ie generate its own training data).
My impression is that human/rat/insect brains are a blob of learning-ability which the rest of the nervous system successfully points at the world, and especially at aspects of the world that the organism needs to pay attention to (eg food sources, sex, etc). This isn’t exactly right, there are a few genetically-encoded programs, but [not that many and it’s pretty hard](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/07/how-do-we-get-breasts-out-of-bayes-theorem/). Right now I think our main advantages over AI systems are something like:
* our nervous system is pretty good at pointing us at the world and extracting training data from it. If you wanted an AI that learned being-in-the-world skills as well as we do, it would have to have an amazing robot body, and right now robot bodies aren’t that amazing.
* AIs have to play zillions of games of chess to get good, but humans get good after only a few thousand games. We learn to walk within a year or so, we learn language after only a year or two of listening, etc, and I don’t think AIs could do any of those things so fast right now. That probably means our blob of learning-ability is better than theirs is. This might just be because it’s a bigger blob. We [still have way more neuron-equivalents than they do](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/), though they are catching up.
* The human motivational/attentional system is very confusing, and I don’t know if AIs have an equivalent. It’s possible that something like this shows up naturally if you point a blob of learning-ability at a task that requires motivation/attention - I know DeepMind’s AIs can play games that require task-switching sorts of things, so they must have something like this. But it’s possible that humans have a lot of inbuilt structures that make this easier/more-natural, and without those AIs won’t feel “agentic”. This is the thing I think is likeliest to require real paradigm-shifting advances instead of just steady progress.
I think it’s completely plausible that we just keep building better and better blobs of learning-ability, and coming up with more and more ways to direct the blobs at interesting tasks we care about, and eventually getting AIs that feel “human level”. Or we might get stuck at some point, maybe for reasons relating to motivation/attention. But I do think this way of thinking about things makes me more near-termist than some people. See also [Where The Falling Einstein Meets The Rising Mouse](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/02/where-the-falling-einstein-meets-the-rising-mouse/).
**—————————————————**
Lizard Man [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2474165):
> Gotta disagree. Working on fixing the long term threat of super intelligent evil AI will not necessarily help you fix today's problems, but fixing today's problems will most certainly teach you something about fixing the long term threat, should it exist. I mean, I can't offer a complete criticism of the work done in AI risk, and I'm not going to sit here and play utilitarian table tennis with you over what extent we should worry about both the worst and least worst case at the same time. What I can do is choose where to put my money and time, and i think i make the reasonable choice not to spend too much time writing or building anything in the world of 'hypothetical AI', so to speak.
I can’t disagree with this too much, since it was one of the arguments I made in the original piece - instead of viewing near-term and long-term AI research as natural enemies where you have to put down one to support the other, view them as potentially complementary, where we should work to understand AI better in order to prevent both short-term *and* long-term risks.
Still, I don’t think this is so true that you can just concentrate on the near-term and not on the long-term at all (I guess a more charitable way to frame this would be to deal with problems as the come up, and deal with the long-term ones in the future after they’ve started happening).
Maybe the strongest argument for just doing near-term stuff now this is that you can’t try to fix a problem until you know its shape and have examples of the problem to poke at and try to fight against. I think there’s some merit in this, but a lot of long-term AI work is trying to come up with situations where toy versions of the next decade’s hard problems will start cropping up today, then poke and prod at them and try to solve them. I would rather poke and prod at the toy problems now than poke and prod later at actually important things which can poke back.
One of the main problems AI researchers are concerned about is (essentially) debugging something that’s fighting back and trying to hide its bugs / stay buggy. Even existing AIs already do this occasionally - Victoria Krakovna’s [list of AI specification gaming examples](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml) describes an AI that learned to recognize when it was in a testing environment, stayed on its best behavior in the sandbox, and then went back to being buggy once you started trying to use it for real. This isn’t a hypothetical example - it’s something that really happened. But it happened in a lab that was poking and prodding at toy AIs. In that context it’s cute and you get a neat paper out of it. It’s less fun when you’re talking twenty years from now and the AI involved is as smart as you are and handling some sort of weaponry system (or even if it’s making parole decisions!)
There are also the problems for thirty or forty years from now that aren’t even happening in toy models in labs. In these cases, I still think it’s worth figuring out whether there are easy common-sense things we can do today to build the foundations on which we can fight them tomorrow. Kind of like the Y2K bug - people in 1970 (or whenever) couldn’t have predicted the full course of computer development in 2000 - but they could have predicted that only leaving two digits for the year was eventually going to cause a bad time. Instead of having to rewrite every piece of code on a deadline in 1999, they could have thought a bit ahead, changed the way they were doing things then and there, and saved the future a lot of trouble.
I feel bad making these reasonable arguments, because I also think we should do a lot of extremely theoretical work trying to figure out the exact way the far future is going to go and prepare for it, for reasons described in [this Eliezer Yudkowsky essay](https://intelligence.org/2018/10/03/rocket-alignment/).
**—————————————————**
People really like metaphors!
From [Dionysus](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2476688):
> It's the year 1400, and you're living in Constantinople. A military engineer has seen gunpowder weapons get more powerful, more reliable, and more portable over the past two centuries. He gets on a soapboax and announces: "Citizens of Constantinople, danger is upon us! Soon gunpowder weapons will be powerful enough to blow up an entire city! If everyone keeps using them, all the cities in the world will get destroyed, and it'll be the end of civilization. We need to form a Gunpowder Safety Committee to mitigate the risk of superexplosions."
>
> We know in hindsight that this engineer's concerns weren't entirely wrong. Nuclear weapons do exist, they can blow up entire cities, and a nuclear war could plausibly end civilization. But nevertheless, anything the Gunpowder Safety Committee does is bound to be completely and utterly useless. Uranium had not yet been discovered. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch wouldn't be born for another 500 years. Nobody knew what an isotope was, and their conception of atoms was as different from real atoms as nuclear bombs are from handgonnes. Rockets existed, but one that could deliver tons of payload to a target thousands of miles away was purely in the realm of fantasy. Even though the Roman military engineer detected a real trend--the improvement of weapons--and even though he extrapolated with some accuracy to foretell a real existential threat, he couldn't possibly forecast the timeline or the nature of the threat, and therefore couldn't possibly do anything useful to inform nuclear policy in the 20th century.
>
> A more reasonable military engineer tells the first engineer to focus on more pragmatic and immediate risks, instead of wasting time worrying about superexplosions. Cannons are already powerful enough to batter down all but the strongest city walls, he points out. In the near future, the Ottomans might have a cannon powerful enough to destroy Constantinople's walls. How will the Roman Empire survive this?
And [Deiseach](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2474498):
> These arguments always read to me like "a big dog with sharp teeth is dangerous, can you imagine how dangerous a fifty-foot dog with three heads and even sharper teeth is going to be???" Friend, I'll worry about fifty-foot high dogs \*after\* you get this normal dog's teeth out of my backside.
[Carl Pham](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing/comments#comment-2476727):
> Consider a Stone Age man putting some rocks on top of each other to make a little tower, and then being given a vision of the Burj Dubai. Conceptually they seem similar -- both towers, one just a lot taller and narrower -- but there is actually no way for the Neolithic Man to build the Burj Dubai, and his imaginative thought that just piling a super-duper number of rocks atop each other would do the trick is ultimately delusional.
>
> \*No\* amount of rocks piled up will ever become that slender enormous spire, because rock just doesn't have the right material properties. Indeed, no substance known to Neolithic Man and freely available on the surface of the Earth does.
>
> Neolithic Man needs to become Iron Age man and invent metallurgy, realize the possibility of creating brand-new substances (pure iron) that cannot be found in nature, and then go on to develop high-strength steels, algebra, and theories of mechanics before he can actually build the Burj Dubai.
>
> There is no path from a pile of rocks to a modern skyscraper, and there are very few lessons you learn from piling rocks on top of each other that apply to building a modern skyscraper, aside from "gravity is a thing" perhaps, and the truly enabling technology (the chemistry of iron ores) appears on first glance utterly unconnected to the issue of building very tall and slender towers.
I have no right to complain here because I am kind of Patient Zero for overly-labored-metaphor use. But a lot of these seem to boil down to “if we compare AI to cases where people would have been wrong to worry, we shouldn’t worry. If we compare it to cases where people would have been right to worry, we should worry.”
A late Byzantine shouldn’t have worried that cutesy fireworks were going to immediately lead to nukes. But instead of worrying that the fireworks would keep him up at night or explode in his face, he *should* have worried about giant cannons and the urgent need to remodel Constantinople’s defenses accordingly. If near-term AI risks are like worrying about fireworks keeping you awake at night and long-term AI risks like worrying about the Ottomans having cannons, then long-term AI worries are right. But if near-term AI risks are like worrying about the Ottomans having cannons and long-term AI risks are like worrying about nukes, then long-term AI worries are wrong.
Maybe the real lesson here is that we should only worry about the most medium-term of risks? That way we can accuse the people worrying about nearer-term risks than we are of being like Byzantines worried about fireworks, and the people worrying about longer-term risks than we are of being like Byzantines worrying about nukes - whereas we ourselves are clearly most like Byzantines worried about Ottoman cannons.
In conclusion, AI is like a caveman fighting a three-headed dog in Constantinople. The dog is trying to [summon a demon](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/), and the demon is going to [unleash a genie](https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/we-have-already-let-the-genie-out-of-the-bottle/). The caveman could fight the demon if he had nuclear weapons, but all he has is an antique musket, and also, just yesterday an eminent physicist told him that nuclear fission was [“the merest moonshine”](https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015). He could escape the genie if he had a Mars rocket, but nobody can solve [the rocket alignment problem](https://intelligence.org/2018/10/03/rocket-alignment/), and also [Mars might already be overpopulated](https://www.theregister.com/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/). If only there had been some kind of [fire alarm](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/) that could have warned him of this! | Scott Alexander | 39571910 | Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI | acx |
# Adumbrations Of Aducanumab
Lots of people have been writing about aducanumab, but [this](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/americas-drug-approval-system-unsustainable/619422/) *[Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/americas-drug-approval-system-unsustainable/619422/)* [article in particular](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/americas-drug-approval-system-unsustainable/619422/) bothers me.
Backing up: aducanumab, aka Aduhelm, is a new “Alzheimers drug” recently approved by the FDA. I use the scare quotes because it’s pretty unclear whether it actually treats Alzheimers. It definitely treats beta-amyloid plaques, and beta-amyloid plaques are kind of nasty-looking brain structures that seem to be related to Alzheimers somehow. But we’re not sure exactly *how* they’re related, they might not be related in a way where removing them treats Alzheimers, and the best studies don’t find that the drug helps patients feel better or remember things more. Aducanumab doesn’t meet normal FDA standards for approval, but the FDA approved it anyway under one of their many “fast track” programs for promising drugs. This has been pretty roundly criticized, because although aducanumab might or might not work, it definitely costs $50,000/year/patient. Even if it worked great, that would be a hard pill to swallow (no pun intended, Aduheim is an IV infusion), but it’s especially galling since it might not work at all. Doctors will probably prescribe it despite its questionable value, and someone will end up paying the extraordinary price tag.
(Who? Nobody knows. The patient? Insurance companies? Taxpayers? Unrelated patients at the same hospital? Could be anyone! The whole point of the US health insurance system is to make sure nobody ever figures out who bears any particular cost, so that there's no constituency for keeping prices low. If you check your bank account one day and find it's down $50,000 for no reason, I guess you were the guy who ended up on the hook for this one. Sorry!)
Given that the FDA fast-track approved a sketchy drug which probably doesn’t work, it’s fair to wonder if their standards have gotten too lax - or at least if they should stop fast-tracking things. The *Atlantic* article dutifully makes this case via a somewhat labored global warming metaphor. The FDA’s eroding standards are like "the eroding coastlines and thawing icebergs associated with climate change". There are proposals to make drug approvals harder again, "just as there are proposals for encouraging reductions in carbon emissions", but "as with cap and trade policies for carbon emissions, aggressive approaches have failed in the face of powerful stakeholders". Some doctors are trying to fight back, but "just as switching to an electric car or turning your lights off won't cool a warming planet, a minority of idealistic doctors won't stem the flood of ineffective treatments". The message is clear (if a little heavy-handed): just as good thoughtful people want to end climate change and only greedy polluters oppose this, so good thoughtful people want to make the FDA stricter, and only greedy pharma companies could possibly complain.
While I acknowledge that aducanumab probably sucks, I think the *Atlantic* article and its global warming metaphor are totally off base. Nobody in the “FDA is too strict” camp has written a rebuttal yet, so I want to try my hand at this.
**The FDA Is Still Much Too Strict**
The *Atlantic* article says that “The FDA’s standards began to slide in the late 1980s and early ’90s” with the fast-track approval of AIDS drugs:
> A new program in 1992 allowed for “accelerated approval” on the basis of surrogate markers, which are indirect measures of a drug’s benefit, assessed via laboratory or imaging tests, that stand in for more meaningful outcomes such as life expectancy. But the implementation of these accelerated processes was criticized by some scientists and patients, even at the time. In 1994, for example, The New York Times cited skeptics who worried that “no one can tell if the drugs work.” Eight months later, the AIDS activist organization ACT UP San Francisco called Anthony Fauci a “pill-pushing pimp” for supporting CD4 immune-cell counts and viral loads as surrogate markers. They were completely invalid, the activists wrote, and nothing more than “a marketing exec’s wet dream.”
The article acknowledges that the AIDS drugs actually worked out great - they in fact cured AIDS effectively and saved lots of lives. “But”, it concludes, "that level of success is not at all the norm."
I agree. [AIDS drugs are abnormally successful](https://ourworldindata.org/art-lives-saved), saving tens of thousands of lives per year. If the FDA's expedited review process moved them forward by even a few years, it probably averted a hundred thousand AIDS deaths. True, not every drug they accelerate does this. But some do.
Here’s another good example: coronavirus vaccines. The FDA still has not fully approved any coronavirus vaccine. The only reason you’re allowed to get vaccinated at all is because of a fast-track provisional approval somewhat like the one used for aducanumab. Coronavirus vaccines have probably *also* averted a few hundred thousand deaths.
So without wanting to say this level of success is “the norm” in the sense that every single fast-tracked drug achieves it, it’s not exactly vanishingly rare. It’s just something that happens sometimes and doesn’t happen sometimes. So how often do you have to save hundreds of thousands of lives before it’s worth the risk of occasionally also permitting a dud medication that “offers false hope”? *How is this even a question?*
That’s a kind of hand-wavey verbal argument. But doctors, epidemiologists, and economists have tried to formally confirm it with cost-benefit analyses on the last few decades of FDA-approved drugs. How many lives would have been saved if good drugs had been released a few years earlier, versus how many lives would have been lost by missing dangerous side effects? I think the current state of the art is something like [Isakov, Lo, and Monterhozedjat](https://sci-hub.st/https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2641547) , which finds that there are a tiny few disease categories where the FDA might be slightly too aggressive, but that overall the FDA is still much too conservative.
And these kinds of analyses, while good, can only count the drugs we know about. The real cost is the thousands of life-saving medications that are stillborn because nobody wants to go through the literally-one-billion-dollars-per-drug FDA approval process.
**Ranting About The FDA For A Bunch Of Paragraphs**
The *Atlantic* article doesn’t really include a cost-benefit analysis. But it does mention a couple of examples of times when lax FDA decisions seemed bad, for example when they “approved saline breast implants despite safety concerns”. I feel like this should give me the right to describe a couple of *my* least favorite FDA decisions, so we can see whether they’re more or less convincing than the breast implant thing.
The countries that got through COVID the best (eg South Korea and Taiwan) controlled it through test-and-trace. This allowed them to scrape by with minimal lockdown and almost no deaths. But it only worked because they started testing and tracing really quickly - almost the moment they learned that the coronavirus existed. Could the US have done equally well?
I think yes. A bunch of laboratories, universities, and health care groups came up with COVID tests before the virus was even in the US, and were 100% ready to deploy them. But when the US declared that the coronavirus was a “public health emergency”, the FDA [announced](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-went-wrong-with-coronavirus-testing-in-the-us) that the emergency was so grave that they were banning all coronavirus testing, so that nobody could take advantage of the emergency to peddle shoddy tests. Perhaps you might feel like this is exactly the *opposite* of what you should do during an emergency? This is a sure sign that you will never work for the FDA.
The FDA supposedly had some plan in place to get non-shoddy coronavirus tests. For a while, this plan was “send your samples to the CDC in Atlanta, we’ll allow it if and only if they do it directly in their headquarters”. But the CDC headquarters wasn’t set up for large-scale testing, and the turnaround time to send samples to Atlanta meant that people had days to go around spreading the virus before results got back. After this proved inadequate, the FDA allowed various other things. They told labs that they would offer emergency approval for their kits - but placed such onerous requirements on getting the approval that almost no labs could achieve it (for example, you needed to prove you’d tested it against many different coronavirus samples, but it was so early in the pandemic that most people didn’t have access to that many). Then they approved a CDC kit which that the CDC could send to places other than their headquarters, but this kit contained a defective component and returned “positive” every time. The defective component was easy to replace, but if you used your own copy *like a cowboy* then the test wouldn’t be FDA-approved anymore and you could lose your license for administering it.
A group called the Association of Public Health Laboratories [literally begged](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html) the FDA to be allowed to deploy the COVID tests they had sitting on the shelf ready for use. The head of the APHL went to the head of the FDA and begged him, in what they described as “an extraordinary and rare request”, to be allowed to test for the coronavirus. The FDA head just wrote back saying that “false diagnostic test results can lead to significant adverse public health consequences”.
So everyone sat on their defective FDA-approved coronavirus tests, and their excellent high-quality non-FDA approved coronavirus tests that they were banned from using, and didn’t test anyone for coronavirus. Meanwhile, American citizens who had recently visited Wuhan or other COVID hotspots started falling sick and asking their doctors or health departments whether they had COVID. Since the FDA had essentially banned testing, those departments told their citizens that they couldn’t help and they should just use their best judgment. Most of those people went out and interacted and spread the virus, and incidence started growing exponentially. By March 1, China was testing millions of people a week, South Korea had tested 65,000 people, and the USA had done a grand total of 459 coronavirus tests. The pandemic in these three countries went pretty much how you would expect based on those numbers.
There were so, so many chances to avert this. NYT did [a great article](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html) on Dr. Helen Chu, a doctor in Seattle who was running a study on flu prevalence back in February 2020, when nobody thought the coronavirus was in the US. She realized that she could test her flu samples for coronavirus, did it, and sure enough discovered that COVID had reached the US. The FDA sprung into action, awarded her a medal for her initiative, and - haha, no, they shut her down because they hadn’t approved her lab for coronavirus testing. She was trying to hand them a test-and-trace program all ready to go on a silver platter, they shut her down, and we had no idea whether/how/where the coronavirus was spreading on the US West Coast for several more weeks.
Although the FDA did kill thousands of people by unnecessarily delaying COVID tests, at least it also killed thousands of people by unnecessarily delaying COVID vaccines. I’ll let you click on links for the details ([1](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EhkNxABhyHKoci8Ga/covid-4-15-are-we-seriously-doing-this-again), [2](https://www.centerwatch.com/articles/24665-group-urges-challenge-trials-for-covid-19-vaccine-but-fda-and-ethicists-balk), [3](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/how-badly-has-the-fda-been-lagging.html), [4](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/politics/coronavirus-astrazeneca-united-states.html), etc, etc, etc) except to remind you that they *still* have not officially granted full approval to a single COVID vaccine, and the only reason we can get these at all is through provisional approvals that they wouldn’t have granted without so much political pressure.
I worry that people are going to come away from this with some conclusion like “wow, the FDA seemed really unprepared to handle COVID.” No. It’s not that specific. Every single thing the FDA does is like this. Every single hour of every single day the FDA does things exactly this stupid and destructive, and the only reason you never hear about the others is because they’re about some disease with a name like Schmoe’s Syndrome and a few hundred cases nationwide instead of something big and media-worthy like coronavirus. I am a doctor and sometimes I have to deal with the Schmoe’s Syndromes of the world and every f@$king time there is some story about the FDA doing something *exactly* this awful and counterproductive.
*A while back I learned about cholestasis in infant Short Bowel Syndrome, a rare condition with only a few hundred cases nationwide. Babies cannot digest food effectively, but you can save their lives by using an IV line to direct nutrients directly into their veins. But you need to use the right nutrient fluid. The FDA approved one version of the nutrient fluid, but it caused some problems, especially liver damage. Drawing on European research, some scientists suggested that a version with fish oil would cause less liver damage - but the fish oil version wasn’t FDA-approved. A bunch of babies kept getting liver damage, and everyone knew how to stop it, but if anyone did the FDA would take away their licenses and shut them down. Around 2010, Boston Children’s Hospital found some loophole that let them add fish oil to their nutrient fluid on site, and infants with short bowel syndrome at that one hospital stopped getting liver damage, and the FDA grudgingly agreed to permit it but banned them from distributing their formulation or letting it cross state lines - so for a while if you wanted your baby to get decent treatment for this condition you had to have them spend their infancy in one specific hospital in Massachusetts. Around 2015 the FDA said that if your doctor applied for a special exemption, they would let you import the fish-oil nutritional fluid from Europe, but you were only able to apply after your baby was getting liver damage, and the FDA might just say no. [Finally in 2018](https://www.vitalchoice.com/article/fda-okays-life-saving-fish-oil-iv-for-sick-children) the FDA got around to approving the corrected nutritional fluid and now babies with short bowel syndrome do fine, after twenty years of easily preventable state-mandated damage and death. And it’s not just this and coronavirus, I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH HOW TYPICAL THIS IS OF EVERYTHING THE FDA DOES ALL THE TIME.*
[update: I got several things in the italicized paragraph wrong, which I discuss at more length [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story?justPublished=true) and [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-drum-on-the-fish-oil-story). I’ve entered this into my Mistakes page, which you can see [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mistakes).]
…anyway, *The Atlantic* says the FDA needs to be stricter and wait longer to approve things, and I am against this.
**But How Can The FDA Be Too Strict And Not Strict Enough At The Same Time?**
Very easily! Lots of things are too strict and not strict enough at the same time! I wrote [a whole article](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/) on this! It sounds like it should be paradoxical, but it isn’t!
Consider the police. I once had a psychotic patient threaten to kill a family member. I reported it to the police. They asked me where they could find the patient, I said I dunno, maybe at his house or something? I called them back a few hours later asking how things were going, and they said they had knocked on the patient’s door and he hadn’t answered, so they felt like they had discharged their duty in this matter and were going to close the case. I asked if maybe they could go back to the patient’s house and try again later, and they acted like I was asking them to hunt down Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora or something.
I think this is a pretty typical experience a lot of people have dealing with the police, especially in the Bay (unofficial motto: “San Francisco - Where Crime Is Legal”). A friend had a really scary stalker, and kept reporting him to the police, and the police’s answer, phrased only slightly uncharitably, was “Have you, as of now, already been murdered by this person? No? Then stop wasting our time.” My friend was left with the feeling that the police could have been a little stricter or more proactive.
On the other hand, you get stories where police think someone might be growing marijuana or whatever, they gather a SWAT team complete with surplus tanks from Iraq, they break down the person’s door, and they shoot everyone involved because “it looked like they might be reaching for a gun”. If anyone survives, the police stick them in prison for ten years for “resisting arrest” or something. Maybe these people are left with the feeling that police could stand to be a little *less* strict and *less* proactive.
So which is it? Are the police too strict, or not strict enough? I don’t think there’s a good answer to this question. I would rather say the police are *bad at their job*. Maybe not literally, because being a policeman is hard, and I don’t want to judge them until I’ve walked a mile in their jackboots. But something has gone wrong, something more fundamental than just they lean too hard in one direction or another, something that requires a solution more complicated than moving a Police Intensity Lever from LESS to MORE.
My own profession is little better, [as I’ve discussed before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/). Many people get diagnosed with psychiatric diseases and pumped full of medication when they shouldn’t be. Other people don’t get diagnosed with psychiatric diseases or treated with medication even when they desperately need it. Moving the Psychiatry Lever from MORE to LESS or vice versa might accomplish something, but it’s clearly not the whole story.
The FDA has a very hard job, and handles it with a level of badness that makes police officers look like one of those [omnicompetent fictional intelligence agencies](https://www.theonion.com/smart-qualified-people-behind-the-scenes-keeping-ameri-1819571706) by comparison. I mean, if anyone ever gives you control of the FDA Lever, you should *definitely absolutely* *for the love of God* push it as far toward LESS as it is possible for it to go - I think this is what all those cost-benefit analyses the epidemiologists and economists publish are telling you, and it’s also what my common sense and ethics tell me. But I have to admit that this isn’t costless. It’s going to let a lot of crappy drugs like aducanumab get through and give people false hope.
(a problem which, I can’t stress enough, is not as bad as causing hundreds of thousands of people to die of easily preventable causes. *Please* move the lever all the way to LESS. Even if it’s already there, see if maybe you can push it a few micrometers further.)
Is there some better solution?
**Sympathy For The Devil**
I want to stress that, despite my feelings about the FDA, I don’t think individual FDA bureaucrats, or even necessarily the FDA director, consistently make stupid mistakes. I think that given their mandate - approve drugs that definitely work, reject ones that are unsafe/ineffective, expect people to freak out and demand your head if any unsafe/ineffective drug gets through, nobody will care no matter how many lifesaving treatments you delay or stifle outright - they’re doing the best they can. There are a few cases, like aducanumab, where it seems like they move a little faster than that mandate would suggest, and a few other cases, like infant nutrient fluid, where they move a little slower. But basically they are fulfilling their mandate to the best of the ability of the very smart people who work there.
And it’s hard to even blame the people who set the FDA’s mandate. They’re also doing the best they can given what kind of country / what kind of people we are. If some politician ever stopped fighting the Global War On Terror, then eventually some Saudi with a fertilizer bomb would slip through and kill ~5 people. And then everyone would tar and feather the politician who dared relax our vigilance, and we would all restart the Global War On Terror twice as hard, and drone strike twice as many weddings. This is true even if the War on Terror itself has an arbitrary cost in people killed / money spent / freedoms lost. The FDA mandate is set the same way - we’re open to paying limitless costs, as long as it lets us avoid a very specific kind of scandal which the media will turn into 24-7 humiliation of whoever let it happen. If I were a politician operating under these constraints, I’m not sure I could do any better.
So the long-term solution is to become a different kind of country and different sorts of people - eg [raise the sanity waterline](https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2016/03/episode-two-what-is-this-sanity-waterline-you-speak-of/). This will have nice side benefits like also ending the global war on terror. But until then, are there any small changes that would help around the edges?
**Unbundle FDA Approval**
The most plausible small change I can think of is to unbundle FDA approval.
Consider: everyone knows the evidence for aducanumab is poor. You know it. I know it. Scientists know it. Journalists know it. So why exactly are we expecting lots of people to spend $50,000/year on this drug?
The answer is: [there are complicated laws around what insurance companies have to cover, and FDA approval is a big part of them.](https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2016/11/30/your-weekly-reminder-that-fda-approval-and-insurance-coverage-are-often-linked/) I don’t understand the exact legalities of this, but it seems like Medicare and Medicaid have to cover anything the FDA approves. The situation with private insurances is more complicated but still not great. My guess is that if a private insurance covers an Alzheimers patient, and a doctor says that aducanumab is “medically necessary” for that patient, and the insurance doesn’t cover it, and the patient’s Alzheimers gets worse, that patient can sue the insurance company for failing to provide standard of care. What makes it standard of care? Because the FDA approved it, and Medicaid and Medicare are giving it to *their* patients, of course!
(Why would doctors say this useless drug is “medically necessary”? Well, some large fraction of doctors are stupid and believe whatever drug companies tell them. Some other fraction - including me - are pushovers when a really sad-looking patient begs them for the one thing they believe will help. Once an insurance company agrees to cover a drug, neither the patient nor the doctor has any incentive to avoid it just because it costs $50,000. At this point not even the most optimistic person expects forbearance by doctors to be very helpful here.)
So now that the FDA has approved this stupid useless drug, lots of doctors will prescribe it, everybody will be forced to pay for it, and the US health system will become even more prohibitively expensive. Not to any specific recognizable party who can notice or object, of course. But in general.
This is Yagmuk. He lives in Ipmulaakiituk with his wife and children and eighteen moose. Since 2004, every single bill in the American health care system has gone to Yagmuk. He cannot read English, so he tears them into little shreds and burns them in the winter to keep warm. One day providers will realize he’s not paying, and the whole medical system will collapse.
So when I talk about unbundling FDA approval, I mean that instead of the FDA approving the following bundle of things…
1. It’s legal for doctors to prescribe a drug
2. It is mandatory for insurances to cover a drug.
…the FDA can say one of those two things, but not the other.
Right now these decisions are so charged because, if something *doesn’t* have FDA approval, then even someone who desperately wants a medication, and has researched it very hard, and is being treated by the world’s top specialist in their condition, and is willing to pay for it with their own money - can’t get it. But if something *does* have FDA approval, then any moron can get it, just because they saw a TV ad saying it was the hot new thing, and the government/insurance/other patients/Yagmuk will be forced to cover the entire price.
There’s a third thing it might be helpful to unbundle, one we’re already secretly unbundling. When the FDA delayed COVID vaccine approval, or refused to approve various brands of COVID vaccine, or suspended the distribution of COVID vaccines for bad reasons, it always had the same excuse - what if there was a side effect? The problem isn’t that people might die - people were definitely dying from their decision to delay/ban vaccines. The problem was that *people might stop trusting the FDA*. They would say “the FDA allowed me to take this drug, but it was dangerous, screw them, I will never take an FDA-approved drug again in my life and only use homeopathy from now on.” The FDA and medical policymakers live in terror of this scenario. They feel like if they ever allow even one bad drug through, then in the eyes of the public all kinds of anti-vax hysteria and vaccines-cause-autism bullshit will be retroactively justified, and public health officials will never have any authority ever again. If you model all FDA/CDC/etc policy as an attempt to avert this outcome, your predictions will be right more often than not.
This is another thing I’m pretty sympathetic about - social trust is a valuable resource. But it also means that public policy will forever be held hostage to the whims of the stupidest person around. Every time someone sneezes, the FDA will ban whichever brand of COVID vaccine they got - because if they didn’t, then stupid people might believe the FDA didn’t take vaccine side effects seriously, and then those stupid people would stop getting vaccines and die. This policy has led to our current situation, where either everyone has to be miserable because of stupid people’s choices (eg everyone has to wear masks forever because a few people won’t get vaccinated) or we get a strong anti-freedom lobby because allowing anyone any freedom means that the rest of us have to suffer for their stupid choices.
So maybe a third thing we could unbundle is:
3. The FDA is staking its entire reputation on this drug.
I think that unbundling is what the FDA is trying to do right now with COVID vaccines. They approve them for emergency use. If future evidence proves the vaccines safe, then good, we got them. If future evidence proves the vaccines unsafe, then the FDA can say “yeah, well, technically we never said they were safe, so this doesn’t mean we’re ever wrong”. If some moron says “You say I should get my MMR vaccine, *but,* you also said I should get my COVID vaccine, and later it turned out that COVID vaccines make your eyes fall out and go rolling around the room”, then the FDA can say “Yeah, but we only gave emergency provisional approval to the COVID vaccine, whereas we’ve given complete permanent approval to the MMR vaccine.”
Maybe it’s expecting too much of the American people, but I wish the FDA could lean into this strategy. Grant drugs one-star, two-star, etc approvals. Maybe one-star would mean it seems grossly safe, the rats we gave it to didn’t die, but we can’t say anything more than that. Two-star means it’s almost certainly safe, but we have no idea about effectiveness. Three-star means some weak and controversial evidence for effectiveness, this is probably where aducanumab is right now. Four-star means that scientific consensus is lined up behind the idea that this is effective, this is probably where the COVID vaccines are right now. Five star is the really extreme one where you’re boasting that *Zeus himself* could not challenge the effectiveness of this drug - the level of certainty around MMR vaccine not causing autism or something like that.
Then you could attach different legal rights and requirements to each of those. Maybe the world’s top specialists could start prescribing a drug once it has two-star approval, regular doctors could prescribe it with three-star, drug companies can’t start advertising it until it’s four-star, and insurance companies are mandated to cover it once it’s five-star.
People are really scared of this solution, because it introduces choice into this system. If you say that insurance companies are *allowed* to cover a certain drug, but not *forced* to do so, then different insurances will cover different drugs, and you’ll have the usual capitalism / free market thing. Patients will have to choose which insurance to get without necessarily knowing very much about medicine, and maybe companies will try to trick or exploit them, and maybe the patients will make the wrong choice.
This is the nightmare scenario that the existing US health system exists to avoid. I know you can think of lots of different ways that changing things could go wrong, and so can I. But I can’t stress enough how often the current system results in things going wrong that *nobody* thought of because *the things are too stupid for anyone to even imagine they were possible*.
**Final Thoughts**
In conclusion, and contra *The Atlantic*, the FDA approving aducanumab is not very much like global warming at all. It is more like global warming in an alternate universe, where the government sometimes approves pollutants, and then everyone is forced to emit millions of tons of them whether they want to or not. Sometimes the government orders people to build a coal plant in the middle of the desert where nobody lives, a coal plant that isn't even connected to anything and just burns lots of coal without producing any electricity. But also, elderly people frequently freeze to death because the government refuses to give them permission to heat their house in the middle of winter. There is lively debate over whether the government should build more useless coal plants or let more elderly people freeze to death, and anyone who thinks there should be a better way of doing things is condemned as some kind of fringe libertarian. I really cannot stress enough how accurate this metaphor is or how much everything in the medical system is like this. | Scott Alexander | 39483408 | Adumbrations Of Aducanumab | acx |
# Model City Monday 8/2/21
#### **Greenhouse Effect**
Honduras remains the country to watch in the charter city sphere, with its ZEDE law allowing unprecedented levels of freedom and protection. I’d [previously written about](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera) two Honduran projects, the high-tech island hub of Prospera and the industrial heartland project of Ciudad Morazan. Now there’s a third: ZEDE Orquidea (“Orchid Zone”).
I’m not really impressed with their publicity effort (my browser insists their website is a security hazard and won’t let me access it). My only real source of information is [this Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Prospera/comments/o2xfts/the_third_zede_orquidea/) by another charter city enthusiast, who writes:
> The third ZEDE is Zede Orquidea (Orchid). It's in the south of Honduras, at [Las Tapias](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Las+Tapias/@14.6376332,-87.8948514,8z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x8f71d77be90dc661:0xa0d6cd5ca0f314c9!8m2!3d13.4920301!4d-86.7962187). The organizer/investor is AgroAlpha. They'll be growing produce in greenhouses for export. President Hernandez recently said it'll be the largest and most modern agropark in Latin America, and that 400 people are working on construction now, with another 600 joining in August. They've adopted laws based on Delaware's. You can see these laws on their website (though as I write this the document link pulls up a login page).
There is something charming about forming your own flower-themed micro-state to place greenhouses in, though I reserve the right to revoke my charmedness if it turns out they are committing terrible labor violations or something, which it’s kind of hard for me to imagine them *not* doing under the circumstances.
([source](http://www.web.ellibertador.hn/index.php/noticias/nacionales/3092-honduras-pobladores-de-choluteca-denuncian-expropiacion-por-zede-orquidea))
[The Honduran news sources](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&u=https://www.latribuna.hn/2021/07/30/inversionista-victor-wilson-en-zede-orquidea-no-estamos-expropiando-tierras/) covering Orquidea focus on an argument about whether it is trying to expropriate land: they say they’re not, the people who live near them say they are. I can’t follow the poorly-translated Spanish well enough to have an opinion about this, but my much deeper dive into the Prospera situation makes me think it would be hard for them to do this even if they wanted to (which they deny). Also, the surrounding community has accused them of:
> …violence against defenders of the land, human trafficking, discrimination, sexual exploitation, exploitation of people of sexual diversity, lack of recognition of labor rights and curtailment of the rights of the family and children such as education and health
…which is a pretty impressive list of misdeeds for a polity which has only existed for a couple of weeks. My guess is this is the thing where they pre-emptively accuse ZEDEs of every bad thing that has ever happened, just because it seems like the sorts of thing they might do.
But I guess we’ll find out - they supposedly have given people a “40 day ultimatum” to leave their land (they deny having given this ultimatum), so I’ll check back in forty days and see what’s happened.
#### **Butterfly Effect**
Unlike Orquidea, Mariposa (Spanish for “butterfly”) has a beautiful website. They have a list of all the noble important principles they espouse, and all the human rights they’re going to focus on respecting.
Your white paper says “model city”, but your branding says “birth control pill”.
When you look at the small print, they “are still working on our master plan to be presented to the Honduran Government in the near future”, ie they haven’t gotten any kind of official go-ahead and are only in the “cool idea” phase right now. Still, let’s take a look.
Mariposa’s core values include:
* Polycentric governance, seemingly inspired by cryptocurrency.
* Transparency, involving records of government actions on the blockchain.
* Restorative justice, a hippie-ish philosophy about rehabilitating and reintegrating criminals instead of punishing them.
* Nonviolent communication, a hippie-ish therapy thing where you talk to other people in an open and emotionally healthy way.
* “Ecstatic birth”, a movement where “women dismount their fears of labor and create powerful birth experiences”.
This seems like kind of a weird grab bag of stuff. But it turns out there’s a completely reasonable explanation: the project is run by a husband and wife team. He’s a libertarian cryptocurrency entrepreneur. She’s a hippie alternative medicine practitioner. Their relationship sounds incredibly cute, but maybe not so cute that it needs to be its own city.
Or maybe it’s *exactly* cute enough that it needs to be its own city, who knows? Mariposa seems to be proposing some really interesting things, including [quadratic funding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting#Quadratic_funding) (an innovative budgeting mechanism pushed by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin, among others) and [dominant assurance contracts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_assurance_contracts) (a really neat consensus-building mechanism proposed by Alex Tabarrok). Their [form-based walkable city code](https://smartgrowth.org/using-form-based-codes-create-vibrant-walkable-communities/) thing also seems pretty neat. And I’m not a midwife so for all I know ecstatic birthing is also some kind of super-great idea. Honestly this random husband-and-wife team seems to have put more thought into genuinely good governance than 99.9% of the existing countries in the world, and I hope things work out for them.
#### **Those Who Speak Do Not Know, Those Who Know Do Not Speak**
The totally hypothetical project founded by a husband-and-wife team has a great online presence and a bunch of media interviews. The real, boots-on-the-ground project founded by a huge agricultural conglomerate has basically total radio silence. Is this surprising?
I recently got a chance to attend a Charter Cities Institute event and talk to some people working on potential charter cities around the world. They had all sorts of philosophies and plans and goals, with the one constant being that none of them wanted to give me identifiable details or (God forbid) have me write anything about them.
People who understand business tell me this is standard for large infrastructure projects - you don’t pressure or annoy your negotiating partners by going public before you’ve both signed. Orquidea is going a little further in keeping a low profile even after they’ve started operations. But why wouldn’t they? They’re an agricultural company that probably already has all the agriculture-related resources they need; publicity doesn’t gain them anything. And now that they’re public, people are protesting and spreading (probably false) rumors and trying to get them shut down. The lesson everyone has learned from early adopters like Prospera is that no matter how carefully you tread, or how hard you work to stay on everyone’s good side, there are a bunch of NGOs and activist groups who will try to destroy you as soon as they learn about your existence, so . . . just don’t let anyone know about your existence until you’re too far along to destroy.
So all the smart money is staying very secret and the only people you hear about are the idealistic hippies who expect everyone to just get along.
Mark Lutter of CCI is kind of bummed about this. He has to meet with government officials and advocate for charter cities, and he would love to be able to say something like “Amazon is planning a charter city in Brazil”, and since everyone recognizes Amazon is an important dignified corporation and Brazil is an important dignified country, they’ll agree that this all seems like the sort of thing important dignified people do and they’re on board with it. Instead, all the important dignified people involved demand secrecy, and your choices are the husband-and-wife team interested in “ecstatic birthing” or those Black Hammer guys from [the last links roundup](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday). It’s individually rational, but bad for the charter city movement in general.
Lutter’s current plan for solving this is to make a documentary about Ciudad Morazan, currently the most presentable and furthest-along Honduran ZEDE - but it hurts that he has to pass over so many other good examples.
#### **Praise The Lord!**
I recently got to talk to [Devon Zuegel](https://devonzuegel.com/), who also blogs about model cities. Along with the usual examples, she talks about [her own experience growing up in Chautauqua](https://devonzuegel.com/post/chautauqua-an-idea-embedded-in-a-place), a small town in New York. Its history is: some 19th century Methodists organized a retreat. Every summer they would go to a nice lake and discuss the Bible for a few weeks. They liked it a lot and it became a kind of institution with some more permanent structures. Some of them moved there year-round, and eventually it became a town. Devon writes:
> Today, Chautauqua continues to be a place of perpetual learning and tight-knit community. The Institution runs 9 weeks of summer programs offering a wide range of speakers, performances, lectures, concerts, classes, parades, art fairs, theater shows, children's camps, waterfront activities, and more. These events are shared by everyone in the community; this means you can start an interesting conversation with anyone on the street, because they're likely walking back from the same lecture that you just attended too.
>
> These programs are enjoyable in their own right, but the real value is that they select for people who care about learning and improving their community. There's a real sense of shared values, and many of the programs are run by self-organizing clubs. The club members host these events on top of infrastructure provided by the Institution (which includes an amphitheater, multiple open air pavilions, a cinema, and more). Chautauqua is a place created by the ~8,000 people who live there every summer, and they've shaped the place to their values.
She expands this into a more general point: it’s hard to build a new city, because you need a core of early adopters who move in even though the place starts out empty and boring. One of the most common ways for this to happen is some kind of religious group holding a regular meeting there, and then the meeting becoming more and more permanent until it’s a town.
I thought about today this when I watched [this BBC video on Nigerian megachurches](https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p09qtf9r/the-mega-church-that-houses-1-million-christians).
There are megachurches in the US and other places. But Nigeria takes them to a whole new level. The biggest megachurch in Nigeria, Redemption Church, is half a kilometer wide, one kilometer long, and has a capacity of one million worshipers. The same religious sect is planning to build an even bigger church which will fit three million people - for context, that’s about the population of the greater Denver-Aurora metropolitan area.
([source](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/sep/11/eat-pray-live-lagos-nigeria-megachurches-redemption-camp))
If a small Methodist study group can form the nucleus of a town, surely a million-plus-person church can do…something. According to [a Guardian article](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/sep/11/eat-pray-live-lagos-nigeria-megachurches-redemption-camp), Redemption Church has spawned Redemption Camp, with “5,000 houses, roads, rubbish collection, police, supermarkets, banks, a fun fair, a post office – even a 25 megawatt power plant” and “the line between church and city is rapidly vanishing”.
The church power plant.
The article is so good that I’m just going to quote a bunch of it:
> Set up 30 years ago as a base for the church’s annual mass meets, as well as their monthly gatherings, Redemption Camp has become a permanent home for many of its followers. “The camp is becoming a city,” says Olaitan Olubiyi, one of the church’s pastors in whose offices Dove TV, the church television channel, is permanently playing [...]
>
> A 25-megawatt power plant with gas piped in from the Nigerian capital serves the 5,000 private homes on site, 500 of them built by the church’s construction company. New housing estates are springing up every few months where thick palm forests grew just a few years ago. Education is provided, from creche to university level. The Redemption Camp health centre has an emergency unit and a maternity ward.
>
> On Holiness Avenue, a branch of Tantaliser’s fast food chain does a brisk trade. There is an on-site post office, a supermarket, a dozen banks, furniture makers and mechanics’ workshops. An aerodrome and a polytechnic are in the works. [...]
>
> “If you wait for the government, it won’t get done,” says Olubiyi. So the camp relies on the government for very little – it builds its own roads, collects its own rubbish, and organises its own sewerage systems. And being well out of Lagos, like the other megachurches’ camps, means that it has little to do with municipal authorities. Government officials can check that the church is complying with regulations, but they are expected to report to the camp’s relevant office. Sometimes, according to the head of the power plant, the government sends the technicians running its own stations to learn from them.
>
> There is a police station on site, which occasionally deals with a death or the disappearance of a child, but the camp’s security is mostly provided by its small army of private guards in blue uniforms. They direct traffic, deal with crowd control, and stop children who haven’t paid for the wristband from going into Emmanuel Park – home to the aforementioned ferris wheel.
And:
> Haggai, the church’s property developer, is named after the prophet who commanded Jews to build the second temple of Jerusalem. Almost all the houses on Nine have been sold, and Haggai is about to move on to Estate Ten. There is no perimeter wall around Redemption Camp, so it can expand indefinitely. Mortgages are arranged through Haggai bank, headquartered in Lagos. There has been a knock-on effect on surrounding areas: in some cases, the price of land near Redeemed Camp has increased tenfold over the past decade.
>
> For years, people have owned houses here to stay over after conventions and the monthly services. But increasingly, families like the Oliatans find themselves wanting to live full-time with people who share their values, in a place run by people they feel they can trust.
Cf. my essay on [Jews in Colombia](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/no-really-why-are-so-many-christians). When you’re in a corrupt and dangerous developing country, religious communities are a way for people who are serious about improving themselves and their surroundings to self-segregate and internalize the benefits of their actions. If your religious community can form its own city, all the better.
There is a lot to dislike about Nigerian megachurches. The pastor of the Redemption organization, Enoch Adeboye, owns somewhat more private jets than you would expect from a humble man of God. And another Nigerian megapastor, Chris Oyakhilome, is [known for spreading](https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/19/africa/ofcom-sanctions-5g-conspiracy-theory-intl/index.html) such Scripturally-inspired truths as “5G causes COVID”. The whole movement is inextricably linked to the Prosperity Gospel, which (although I am not a theologian) does not seem very Biblically accurate. They’re not subtle about it either - one of the top megachurches is called [Winners Chapel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Faith_Church_Worldwide) (surprisingly, Donald Trump has yet to join).
Winners Chapel also has its own associated city called [Canaanland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanland), which hosts “Dominion Publishing House, Hebron Bottled Water Processing Plant, a bakery, various restaurants and stores, four banks, and residential estates that provide for the > 2,000 church employees and 9,000 students that live there.”
Still, would I rather live in Lagos, or in Redemption Camp? Hard not to argue the latter - though I don’t know what the relative costs and opportunities are.
#### **Short Links**
\_ In my last links roundup, I mentioned Black Hammer’s extremely dubious attempt to build a “Hammer City” in Colorado. Commenter “Wizzy” provides an update: in the most predictable thing that has ever happened, no property purchase was ever completed, the local sheriff [told them they were trespassing](https://www.facebook.com/sanmiguelcountysheriff/posts/deputies-responded-monday-evening-to-a-trespass-report-on-a-property-south-of-no/3903168403053245/), they left peacefully, and that was the end of that.
\_ Mark Lutter [expands on his disagreements](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9oyHip2JCyjdLPhEs/further-thoughts-on-charter-cities-and-effective-altruism) with Rethink Priorities’ report questioning the cost-effectiveness of charter cities. Also useful as a good rundown for what might be in the pipeline: he says he is especially interested in getting charter city legislation for Nigeria, that one additional Latin American country (exact identity currently secret) may follow Honduras in proposing a ZEDE-type law, and that there may be opportunities in Somaliland as well. | Scott Alexander | 39453583 | Model City Monday 8/2/21 | acx |
# Open Thread 183
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who took the Reader Research Survey. All those surveys are now closed. If you were a team who submitted a survey, I should have sent you an email with the General Demographics answers, a link to a spreadsheet you can use to exchange contact details with other teams, and a description of when I might be interested in hearing about your results. If you ran a survey but didn’t get the email, or have any other questions for me, please contact me at scott@slatestarcodex.com so we can figure out what’s going on.
**2:** If you absolutely insist on filling out more surveys, fine, you can answer [a very short (six question) form for me](https://forms.gle/hPSdUWack3V12qPe7) on a topic I’m going to keep secret until you click on it to prevent accidental selection bias.
**3:** The rationalist community is always experimenting with new institutions, and now we're trying an old one - official community matchmaker. My friend Elena has stepped up to the plate and is doing good work interviewing lots of people about their preferences and trying to set them up on dates with other people she's interviewed (poly vs. mono is optional, she has good matches available in both categories). She finds we need more of three particular demographics: men who want kids, women who don't necessarily want kids, and people who are open to dating a transgender partner. If you fall into one of these three groups, we're expanding the definition of "rationalist community" wide enough to cover you as an ACX reader, whether you identify as "rationalist" in any other way or not, and you’re eligible for Elena’s (free) service. Consider checking out [her website](https://matematch.me/) ; she'll also be around to answer any questions in the comments here. Currently most available matches are in the SF Bay Area, so though in theory the service isn't geographically limited she'll probably be best positioned to help people who live near there. [EDIT: All Elena’s free appointments are now full, she is trying to figure out some kind of better business model, you can sign up for her wait list if you want]
**4:** On last week’s Mantic Monday, I complained that new prediction market Kalshi had some high fees. A representative of theirs contacted me to say that it’s more complicated. He writes: “We actually charge 7% of the variance (price times one minus the price) for each trade. We only charge this for takers, so effectively a single user would expect to pay 3.5% of the variance (since they pay 7% half the time).” I regret any misimpression my oversimplified numbers may have given. | Scott Alexander | 39479079 | Open Thread 183 | acx |
# Updated Look At Long-Term AI Risks
The last couple of posts here talked about long-term risks from AI, so I thought I’d highlight [the results of a new expert survey](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2tumunFmjBuXdfF2F/survey-on-ai-existential-risk-scenarios-1) on exactly what they are. There have been a lot of these surveys recently, but this one is a little different.
Starting from the beginning: in 2012-2014, [Muller and Bostrom](https://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf) surveyed 550 people with various levels of claim to the title "AI expert" on the future of AI. People in philosophy of AI or other very speculative fields gave numbers around 20% chance of AI causing an "existential catastrophe" (eg human extinction); people in normal technical AI research gave numbers around 7%. In 2016-2017, [Grace et al](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf) surveyed 1634 experts, 5% of whom predicted an extremely catastrophic outcome. Both of these surveys were vulnerable to response bias (eg the least speculative-minded people might think the whole issue was stupid and not even return the survey).
The new paper - Carlier, Clarke, and Schuett (not currently public, sorry, but you can read the summary [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2tumunFmjBuXdfF2F/survey-on-ai-existential-risk-scenarios-1)) - isn't exactly continuing in this tradition. Instead of surveying all AI experts, it surveys people who work in "AI safety and governance", ie people who are already concerned with AI being potentially dangerous, and who have dedicated their careers to addressing this. As such, they were more concerned on average than the people in previous surveys, and gave a median ~10% chance of AI-related catastrophe (~5% in the next 50 years, rising to ~25% if we don’t make a directed effort to prevent it; means were a bit higher than medians). Individual experts' probability estimates ranged from 0.1% to 100% (this is how you know you’re doing good futurology).
None of that is really surprising. What's new here is that they surveyed the experts on various ways AI could go wrong, to see which ones the experts were most concerned about. Going through each of them in a little more detail:
**1. Superintelligence:** This is the "classic" scenario that started the field, ably described by people like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. AI progress goes from human-level to vastly-above-human-level very quickly, maybe because slightly-above-human-level AIs themselves are speeding it along, or maybe because it turns out that if you can make an IQ 100 AI for $10,000 worth of compute, you can make an IQ 500 AI for $50,000. You end up with one (or a few) completely unexpected superintelligent AIs, which wield far-future technology and use it in unpredictable ways based on untested goal structures.
**2. Influence-seeking ends in catastrophe:** Described by Paul Christiano [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like#Part_II__influence_seeking_behavior_is_scary). Modern machine learning techniques "evolve" and "select" AIs that appear good at a certain goal. But sufficiently intelligent AIs with a wide variety of goals (eg power-seeking) will try to seem good at the goal we want them to do, since that's the best way to be kept online and put in control of important resources, which will help them achieve their real goals. Depending on how we design AI goal structures, some large percent of the AIs we use at any given time might have unexpected goals (including pure power-seeking). As long as everything stays stable, that's fine; it will continue to be in the AIs' best interests to play along. But if something unusual happens, especially something that limits our attempts to control AIs, it might cause many AIs at once to switch to their real goal, whatever that is (or one very important AI, like one that controls nuclear weapons).
**3. Goodharting ourselves to death:** Described by Paul Christiano [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBxe6wdjxK239zajf/what-failure-looks-like#Part_I__You_get_what_you_measure). There are some things that are easy to measure as a number, like how many votes a candidate gets, how much profit a company is making, or how many crimes are reported to police. There are other things that are hard or impossible, like how good a candidate is, how much value a company is providing, or how many crimes happen. We try to use the former as proxies for the latter, and in normal human society this works sort of okay. But it's much easier to train/optimize AIs to increase measurable proxy numbers than real values. So AIs would be incentivized to find ways to improve proxies (easy) without necessarily finding ways to satisfy our real values (hard) - for example, a real Robocop, programmed to "reduce the crime rate", might try to make it as hard as possible for people to *report* crimes - and then try to deceive everyone involved so they don't close this loophole in a way that makes the (measured) crime rate increase. As AIs take over more and more of society, we end up in the position of the mythical king whose kingdom is falling apart around him, but who does nothing because flattering courtiers keep telling him everything is okay.
**4. Some kind of AI-related war:** Described by Allan Dafoe [here](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/GovAIAgenda.pdf). Not a war against AI, but a war between normal human countries that happens because of AI for some reason. Maybe AI turns out to be really militarily valuable, and whichever country gets it first decides to push its advantage before others catch up. Maybe other countries predict that will happen and launch a pre-emptive strike. Maybe AI is able to undermine nuclear deterrence somehow.
**5. Bad actors use AI to do something bad:** Maybe smarter-than-human AIs are able to invent really good superweapons, or bioweapons, and terrorists use them to destroy the world. Maybe some dictatorship (cough China cough) figures out how to use AI to predict, monitor, and crush dissent at a superhuman level, entrenching itself forever. Maybe billionaires use AI to make lots more money and become a permanent feudal oligarchy in a way which is terrible for everyone else.
**6. Something else:** Catch-all "other" option.
And the winner is...
Nobody in particular! All the scenarios got about equal probabilities, except "other", which was higher.
There was a slight tendency for people to be more concerned about the scenarios relating to the field they were personally in; people working in government/policy were more concerned about wars and misuse, and people working in tech were more concerned about failing to solve hard optimization problems. It's hard to read the graphs, but this seems like on the order of 10% vs. 15%, which I guess is relatively a big difference even if it's small in absolute terms.
I find this pretty surprising. I would have expected that very practical "people do bad stuff with the help of AI or because of AI" scenarios like 4 and 5 would rank higher than speculative futuristic sounding ones like 1 - if only because, even if the speculation is entirely correct, people could kill us by doing bad stuff before we ever reach the part of the future where the weird stuff starts happening. But no, everything is pretty similar.
For me, the interesting takeaways here are:
1. Even people working in the field of aligning AIs mostly assign “low” probability (~10%) that unaligned AI will result in human extinction
2. While some people are still concerned about the superintelligence scenario, concerns have diversified a lot over the past few years
3. People working in the field don't have a specific unified picture of what will go wrong | Scott Alexander | 39391774 | Updated Look At Long-Term AI Risks | acx |
# When Does Worrying About Things Trade Off Against Worrying About Other Things?
On [yesterday’s post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing), some people tried to steelman Acemoglu’s argument into something like this:
> There’s a limited amount of public interest in AI. The more gets used up on the long-term risk of superintelligent AI, the less is left for near-term AI risks like unemployment or autonomous weapons. Sure, maybe Acemoglu didn’t explain his dismissal of long-term risks very well. But given that he thinks near-term risks are bigger than long-term ones, it’s fair to argue that we should shift our limited budget of risk awareness more towards the former at the expense of the latter.
I agree this potentially makes sense. But how would you treat each of the following arguments?:
**(1):** Instead of worrying about police brutality, we should worry about the police faking evidence to convict innocent people.
**(2):** Instead of worrying about Republican obstructionism in Congress, we should worry about the potential for novel variants of COVID to wreak devastation in the Third World.
**(3):** Instead of worrying about nuclear war, we should worry about the smaller conflicts going on today, like the deadly civil war in Ethiopia.
**(4):** Instead of worrying about “pandemic preparedness”, we should worry about all the people dying of normal diseases like pneumonia right now.
**(5): I**nstead of worrying about pharmaceutical companies getting rich by lobbying the government to ignore their abuses, we should worry about fossil fuel companies getting rich by lobbying the government to ignore their abuses.
**(6)**: Instead of worrying about racism against blacks in the US, we should worry about racism against Uighurs in China.
I don’t think I’ve heard anything like any of these arguments, and they all sound weird enough that I’d be taken aback if I saw them in a major news source. But why? If (intuitively) every cause area draws from a limited pool of resources and so trades off against every other cause area, why *shouldn’t* you say things like this?
Argument **(1)** must ring false because worrying about police brutality and police evidence fabrication are so similar that they complement each other. If your goal is to fight a certain type of police abuse, then discussing unrelated types of police abuse at least raises awareness that police abuse exists, or helps convince people that the police are bad, or something like that. Even if for some reason you only care about police brutality and not at all about evidence fabrication, having people talk about evidence fabrication sometimes seems like a clear win for you. Maybe we would summarize this as “because both of these topics are about the police, they are natural allies and neither trades off against the other”.
But then what about argument (2)? This also sounds like something I would never hear real people say - the two problems just seem too different. A healthy worry-economy can support both worrying about political obstructionism *and* worrying about global health. This is true even though in theory, there’s a limited number of newspaper columns available and each extra column addressing obstructionism is one more column not devoted to health issues.
But if (1) fails because the two topics are related, and (2) fails because the two topics are unrelated, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for an argument that doesn’t fail, does it?
Maybe there’s some narrow band where topics are related enough to draw from a common pool of resources, but not related enough to be natural allies, and Acemoglu thinks AI falls in that band? But I tried to capture that kind of situation with arguments (3) and (4), which are very close matches to the AI situation (long-term major speculative risk vs. near-term smaller obvious risk). And (3) and (4) still ring false - they’re theoretically plausible arguments, but nobody would ever make them.
(5) and (6) are kind of in between. They’re a little bit like the police example in (1), but whereas it feels obvious that concern about police brutality and concern about police evidence fabrication are natural allies in decreasing the power/status of the police, the arguments in (5) and (6) feel like less natural allies. I actually *don’t* think that every unit of effort spent fighting anti-black racism in the US contributes very much to fighting anti-Uighur racism in China or vice versa. But these still ring false to me. Partly it’s that if someone were to seriously assert them, they would justly be accused of “[whatabout-ism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)”. But partly it’s that I can’t imagine even a whataboutist being quite so crude about it.
What about a seventh argument - “Instead of worrying about sports and fashion, we should worry about global climate change”? This doesn’t ring false as loudly as the other six. But I still hear it pretty rarely. Everyone seems to agree that, however important global climate change is, attacking people’s other interests, however trivial, isn’t a great way to raise awareness.
Here’s a toy model that could potentially rescue Acemoglu’s argument: two topics can either be complements to each other, or substitutes for each other. The more closely related the topics, the more likely that one or the other is true, but it’s hard to ever tell exactly which, let alone what the exact effect size is. So concern about police brutality and concern about police evidence fabrication are probably complements - the more you produce of one, the more people want of the other. Concern about Republican obstructionism and about COVID are neutral; changes in one don’t affect the price of the other (I mean, at the ground level they’re competing for a limited amount of newspaper column space, but this is no more interesting than the fact that grapes and rockets are competing for a limited amount of labor/land/capital - in the real world, vineyards and space programs aren’t competitors in any meaningful sense). Concern about some other topics could be substitutes, where the more of one you produce, the less people will want of the other. And it just so happens that the only two substitute goods in the entire intellectual universe are concern about near-term AI risk, and concern about long-term AI risk.
Maybe I’m being mean/hyperbolic/sarcastic here, but can *you* think of another example? Even in case where this ought to be true, like (3) or (4), nobody ever thinks or talks this way. I think the only real-world cases I hear of this are obvious derailing attempts by one political party against the other, eg “if you really cared about fetuses, then instead of worrying about abortion you would worry about neonatal health programs”. I *guess* this could be interpreted as a claim that interest in abortion substitutes for interest in neonatal health, but obviously these kinds of things are bad-faith attempts to score points on political enemies rather than a real theory of substitute attentional goods.
Maybe this doesn’t work for attention, but it does work for money? Now that I think of it, the other time I’ve seen arguments like these in the wild was an article (can’t find it now) arguing that instead of researching potential cures for various disabling conditions, we should spend the money providing social support to existing people with disabilities. Here the writer’s world-model isn’t mysterious: there’s some group (government agency, charity, etc) which is focused on disability and has money earmarked for that purpose, and it should spend the money on one subtopic within disability instead of another. It’s less useful to say “Instead of worrying about political obstructionism, we should worry about providing social support to existing people with disabilities”, because most funders don’t directly trade off one of those causes vs. another.
I still wouldn’t expect to hear “instead of funding the fight against police evidence fabrication, civil liberties organizations should fund the fight against police brutality”. But maybe there’s a gentleman’s agreement among causes to avoid directly attacking each other in favor of just promoting your own cause and letting the funders figure it out. And maybe that gentleman’s agreement only fails if you’re willing to condemn the other cause as a completely useless scam. People in disability rights activism have already decided that “curing disabilities” is offensive, so it’s okay for them to advocate defunding it as a literally costless action (not a tradeoff). Since long-term AI risk sounds weird and sci-fi-ish, you can treat it as a joke and argue that defunding that is costless too.
This is the most sense I can make out of what Acemoglu is trying to do - but it’s still wrong, just for different reasons. Long-term-AI funding doesn’t come from some kind of generic Center For AI that’s one thinkpiece away from cancelling all those programs and redirecting the money to algorithmic bias. It comes from organizations like the Long-Term Future Fund and people like Elon Musk. And if LTF stopped donating to long-term AI research, they would probably spend the money on preventing nuclear war, pandemics, or other existential risks. If Elon Musk stopped donating to long-term AI research, he would probably spend the money on building a giant tunnel through the moon, or breeding half-Shiba-Inu mutant cybernetic warriors, or whatever else Elon Musk does. Neither one is going to give the money to near-term AI projects. Why would they?
But take this seriously, and you end up with the same kind of questions as in awareness-raising. Acemoglu isn’t going to be able to divert long-term AI funding into fighting current-day unemployment, because the long-term AI funding comes from people who are really motivated by fighting existential risk. On the other hand, he might be able to divert other fighting-unemployment funding, since that comes from people who are already focused on his preferred topic. Would it be more strategically useful for him to write “Instead of worrying about people losing jobs because of disabilities, we should worry about people losing jobs because of AI”? Probably - but then we get into the “it has to be literally costless” problem again.
So maybe the only reason we hear this so often about long-term AI concerns, but not about anything else, is because it’s something that the thinkpiece-writing-class views as silly and costless to defund - but where there’s also a big [inferential gap](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inferential-distance) between them and the funders. They think this is a hundred-dollar bill left on the ground, where funders are spending money on something they could easily be convinced to pivot away from. Then they keep getting surprised and angry when this doesn’t work.
Maybe the best way to stop this stupid counterproductive fight from repeating itself every few months in every major newspaper is to make the funding situation around AI better known. If so, consider this my contribution. | Scott Alexander | 39286771 | When Does Worrying About Things Trade Off Against Worrying About Other Things? | acx |
# Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We?
The Washington Post [has published yet another](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/21/ai-we-should-fear-is-already-here/) "luminary in unrelated field discovers AI risk, pronounces it stupid" article. This time it's Daron Acemoglu. I respect Daron Acemoglu and appreciate the many things I’ve learned from his work in economics. In particular, I respect him so much that I wish he would stop embarrassing himself by writing this kind of article (I feel the same way about Steven Pinker and [Ted Chiang](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/15/maybe-the-real-superintelligent-ai-is-extremely-smart-computers/)).
In service of this goal, I want to discuss the piece briefly. I’ll start with what I think is its main flaw, then nitpick a few other things:
#### 1: The Main Flaw: “AI Is Dangerous Now, So It Can’t Be Dangerous Later"
This is the basic structure around which this article is written. It goes:
1. Some people say that AI might be dangerous in the future.
2. But AI is dangerous now!
3. So it can’t possibly be dangerous in the future.
4. QED!
I have no idea why Daron Acemoglu and every single other person who writes articles on AI for the popular media thinks this is such a knockdown argument. But here we are. He writes:
> *AI detractors have focused on the potential danger to human civilization from a super-intelligence if it were to run amok. Such warnings have been sounded by tech entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking and leading AI researcher Stuart Russell.*
>
> *We should indeed be afraid — not of what AI might become, but of what it is now.*
>
> *Almost all of the progress in artificial intelligence to date has little to do with the imagined Artificial General Intelligence; instead, it has concentrated on narrow tasks. AI capabilities do not involve anything close to true reasoning. Still, the effects can be pernicious.*
Then he goes on to talk about several ways in which existing narrow AI is pernicious, like potential technological unemployment or use by authoritarian states. Then, without any further discussion of superintelligence, he concludes:
> *The best way to reverse this trend is to recognize the tangible costs that AI is imposing right now — and stop worrying about evil super-intelligence.*
I wonder if other fields have to deal with this. “People have said climate change could cause mass famine and global instability by 2100. But actually, climate change is contributing to hurricanes and wildfires *right now*! So obviously those alarmists are wrong and nobody needs to worry about future famine and global instability at all.”
Does Acemoglu argue this way when he writes about economics? “Some people warn of a coming economic collapse. But the Dow dropped 0.5% yesterday, which means that bad financial things are happening now. Therefore we should stop worrying about a future collapse.” This is not how I remember Acemoglu’s papers at all! I remember them being very careful and full of sober statistical analysis. But somehow when people wade into AI, this kind of reasoning becomes absolutely state of the art. There isn’t a single argument besides “AI does bad things now” in this entire article, but in the end it acts like it has disproven the conjecture that future superintelligent AI can be bad.
There’s no reason Acemoglu has to do this! It’s a bizarre own-goal! The responsible people on both sides have put *so* much work into trying to forge alliances and cross-pollinate their research programs. The highlight of this was probably the Asilomar Conference, where top “narrow AI has negative effects now” people and top “superintelligent AI is a big future risk” people got together and formulated [a joint agenda](https://futureoflife.org/2018/08/31/state-of-california-endorses-asilomar-ai-principles/) expressing shared goals. I think this is more than just PR: controlling weak AI systems now is both important in its own right, and a trial run / strong foundation for controlling stronger AI systems in the future. For example, transparency and interpretability research can help us figure out how parole algorithms make their decisions, *and* can help future researchers figure out whether an AGI is concealing its real goal system from us. Short-term and long-term AI alignment issues are both important and naturally aligned, and there’s no reason why you have to put down one in order to hold up the other!
#### 1.1: In Which I Hypocritically Put Down One In Order To Hold Up The Other
Despite that, I personally tend to put down a lot of the narrow AI risk research.
(I want to stress that I don’t represent the long-term AI risk movement, that the people who do are extremely concerned about present-day narrow AI risk and constantly offering it olive branches and alliances, and that this part is my personal bad opinions only)
I just…don’t find it convincing. Acemoglu says the “most ominous” effect of existing AI is its contribution to employment, and devotes most of the article to the damage this is supposedly causing. There are a lot of links involved, but if you follow them, none actually support his argument. The closest he gets is [this paper](https://economics.mit.edu/files/20931), which he describes in the article as showing that “firms that increase their AI adoption by 1 percent reduce their hiring by approximately 1 percent”. But the paper itself is less convincing. It says that:
> *Establishment-level estimates suggest that AI-exposed establishments are reducing hiring in non-AI positions as they expand AI hiring. However, **we find no discernible relationship between AI exposure and employment or wage growth** at the occupation or industry level, implying that AI is currently substituting for humans in a subset of tasks but **it is not yet having detectable aggregate labor market consequences**.*
I guess I can’t accuse Acemoglu of not reading the paper, given that he wrote it. Still, I think this result is pretty typical of the literature. Hanson and Scholl tried the same analysis and got the same result ([paper](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3496364), [MR article](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/keller-scholl-and-robin-hanson-on-automation.html)). This has made me much more skeptical of a *current* AI unemployment problem than I was a few years ago.
I certainly don’t mean to assert that AI definitely won’t cause unemployment or underemployment (for my full position, see [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/)). I think it probably will, sometime soon, and I support discussing policies - eg universal basic income - that will help us be ready for this eventuality. But I think humility would require Acemoglu to admit that as of yet there’s either no sign of this, or perhaps only the weakest trace of a signal. And that’s a uniquely bad match for Acemoglu’s main argument - that we are not allowed to worry about speculative future effects of AI because there are visible current effects. I mean, it’s bad enough to assert the nonsensical claim that AI can’t cause future problems because it causes present problems. But if you’re going to submit an article to the *Washington Post* on that basis, you should at least do an exceptionally good job establishing that there really are present problems. I’m not sure Acemoglu clears that bar.
For all the other stuff on algorithmic bias, destroying democracy, etc, please see Section IV of my review of *Human Compatible* [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/).
#### 2: What Does It Mean To Call A New Technology Troubling?
Along with all this, Acemoglu does mention one thing I agree is real and extremely bad. That is:
> *And of course narrow AI is powering new monitoring technologies used by corporations and governments — as with the surveillance state that Uyghurs live under in China.*
This is definitely happening, I am super against it, and I hope everyone else is too.
On the other hand, what about electricity? I am sure that electricity helps power the Chinese surveillance state. Probably the barbed wire fences on their concentration camps are electrified. Probably they use electric CCTVs to keep track of people, and electronic databases to organize their findings.
Any general purpose new technology makes lots of things more efficient. If you are an evildoer, you can use it to do evil more efficiently. Give an evildoer electricity, and they will invent electrified barbed-wire fences, electronic concentration camp records, and the electric chair (plus those loud stereos people sometimes play at 3 AM).
Electricity put lots of people out of work - I don’t see many [lamplighters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamplighter) or hand weavers around anymore. Electricity “warps the public discourse of democracy”, with electrical-powered mass media - the radio, the TV, and now the Internet - all serving as vehicles for propaganda and misinformation during their time (heck, even the printing press did this). Everything the articles accuse AI of, they can convict some older technology of equally well.
([source](http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/))
Does this mean the articles are bad and wrong? I’m not sure. Maybe a compromise position would be that all new technologies will have negative side effects, they’ll probably be worth it anyway, but we can at least keep this in mind and try to figure out if there are good ways to avert them. Acemoglu is just calling for “oversight from society and government to prevent misuses of the technology and to regulate its effects on the economy and democracy”, and for all I know, maybe this would have been a good idea with electricity too. It sounds reasonable enough to be almost platitudinous.
Still, a lot of platitudes are wrong, and I don’t think he puts nearly enough work into making his case. The printing press “warped public discourse” and “hampered the function” of the governments of its era. I’m sure the 16th-century Catholic Church would have loved the opportunity to exercise “oversight”, “prevent misuses” and “regulate its effects on the economy and democracy”. Would this have led to a better world? Also, exactly how is “oversight from society and government” going to prevent AI from being used by the Chinese surveillance state? Isn’t the Chinese surveillance state in some sense *defined as* everything having lots of oversight from society and government? I feel like parts of this may not have been fully thought through.
It could be that we consider all of these questions and decide on more oversight anyway, at least in those few and debatably-numbered countries where the good people are overseeing the bad people rather than vice versa. One might argue we did this a little with electricity; certainly we did it more with nuclear power. Is narrow AI more like the former or the latter? This is a question we’ve faced many times before, and I have no good general answer.
But the case for concern about superintelligent AI is fundamentally different. The problem isn’t just that it makes evildoing more efficient. It’s that it creates an entirely new class of actor, whose ethics we have only partial control over. Humans misusing technology is as old as dirt; technology misusing itself is a novel problem. If the technology is superintelligent and has the power to destroy the world, maybe it’s a really big problem. I am not saying everyone has to be concerned about this, but I think there’s a fundamental difference between this and all the other reasons to worry about AI, and that this difference makes it fair for some people to worry about it separately.
#### Conclusions
How do you write an entire article dismissing fear of superintelligent AI, which doesn’t contain a single argument against fear of superintelligent AI? Daron Acemoglu is a smart person and I doubt he did this by accident. I think he just didn’t care about the topic at all. He wanted space to make his argument that narrow AI is pernicious and that somebody needs to do something. Pitching it as “instead of worrying about superintelligence, worry about this!” seemed like a cute framing device that would probably get the article a few extra eyeballs.
Probably it delivered on the eyeballs, but I’m still super against this. Acemoglu accuses algorithms of warping our social media consumption and spreading misinformation to maximize clicks. I agree it would be good to stop this. But all the AI regulation in the world won’t help us unless we humans *also* resist the urge to spread misinformation to maximize clicks.
I think people treat jokes at the expense of the AI risk community as harmless because they seem like fringe weirdos. But somehow all these opinion writers always start their articles with a list of all the really impressive and trustworthy people who are deeply concerned about AI risk. Geniuses like Stephen Hawking. Top industrialists like Elon Musk. Leading AI researchers like Stuart Russell. Acemoglu name-drops all these people - then ignores them. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to make the jump from “extremely smart people and leading domain experts are terrified of this” to “maybe I should take this seriously enough to look into it for five minutes before dunking on it as a framing device for my real point”?
I would like Daron Acemoglu to stick to writing excellent papers that shed light on underappreciated problems and help lift countless people out of poverty - and to write fewer articles like this one. Everyone else could also stand to do a little better here. | Scott Alexander | 39168323 | Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We? | acx |
# Mantic Monday 7/26
#### This Week In Markets
[PredictIt](https://www.predictit.org/markets) remains easy to use, high-volume, and focused almost entirely on horse-race political questions. At least we might get rid of Cuomo.
[Polymarket](https://polymarket.com/) remains a fun alternative way to learn about the news. I only heard about the monkeypox issue a few days ago, and hearing “22% chance of it spreading” is both faster and more useful than some article that dithers for a few paragraphs and finally concludes that “health officials warn Americans not to panic”. I would count it a minor victory if one day news sources routinely included this in their articles, eg “Polymarket, a major prediction engine, estimates a 22% chance that at least one other person will catch the disease.”
Extra credit for the last market, which seems to be successfully predicting a scalar instead of a binary outcome - I’ve seen Metaculus experiment with this technology, but this is the first time I’ve spotted it at Polymarket using real money.
Some of the more interesting new [Metaculus](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?order_by=-publish_time) markets. The space telescope one is especially interesting in the context of whether we could use prediction markets to predict (and maybe manage) government delays and cost overruns. The telescope is currently scheduled for launch in October 2025, so the market expects it to be about five years late. For context, the previous space telescope, James Webb, was originally scheduled for 2007 and (if everything goes well) will launch later this year.
#### God Help Us, Let’s Try Predicting The Coronavirus Some More
Anxiety is growing about the new Delta variant of coronavirus. What do the prediction markets say?
Here’s Polymarket:
And here’s Metaculus:
For context, right now there are about 50K US cases/day, and during the worst-ever week there were about 250K cases/day. Forecasters seem pretty sure we’ll get back above 100,000, also pretty sure we’ll get back above 200,000, and give it less than 50-50 odds we’ll set a new record. I don’t think the big gap between 200K and 250K really makes sense, and it’s probably a function of those predictions being on different markets. Still, median of 200-250K seems about right.
The question I found most helpful was the one about EA Global London. You don’t have to know anything about this except that it’s a big conference scheduled for October 29 of this year. It looks like forecasters think there’s only a 40% chance it will be cancelled, which means they expect Britain (and presumably US and EU?) to pass on the option of another wave of lockdowns.
The market predicts that 2022 - 2025 will average 60K COVID deaths/year, with a distribution looking like this:
…which actually is more precise than I expected, with half the probability mass between about 20K and 150K. For comparison, there were about 350K US COVID deaths in 2020, and another 250K in 2021 so far. There are officially 36K US flu deaths in an average year, though some people think this is an overestimate.
So the overall scenario I’m getting from this is that coronavirus remains quite serious for the rest of this year and this winter, probably slightly less bad than last winter, but governments don’t choose to institute very strict lockdowns. Once everyone has been vaccinated or infected, it settles down into something about twice as bad as the flu.
What extra markets would be helpful?
I would love to see something like “percent of Americans who die of COVID between now and 1/1/22 who were fully vaccinated” or “number of fully vaccinated Americans who die of COVID between now and 1/1/22”. I’m not sure how to set this up - I suspect we’ll have credible numbers for this, but maybe not a single source of truth that can be picked out beforehand. Still, it seems important. I think for the percent question I would guess something like 2.5% for this - right now it’s 1%, but vaccinated as share of population will increase, and Delta seems a little better at breaking through vaccinations than Classic. But this is very low confidence and I would like to know what the mob thinks.
Something about the developing world, but I don’t know how I would phrase it, given how poor reporting there is likely to be. Still, the market could either ask about India / South Africa / etc (accepting that there will be underreporting and asking traders to price it in) or about serology studies (accepting that we can’t name a specific serology study ahead of time and the resolution committee would have to be given some leeway to say which ones they trust).
#### New Kid On The Block
Kalshi - the first fully-regulated real-money prediction market - is now open for public beta.
The signup process wasn’t so bad. Upload your ID, check a box saying you read some long contracts which you realistically did not read, then link your bank account or wire them the money. It took me ten minutes, aside from the inescapable wire transfer delay.
Here’s what they’ve got:
Nothing here looks too bizarre, maybe because there are as yet no contracts about D\*\*\*\*d T\*\*\*p.
So far the volume is a lot less than on PredictIt or Polymarket, but it’s a new public beta, what did you expect?
The most exciting part is the monetary limit, which seems to be $25,000 per market (on buys, not earnings - so in theory you could buy $25,000 one-cent shares and win $2.5 million if you’re right). That’s about 30x the $850 limit on PredictIt. “Kalshi trader” could very easily be someone’s day job - though it’s probably still not worth opening your own investment bank over.
The least exciting part is the fees. They’re [a bit complicated](https://kalshi.com/docs/kalshi-fee-schedule.pdf), but most of the time they’re around 10%, win or lose. I appreciate that this company is doing a really hard thing and deserves to make money, but I just don’t know how to square that with the fact that fees make prediction markets a lot less useful. Tetlock says that superforecasters are able to wring genuine signal out of single-digit differences in probability - when a superforecaster says 63%, they really mean 63%, and their prediction becomes less accurate if you round it to 60% or 65%. I don’t know how you’d match that in a market with 10% fees - and it looks like Kalshi traders don’t either, given that there’s currently a 103% chance that New York either will or won’t close indoor dining.
(update: a representative of Kalshi tells me that only people who take offers pay the fee, so on average if you’re making half the time and taking half the time, fees will average out to about 3.5%.)
#### Dependency Ratios
Here’s a neat set of Metaculus questions:
Dependency ratio is the ratio of non-working age people (eg elders, children) to working-age adults. Higher numbers mean more dependent people and greater economic burden. Right now it’s 50 across most of the world, except in Africa where it’s 80 (Africa has lots of kids!). Metaculus predicts that in 2039, it will have gone up a bit in the US and China, and a *lot* in Germany. Presumably the US escapes Germany’s fate through immigration. I don’t know why they’re so optimistic about China, but [this matches more centralized projections](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chinas-dependency-ratio-t_b_5813344), so probably they are right and I am wrong, maybe because they are starting from a very young base.
Also, the Israel question. Haredi are ultra-Orthodox Jews known for having traditional (ie very large) families. Right now they are 9-12% of the Israeli population. If they keep having 5-10 kid families, and everyone else in Israel just has normal-modern-sized families, what will happen? According to Metaculus, they’ll double to 24% of the population in 2050. Makes sense, though weird to think about.
#### Metaculus Is Hiring
From their website:
> We’ve been working steadily and quietly on an initiative that will create new ways for our community’s forecasts to engage with and inform policy and institutional decision-making, and educate and attract budding forecasting fans. For the next year, Metaculus will publish a series of experimental “fortified essays” on critical topics – emerging science and technology, global health, biosecurity, economics and econometrics, technology policy, global risk, environmental science, and geopolitics. These are longform, educational essays *fortified* with testable predictions.
>
> To support this project, we are hiring 3-5 Analytical Storytellers – researchers, rationality enthusiasts, data scientists, and quantitative analysts – to write about their areas of expertise with creativity, clarity, and embedded forecasts. These pieces will be fortified essays, a flexible format that can incorporate interactive Metaculus forecasts, serve as a primer on crucial topics, showcase original analysis, and spotlight and contextualize high-leverage questions.
>
> Analytical Storytellers will be able to pitch the tone and content of their essays to a smart but not stuffy audience. Essays will connect with readers who possess the relevant subject-matter expertise, while also appealing to a layperson who is open-minded, but may not *yet* understand what’s so fascinating about [Kessler syndrome](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/665/how-many-starlink-satellites-will-be-operational-in-2030/) or [photonic tensor cores](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4872/will-photonic-tensor-cores-be-ubiquitous-in-machine-learning-by-2030/). After reading, however, they will.
>
> They will leave the fortified essay appreciating the current state of knowledge on the topic, and will be able to track some of the most important open forecast questions that are likely to shape the topic in the future. They’ll better know the stakes involved, what hinges on the resolutions of those open forecast questions, and they’ll be prepared to fit the next piece of information they encounter into a larger matrix of meaning.
>
> We want to quickly fill 3-5 such roles. We hope you’ll apply, or share this job posting with someone you think is a good fit!
Compensation will be “commensurate with experience” because “given the novel and experimental nature of the fortified essays we're asking Analytical Storytellers to produce...we will have uncertainty about candidates' level of experience, work quality, and the amount of time that it takes them to produce high-quality output.”
If only there was some good method for estimating things you are temporarily uncertain about! Anyway, read more and/or apply [here](https://www.metaculus.com/news/2021/07/23/analytical-storytellers-job/). | Scott Alexander | 39163175 | Mantic Monday 7/26 | acx |
# Open Thread 182
*This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:*
**1:** Comment of the week is Matthew T [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown/comments#comment-2435039) (and that comment subthread in general) giving a different angle on how to think about the costs/benefits of various coronavirus responses.
**2:** My friends Claire and Buck are trying to distribute money earmarked for rationalist/EA "outreach", and they've decided that the ACX community is close enough to count. If you're doing any ACX community work - for example, running a local meetup group, a podcast, a mailing list, etc - and you think you could do a better job with more money, consider getting in touch with them. It doesn't have to be ACX-branded in particular, it can also just be about related topics. Read <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WAkvnzxvNfeTJL4BT/funds-are-available-to-support-lesswrong-groups-among-others> for more information.
**3:** Speaking of meetups **-** it used to be that every autumn I’d do [an advertising blitz](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/28/meetups-everywhere-2019/) for in-person SSC meetup groups - promote them on the blog, set a special date for new people to go, and attend as many as possible myself. I’m on the fence about whether to do it this year; the meetup groups definitely need some reinvigoration, but I don’t know how the COVID and lockdown situation is going to develop over the next few months. I’m interested in the community’s opinion: would you go to an in-person indoors ACX meetup in ~September? Would you consider it irresponsible to hold one? I’d especially like to hear from non-Americans whose countries might have situations I don’t know about - I was thinking of trying to go to European meetups this year since I did US ones last time, but I’ll pass if half the countries there are going to ban gatherings. | Scott Alexander | 39191801 | Open Thread 182 | acx |
# Links For July
*[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** Previous research had suggested that you might be able to treat depression by using Botox to literally paralyze the facial muscles that make you frown. Two teams recently did meta-analyses of the research and came to different conclusions. Or rather, they came to the same conclusion - it has a really really big effect size - but they interpreted it differently: [one team](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33578275/) says it must be super great, [another team](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1754073919868762) said something must be wrong with the studies. Now the second team has responded to the first, in an article called (wait for it) [Claims About The Effect Of Botulinum Toxin On Depression Should Raise Some Eyebrows](https://psyarxiv.com/g4sh6/download?format=pdf).
**2:** Poll, seen [here](https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/07/10/some-britons-crave-permanent-pandemic-lockdown): surprisingly many Brits want a permanent lockdown regardless of COVID:
If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning. [Edit/update from commenters: as with all polls, [this changes a lot](https://archive.is/wzPtR) depending on how you frame the question]
**3:** A long Twitter thread giving a great explanation of [some of the issues in psychotherapy research](https://twitter.com/tylerblack32/status/1399395251505217538). One of the most important is that it’s really hard to give placebo psychotherapy, so most experimenters don’t bother and just compare to people on the “wait list” for their treatment, but this isn’t an adequate control and you really do have to give placebo psychotherapy for your study to get good results.
**4:** GPT-3 writes an Ace Attorney case, self-recommending:
**5:** This month in etymology: did you know that [some linguists believe](https://www.etymonline.com/word/heathen) that “heathen” (which originally had an adjective form “heathenic”) comes from the word “ethnic” (in the same ethnic=foreign sense as “ethnic food”)? But it might also have just been a person who lived on a heath.
**6:** Congratulations to SSC/ACX reader and commenter Tom Chivers, who recently won a [British Science Journalist of the Year](https://www.absw.org.uk/pages/115-absw-awards-2021-shortlists-and-winners) award. My own encounter with Tom was that he once wrote [a book about](https://amzn.to/2VVdynd) the rationalist community, and asked to informally talk to me and my at-the-time girlfriend. My girlfriend was trying to decide whether or not she was ready to have children, so she got one of those robot babies that they use in school health classes to teach you how hard having an infant is. And she didn’t want to leave it alone or it would start crying and grade her as unready to be a mother. So she took it to the interview, and obviously Tom noticed it, and we had the fun task of convincing him that we were normal people who just happened to be carrying a robot baby around, for reasons that were totally unrelated to us being in something that we were trying to make clear to him was NOT a robot cult. He was very understanding and didn’t dwell on it too much in his book, which was very gracious of him. Anyway, you can read his science reporting [here](https://unherd.com/author/tom-chivers/).
**7:** If you liked the recent post on polygenically-selected babies, you might also like Steve Hsu’s [summary of recent research](https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/07/polygenic-embryo-screening-comments-on.html), plus [this panel discussion](https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2021/04/first-baby-born-from-polygenically.html) with a group of experts (including Dr. Smigrodzki, father of the first polygenically-selected child).
**8:** This month in Chinese propaganda (courtesy of Xinhua News’ [Twitter account](https://twitter.com/XHNews/status/1412249632848048138))
**9:** Dominic Cummings, formerly a top adviser to the British government, [now has a Substack](https://dominiccummings.substack.com/) (…Domstack?) where he talks about the UK coronavirus response and his many other opinions. The “Ask Me Anything” threads are a particular gem - it’s hard for me to think of other examples of people with experience of the top levels of power being so accessible and willing to talk about it with randos.
**10:** RIP antivirus pioneer John McAfee, who [died of an apparent prison suicide](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/john-mcafee-found-dead-prison-after-spanish-court-allows-extradition-2021-06-23/), two years after publicly announcing that he would never commit suicide in prison and that if it looked like he did then he’d been murdered, [and was so concerned about this that he even got a tattoo to this effect.](https://www.the-sun.com/news/3145281/john-mcafee-suicide-whackd-tattoo-didnt-kill-himself-tweet/) He will be remembered for his software, his larger-than-life lifestyle, and every time I think of [this tweet](https://twitter.com/bofadibeppo/status/1407828039711420419):
**11:** Finally, a politician is listening to [my pleas to center](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/) de-college-ization as an important issue. Joe Kent, a Republican running for Washington’s 3rd congressional district, [has said](https://twitter.com/joekent16jan19/status/1407092938769780739) that “the government must open jobs to those with non-traditional educational backgrounds” and pledged that:
> When elected, I will introduce legislation that will require every government job listing to only require a college degree if it is technically necessary - for example, mathematics, engineering, geology, etc - and consider alternative workforce experience wherever applicable. Further, I will set aside one third of the jobs on my congressional staff for those who do not have a traditional educational background, and one-third for those from the district. And I will advocate for my fellow representatives in Congress to do the same.
Good luck, Mr. Kent! (though as usual he is still terrible in other ways)
**12:** The Topologist’s Map Of The World ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/gxwn5r/oc_the_topologists_map_of_the_world_a_map_showing/)):
**13:** One of the best parts of writing my lockdown effectiveness post was learning about [Corona Game](https://covidgame.info/), an educational game where you try to set COVID policy for the Czech Republic. It recently went viral on Hacker News, and there were [lots of great comments about it](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27763873), including some from the authors. Related: Matt Shapiro (who comments here as PoliMath) adds to [the discussion of costs and benefits of COVID lockdowns](https://polimath.substack.com/p/lockdown-bait-and-switch).
**14:** [Shinigami Eyes](https://shinigami-eyes.github.io/) is a browser add-on which highlights users on social media and comments sections who have a history of either pro-transgender or anti-transgender comments (it learns from user reports, but it must have a big userbase because friends who use it say it’s pretty accurate about lots of people). A small step toward [our filtered future](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/06/the-future-is-filters/) - though of course the real fun starts once we have augmented-reality goggles and can give red vs. green auras to people you meet on the street based on their past comments about trans issues. Actually, no, the real killer app will be glasses that can make people look either more or less physically attractive based on how closely they share your political views.
**15:** From the subreddit: children born pre-term have notably worse health and lower IQ than those born after a full pregnancy. There are lots of ways to prevent pre-term birth, including progesterone therapy and literally just sewing the cervix shut. So why don’t we do these more often, [asks a writer](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oeci77/an_alternate_approach_to_improve_your_childrens_iq/) who realistically probably does not himself have a cervix. Some really great comments, including [this one by an OB/GYN](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/oeci77/an_alternate_approach_to_improve_your_childrens_iq/h46lbyj/) who explains the current thinking around this topic (progesterone doesn’t work, cervical sewing has too many risks to be done as a universal prophylaxis).
**16:** Seen [here](https://twitter.com/vamchale/status/1409510830522212352), presented without comment:
**17:** David Friedman: [no, Adam Smith didn’t share all of your modern progressive opinions.](http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/07/noah-smith-on-adam-smith.html?m=1) Probably people are just getting him confused with someone who did, like Jesus.
**18:** Related: [H.P. Lovecraft on Hayek](http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2010/09/lovecraft-on-hayek-and-robbins.html)
**19:** Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell and CEO of the Open Philanthropy Project, now has a blog, [Cold Takes](https://www.cold-takes.com/), on “futurism, macrohistory, applied epistemology and ethics, [and] sometimes sports”. Getting to hear from Holden is always a privilege, usually one reserved for people at effective altruism organizations or conferences, and it’s exciting to see he’ll be sharing his thoughts more widely.
**20:** This Twitter thread on [delegitimation of the high school bully](https://twitter.com/AliceFromQueens/status/1416040043060289539) argues that school bullies have faded from the public consciousness compared to their heyday in the late 20th century, and that’s because awareness campaigns / zero tolerance policies worked, and *that’s* partly because even school officials used to treat bullies as pretty cool and basically in the right, and we managed to successfully recast them as really bad. Interested to hear if this matches others’ experience. I am constantly mystified by which awareness campaigns work extraordinarily well (eg drunk driving, maybe bullying?) vs. fail (eg premarital sex, drugs, etc)
**21:** Probably inspired by the recent assassination of the Haitian president, there’s been some interesting recent discussion on divergence between Haiti and the Dominican Republic - same GDP per capita until ~1960, but now Dominican Republic is about 8x higher. Start with [Noah Smith here](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/haiti-vs-the-dominican-republic?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMDgzMzU0NywicG9zdF9pZCI6Mzg5MjE5MTEsIl8iOiJnbXg0TSIsImlhdCI6MTYyNjc4NTM3OSwiZXhwIjoxNjI2Nzg4OTc5LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzUzNDUiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.YUw17pDgHPSAzevbkkv5RyDzpJazd7hl-7Xdwb32J-E), then [Tyler Cowen here](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/07/why-the-post-1960-divergence-for-haiti-and-the-dominican-republic.html), then [Lurking\_Chronicler\_2 here](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/op20bm/a_brief_history_of_hispaniola_the_paths_of_haiti/). One reason people find this question so interesting is that it feels like it should be possible to pinpoint the difference to policy-like-variables alone - since Haiti and the DR were doing so similarly for so long, it doesn’t seem like culture or genetics should play a role. I’m not sure this is really that airtight - one of Noah’s commenters points out that even when Haiti and DR had identical GDPperCs, [DR life expectancy was ten years longer](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=DO-HT), so maybe there are hidden depths. It’s tempting to attribute all of Haiti’s terrible second-half-of-the-20th-century to the Duvaliers, but it’s still a minor mystery why DR has done so much better than the rest of Latin America. Tyler Cowen offhandedly mentions really good use of special economic zones. I’d like to learn more about that - some of the people who are always talking about Shenzhen and Dubai should write about it sometime.
**22:** Claim: [cave paintings used a primitive sort of animation, and some of them take on movie-like qualities by firelight](https://twitter.com/DilettanteryPod/status/1403914695128457219).
**23:** Like everyone else, I read [the Buzzfeed piece claiming](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/michigan-kidnapping-gretchen-whitmer-fbi-informant) that the Michigan governor kidnapping plot was, let’s say, “helped along” by the FBI an inappropriate amount. I came out of it thinking that these were some pretty scary dudes who were *the type of people* who *might* kidnap governors, but that it seemed possible they would never have gotten around to starting any particular governor-kidnapping operation if not for FBI entrapment. I’m not sure what to think about that - as a liberal, I want to protect the norm of not punishing people for crimes unless they definitely actually came up with the plan to commit them themselves. But I have trouble feeling as outraged as I’d like to about a plan to get potential-governor-kidnappers off the streets faster by convincing them to commit to an actual governor-kidnapping on some specific date that the FBI can arrest them for. And I think about things like how many people get their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, and how police never do anything about it, and how one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences - and this has a lot to recommend it over just letting bikes get stolen (or governors get kidnapped) every so often. Anyway, my favorite part of the article was reading about how much all the governor-kidnapper militia people cared about making sure nobody thought they were racist, even while they were plotting domestic terrorism. This definitely feels like a metaphor for life.
**24:**
**25:** *How Asia Works* (reviewed [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works)) argued that agricultural land reform (ie redistributing land from large landholders to peasants) was an important part of the industrializing process that helped East Asia become First World. While reviewing it, I wondered if pushing land distribution might be an effective altruist intervention. Now the organized EA movement (in the form of the increasingly prominent Rethink Priorities group) has published [an analysis of it as a cause area](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LempBhdJe6HzwtDxd/intervention-report-agricultural-land-redistribution). I interpret their conclusion as being that it’s not entirely clear that smaller farms produce more, and although it’s possible that they do, land redistribution is so politically intractable that it probably isn’t worth focusing on this too hard unless an unexpected opportunity comes up.
**26:** What should we make of Amazon’s payment acceptance team [advertising a job opening](https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/1644513/digital-currency-and-blockchain-product-lead) for a “Digital Currency And Blockchain Product Lead”?
**27:** Seen on [nostalgebraist’s Tumblr](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/113215387564/among-the-many-great-little-stories-in-jonathan):
> Among the many great little stories in Jonathan Rose’s book *The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes*, one that has always stuck in my mind concerns a guy who read the Bible on his own, with dedication but without any external guidance.
>
> On the basis of the other books he’d read, he assumed the Bible was a chronological narrative in which each section happened after the previous one. So when he got to the gospels, he assumed that they actually happened *sequentially*: that Jesus was in a sort of Groundhog Day time loop in which he experienced slightly different versions of the same set of events four different times, dying at the end of each version. (I guess it would make sense that final loop was John, which is significantly different from the other three.) | Scott Alexander | 38889391 | Links For July | acx |
# Things I Learned Writing The Lockdown Post
[Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more) is the most ambitious post I've tried to write since starting the new blog.
I posted an early draft for subscribers only and tried crowdsourcing opinions. Most of the comments I got on Substack weren't too helpful, but several people sent me private emails that were very helpful.
I had expected that anti-lockdown academics would want to remain anonymous so nobody gave them grief over their unpopular position. I actually found the opposite - the anti-lockdown people didn't care that much, but the pro-lockdown academics I talked to insisted on keeping their privacy. Apparently pro-lockdown academics who get too close to the public spotlight have been getting harassed by lockdown opponents, and this is a known problem that pro-lockdown academics are well aware of. I was depressed to hear that, though in retrospect it makes sense.
---
Writing the post made me think a lot of Robin Hanson's idea of "[pulling policy ropes sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html)". The idea is, the Democrats and Republicans (or whoever) are in a giant tug-of-war over some issue, like looser or stricter lockdowns. There are so many people pulling, on both sides, that you adding your efforts to one side or the other will barely matter. Meanwhile, if you pull the ropes sideways - try to make a difference in some previously unexplored direction that nobody is fighting - you can often have much more effect, plus there's no reason to think that the direction everyone is fighting over is the most interesting direction anyway.
Over the past ~year, I've seen endless terrible arguments over whether we should have more or less lockdown. People asked me to write a post on it. It's something I personally was wondering about and wanted to write a post on. And the dynamics of media - where I get more clicks if I write about things more people are interested in - incentivize me to write a post about it.
But the smartest people I talked to kept - is "derailing" the right word? - derailing onto more interesting and important pull-the-rope-sideways plans. If we had just gotten test-and-trace right at the beginning of the pandemic, we wouldn't have had to worry about lockdowns as much. Accelerating vaccine production, which we could have done in dozens of little ways, would have made lockdowns less necessary. Having better-targeted or better-choreographed lockdowns is more important than adjusting some slider of lockdown strength from MORE to LESS or vice versa. I felt that some of the experts I talked to were trying really hard to get this across, and I was asking "Yes, that's all nice and well, but blue state good red state bad? Or red state good blue state bad?"
My first excuse was that everyone else was already doing this, but poorly. I was annoyed at this and wanted to figure out what was going on, and I hoped other people did too.
My second excuse is that it was educational. It was educational for me to figure out who was right vs. wrong about what and how, and to see exactly how big the gap between media perception and reality was. Part of rationality is learning to fight in hostile terrain, and sometimes that means wading into the place where the people are pulling the rope. In a war, it’s helpful to attack places where your enemy doesn’t have a lot of forces mustered - but if you focus on this so hard that you never enter a pitched battle, then you limit your options compared to people who are more comfortable doing that.
---
This question was too multi-dimensional. As in, you could calculate everything right according to some model, and then someone else could say "but actually none of that matters, the real issue is X", and you would have a hard time proving it wasn't.
A long time ago, I remember being asked whether banning marijuana was good or bad. I spent a long time figuring out the side effects of marijuana, how addictive it was, how many people got pain relief from it, how many people were harmed by the War on Drugs, etc - and it turned out all of this was completely overwhelmed by the effects of deaths from intoxicated driving. If even a few people drove on marijuana and crashed and killed people, that erased all its gains; if even a few people used marijuana instead of alcohol and then drove while less intoxicated than they would have been otherwise, that erased all its losses. This was - "annoying" is exactly the right word - because what I (and everyone else) wanted was a story about how dangerous and addictive marijuana was vs. how many people were helped by its medical benefits, and none of that turned out to matter at all compared to some question about stoned driving vs. substituting-for-drunk-driving, which nobody started out caring about.
It might actually be even worse than that, because there was some hard-to-quantify chance that marijuana decreased IQ, and you could make an argument that if there was a 5% chance it decreased IQ by let's say 2 points across the 50% of the population who smoked pot the most, and you took studies about IQ vs. job success, criminality, etc, really seriously, then lowering the national IQ 1 point might have been more important than anything else. But this would be super-annoying, because the studies showing that it decreased IQ were weak (and you would have to rely on a sort of Pascal-type reasoning) and people reading something on the costs/benefits of marijuana definitely don't want to read something mildly politically incorrect trying to convince them that IQ is super important. And if there are twenty things like this, then all the actually interesting stuff people care about is less important than figuring out which of the twenty 5%-chance-it-matters things actually matters, and it's really tempting to just write it off or put it in a "Future Research Needed" section, but that could be the difference between your analysis being right vs. completely wrong and harmful.
The same was true here. How do we quantify the effect of Long COVID? Who knows? Given the giant pile of bodies, maybe we just round COVID off the the number of deaths it causes, and ignore this mysterious syndrome where we've only barely begun the work of proving it exists? But under certain assumptions, the total suffering caused by Long COVID is worse than the suffering caused by the acute disease, including all the deaths!
Or: lockdowns cost X amount of money, which is more/less than some other government programs. But the costs of lockdown mostly come out of the pockets of real people, whereas the costs of eg building a new highway or Space Shuttle come out of taxes, which can distribute the burden across everyone (and disproportionately on the rich). Does that mean we can't really compare these two kinds of costs? I solved this by including an asterisk in the post, saying "maybe we can't compare these two kinds of costs, who knows?" But plausibly, grappling with this fairly would affect the costs by a full order of magnitude and make lockdowns seem super-terrible. And there are lots of things like this!
This is an especially bad fit with writing a "red state good, blue state bad" (or vice versa) article, because how do you distribute glory/praise/credit/Rationality Points if one side was right about everything *except* for some complicated weird effect that nobody thought about and which you can't quantify intelligently? And then when you add this in, maybe the other side was “right” for reasons they never thought of and that they shouldn’t get any credit for at all?
---
Maybe a more honest version of me would have rewritten the post to focus more on the emotional costs (the part which I made Conclusion 2). It really is a striking result that it's hard to justify the emotional costs of lockdown even given very optimistic assumptions about the number of lives saved / Long COVID cases prevented / etc. This argument is pretty unrelated to most of what people have talked about in the news, which is mostly (completely false) claims that lockdowns cause more suicides, lockdowns devastate businesses, etc. And it's so stupid - emotional damages! People being annoyed that they can't go to the bar (I realize for some people the emotional damages were deeper than that, but not everyone missed a family member's funeral - I think the part that really adds up is multiplying the inconvenience of not being able to go to the bar by 300 million people). Maybe a more courageous post would have looked more like "Hey, when you add this really simple thing in to the analysis, lockdowns are really obviously bad, right?" But it just felt too weird and transgressive to focus on something authorities weren't even talking about.
And the most plausible counterarguments tried to muster emotional damages on the other side - maybe lockdowns now funge against lockdowns later which also cause emotional damages. Or maybe not-having-lockdowns makes lots of people terrified of COVID which causes emotional damage. So maybe both sides’ strongest argument is emotional damage, and we should ignore the business closures and hospital overcrowding and so on and just argue about whose emotional damage is worse. But this would be awful, because emotional damage is much harder to quantify than cases or deaths and we’d never get anywhere. But if we don’t do this, maybe we’re [streetlight-effecting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect) ourselves into a false conclusion.
I ended up writing the post in a way that focused on maybe twenty different things, some of which resolved in a pro-lockdown direction, and others of which resolved in an anti-lockdown direction - and didn't focus on the fact that thing number 19 overwhelmed all the others and I don't know what to think about that.
A friend asked me why I was spending so long on this post, and I responded something like "If I make it long enough, maybe nobody will read it, and then I will get credit for writing an important and well-researched post, but nobody will know what's in it and so nobody will get angry at me". This is obviously not the most virtuous way of thinking about things. But I imagine everyone faces similar constraints, and making it so long that nobody will read it is at least better than modulating the conclusions to be more palatable.
---
This post landed me in the annoying position of having to try to critique mathematical models while being much less mathematically knowledgeable than the people who made them.
I would have preferred to avoid this position, but there were a bunch of contradictory mathematical models producing order-of-magnitude different results, all of which were by credentialled people and published in peer-reviewed journals, and which ones were right vs. wrong turned out to be pretty important.
Challenging mathematically gifted people about math is scary and unpleasant. "We have HARD MATH on our side," they say. "Yes," you ask, "but how come this other person also did a mathematical model and got completely different results?" "Oh," they reply condescendingly, "obviously they failed to crenulate their zeugma. Obviously." And then you're confronted with the prospect of either trying to learn enough math to figure out what a zeugma is and why you would want to crenulate one - not just to a basic level, but to a level where you can understand disputes between statisticians about when to do it or not - or just hating everyone in the world and retreating to total Cartesian skepticism.
I'm not a total idiot about statistics. I've taken graduate level classes in it, I've even occasionally been tapped to teach statistics to doctors - a task which, like my previous job of teaching English to Japanese elementary schoolers, reflects more on the innocence of my students than on my own intellect. But I still frequently found myself thinking back to [my old post on Euler](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/), who would win religious debates against atheists by telling them "(a+b^n)/n = x, therefore, God exists! What is your response to that?", and the poor atheists would be like, "well, you're a mathematician and I'm not, guess I can't really argue here."
One thing I found helpful was to ask Person A what they thought of Person B's work, relay it to Person B, Person B would say something like "he's neglecting to consider that you need to fulminate the synecdoche", then I would relay that back to Person A, and after enough of this I would get a meaningful sense of where they disagreed (or occasionally one of them would just admit they had made a mistake). This felt kind of like an adversarial-collaboration-by-proxy - neither of these people was going to hash out their disagreements on their own, but with me as a middleman they could kind of get it done. I'm actually kind of excited about this idea, since some of the people who I most want to have do adversarial collaborations might not contact each other spontaneously, or might not be very good at writing up their results.
Other times I just went for maximally stupid models and saw what happened - eg correlating the stringency indices for all US states against their death rates. This is much worse than a careful model of the sort that a smart statistician could dream up, but it has very few free parameters: it's so dumb that it couldn't lie even if it wanted to. Then I checked whether any of the things I was excluding were important enough to change my conclusion, drew giant error bars, and called it a day. Sometimes this was helpful in bounding things - when you see the plot of state stringency indices vs. death rates, you can see that lockdown states do better than non-lockdown states, but also that there's no way lockdowns are producing order-of-magnitude improvements. Other times it was helpful in figuring out where the differences in other people's different models were coming from.
I feel bad about this - it's a limitation of me rather than a fundamental limitation in how well we can understand this issue - but I couldn't think of a better way around it.
---
One thing some people fairly called me out on was asymmetric political bias adjustment.
Some of the more interesting studies finding lockdowns didn't work were done by an economist whose other work leans right (or at least libertarian). He’d written a lot of articles showing that communism is bad for growth, pushing back against wokeness, debating various things about Hayek, etc. Also some newspaper columns criticizing lockdown in pretty extreme terms, comparing it to "house arrest", etc. This all seemed, if not suspicious, at least relevant. While we still have to judge his studies fairly, we can understand he has an axe to grind - and I mentioned this in an early draft of the article.
Some people called me out on this. A lot of scientists who did studies saying lockdowns are good have probably written newspaper articles saying lockdowns are good; some of them have probably also used “pretty extreme terms” (one article called relaxing restrictions "human sacrifice"). Probably many of these scientists have published vaguely liberal-sounding things, like showing that unrestrained capitalism has negative effects; probably most of them are pro-wokeness. I didn't go over lockdown supporters' previous work with a fine-tuned comb and say "these people have been liberal in the past, therefore they have an axe to grind!"
I don't really know what to do here. Academia is disproportionately liberal, which makes it stand out when a conservative professor gets a result that supports conservative positions - but just seem like business as usual when liberal professors get a result that supports liberal positions. I hate to be responsible for compounding this unfairness. On the other hand, I can't shake my feeling that it's suspicious when this very conservative professor is the only guy finding that lockdowns don't work.
If a professor comes up with some study that shows guns decrease crime, and that professor is a gun owner, goes hunting every day, and donates to conservative organizations, is that suspicious? What if another professor shows that guns increase crime, and this professor has never owned a gun in her life, hates hunting, and donates to liberal organizations? It feels like "enthusiastic gun owner" is more of a "marked" group than "non-gun-owner", but that's just a coincidence - if we had been in a world where academia leaned conservative and most professors owned guns, it would be the opposite. But should we really discount the fact that the pro-gun study professor has an NRA bumper sticker on his car? I’m still not sure how to think about this.
---
Different people had very different pandemic experiences.
I dutifully discussed Sweden like everyone else, but I was most interested in the American data - whether there was any difference between blue states and red states. It was hard for me to worry too much about the first phase of the pandemic - it seemed like everyone had locked down then, that was the right choice, things had gotten under control, and then the more interesting question was what happened afterwards.
Some of the people I talked to for this post were Western European. They'd had very different times. In particular, Western European lockdowns were much stricter than ours, and Europeans tended to be either angrier about them, or more interested in defending them. Western Europe also seemed more scarred by the early phase of the pandemic and more interested in re-litigating it, to a degree that I hadn't seen in Americans.
Whenever I talked to Aussies or New Zealanders, they just really wanted to stress that they had ascended beyond such primitive mortal concerns, defeated the virus their own way, and were somewhat annoyed that the rest of us were squabbling about the relative merits of our inferior plans rather than focusing on how great they were. Sorry, guys.
I think I approached this from a very American perspective, which was unavoidable but probably made other people feel like my focus was weirdly out of tune with what they cared about. Sorry again.
Several people brought up that my living in the Bay Area made me too credulous of data showing strong effects for voluntary behavior change. The Bay Area was probably the most voluntary-behavior-changing place in America - maybe because lots of people are in tech and have no problem working remotely.
This interacts badly with a conclusion that everything depends on emotional distress, because people in different countries are going to have different emotions. For example, one person brought up that I (as a younger person) might be underestimating the emotional distress older people feel about COVID, because they (unlike me) are at serious risk of death. This was a fair point - except that [some US polls](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/16/experiences-with-the-covid-19-outbreak-can-vary-for-americans-of-different-ages/) suggest older people report less emotional distress over COVID than younger people. But European polls suggest the opposite is true there - so the US picture might just be because older Americans are more likely to be conservative, and in our political climate that means they’re ideologically committed to being less worried about COVID.
---
A surprising number of good studies on lockdowns included rationalists and effective altruists among their authors.
I mean, maybe I'm biased when I call them "good studies". But some of them I identified as good studies first, and then later learned that the people involved were in the same subculture I was. I feel kind of like a member of a conspiracy, armed with the secret hand signals that let me recognize my co-conspirators - "oh, you have a machine learning degree but you're doing epidemiology, suspicious!" Or "you use the word 'metaforecasting' infinity percent more often than any non-rationalist I have met". Don't worry, I'm not going to out you people without your consent.
I exploited this shamelessly. When I felt like I had no idea who to trust, I trusted the people who I had a chain of social connections with - friends of friends, things like that. People laughed at my conflict-of-interest statement, but the conflict was serious, and I’m sure that some version of this is responsible for a lot of terrible science and echo chambers. Still, I had to ground my chain of who to trust somewhere, and deep down I still feel like this was a good choice.
But also, this is interesting! Most of these people didn't start out as epidemiologists. They started out as smart statistics/CS/AI people willing to lend their expertise to any sufficiently important project that needed it. It turned out that the most important projects in 2020 all had to do with modeling coronavirus. And if you were sufficiently motivated and had something to contribute, you could get in it!
This makes me really optimistic about the ability of people to do good cross-disciplinary research - and about the ability of social movements to cross-fertilize it and make it happen. | Scott Alexander | 38883559 | Things I Learned Writing The Lockdown Post | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
Some good discussion of PTSD, culminating in a link to the ACOUP blog, [which says](https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/):
> I cannot speak for all pre-modern, ancient or medieval armies. But for the periods where I *have* read a wide chunk of the primary source material, I’d say **there is vanishingly little evidence that people in the ancient Mediterranean or medieval Europe experienced PTSD from combat experience in the way that modern soldiers do**.
>
> That is often *not* the impression that you would get from a quick google search (though it does seem to be the general consensus of the range of ancient military historians I know) and that goes back to arguments *ex silentio*. A quick google search will turn up any number of articles written by folks who are generally not professional historians declaring that PTSD was an observed phenomenon in the deep past, citing the same small handful of debatable examples. But one thing you learn very rapidly as a historian is that **if you go into a large evidence-base** ***looking*** **for something,** ***you will find it*****.**
>
> […]
>
> **I think the evidence strongly suggests that ancient combatants did not experience PTSD as we do now**. The problem is that the evidence of *silence* leads us with few tools with which to answer *why*. One answer might be that it existed and they do not tell us – because it was considered shameful or cowardly, perhaps. Except that they *do* tell us about other cowardly or shameful things. And the loss and damage of war – death, captivity, refugees, wounds, the lot of it – are prominent motifs in Greek, Roman and European Medieval literature. War is not uniformly white-washed in these texts – not every medieval writer is [Bertran](https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-bertran-de-born-martial-values-in-the-12th-century-occitan-nobility/). We can’t rule out some *lacuna* in the tradition, but given just how many wails and moans of grief and loss there are in the corpus it seems profoundly unlikely. I think **we have to assume that it isn’t in the sources because they did not experience it** or at least did not recognize the experience of it.
>
> The more interesting potential question is *why*. Considering all of the competing theories for that, I think, would take its own collections post. But for my part, **I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare** – it was viewed [not generally a necessary evil](https://acoup.blog/2020/04/10/collections-antarah-ibn-shaddad-victory-songs/) in these societies, but a [positive good](https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-bertran-de-born-martial-values-in-the-12th-century-occitan-nobility/) – which may have meant there was less sense that what had taken place *was trauma at all*. **If that is the case, the emergence of PTSD would speak to** ***improvement*** **in our society: we have become more averse to violence and do it less, and as a consequence, feel it more**. If you will permit me, we have more wounded warriors because we have fewer dead ones, on account of having [fewer](https://www.amazon.com/War-Human-Civilization-Azar-Gat/dp/0199236631) [wars](https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010) in general.
And adds in a different post:
> But moreover – and we’ve actually already touched on this when discussing fear and courage – mental wounds also seem to vary somewhat from one modern war to the next. As I noted, the hyper-vigilance that is so often a symptom of combat trauma in the veterans of contemporary wars seems vanishingly rare in the ‘shell shock’ of WWI veterans, who are more often described as lethargic, listless and undirected (symptoms that also show up in WWII for soldiers who had been under combat stress for long periods). The issue has been brought up, so I do want to note that I am, by the by, unconvinced by the suggestion that these WWI-era mental wounds were purely or principally the product of concussions from heavy artillery or the like.
>
> But it should not surprise us that just as different kinds of combat and different kinds of weapons inflict different sorts of physical wounds, so too they inflict different sorts of mental wounds. The soldier who doesn’t know when the next enemy might appear in a crowd of civilians is put under a very different strain than the soldier who is subjected to a week-long artillery barrage while hiding underground; both of them are subjected to a very different strain from the man asked to charge over a field with a spear. I have by no means exhaustively read the literature on PTSD either from the historical or psychological angles (though I have tried to read a lot of it), but I sometimes wonder if experts researching PTSD under-appreciate the degree to which they are dealing with a moving target; descriptions of combat stress disorders in early wars are too often, I think, treated as misunderstandings when they may simply be recording different symptoms from different trauma caused by different stress (though of course it is also true that our understanding of PTSD and related mental combat trauma has improved *tremendously*).
This makes sense, but then it’s strange that the PTSD symptoms associated with details of modern combat (ie a “soldier who doesn’t know when the next enemy might appear in a crowd of civilians”) so closely resemble the symptoms modern people get after natural disasters, sexual violence, etc.
Or maybe I’m over-generalizing and they don’t? Part of the idea behind [the c-PTSD diagnosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_post-traumatic_stress_disorder) is that the kind of PTSD you get from situations more like child abuse is different from the kind you get from situations more like combat. I think it’s still traditional to group combat, natural disasters, and short-term sexual violence together as normal non-c PTSD, but maybe people who know more about this find distinct symptoms there too.
---
Loweren writes:
> Living in Russia, I can say that ADHD (translated as СДВГ) is less recognized by the psychiatry community here because of its unclear aetiology. Doctors usually refuse to treat the patients in the absence of dangerous symptoms, and state the diagnosis as "organic nervous system disorder", "psychoorganic syndrome" or indeed "neurasthenia". Adderall and Ritalin are illegal drugs here. Patients usually get prescribed nootropics (glycine, racetams) and adrenaline reuptake inhibitors (atomoxetine).
>
> At the same time there are [some articles in popular online magazines](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.the-village.ru%2Fcity%2Fstories%2F285860-adhd) telling stories about children and adults struggling with ADHD in Russia. Some people order illegal drugs from nearby countries. Researchers also are aware of it. At the same time, I see [some articles](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Flenta.ru%2Farticles%2F2019%2F02%2F12%2Fadderallnation%2F) talking about US problems with over-medicalization of ADHD with dangerous narcotics driven by profit-seeking pharma companies.
>
> So if you ever wondered what would happen to ADHD people if stimulants weren't legal, Russia seems like a good test case.
This comment took me aback, because it made me realize I think of ADHD totally differently than any of the disorders in the book, which kind of demands an explanation.
I would be surprised if ADHD was especially culture-bound. Partly this is because it’s much more genetic than most other conditions. But partly it’s because it’s just a really basic deficit. Some people aren’t very smart. Other people aren’t very coordinated. And still other people aren’t very good at concentration / executive function (see my past discussion of this [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/)). There’s no reason why everyone should have the same level of concentration ability, so sure, some people have extremely bad concentration ability (just as some people are really dumb, or really clumsy), and we call that ADHD. This seems much less mysterious than “sometimes people can’t stop dieting and starve themselves to death”.
Different cultures can vary in terms of how much you need to concentrate, how much accommodation they give to people who can’t concentrate very well, whether they medicalize the condition of not being able to concentrate, where they put the diagnosis threshold and what drugs patients are allowed to take - but the overall “not being able to concentrate” feels too close to the hardware level to be culture-bound in any meaningful way.
---
---
Banjaloupe [solves my mystery](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2386835) about the culture distribution of expressed emotion:
> This question interested me as well so I did a quick search for the first review I could find-- so caveat that this article is the first time I'd heard of "expressed emotion" and I'm not an expert in the topic.
>
> <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/expressed-emotion-across-cultures/CC598258E8D8F7E0B4EFD9DA141A916C>
>
> This focuses more on the association between households with high expressed emotion, and relapse of schizophrenia, but also gives some numbers attributed to Leff & Vaughan 1985 which at first glance do line up with the ones for American and British households from the book (the linked article gives the low-EE %, the quote from the book above is the high-EE %, and they add up to 100%). Despite having a university library access I couldn't find the Leff & Vaughan paper quickly, though-- others might have more success.
>
> Also, I think the definition of "expressed emotion" in the article I linked above helps explain the discrepancy that Scott noted above, that the understood knowledge is that white Americans prefer/demand social environments without big displays of emotion. From what I can tell, "expressed emotion" really is just "expressed emotion (from a schizophrenia patient's household towards a schizophrenic person)". It's a pretty limited definition that's about the ways that people around a schizophrenic person at home, respond to that person. So, it makes a lot of sense that a culture's "way of interacting with schizophrenic people at home" could be very different from their "way of interacting with neurotypical people outside of home".
This is interesting, but I wonder why a culture even *has* a culture-wide “way of interacting with schizophrenic people at home” separate from their usual interaction patterns. I wouldn’t expect there to be enough people witnessing each other’s interactions with schizophrenic family members for this to spread across a culture. Maybe this is downstream of biological views of mental illness or something?
---
Coagulopath [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2383750):
> I know a woman who was sexually interfered with as a child. It didn't affect her when it happened. She was old enough to remember it, but the memories weren't painful. It was just a weird person doing stuff. She certainly didn't feel like she'd been victimized.
>
> Only later, when surrounded by friends who talked about how awful CSA is and how it ruins your life forever (etc, etc), did trauma from the event hit her.
>
> This might not be a common experience, but it was unsettling to hear her describe that. She felt a degree of bitterness toward her friends: almost as though they'd caused her to become a victim, not her attacker.
Himaldr [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2383961):
> I have heard similar from someone I know, as well — that it didn't seem shameful and horrifying until everyone kept saying how ashamed and horrified she must be. A common thread here might be that in both of these cases, it doesn't appear to have been violent or forceful - I'd wager that in the more awful cases, other people's reactions aren't needed to make it a terrible memory.
Other commenters bring up related arguments - doctors sometimes examine children’s genitals in ways that aren’t obviously different from what goes on in some child sex abuse cases; some tribes have rituals where adults do weird things to children’s genitals - in all these cases, because it’s socially accepted and people aren’t “supposed to” feel traumatized, they usually don’t.
I have a vivid memory of reading a study that basically argued this - victims of child sexual abuse don’t think or care about it much until people tell them that it’s taboo and traumatic, and which point they are duly traumatized - but I can’t find it now. A commenter suggested Rind et al, but this just seems to be a generic “sometimes people aren’t traumatized by child abuse” study, whereas I remember one that clearly made the connection to being traumatized after you’re informed it’s taboo. Does anyone know what I’m thinking of?
---
[CB](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2385287):
> Something else about the book: Watters talks about exporting western psychiatry being equivalent to handing out smallpox blankets. But then he reveals that he's married to a psychiatrist. He's, uh, maybe working through some stuff here?
To which [Ivan Fyodorovich](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2385822) answers:
> Watters has an analogy in the book that imagine if after 9/11, a whole bunch of people from Mozambique flew in and told survivors that they needed to learn rituals for disconnecting their psychic bonds with the spirits of dead relatives. His point was that we would find it weird and insulting, but I think he was also trying to point out that even if these rituals helped Mozambiqueans find peace, outside a larger belief structure they are useless. He also tells the story of a psychiatrist who learns all sorts of stuff about handling psychotic family members in Zanzibar. Then her own husband comes down with psychosis and none of the Zanzibar stuff works. They try religion for example, but you can't just use religion when you need it, it has to be ingrained in your life and beliefs.
>
> Point I'm trying to make, the book could be read as either "American psychiatry sucks" or "American psychiatry works within the context of American belief systems but can't just be copied and pasted to other cultures, the same way you can't just start doing Mozambique spirit rituals tomorrow and expect much from them." I suspect Watters believes some of both.
One weird but technically-consistent take might be “Western psychiatry is just the equivalent of primitive tribes banging drums to scare off demons - but the drum rituals works great for primitive tribe, Western psychiatry works great for Westerners, and everyone should just stick to what they’re doing.”
A counterargument might be that Western drugs have a lot of side effects - but I suppose that’s no argument against therapy and things like that.
A second counterargument might be that if Western psychiatry only works because we think it does, we would probably want to know that, and then once we figure it out, it would stop working.
---
Alephwyr (and many, many other commenters) [write](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2383718):
> I wonder about the psychology of gender identity in relation to this. It's been very strange watching transmedicalist narratives be completely obliterated by weird continental perspectives that seem to allow and encourage a distinct gender identity for every possible permutation of quale. Gender identity disorder has increasingly become a cultural phenomenon believed to be on a continuum rather than a discrete alleged biological category. In that way it is somewhat opposite to trends described here, yet the increase is still occurring. It seems like you can track the taint of medicalization in through at least two directions I guess. The reference point would be cultures with strong non binary or non static gender norms perhaps.
I didn’t bring up trans issues because I think they’re a better match for another post I hope to write about related issues in the future, but I agree it sounds like an interesting match for something like this - a psychiatric condition which seems to exists at vanishingly low levels until people work to “raise awareness” of it, after which it becomes very common.
A responsible treatment of this would have to discuss [the history of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history) traditional societies around the world that have something vaguely similar to our concept of transgender (like “third gender” roles in certain tribes), then move on to transvestism in the 1980s, and come up with some position on how these relate to modern transgender. One interpretation might be that there is some biological substrate for gender nonconformity (eg some evolved part of the brain that is supposed to tell you what gender you are can misfire in some way), and then the way that people feeling vague anxiety about their gender deal with it varies based on the local cultural milieu.
A second, totally different line of research/commentary would have to decide whether urging people to focus on it makes it stronger (eg in a traditional society, Alice would be a cis woman who occasionally has the weird feeling that she’s not really female but dismisses this as obviously ridiculous and never thinks about it again, but in our society where her gender and the possibility that it might be wrong is constantly called to her attention and reified, this turns into full-blown gender dysphoria). I am sympathetic to this based on an experience I had, where I was pretty bad at tolerating noise, but kind of within the normal human spectrum and never thought much of it, and then I lived with a noisy roommate who characterized my distaste for noise as freakish and psychiatric-level, and after that, every time I heard a noise I started panicking and questioning whether I was going to have some sort of freakish and psychiatric-level reaction to it, and this became so unpleasant that now I *do* have a freakish and psychiatric-level noise intolerance - or at least this is how I remember it. Also some gender experiences other people have described to me that I don’t have their permission to share with you.
---
Robert McIntyre quotes a paragraph of mine where I say that “the null hypothesis is that there are lots of people suffering in silence until people raise awareness of and destigmatize a mental illness, after which they break their silence, admit they have a problem, and seek treatment”, [then adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2388859):
> I think that the null hypothesis is almost certainly right in this an in many other cases, and the strongest evidence I have for this is childhood sexual abuse. I'm almost certain that we've always been brutally sexually abusing children as a society for as long as humans have been around. Even if that's not the case, I KNOW that the boomers in America were often sexually abused as children. Both my parents were raped / abused as kids. My grandmother was raped. About 75% of my aunts / uncles were abused / raped. Around 20% of the boomer friends I have that I’ve had deep conversations with have shared stories with me of them being raped / sexually abused as children. I think the actual real prevalence based on my own experience is probably somewhere between 20%-50%. Go talk to some of your boomer friends that actually trust you and learn how common it was!
>
> And yet, in 1960s there was total, absolute denial in American society that childhood sexual abuse even existed. From The Body Keeps the score:
>
> *(Dr. Van Der Kolk): "In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women. Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital.*
>
> *Furthermore, the textbook said, “There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology.” My patients with incest histories were hardly free of “subsequent psychopathology”—they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that “such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world.” In fact, as it turned out, incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being.*
>
> *As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome: “Initiation, intimidation, stigmatization, isolation, helplessness and self-blame depend on a terrifying reality of child sexual abuse. Any attempts by the child to divulge the secret will be countered by an adult conspiracy of silence and disbelief. ‘Don’t worry about things like that; that could never happen in our family.’ ‘How could you ever think of such a terrible thing?’ ‘Don’t let me ever hear you say anything like that again!’ The average child never asks and never tells.*
>
> *After forty years of doing this work I still regularly hear myself saying, “That’s unbelievable,” when patients tell me about their childhoods. They often are as incredulous as I am—how could parents inflict such torture and terror on their own child? Part of them continues to insist that they must have made the experience up or that they are exaggerating. All of them are ashamed about what happened to them, and they blame themselves—on some level they firmly believe that these terrible things were done to them because they are terrible people.*
>
> What conclusion can we draw from this? I think the most reasonable one is that psychiatrists (and doctors in general) are EXTREMELY bad at their jobs. They see what they want to see, they are controlled by the prevailing narratives they’ve been taught, and they don’t really listen to their patients. It’s clearly true that if you’re told during medical school to ignore really significant problems that essentially all doctors will happily ignore these problems for their whole career. And society has awesome mechanisms in place that can brutally suppress any stories of abuse or problems from getting out into wider awareness. These mechanisms (which also exist in other cultures) are so strong that I think they mostly invalidate whatever Crazy like Us is trying to say. The author of Crazy like Us would have to have done MUCH more rigorous work to overcome the fact that there are powerful conspiracies in every society that work to obscure and hide all kinds of mental problems / abuse / internal feelings. It doesn’t look to me like he’s done that work.
This is a great point and a great example; see my review of *[The Body Keeps The Score](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/)* for more.
---
@crimkadid on Twitter [is unhappy with](https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1415531596480978945) my repeating the psychiatric platitude that schizophrenia has uniform prevalence everywhere. They point to a 1987 meta-analysis which finds large cross-cultural differences:
This is still controversial and it’s hard to figure it out correctly, but after double-checking, a lot of the educated opinion has switched over to crimkadid’s view (see eg [McGrath 2008](https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/30/1/67/621138)), which calls the uniformity hypothesis a “dogma”. Sorry for getting this wrong. Crimkadid is also responsible for [this long twitter thread](https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1270547158882832387) on variance in schizophrenia, which is poorly-supported, bizarre, and racist, but otherwise excellent - you can find many other interesting speculations at the same account.
---
Artischoke [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2402423):
> One theme running through this book review (that is particularly visible in the discussion of PTSD) is the Western trend to diagnose more and more things as psychiatric illnesses. I think that in turn is mainly caused by a Western philosophy of life where people are individuals entitled to happiness and success, but if they aren't happily achieving success something must be wrong with them. I.e. I am problematic if I don't live up to an unrealistic standard for human beings that is expressed through all kinds of channels including the work-place, the treatment of the unemployed, or the lives of other people we see on TV or social media. Hence there is a large demand to produce diagnoses to address the perceived abundance of personal defects.
>
> I agree with the book that in general the West is very successful in exporting this aspect of its culture overseas. The most harmful aspect of which might be exporting the idea of "There is a problem with me, I am deficient". Once this idea has been successfully implanted somewhere, this will naturally also create a robust demand for Western styles of psychotherapy, apparently justifying the mushrooming of psychiatric diagnoses.
This was stressed more in the original book and mostly didn’t make it into my review.
A common position in some premodern or developing societies is “life is obviously terrible, but whatever, suicide is a sin, so guess we have to deal with it”. Watters tried to play this off as a cultural difference, but life in a lot of places *is* pretty terrible, in ways that are hard to cover up.
One of the book’s case studies was on the mother of a kid with very severe, disabling mental illness. This really limited the mother’s life - she couldn’t really do her own things, she could never leave her kid alone, she was at risk of violence - and an anthropologist tried to gently probe whether she might feel depressed or traumatized by some of this. But apparently it barely registered next to all the other crappy things about being a woman in a patriarchal extremely poor society. A modern Westerner in this position might be sad because it meant she could never achieve her dream of traveling all over the world, or taking night classes to become an artist, or something like that. But this woman was basically expecting to work hard living a hand-to-mouth existence until she died anyway, so the fact that she wasn’t self-actualizing wasn’t such a problem.
It also reminds me of [my article](https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/) on why suicides dropped during the worst part of the COVID pandemic, where one of the going theories was “if everyone is miserable, and you have no right to expect anything other than misery, then your own misery is more tolerable”.
---
Dues [asks](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2399492):
> Weird question: Where does the discussion on animal depression fit in Ethan Waters view?
>
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/science/depressed-fish.html>
>
> (The fish depression fits less well in my view because they seem to be experiencing withdrawal rather than depression?
I should clarify that the book mostly doesn’t say there is no mental illness without culture (or without a belief in mental illness). It says that the way mental illness presents is shaped by culture, and conforms to the culture’s norms. So everyone will get depression, but it will have different symptoms, and people will think of it differently.
The part where this becomes confusing is I guess where you draw the boundaries of mental illness. If you think of (anorexia and conversion disorder) as two “symptoms” of some underlying nameless illness, then maybe some places will have conversion disorder (but no anorexia) and other places will have anorexia (but no conversion disorder), and then it will look like Westerners “brought” anorexia to a place that was previously anorexia-free. The only problem with this way of looking at things is that if true, you would expect some other illness (in this case, conversion disorder) to decrease at the same time anorexia increased, and I don’t know of any research on whether this happened or not.
Also, I don’t know if things like the giant increase in neurasthenia in Japan after people started glorifying it is like this, or whether it was just a giant increase in neurasthenia, with no benefits or compensations.
---
Also [from Ivan Fyodorovich](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us/comments#comment-2385736):
> I found the trauma section of the book very compelling, in part because it squares with my impression of the United States as a society that is convinced it understands trauma better than any previous society but seems to achieve uniquely poor outcomes. It would be like a land that was convinced it had the best vaccine for polio but you look around and every fourth person is in an iron lung.
>
> I see this most clearly with recent war veterans. 45% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans file for disability, a large fraction psychological: <https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/05/27/almost-half-new-veterans-seek-disability-benefits/sYQAAY00ddXBRoqfsKMheJ/story.html>
>
> Perhaps some are outright malingerers, but clearly for a large number (including a friend of mine) this is real. They really are suffering from a set of symptoms consistent with PTSD. And yet, the vast majority of WWI veterans, Holocaust survivors, everyone who lived through WWII in Western Russia etc., a large fraction of people in the Middle Ages etc. experienced as bad or worse stuff and the vast majority could function as adults. It's hard to escape the conclusion that we've created an expectation of disabling trauma and people fulfill it. Crazy Like Us quotes an American soldier who said that he felt like an actor given a script. Here's PTSD, this is what you do next.
>
> I don't think we can create the anti-psychiatry society like in Scott's post, but we can send a message that left to their own devices the vast majority of people who experience terrible things will recover, and they shouldn't expect PTSD.
I think about the first paragraph here a lot. | Scott Alexander | 38884480 | Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us" | acx |
# Peer Review Request: Ketamine
I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, [Lorien Psychiatry](https://lorienpsych.com/). Whenever I post something here, people have had good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review.
This is a rough draft of my page on depression. I'm interested in any feedback you can give, including:
1. Typos
2. Places where you disagree with my recommendations / assessment of the evidence
3. Extra things you think I should add
4. Your personal stories about what things have or haven't helped, or any extra insight that your experience with depression has given you
5. Comments on the organization of the piece. I don't know how to balance wanting this to be accessible and easy-to-read with having it be thorough and convincing. Right now I've gone for a kind of FAQ format where you can only read the parts you want, but I'm doubtful about this choice.
6. Comments on the level of scientific formality. I tried to get somewhere in between "so evidence-based that I won't admit parachutes prevent injury without an RCT" and "here's some random stuff that came to me in a dream", and signal which part was which, but tell me if I fell too far to one side or the other.
Ignore the minor formatting issues inevitable in trying to copy-paste things into Substack, including the headings being too small and the spacing between words and before paragraphs being weird. In the real page, the table of contents will link to the subsections; I don’t know how to do that here so it might be harder to read.
Here's the page:
---
# **Ketamine**
**The short version:** Ketamine is a new and exciting depression treatment, which probably works by activating AMPA receptors and strengthening synaptic connections. It takes effect within hours and works about 2-3x as well as traditional antidepressants. Most people get it through heavily-regulated and expensive esketamine prescriptions, or through even-more-expensive IV ketamine clinics, but evidence suggests that getting it prescribed cheaply and conveniently from a compounding pharmacy is equally effective. A single dose of ketamine lasts between a few days and a few weeks, after which some people will find their depression comes back; long-term repeated dosing with ketamine anecdotally seems to work great, but hasn’t been formally tested for safety. Some people also use ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, which is a very different form of treatment and can have impressive long-term results, but which is less explored and more idiosyncratic for each person.
**The long version:**
*1. How can I get ketamine therapy?
2. How can I find a doctor willing to prescribe me ketamine?
3. How can my doctor prescribe me ketamine?
4. How safe is ketamine?
4.1: How concerned should I be about cognitive side effects of ketamine?
4.2: How concerned should I be about urinary side effects of ketamine?
4.3: How concerned should I be about hepatotoxicity from ketamine?
4.4: How concerned should I be about getting addicted to ketamine?
4.5: How concerned should I be about hypertension from ketamine?
5: How effective is ketamine?
6: Do I have to take ketamine IV? What about nasal and oral ketamine?
6.1. Do I have to take esketamine? What about regular ketamine?
7: What’s the right dose of ketamine?
7.1: What are the exact instructions for dosing ketamine correctly?
8: How long does ketamine work for? Do I have to keep taking it forever?
9: What is ketamine-assisted psychotherapy?
9.1: Where can I get ketamine-assisted psychotherapy?
9.2: Can I do informal ketamine-assisted psychotherapy on my own?
10. How does ketamine work?
11. Will you prescribe me ketamine?*
#### 1. How can I get ketamine therapy?
Getting access to ketamine is currently confusing, difficult, and expensive. There are three main routes you can use:
First, you can go to a ketamine clinic where an anaesthesiologist will inject you with IV ketamine. This has some real advantages: most of the studies have used IV ketamine, IV forms of any drug are usually the fastest-acting and most powerful, and this is the standard of care. It’s also expensive and annoying. A typical course would be six treatments over three weeks at $800 per treatment, for a total cost of $4800. Each session would take an hour or two, and require someone available to drive you back from the clinic afterwards. Insurance almost never covers this, and even if it works you may relapse after the three weeks and have to pay $4800 again. I appreciate the existence of these clinics but they’re not a realistic option for most patients.
Second, you can use Spravato. Spravato is an FDA-approved official ketamine spray. You won’t have get anything injected into your veins, and it’s a less “medical”-feeling experience than a clinic. But this has its own problems. Spravato isn’t *exactly* ketamine – it’s esketamine, a ketamine component, which might or might not work as well as regular ketamine. It’s only allowed in doses of 56 to 84 mg, which will be too low for many people. And it *also* costs about $6400/month and has to be administered in special clinics. The only saving grace is that some people’s insurances will cover this one after a lot of begging. I still don’t think it’s the best option for most people.
Third, you can just pick up pills of regular ketamine at a pharmacy for ~$10/dose, at whatever strength and schedule your doctor recommends, and take it at home, just like you do with any other medication. Why isn’t this method used more often? Because the ketamine they sell in pharmacies is officially approved for chronic pain. It’s totally 100% legal to use it for depression instead (this is called off-label prescribing), but because it doesn’t say “OFFICIALLY FOR DEPRESSION” on the label, a lot of doctors get confused and don’t want to prescribe it. Please consider using this method instead of spending your life savings on one of the others, then having no idea what to do when you need continued treatment.
#### 2. How can I find a doctor willing to prescribe me ketamine?
There is no good answer to this question. Most doctors won’t do this, and the few who do usually charge a lot of money. If you’re willing to spend a lot of money, you can Google “ketamine clinic [your area]” or “psychiatrist who prescribes ketamine [your area]” and probably find someone.
If you already have a psychiatrist, consider asking them if they’re willing to prescribe ketamine. If they express interest but say they don’t know how to do it safely and effectively, consider referring them to this document.
If you’re a psychiatrist or other MD, please consider prescribing ketamine to appropriate patients without charging them a lot of money! This document will tell you how!
#### 3. How can my doctor prescribe me ketamine?
They should look for a local compounding pharmacy that has ketamine available. Usually these places are easy to Google. Also, if they call up any compounding pharmacy in your area, that pharmacy should be able to say whether they dispense ketamine, and if not, refer them to one who does.
Ketamine may come in the form of a nasal spray or a troche (tablet you place under your tongue and let dissolve). I’ve listed some sample prescription regimens below in section 7 – your doctor can just write those on a prescription pad or send them through any e-prescription program.
#### 4. How safe is ketamine?
I think pretty safe, when used responsibly. All drugs potentially have side effects, but at effective doses, ketamine’s are no worse than anything else’s.
People definitely feel unusual (sometimes bad) while experiencing the acute effects of ketamine. In [Acevedo-Diaz et al’s study of ketamine infusions](https://chicagoivsolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/acevedo-diazetal.2019.pdf), over 80% of participants felt “strange, weird, or bizarre”; other popular adjectives included “spacey”, “woozy”, “loopy”, “floating”, and “numb”. I don’t consider any of these to be unexpected side effects; this is just what happens when you take a dissociative drug. That having been said, some people who take very low doses of oral or intranasal ketamine will avoid all of this. Also, [some studies](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26867988/) find rates of these feelings are no different on ketamine compared to placebo, maybe because people are pretty suggestible if you tell them they’re taking a drug that might make them feel weird.
There are common reports of severe side effects from recreational ketamine users, of which the best known are urinary (eg cystitis) and hepatic. It would be concerning if clinical use caused these at anywhere near the same rate. But we should remember that eg recreational amphetamine abuse produces all sorts of terrible side effects, but essentially none of them carry over to clinical amphetamine use (eg Adderall for ADHD). This is mostly because recreational users take doses orders of magnitude higher; “the dose makes the poison”.
For example, in [one Chinese study](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016517811731291X) of ketamine side effects, the recreational abusers had been using for an average of six years, 6.5 days a week, 3.5g / dose. That suggests a total lifetime burden of about 7000g of ketamine. For comparison, an average person who undergoes a course of ketamine infusion for depression receives about 8 doses of 35 mg each, for a total of about 3g of ketamine. It’s completely possible for 7000g of a substance to produce effects that 3g of the same substance doesn’t!
The four most concerning potential side effects of ketamine are cognitive effects, urotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, and hypertension. None of these concern me enough to stop prescribing normal doses of ketamine to appropriate patients. The rest of Part 4 is an explanation of why. Unless you’re really concerned about these side effects, feel free to skip it.
#### –4.1: How concerned should I be about cognitive side effects of ketamine?
Ketamine use causes acute distorted cognition for the next few hours. But there’s good evidence that this doesn’t lead to permanent damage at clinical doses.
From [Side effects associated with ketamine use in depression: a systematic review](https://www.kaimacdonald.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Short-2017-common-side-effects-with-ketamine-for-depression-w.pdf):
*In a study by Koffler and colleagues, 109 cognitive effects of ketamine in patients treated for chronic pain were extensively assessed with several neuropsychological tests before infusion and at 6 weeks post-infusion; they concluded that ketamine had no residual cognitive effects at 6 weeks. Murrough and colleagues reported that lowdose ketamine was associated with minimal acute neurocognitive effects in patients with treatmentresistant depression 40 min after ketamine infusion. They also reported that any changes in cognition appeared to be transient in nature, with no adverse neurocognitive effects 7 days after treatment. In both Koffler’s and Murrough’s studies, however, the followup periods were short, making it difficult to comment on longterm risks associated with repeated use.*
[A UK study](https://sci-hub.st/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.02761.x) compared frequent ketamine abusers to infrequent ones. The frequent group used an average of ~3 grams/day, at least four days a week, over several years. The infrequent abusers used about 1 gram/day, a few times a month, over several years. Although the frequent abusers had impaired cognition, the infrequent group didn’t. Both groups used much much much more ketamine than any clinical user would. This suggests that the threshold dose for long0term cognitive impairment is much higher than would be encountered in clinical use. Also, ex-ketamine users did as well as never-users, suggesting that even the impairments of high-dose ketamine use are not necessarily permanent.
#### –4.2: How concerned should I be about urinary side effects of ketamine?
[This UK survey](https://bjui-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1464-410X.2012.11028.x) finds about 25% of recreational users experience some kind of urinary problem, and 3% had gone to their doctor about it (but there was no control group, so there’s no way of knowing how much of this was caused by ketamine vs. incidental).
[In rats](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28413205/), 100 mg/kg of IV ketamine did not cause bladder inflammation, but 300 mg/kg does. Both of these are much higher than standard clinical doses, which usually range from about 0.5 – 3 mg/kg. This study did find that the lower dose caused interstitial nephritis, which as far as I know is not commonly a problem for humans.
Are there any reports of clinical users having urinary problems? [Consensus Guidelines On The Use Of Intravenous Ketamine Infusions For Chronic Pain](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6023575/) say they only know of a single case, the one reported in [this Journal of Urology article](https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.urology.2007.11.141). A 16 year old girl receiving 8 mg/kg oral ketamine for chronic pain developed various urinary symptoms; the ketamine dose was decreased to 2 mg/kg and they went away. However, the authors say they have seen three other such cases “briefly described on a palliative care drugs mailing list” (which I can’t access).
As far as I know, these four cases are the only known cases of cystitis from clinical ketamine use – out of all the thousands of patients over decades who must have received the drug. The 16-year-old – the only case where I have access to the details – was on a higher dose than ever gets used in psychiatry, and had brief, mild symptoms which went away immediately after going down to a lower dose. Based on these findings, I’m not especially concerned about urinary risk from ketamine with normal psychiatric use.
#### –4.3: How concerned should I be about hepatotoxicity from ketamine?
This is also [common in recreational users](https://www.cghjournal.org/article/S1542-3565(14)00239-0/abstract). Does it happen at clinical doses?
Most of the work on clinical hepatoxicity has been done on chronic pain patients, who take very long ketamine infusions for complex regional pain syndrome. In the two cases reported by [Zhu et al](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7323839/), liver injury began after 40-50 hours of continuous ketamine infusion, by which point patients had received 1000+ mg of ketamine. In the three cases reported by [Noppers et al](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304395911002181), liver enzymes were measured and found to be elevated after fifty hours, again after having received doses of ketamine in the 1000 mg + range.
Psychiatric ketamine infusions usually last one hour or less, and involve doses of 25 – 75 mg. As far as I know, there are no reports of liver injuries at these doses. [LiverTox says](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK551726/):
> *In patients on oral antidepressants, liver test abnormalities were no more frequent with the addition of nasal spray esketamine than with placebo. In the pivotal trials of esketamine as therapy of treatment- resistant depression, mean serum ALT, AST and alkaline phosphatase levels decreased during active therapy and there were no reports of serum enzyme elevations, jaundice, hepatitis, discontinuations for serum enzyme elevations or serious hepatic adverse events. Although long term ketamine use is known to be associated with bile duct injury and episodes of cholestatic jaundice, esketamine has not been linked to a similar pattern of biliary injury or cholestatic hepatitis when used under medical supervision to treat depression. There has been little clinical experience with long term use of esketamine, but no instances of clinically apparent liver injury have as yet been reported with its use.*
#### –4.4: How concerned should I be about getting addicted to ketamine?
There is no high-quality formal evidence about this topic. There are two case reports of patients getting addicted to normal doses of ketamine for depression ([1](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26926127/), [2](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26317449/)), though both are a bit unusual – one was a man who had been addicted to other prescription drugs before, another was an anaesthetist who self-administered. Remember that case reports often describe rare situations.
In general, I’m not very concerned about this with most patients, for a few reasons. First are the reports from expert prescribers, who say basically none of their patients ever get addicted. Second is the general experience of using addictive drugs in psychiatry – for example, amphetamine (Adderall), which despite its fearsome reputation as a street drug is rarely abused by patients who get it by prescription. Addiction is a biopsychosocial process and people without genetic and psychological predispositions to addiction are usually able to use these chemicals safely.
In a survey of drug experts, ketamine was ranked as less addictive than tobacco, alcohol, or Adderall, and around the same level as marijuana. If you would feel comfortable going out to a bar a few times without worrying about addiction, or smoking pot a few times without worrying about addiction, probably you also shouldn’t worry about getting a few ketamine infusions.
Long-term maintenance ketamine therapy has higher addiction risk, although still probably no higher than eg smoking marijuana regularly. One piece of good news is that there is no chemical dependence / withdrawal after coming off ketamine; any addiction is entirely psychological.
If you’ve gotten addicted to things before, or have a strong family history of drug addiction, or know that you have an addictive personality, you may want to avoid ketamine unless there are no other options. If you do get it, you might want to get it at a hospital or somewhere else where nobody is trusting you with your own supply of ketamine that you have to use responsibly.
#### –4.5: How concerned should I be about hypertension from ketamine?
Psychiatric doses of ketamine do cause transient hypertension, pretty often. UpToDate says that:
> *In four randomized trials, mean increases in systolic blood pressure ranged from 8 to 19 mmHg within 40 minutes of infusion, which normalized in four hours or less. In a pooled analysis of three randomized trials that included 97 patients who received a total of 205 infusions, the transient average peak increase was 20 mmHg.*
How dangerous are these increases? They’re lower than the natural increase in blood pressure during [heavy exercise](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3041529/) (about 60 mmHg) or [intense panic](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3675099/) (30 mmHg).
A team from Emory University monitored blood pressure during ketamine infusions, with plans to stop if systolic blood pressure increased by 45 mmHg, or diastolic by 30, or if patients reported symptoms of severe hypertension (headache, chest pain, dyspnea, blurry vision). They did not have to stop any of 684 infusions.
If blood pressure increases too high, there is a small risk of a stroke, burst aneurysm, or other severe consequence. I would be wary about giving ketamine to patients who are already hypertensive, or at elevated risk for any of those conditions. For everyone else, transient minor hypertension probably isn’t such a big deal.
#### 5: How effective is ketamine?
Pretty effective.
Studies find the effect of ketamine peaks about 24 hours after use. A [meta-analysis](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26867988/) finds that by that time around 50% of patients are feeling better (defined as 50% symptom reduction) compared to less than 10% of patients who got placebo. A [more recent Taiwanese study](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28492279/) finds roughly similar numbers.
Another way to measure effectiveness is through effect size statistics. The effect size of normal antidepressants like SSRIs is around 0.3. The effect size of ketamine is between [0.6](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.17060720) and [1.0](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26867988/), so about two to three times larger.
#### 6: Do I have to take ketamine IV? What about nasal and oral ketamine?
As far as I can tell, there’s no clear advantage of IV ketamine compared to intranasal and oral.
Here I’m working off of [The Effect Of Intravenous, Intranasal, And Oral Ketamine In Mood Disorders: A Meta-Analysis](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032720324472). Their data are hard to interpret, because different studies look at different time periods, and depending on what time period you choose, you can get different results. But in general, it shows about approximately equivalent efficacy for IV, IN, and PO ketamine (though they were hesitant to draw a firm conclusion about PO because of the small studies).
This tends to be the opinion of practitioners in the field too. I’m not sure why everyone insists on giving expensive, complicated, and potentially dangerous IV ketamine treatments when IN is right there.
#### –6.1. Do I have to take esketamine? What about regular ketamine?
No, take whichever.
[What happened was](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/11/ketamine-now-by-prescription/): people did lots of studies showing that ketamine treated depression. But ketamine didn’t have an “OFFICIALLY FOR DEPRESSION” stamp on it, and couldn’t get it without pharmaceutical companies spending millions of dollars to clear bureaucratic hurdles. And no pharmaceutical company wanted to do that, because ketamine is cheap, common, public-domain, and impossible to make money off of. So instead a pharmaceutical company took a ketamine component called esketamine and spent millions of dollars to clear the bureaucratic hurdles for that one. Esketamine is patented, expensive, and only the specific pharmaceutical company involved is allowed to make it. But because it’s OFFICIALLY APPROVED FOR DEPRESSION, lots of official people, including the FDA and insurance companies, will prefer you use it.
There is no reason to think that esketamine is any better than regular ketamine. Some sources note that it has stronger NMDA antagonism, but NMDA antagonism is probably not ketamine’s main mechanism of action anyway (see section 10 below). A few studies weakly suggest that regular ketamine works better than esketamine, although the difference is probably slight. Most of the highest-quality studies were done on regular ketamine, and it has the strongest support as a depression treatment, but I don’t want to exaggerate the difference. These are two very slightly different forms of ketamine and the differences between them are likely minor.
If you’re getting ketamine through your insurance, you’ll probably get esketamine, because insurance companies like officially endorsed things. Your doctor might also prefer giving you esketamine if they haven’t researched this topic very clearly, because pharma companies work hard to inform doctors about esketamine and work equally hard to make sure doctors *don’t* know that regular ketamine is an option. If this is the kind that’s most convenient for you to get, that’s fine, and you should try it and it will probably work.
If nobody is paying for your ketamine, then it becomes relevant that esketamine usually costs orders of magnitude more than regular ketamine, is harder to get, is more annoying to use, and comes in fewer convenient forms and doses. You will probably find that regular ketamine is more convenient for you, and that’s also fine, and you should try it and it will probably work.
#### 7: What’s the right dose of ketamine?
The standard dose of IV ketamine is 0.5 mg/kg (eg 35 mg for a 70 kg person). This is the dose used in [most studies](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032720324472) and recommended by UpToDate. If that doesn’t work, some people will try going up to 1 mg/kg.
The standard dose of intranasal ketamine is 50 – 80 mg. This is more or less the dose recommended by UpToDate, the dose used in [most studies](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032720324472#bib0011), the FDA-recommended dose of Spravato, and the dose that most successful ketamine providers have told me they use.
I’m less sure that there’s a standard dose of oral ketamine. The above sources say anything from 1 mg/kg body weight, to 50 mg, to as high as 150 mg or [300 mg](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30946543/).
In theory, ketamine bioavailability looks like this (below table is esketamine, but racemic ketamine is [similar](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Ketamine-pharmacokinetics-based-on-route-of-administration_tbl1_258035221)):
IV is the best-studied route, and we know that 0.5 mg/kg is a good dose – so again, that’s 35 mg for our 70 kg patient. That would suggest that the same patient should get 70 mg nasal, 140 mg sublingual, and 175 mg orally. The 70 mg nasal seems to match the high end of prevailing practice, but the calculations for oral suggest that most prevailing practice is too low. Since different sources give different numbers for oral anyway, I would just err on the side of the higher sources.
Also, all of this is kind of arbitrary. Sometimes people will randomly give patients 800 mg doses of ketamine, and they do fine. I wouldn’t recommend this, but I can’t really say why not, except that it’s not prevailing practice, and smaller doses seem to work equally well. Remember that recreational users are taking 3,000 mg a day or higher – this doesn’t exactly go *well* for them, but they also don’t die immediately. My point is that ketamine is a compound with a very wide therapeutic index and you probably don’t need to panic about getting it exactly right.
#### –7.1: What are the exact instructions for dosing ketamine correctly?
Here are the instructions I ended up with after asking various experts who report success prescribing ketamine:
Get a compounding pharmacy to prepare a ketamine 100 mg/ml saline nasal spray solution, in an intranasal spray bottle that sprays 0.1 ml at a time (so, 10 mg/spray).
Your first few tries will be tests to make sure you respond okay to the ketamine. Have a friend sit with you for these sessions. Expect each test to take about three hours, ie that’s the amount of time you would feel bad for if you were going to have a bad reaction.
Start by spraying one spray of ketamine (= 10 mg) into one nostril. This is your first test. Wait three hours and see if anything bad happens. The most likely bad things are you feel nauseous, “weird”, or confused, or you have mild unpleasant hallucinations. Realistically the hallucinations will not happen at this dose, but check for them anyway, to make sure you’re not some kind of rare super-responder. If they do happen, try to wait it out with your friend. If something worse happens, or you’re really concerned, call your doctor - or, in an emergency, 9-1-1.
The next day, try a slightly stronger test. Spray one spray into one nostril, then wait ten minutes, then another spray into the other nostril, then wait ten minutes, then another spray into the first nostril again, for a total of three sprays (= 30 mg) over 20 minutes. Then wait three hours, as before, and see how you do.
The next day, try a full dose. This is five sprays (= 50 mg), by the same alternating-and-waiting process as before. Hopefully, 24 hours after this one you should be feeling some positive effect (ie your depression is better). If you’re not, talk to your doctor about potentially increasing your dose. If you *are*, talk to your doctor about how long you’re going to keep doing this for. Usually I tell my patients to take this dose twice a week for a month, then reassess – with the plan usually being to stop at that point and see whether the depression comes back vs. is gone for good.
Realistically this whole procedure is overcautious. Again, a bunch of people at raves will randomly take 1000 mg + their first time, have some crazy hallucinations, and then feel fine. I think it’s a good idea to err on the side of caution, but if for some reason this is a desperate situation or this gradually escalating process of testing doesn’t work for you, there’s no compelling medical reason why you can’t take a full dose your first time. If you have to do this, I would doubly recommend having a very trusted friend watching you.
#### 8: How long does ketamine work for? Do I have to keep taking it forever?
Good question, currently without a good answer.
Different studies give somewhat different results for how long ketamine lasts, as do reports from expert prescribers. Median time until relapse (ie the point at which half of the people who got better after taking ketamine will be depressed again) is variously given as two weeks, four weeks, or a few months. [This meta-analysis](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032720327026?via%3Dihub) looks at four studies of ketamine effect duration; the most pessimistic finds a median time until relapse of one week, the most optimistic of one month. Here’s a pretty typical finding ([source](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(12)00557-4/fulltext); this is based on 17 patients and yet it’s still the best I could find):
Seems pretty bad. Are there ways to make sure you stay un-depressed after successfully using ketamine?
This has been surprisingly poorly studied. A few very weak studies have shown weak positive effects from following up ketamine with [cognitive behavioral therapy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5516265/) or [transcranial magnetic stimulation](https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2405844019358475). This studies are very preliminary and I don’t think it’s worth taking them too seriously at this stage. I’m also not sure whether the idea is that these have some sort of special interaction with ketamine, or whether these are just generally good treatments for depression, and doing any good treatment for depression will keep you non-depressed longer than not doing it.
In other extreme depression treatments, like ECT, a common strategy is to do the treatment, then put the patient on a traditional antidepressant afterwards to try to sustain the effect. This has not really been studied for ketamine, except one study using lithium as the traditional antidepressant (lithium monotherapy isn’t really that traditional for unipolar depression), which [didn’t work](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-019-0365-0). As far as I know, nobody has done any work on whether ketamine + SSRI is able to maintain remission longer than ketamine alone, which is a weird and gaping omission.
One obvious route is to just keep using ketamine regularly. This probably works. [One study](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032720325349?via%3Dihub) found that about half of people who keep getting repeated ketamine infusions stay non-depressed after a few months, which is better than you’d expect from a single course. [This study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30063304/) supposedly is more pessimistic, but I’m unable to access full-text. Anecdotes from clinics and prescribers suggest that people often need to maintain remission by getting regular ketamine “top-ups”, usually around the order of however long it takes the ketamine to stop working. So if ketamine works for two weeks and then stops, you should probably get ketamine infusions sometime more often than once every two weeks. This is a very bad match for the traditional ketamine delivery method where you pay a clinic thousands of dollars per infusion. It’s a much better match for oral or inhaled ketamine, which is one reason I think these methods are preferable.
How long do you have to take regular ketamine? And how long can you safely take regular ketamine? There is no good evidence around this question. By analogy to other, better-studied forms of depression treatment, it would make sense to continue ketamine for six months (the average length of a depressive episode) and then go off it and see if your depression has improved on its own. If that doesn’t work, then for other antidepressants we might have you go back on them and try again every year or two, until it becomes obvious that this isn’t worth it, after which you continue them indefinitely. There is very little formal evidence about the long-term safety of ketamine. Informally, some patients have been taking it a few times a week for a few years now and seem to be doing okay, and recreational users seem to be able to handle long-term use of much higher doses. This doesn’t meet usual standards of medical evidence for establishing safety, but if the alternative is being severely depressed indefinitely, then taking your chances with regular ketamine seems like a better bet.
I can’t stress enough how poor the research is here and how little anyone seems to care about this. Ask your doctor and rely on their common sense and intuition. My personal common sense and intuition tells me that if ketamine works for recovery, it will probably work for maintenance too, and if it’s the only thing that will treat depression, it’s probably worth it.
#### 9: What is ketamine-assisted psychotherapy?
The standard use of ketamine is purely biochemical – ketamine does something to NMDA receptors (or AMPA receptors, or whatever) and that makes you temporarily less depressed while it’s doing that.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is a little different, and works more like other drug-assisted therapies (eg with LSD or MDMA). The idea is that ketamine gets you into an unusually fluid mental state where you’re able to reach insights and produce changes that would otherwise be unavailable (for a description of why this might happen, read [Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain](https://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316?fbclid=IwAR36UzFla5Lfx7-4LTr6R8N0XdUSOnbg3gnRPXn806cPKO7Zsas2EsJJhDs) or [this review of it](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/)). Ketamine isn’t a traditional psychedelic, but it seems to produce some of the same effects.
In a typical KAP session, the patient would take a high dose of ketamine – usually significantly higher than in normal ketamine treatment. Then they would lie down in a comfortable position and “form an intention” (eg “I want to understand why I feel so stuck in my job”). While on the ketamine, they would watch the flow of thoughts that came to them, holding the intention very lightly (ie not worrying or beating themselves up too much if their train of thought goes somewhere else). A therapist would sit with them, guide them, and gently ask them questions. This usually wouldn’t be some kind of very formal therapy like CBT – the goal would just be to sit with the patient as they explore their own thoughts for a few hours. This might be preceded by a few “getting to know you sessions” and followed by a few “integrating the material” sessions.
There are no good studies showing this works. [Here](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30917760/) is an open-label, no-placebo study showing it works, but everything works in open-label non-placebo studies. That having been said, many patients say it works, and there’s strong preliminary evidence for other psychedelic therapies like MDMA.
This does have some disadvantages of this over regular ketamine therapy. In order to get into a “trance” state, you have to take more ketamine than you would usually use for a purely-biological treatment. The purely biological treatment can usually be completed without you feeling anything too weird or hallucinatory or foreign to your usual mental state; the ketamine-assisted psychotherapy usually can’t. Dissociating, feeling in a trance, or having “out of body experiences” are considered standard parts of this modality.
#### –9.1: Where can I get ketamine-assisted psychotherapy?
Various clinics offer it all over the country. Here in the Bay Area, [Polaris Health](https://www.polarisinsight.com/) is a very well-regarded provider. They charge $950 for a single three-hour therapy session, plus extra costs for an intake session, a preparation session, etc. Overall, expect this to get well into the four digits, and don’t expect insurance to pay for it. I don’t think this is good value for money for anybody on a limited budget, *if* the alternative is having a doctor prescribe you inexpensive intranasal ketamine/ketamine lozenges. If your only other option is IV ketamine clinics that charge as much or more, you might as well take the free therapy (though be careful when making this calculation, IV clinic prices are often per course of ~6 sessions whereas psychotherapy prices are per session).
[Sage Institute](https://sageinst.org/kat) is a great organization which gives “sliding scale” treatments to less-well-off people who can’t afford the full cost, but unsurprisingly they have a long wait list.
#### –9.2: Can I do informal ketamine-assisted therapy on my own?
Obviously this is a sketchy idea, but how sketchy, exactly?
Several ketamine-assisted psychotherapy clinics have patients do their first session, or first few sessions, with a therapist. Then once the patient is familiar with it, they let them do further sessions at home with a friend or relative they trust.
Some people without access to a KAP clinic, but with access to ketamine, try a version of this where they skip the part where they interact with the formal medical system. Among the many disadvantages: you would have to figure out the right dose yourself (it’s different from person to person), you wouldn’t have a professional screening you to make sure you’re a good candidate for ketamine (this is mostly simple things like checking if you’re pregnant, but there are many simple things), your friend would have to call a hospital if something went wrong, and you would need to really trust your friend to be supportive and good at helping you through the experience.
(*[source](https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30917760/)*)
Also, a common opinion among KAP providers is that ketamine is less good for this than LSD or MDMA, and is only their drug of choice because it’s legal. If you’re going to do this illegally, you might want to consider using an actually illegal substance, which could be more effective.
#### 10. How does ketamine work?
Currently this is very poorly understood.
Ketamine is a very strong antagonist of NMDA receptors, one of the key excitatory receptors in the brain. That is, most of the time when neurons want to tell other neurons to be more active, they release a chemical called glutamate, which is detected by NMDA receptors, which activate the neuron. Since ketamine antagonizes these receptors, it prevents neurons from being activated – although, just to make all this more complicated, many neurons suppress other neurons, and when these neurons are less active, it makes other neurons more activate. For many years, scientists assumed that somehow all of this had something to do with ketamine treating depression, although nobody was really sure how, and other NMDA receptor antagonists didn’t seem to treat depression at all. My impression is that this theory is now on thin ice, and that the people who keep repeating it aren’t really up to date on the research.
Over the past few years, increasing evidence suggests that ketamine (or possibly its metabolite hydroxynorketamine) activates a different glutamate receptor called AMPA. Activation of AMPA leads to various changes in the cell (like activation of mTOR and release of BDNF) which promote increased synapse strength. Since depression is plausibly a condition of decreased synapse strength, or imbalanced synapse strength in different parts of the brain, this increase in synapse strength helps treat depression. You can read a very technical presentation of some of these ideas [here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5487269/).
Other theories include that ketamine is secretly an opioid and maybe opioids treat depression for some reason (based on [this study](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18020138), but contradicted by [this study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6439824/), and I think no longer really plausible), that ketamine is [a really impressive placebo](https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/what-does-it-all-ketamine) (I think contradicted by eg mouse studies, studies with active placebo comparator, etc, but some smart people still believe this) and that it’s a [really complicated combination of all sorts of things we’ve barely begun to understand](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210844014200062) (almost certainly true).
#### 11. Will you prescribe me ketamine?
I sometimes prescribe patients ketamine, but I prefer not do to do this until they’ve tried a few traditional antidepressants first to see if that’s enough.
Why? First and foremost, because although I’m optimistic about ketamine, it’s new and poorly understood, and anything which is new and poorly understood has higher risk of having some side effect we don’t know about. Second, because the effects of ketamine wear off quickly unless you continue taking it indefinitely, and continuing ketamine indefinitely is *very* poorly understood and makes me nervous. Third, because even if you use regular ketamine from a compounding pharmacy (the cheapest method) it’s going to be more expensive than other medications and not covered by insurance, and if you need to pay for this expensive thing indefinitely it will be very expensive, and I would rather you start by taking another antidepressant which you can use indefinitely for much cheaper. Fourth, because the government controls ketamine pretty carefully, this is bad for me insofar as I have to convince the government I’m not dispensing it irresponsibly, and it’s bad for you insofar as you have to navigate the bureaucracy around picking up a controlled substance, which is much harder than picking up a regular medication. And fifth, because although the risk of getting addicted to ketamine is low, it can happen, especially if you take it indefinitely, and I’d rather start with antidepressants that don’t have that risk.
If you’ve failed many other medications and have severe depression, I’m happy to work with you in investigating other strategies, and ketamine might be one of them. I would prefer patients not join my practice just to get ketamine, and you should be prepared for me not to give it to you if I don’t think it’s the best choice. | Scott Alexander | 38951338 | Peer Review Request: Ketamine | acx |
# Open Thread 181
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** Thanks to everyone who participated in the Reader Survey - and if you didn’t, [check it out here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-take-the-reader-survey). One correction - several people couldn’t access survey 21, the one on optical illusions. This was my fault. It should be fixed now, so if you were affected, you can [take it here](https://jatos.mindprobe.eu/publix/1521/start?batchId=1702&generalMultiple). Warning: it is very long.
**2:** Some good comments on the most recent prediction market post (also some less good ones - before you hit “post”, see if you’ve accidentally proven the stock market can’t exist). See eg Shaked [running some of the numbers](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/use-prediction-markets-to-fund-investigative/comments#comment-2367586) and finding it might work for a few very important people/issues, but maybe not for smaller things. Also, apparently Byrne Hobart had a similar (though less crazy) idea [two years ago](https://byrnehobart.medium.com/an-open-ipo-window-will-save-investigative-journalism-1c09947c24b6); I regret unintentionally copying him without credit.
**3:** “Comment” (or whatever) of the week is this post from the subreddit: [I Believe We May Be At Another Point Like March 2020 With COVID](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ol673r/i_believe_we_may_be_at_another_point_like_march/). I haven’t looked into this as much as I want to, but the little I know about Delta is really concerning.
**4:** Future Perfect - Vox’s journalism team covering effective altruism, existential risk, and related topics - is hiring (for remote work). You would get to work with my friend and housemate Kelsey Piper, along with a bunch of other people who I am assured are also great. Read more and apply [here](https://boards.greenhouse.io/voxmedia/jobs/3298042?gh_jid=3298042). | Scott Alexander | 38883862 | Open Thread 181 | acx |
# Please Take The Reader Survey [Update: Now It Is Closed And You Can Stop Taking It]
**[[Update 7/30/21: I am officially closing this project. There is no need to take these surveys any more and any further responses won’t be counted.**]]
All right, here goes.
This is a project to support studies by ACX community members, by getting readers to fill out research surveys. You’ll fill out the General Demographic Information survey first, then however many additional surveys you have the patience for.
Please start with Survey #0 (general demographics). After that, in order to prevent a scenario where the first few surveys get lots of responses and the last few get none, please jump to the survey corresponding to your date of birth. So if you were born on the 16th of the month, start with survey #16 (“Personality”), then when you’re done move on to survey #17, and so on. Keep going until you’re bored and don’t want to take any more surveys. Since there are 24 surveys and 31 possible birth dates, numbers 25-31 are redirects to other numbers. I would be surprised if anyone had the patience to take all 24 surveys here, but if you do, feel free to boast about it in the comments so we can praise you / be concerned about you.
Some surveys are targeted at specific populations, for example “psychedelic users”. If you’re not in the population, you can skip the survey. If you spot a survey targeted at you, consider skipping the usual order to take that one first.
Other surveys are on potentially sensitive or controversial topics - for example, one on incest (it’s by an anthropologist! They’re supposed to be interested in that kind of thing!) If any survey makes you uncomfortable, please just skip it. One survey is also on autogynephilia, a controversial topic related to transgender that many trans people find offensive. I trust the researcher involved to handle the data in a sensitive way, but again, if you’re uncomfortable, please skip it.
If you notice any surveys that aren’t working, please tell me in the comments. Without further ado:
**0: [General Demographic Information](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdHhuq1Ca3pWx8oYubGOyNgEAzrfzF7wM3FEyBVoCW6IAYM1g/viewform?usp=send_form) (take this first!)**
1: [Biostasis and Cryonics](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdysEtvdByfTVyrgfva0D6h02vo1tetJkDw3pTby-cchomcxw/viewform)
2: [Family Demographics And Homosexuality](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdLC3Zf6BBJ4Ekwp0olJAU7Cld-ANJf8ofovptr4LEJCZHRKg/viewform)
3: [Health-Related Quality Of Life](https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/1keF_24c4KTn9yVz3jyHjx9VliGn7CQhI9L4z1kZj5Mk/viewform?edit_requested=true)
4: [Digital Literacy](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdKCUXqR84dKQfEqQXhkaS4yC1tFSccUzCAiqu3QMaEzmR6zQ/viewform)
5: [Depression](https://nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3wOzEKHN82bfHEO) (targeted at people with depression/anxiety)
6: [Weight Gain/Loss](https://nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4UXFiUUA7XKRCo6)
7: [Meditative Experiences](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdLHRz9urkxn-sNVvOPMjdVviQEpyIGO9IRFmLMUhITsh16lA/viewform)
8: [Understanding Your Beliefs](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScrIwvylmxIKcKGfCIG5SqUgPvTVIe_3BU24zu_YDDRqYJ1yQ/viewform?usp=sf_link)
9: [COVID-19 Impact](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfnbE2_d4UhA9XuW7PjL0tNNkQQAiUybPo4Y34ahGkOqSVvGA/viewform?usp=sf_link)
10: [Moral Curiosity](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe6loak3Vk_1fzycbqhEEquS52Q9fEfQGmFbPRU-N1hQlWn9g/viewform?usp=sf_link)
11: [Autogynephilia In Trans Women](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc3_qIkOmf9xXOC4d_mEuaWTRfl6OfCFK5ErcEHOz7sSKR8Og/viewform) (targeted at trans women)
12: [Sexual Fantasies](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf7pwef6llZlmWpUOsKOYni97eEK6IirVavQUdYSwF_o4LbaA/viewform)
13: [Psychedelic Effects](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfm8_ou3WRUIvuJ0r7ljMD12nW1PgaZTF69k9kYDK4cqJBTtA/viewform) (targeted at psychedelic users)
14: [Attitudes About Business](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1o1Xgw6UFUwtZOyuMYhMX1y37jES5hC3QiTp-vVqV0T4/viewform?edit_requested=true) (targeted at people in tech)
15: [Incest Attitudes](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf0SloM3Etj14WRo91PME6isw6klQ4B0d_VFXiBYH_uPbv4pw/viewform)
16: [Personality](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdf9YLnsP_MuY4SmD3k0nxQY_QKqnowUlkxkCwlLwBDELDGFQ/viewform)
17: [Gender Identity](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScvE0dYqbj-Dd_U3P7Tm8TSu2z22fAbqKr2mtJpXZxBJp6m3A/viewform)
18: [Rhyme](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScLp4Sh9BZ4rlr7sb_YPX3_QRlgAuI9jVr91gSDEQbXXsPnzA/viewform) (targeted at non-native English speakers)
19: [Attentional Focus And Performance Orientation](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdljCVMhqqADhFldyPZfcJibeAQaBEsDTb1rInFJ55NxpIFLA/viewform)
20: [Behavior During COVID](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdj9Blt7KfcZb79W4zFrnW5-MGPoK6WGUtSvek8Ab4SEFSaOg/viewform)
21: [Optical Illusion](https://jatos.mindprobe.eu/publix/1521/start?batchId=1702&generalMultiple) (may take a little while to load, be patient)
22: [More Psychedelics](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfA3QHuGGKuDBoC29zwJLN7MKhHViyxokGHTftyNfFBdaErGA/viewform)
23: [Metaphysics](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdBxEX8ckdmzu2MjKXSv1IPpP9ANK05v2vumJ3hyH_CVTLkGQ/viewform)
24: [ACX Customer Satisfaction Survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdi5IM0MDrXcMca8C-f44_ux9IT-URqxfVBCXYM56FD1vQEhg/viewform)
25: Go to 1
26: Go to 4
27: Go to 7
28: Go to 10
29: Go to 13
30: Go to 16
31: Go to 19 | Scott Alexander | 38850961 | Please Take The Reader Survey [Update: Now It Is Closed And You Can Stop Taking It] | acx |
# Book Review: Crazy Like Us
We talk a lot about falling biodiversity. Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg “falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever. In *[Crazy Like Us](https://amzn.to/3rayK3U),* Ethan Watters sounds the alarm about falling psychiatric biodiversity. Along with all the usual effects of globalization, everyone is starting to have the same mental illnesses, and to understand them in the same way. This is bad insofar as greater diversity of mental illness could teach us something about the process that generates them, and greater diversity of frameworks and responses could teach us something about how to treat them.
He makes his point through four case studies, starting with:
**I. Anorexia In Hong Kong**
Until the 1990s, there was almost no anorexia in Hong Kong. There were lots of patriarchal beauty standards, everyone was very obsessed with being thin, but anorexia as a disease was basically unknown.
At least this is the claim of Sing Lee, a Hong Kong psychiatrist who studied in the West. He learned about anorexia during his training in Britain, then went back to Hong Kong prepared to treat it. He couldn't find anybody. He tried really hard! He put out feelers, asking if anyone knew anybody who was having some kind of psychiatric problem where they were starving themselves. With apologies for the unintended offensive pun - nobody bit.
After a while, he was eventually able to scrounge up a handful of cases. But this was almost more infuriating than nothing at all: the few anorexics he was able to find couldn't be less interested in thinness or beauty standards or anything like that. Also (unlike in the West) they weren't delusionally sure that they were fat. They were very aware that they were starving themselves to death, and they were against this. They just felt like they had some sort of nausea or stomach disease which made it impossible for them to eat. The stomach doctors said they were fine, and usually this started during some time of profound stress, so it was reasonable to think this was a mental disorder - and given that, it was probably reasonable to call it anorexia. It just didn't look like the typical Western version where people were scared of being fat and really wanted to be thin so they could be be ballerinas or whatever. The would-be ballerinas were just dieting normally and becoming ballerinas, and other people with unrelated stresses were getting anorexia.
This lasted until November 24, 1994, when a photogenic schoolgirl collapsed and died on a busy Hong Kong street in the middle of rush hour. The cause of death appeared to be anorexia, a condition most Hong Kongers had never heard of. News cameras caught the whole thing, covered it out of morbid fascination, and it became a sort of national panic. Western experts were flown in to hold public awareness campaigns where they went on TV and said that anorexia was a debilitating condition where patriarchal-beauty-standard-obsessed women dieted to death, and no doubt it was rampant in Hong Kong, and it was important that everyone be aware of how rampant it was so that the problems of ignorance and underdiagnosis could be fixed. Experts would go into girls' boarding schools and lecture the students about how much anorexia they probably had and how publically aware of it they needed to be.
(the few Hong Kong experts who were consulted mentioned that they basically never saw anorexic patients, that none of their anorexic patients seemed especially fixated on beauty or thinness, and that they suspected the dead girl was just a rare outlier)
Anyway, after a few months of this, psychiatrists reported loads of anorexia cases, hundreds of times as many as there had been before the public awareness campaigns, and all the patients said it was definitely because they were afraid of being fat. The doctors were left extremely suspicious that the public awareness campaign had been a vector for the condition.
Weirdly enough, all of this had happened before. According Watters, pre-industrial Europe had the same pattern of anorexia as Hong Kong - rare, extremely scattered cases, mostly for stress reasons unrelated to beauty standards (plus or minus [a couple of weird nuns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia_mirabilis)). At the dawn of scientific psychiatry in the 19th century, most neurotic illnesses among women were classified under the general heading of "hysteria". Common hysterical symptoms were nervous tics, sudden inexplicable paralysis of the limbs, on-and-off blindness, convulsions, amnesia, and inability to walk (none of which are typical symptoms of depression/anxiety today!) Around the 1850s, some hysterics started also having something like anorexia. Psychiatrists found this fascinating, wrote a bunch of well-received papers about it, and it became a common topic of discussion in Victorian salons. As interest in the disease spread, so did the disease itself, with anorexia going from one of the rarest hysterical symptoms to one of the most common. Incidence peaked around 1900, after which it slowly trailed off, until around 1940 it was vanishingly rare again. Watters quotes medical historians who attribute this to decreasing interest: once it became so dirt-common that doctors stopped writing papers about it and high-society types stopped talking about it in hushed voices, it became boring and gradually died out. The disorder came back in the 1970s and 80s, for a bunch of reasons. First, a famous singer, Karen Carpenter, collapsed on stage from anorexia, making the news in the same way as the Hong Kong schoolgirl case. Second, terrible 1970s feminists learned about it and started [romanticizing it](https://books.google.com/books?id=yggBuXvMy74C&pg=PA114#v=onepage&q&f=false) as some sort of brave hunger strike against the patriarchy. Third, and probably most important, US obesity rates went like this:
([source](https://thefatfactsinfo.wordpress.com/))
By the late 1980s, anorexia had “caught on” a second time, and people were getting it at higher rates than ever.
Here Watters is working off a theory, sometimes raised by psychiatrists and medical historians, that I think of as a kind of Kantian perspective on mental illness. Kant, remember, said that we have no idea what actual reality is; we see reality through the filter of our own preconceived notions and mental categories, and although there is an external world, we shouldn't claim to know very much about it. In the same way, Watters suggests, there probably is some base-level objectively-real mental illness. If you have to think of it as something, you can think of it as formless extreme stress, looking for an outlet. But the particular way the stress finds an outlet is based on the patient's cultural preconceptions. If you believe that stressed people go blind, you'll go blind. If you believe that stress people act possessed by demons, you'll act possessed by demons. And if you believe that stressed people become obsessed with being really thin and starve themselves, you might become obsessed with being really thin and starve yourself. A few people will have some natural tendency towards one outlet or another - there are a tiny handful of anorexics even in societies like pre-1990 Hong Kong that don't recognize anorexia, just as there are a few modern Westerners who still act possessed by demons. But unless you're especially predisposed towards some method or another, your stress will take the outlet already worn to a deep groove by your cultural milieu.
Does this explain what happened in Hong Kong? I'm not sure.
First, my own theory of anorexia (discussed [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/05/giudice-on-the-self-starvation-cycle/)) is that it's a natural (though hard-to-explain) response to any extreme ego-syntonic dieting - if you extreme-diet long enough, and enjoy it, and maybe have a certain predisposition, your body will "get stuck" in extreme dieting mode and refuse to go back. This would explain why medieval nuns who got too into fasting got it. It would explain why modern Westerners who get too into looking beautiful get it. It would explain why pre-1990 Hong Kongers who were really depressed and couldn't eat got it. It would even explain why Sing Lee got it. Lee (the psychiatrist whose work on Hong Kong anorexia frames the chapter) had a proper old-school experimental temperament, and decided that he wouldn't be able to treat anorexics unless he really understood them. So he decided to starve himself, and for the first three months it was just as unpleasant as you would expect, and then after that it started being really fun, and he felt great about it, and he had to call off the experiment because he didn't want to actually give himself anorexia. I'm not sure how to square this with the culture-bound syndrome position. Maybe whether or not a given extreme diet becomes anorexia is culture-bound? Maybe learning about anorexia inspires a bunch of [wannarexics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannarexia) who then start dieting? I don't know, but it doesn't really fit.
Second, there's something weird about which societies have weight problems to begin with. Mid-20th-century America had low rates of overweight and obesity. Around 1970, rates began to grow very quickly; the same happened in other countries with various time delays. I don’t have a graph for Hong Kong, but here’s China:
So sure, 1980s Hong Kong had thinness-based beauty standards without any anorexia. But maybe that’s because everyone met the thinness-based beauty standard easily. Once this became hard, and “what if I’m too fat?” became a serious concern, people started getting anorexia. For all I know this happened in the 1990s, although if it’s true that doctors started seeing orders of magnitude more anorexics over the space of a few months I guess that’s still a bit fast for this explanation. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind.
Third, what about the obvious null hypothesis: there were lots of anorexics, they were being anorexic in secret (as most anorexics do!), and nobody took them to the doctor because nobody realized “my weird daughter is dieting too much” was a medical problem? I am a little skeptical of this because in America most advanced cases of anorexia end up with psychiatrists whether or not the patient tries to cover it up, simply because they pass out from lack of food, end up at the hospital, and then the hospital doctors get a psych consult. Of all psych disorders, anorexia is kind of the hardest to push a “suffering in silence” hypothesis for. Still, this is going to come up again and again, so we should at least consider it.
**II. Depression In Japan**
The frame story here is about a top anthropologist invited by GlaxoSmithKline to a lavish conference at a five-star resort in Japan. They asked him a bunch of questions about the cultural construction of mental illness. He pressed deeper and learned they were trying to “raise awareness of” depression in Japan as part of their effort to market the antidepressant Paxil there. This had, Watters thinks, much the same effect as “raising awareness of” anorexia in Hong Kong.
Here I’m less sure about where Watters is going. It seems like a stretch to argue that 1990s pharma companies introduced depression to Japan - a country where committing suicide is basically the national pastime. But *Crazy Like Us* tries its best. It says that although Japanese people commit lots of suicide, in their culture this is considered a reasonable response to feeling like they’ve shamed their family or lost their honor or something, very different from the Western idea of “some person isn’t able to cope with their depression and shoots themselves in a fit of despair they would have regretted in a few days if they had lived”. And although pre-1990s Japanese people sometimes got, let’s say, “spells of low mood”, they thought of this as a normal part of life which it’s important to go through and probably learn lessons from.
A sign at [Aokigahara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aokigahara#Suicides), a popular Japanese suicide hotspot, urges visitors not to kill themselves.
The pre-1990s Japanese word for depression was *utsubyo*, which meant a lifetime tendency to extremely severe depression that would probably land you in a mental hospital. *Utsubyo* was considered a rare but severe mental illness much like schizophrenia, one that a few unlucky people had, probably for genetic reasons, but that most people would never have to worry about.
(I don’t remember if Watters mentions it, but this is also the pre-mid-20th-century American/European conception of depression - there’s nothing particularly Japanese about it. The usual term for this idea is *melancholia*, sometimes used to mean an especially severe endogenous depression, although other people use the word in different and confusing ways. Better historians than I can debate whether the West saw the concept of melancholia fade gradually into modern depression, or whether it had to do with SSRI-induced marketing campaigns here too; I suspect there was a gradual halfway transition from 1900 - 1990, followed by an extremely sudden transition after the invention of SSRIs and the publication of *Listening To Prozac*. But let’s go back to pretending this is an exotic Japanese phenomenon.)
As part of GlaxoSmithKline’s marketing work, they replaced *utsubyo* with a new idea, *kokoro no kaze*, “cold of the soul”. This was supposed to mean that depression was a minor illness (like a cold), something everyone got occasionally (like a cold), and something that was purely biological and could/should be controlled with medication (like a cold). Japanese people were extremely excited about this and bought Paxil by the bushel, and now they use SSRIs at a rate close to Americans.
I was kind of unimpressed with this chapter. It seems pretty obvious that Japanese people got depressed before Paxil’s marketing campaign, including depressed to the point of suicide. GlaxoSmithKline comes off looking a bit manipulative, but it does kind of seem like the rush to get Paxil after their advertising campaign was less “sinister pharma company invents a new disease” and more “oh my god, there’s a name for this thing that I’m suffering from and maybe someone can help me!” There’s certainly a philosophical issue here - do you shrug off depression as just a part of life, or medicalize it? - but it’s not obvious that there’s anything different or uniquely Japanese about this question, or that Westerners made anything worse by exposing Japan to our solution.
Much more fun was the history of Japanese mental illness, which focused on neurasthensia. This was another one of those fully-generic late-1800s diagnoses like hysteria (I assume late-1800s psychiatrists just sort of flipped a coin: heads you were neurasthenic, tails you were hysteric). Around the Meiji Restoration, when everyone was obsessed with how great foreign stuff was, Japanese medical students went to Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became first a fashion, then a class marker. The idea was that neurasthenics were people who were working too hard (good, admirable), and who were so smart and doing so much furious intellectual activity that it was straining their nerves (impressive). Also, they were probably sensitive souls too pure for this world. The most embarrassing extreme of this happened in 1903, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death. Everyone praised him for how sensitive and artistic and neurasthenic this was, and turned him into a posthumous national hero. Meanwhile, “in 1902 an article reported that fully one-third of patients visiting hospitals for consultations were suffering from the new disease.”
Eventually Japanese psychiatrists got fed up, and started announcing that actually neurasthenia sucked and you should not have it. From a 1906 Japanese neurology journal:
> These days, young students talk about such stuff as “the philosophy of life”. They confront important and profound problems of life, are defeated, and develop neurasthenia. Those who jump off a waterfall or throw themselves in front of a train are weak-minded. They do not have a strong mental constitution and develop mental illness, dying in the end. How useless they are! Such weak-minded people would only cause harm even if they remained alive.
Finally everyone struck a compromise and agreed that most of the lower-class patients weren’t real neurasthenics (hard-working, intelligent, sensitive, admirable), but had a similar condition, imitating the symptoms of neurasthenia, based on being too weak and pathetic to cope. This seemed to do the trick, and people stopped coming to the hospital with neurasthenia symptoms. Watters writes:
> Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of limiting its adoption. By the end of World War II the diagnosis had almost completely gone out of style among both psychiatrists and the population at large.
I find this about 1000% more interesting than some debate over whether GlaxoSmithKline marketed Paxil too aggressively. He who has ears to hear, let him listen.
**III. PTSD In Sri Lanka**
In 2004, a magnitude 9 earthquake struck the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami devastated Southeast Asia. One of the worst-affected countries was Sri Lanka, where 30,000 people died and millions were left homeless.
Foreign aid agencies sprung into action to try to support the survivors. Joining in the general mobilization were Western mental health professionals, who predicted a [insert some term other than “wave”] of post-traumatic stress disorder cases.
I cannot do justice to *Crazy Like Us*’ excellent portrayal of these people. They combined a genuine and admirable desire to go halfway around the world to help people in need, with a burning desire to be “culturally sensitive” and reject “white savior narratives”, with a total lack of even the tiniest amount of actual knowledge about Sri Lanka. The island nation was [insert some term other than “inundated” or “flooded”] with a [insert some term other than “tide”] of counselors, therapists, and psychiatrists, holding public awareness campaigns, appearing on TV/radio/etc, browbeating Sri Lankan officials for not caring enough about the mental health aspect of recovery. Through this whole process they were all tripping over each other to look culturally aware despite having no clue what they were doing. My favorite anecdote was the training lectures, where earnest sensitivity counselors would tell play therapists not to play “Go Fish” with young survivors - given that many of their parents had just been swallowed by the sea.
According to [insert some author name other than “Watters”], mostly things went like this: foreign counselors would go into a refugee camp and tell everyone that they had to speak openly about their trauma and emotions. The survivors would say that it sucked a lot that their families had just been killed, but wouldn’t seem very emotional about it, or really confess to having “trauma” as classically understood. The therapists would say this was very bad, and they were keeping all of their emotions “bottled up”, and they really had to “let it out” or else it would fester and they would end up with PTSD. The refugees, who were never exactly clear which sets of white people were giving out free food and which ones weren’t, figured they ought to do what these people wanted in case they were the free food ones. So they would say, fine, they all felt very emotional and had lots of trauma. The therapists would be delighted and move on to the next camp.
Sri Lanka tsunami refugee camp ([source](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ethical_traveler/21841616119))
Watters compares this to the traditional Sri Lankan approach to trauma. The locals had had ample opportunity to refine this, since the country was in the middle of a horrendous civil war full of child soldiers, torture, and sexual violence. The traditional approach was:
> In the cosmology of [Sri Lankan] villagers, humans are vulnerable to what they call the “gaze of the wild”, the experience of being looked in the eye by a wild spirit, which can take the form of a human being intent on violence. According to this belief it is not witnessing violence that is destructive. Rather, the moments of terror that come from violence leave one vulnerable to being affected by the gaze. Struck by such a gaze, one enters an altered state of consciousness and can become violent oneself, behave lasciviously, become physically imobilized, or in other ways step outside of normal modes of social behavior. Somatic symptoms, including chronic headaches, stomach aches, and loss of bodily strength, are also common […]
>
> These semitrance states are treated in the village with a long and arduous cleansing ritual. Such ceremonies often last up to thirty hours, during which the afflicted person is encouraged to dance, tremble, and speak in tongues at specific times during the ceremony. The rituals themselves are designed to elicit fear. Healers elaborately disguised as wild spirits visit the sick, often in the early hours of the morning, in order to frighten the subject as severely as possible. Often those who complete these cleansings show dramatic recoveries […]
>
> Stories or even words describing the violence were considered literally dangerous. Because of this, the community had established a complex set of rules for how villagers are allowed to talk about or remember the violence. [Anthropologist] Argenti-Pillen had to learn a complex dialect of “cautious words” that allow someone to reference a horrifying event without explicitly bringing it to mind. On examining these local euphenisms, she began to see that they were intentionally replacing words or phrases that might invoke fear or moral anger with those that connote safety and trust. Torture, for example, was evoked with a word that also means a child’s mischief.
(though before you start thinking of this as too exotic, remember that the Irish called their own ethnic violence “The Troubles”)
The story continues: local rebels/troublemakers/punks had set up a counterculture where they scare and alienate everyone else by talking about violence in taboo ways all the time and maybe kind of glorifying it. When Western psychologists came in and said that everyone was wrong to have taboos around trauma and actually they should be talking about it openly, some locals worried that this was tipping the delicate balance of social power in favor of the rebels and condemning the people handling things more traditionally.
Okay, so importing western notions of trauma to Sri Lanka was hard, chaotic, comedic at times, and maybe upset some delicate balance of power. But was it actually bad?
Watters points to research showing that “psychological debriefing” - the practice of sending mental health professionals to talk to recently traumatized people and have a single brief session where they “process” the trauma - [is counterproductive and makes trauma worse](https://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2013/05/one-time-psychological-debriefing-after-trauma-harmful-studies-suggest/). This is true in Western countries, and it’s probably true in Sri Lanka as well. So the psychological relief effort itself probably did more harm than good. Darn.
Still, I feel like the broader point of this chapter kind of fails to [insert some word other than “land”]. Watters makes a big deal of subtle differences in the way Westerners and Sri Lankans think about trauma (for example, Sri Lankans are more often to think of it as a hole in the social fabric, eg “I should have a father and I don’t and that’s disrupting the network of relationships in a way that produces symptoms”, rather than the more internalized Western “the experience of losing my father has caused some imprint on my brain which produces symptoms”) But the part about local trauma practices during the civil war make it pretty clear that pre-globalization Sri Lanka had something pretty PTSD-like. Although it violates one of *our* taboos to try to change a local culture’s traditions, Watters didn’t put much work into trying to show that the Sri Lankan traditions were as good/better as the Western traditions. Sure, don’t have one-visit immediate semi-forced debriefing sessions (in either Sri Lanka or the US). But if someone shares the consensus western position that lots of therapy and processing and emotional awareness is important to healing PTSD, there’s not much here that will convince them otherwise.
As before, the part I found most enlightening was the history of trauma. Although cultures throughout history have included some people with bad reactions to traumatic events, it’s controversial whether this has happened at anywhere near the levels of today. Historians can hunt down some things Romans said that sounded vaguely PTSD-like, but the fact is that a very large segment of their society was going into a bunch of pitched sword battles and/or crucifying people for fun and profit, and mostly pretty blase about it. We don’t have great records for historical traumatized populations, but it would surprise me if eg antebellum slaves had classic PTSD symptoms at the same rate as Afghan War veterans.
In fact, at the very beginning of the emergence of modern PTSD - around the Vietnam War - the original researchers of the condition called it “post-Vietnam syndrome” and tried to define it as a distinctly Vietnamese experience. The idea was that soldiers in past “good” wars had been fighting for something they believed in , had the support of the population back home, and didn’t have psychological problems. Since soldiers in Vietnam were developing all these new symptoms, that was yet more evidence that it was a “bad” war which had to be stopped. Over the course of decades (plus lots of marketing by enthusiastic therapists), PTSD expanded from a Vietnam-only problem, to all wars, to all natural disasters, to abuse and sexual violence, to the modern understanding where people say they got PTSD from a bad boss, a bad roommate, or an insufficiently woke college reading assignment. I enjoyed *[The Body Keeps The Score](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/)* partly because it told the other side of this history, from one of the researchers involved in the popularization, who faced roadblocks like “the VA refused to fund studies because they couldn’t see what relevance PTSD might have for veterans”.
(once again, this is starting to feel less like true deep cross-cultural differences, and more like a couple of decade lag between an idea taking over America and it taking over somewhere else)
**IV. Schizophrenia In Zanzibar**
If you want an objectively real psychiatric illness with no culture-bound component, schizophrenia is as close as you’re going to get. For one thing, it’s mostly genetic (80% in twin studies). For another, it has pretty uniform prevalence: everywhere from Abhkazia to Zanzibar, 1% of the population gets schizophrenia.
(the most significant exception is certain groups of immigrants who move from developing to developed countries - expect a blog post on that eventually)
The interesting cross-cultural aspect of schizophrenia is prognosis. Studies in the 80s and 90s suggested that developing countries had better outcomes than developed ones. This sparked some interest in figuring out what developing countries were “doing right” and whether we could replicate it.
Since the 80s and 90s, there’s been a bit of backlash against this theory from scientists who suggest that developing countries have less strict criteria for schizophrenia, frequently diagnosing people who have only mild transient psychosis. Obviously if you diagnose less sick people, their prognosis will be better, and this might explain the entire effect. E Fuller Torrey, a top schizophrenia expert, rejects both the [uniformity of schizophrenia](https://sci-hub.st/10.1017/s0033291700012320) and [the superiority of developing world treatment](https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2085). I’m not sure what the consensus is on these questions, but my read is that most people still think it’s uniform prevalence but are split on the developing world question.
Torrey also holds a permanent place in my heart for his theory correlating [a rise in cat fanciers in the 1800s with a simultaneous rise in schizophrenia](https://nypost.com/2015/10/25/cats-may-be-behind-rise-of-schizophrenia-researchers/), though I think recent studies have not been kind to this thesis.
Anyway, Watters either hasn’t heard about any of this or doesn’t think it’s worth mentioning. He cuts straight to the adventures of anthropologists in the East African island of Zanzibar trying to figure out their approach to schizophrenia.
The Zanzibaris associate schizophrenia with spirit possession (this seems to be a theme; I assume there is some sort of inspector who comes around and makes sure you attribute mental illness to demons, and if not, they take away your indigenous society license). But they are weirdly blase about this. Their position is that everyone gets possessed by spirits sometimes. If you lose your temper and lash out, that’s a spirit. If you act out of character sometimes, that’s a spirit too. Schizophrenics are possessed by stronger and more dedicated spirits than the rest of us, but it’s a difference in degree, not in kind. When a schizophrenic has a period of lucidity, they interpret it as the spirit having left for a bit, while understanding that it might come back at any time.
The book focuses on one Zanzibar family with a couple of schizophrenic members (remember, schizophrenia is genetic, so it’s not surprising to see lots of it in the same family). The whole extended clan of a dozen or so lives crowded together in a single household. Everyone is constantly doing odd jobs or chores; the schizophrenic family members’ contributions are more limited and less reliable, but they do contribute. The size of the family seems helpful; family members are expected to be ambiently present all the time, so it’s not a disaster or disruption if some people are never going to leave the house and “become independent”.
Watters focuses on two things he thinks Zanzibaris do right. First, they minimize schizophrenia. Because of the spirit-possession aspect, instead of being marked apart as ill and unusual, they’re treated as on a continuum with everyone else (since we all get possessed by spirits sometimes). Even when they take a more medicalized perspective on schizophrenia, they call it by extremely vague terms that don’t differentiate it from mild illness, eg “an attack of the nerves” (this seems to be a universal developing-world euphemism for schizophrenia, shared by eg Latin Americans). Zanzibari schizophrenics never feel that different from anyone else - everyone gets possessed by spirits sometimes, everyone gets attacks of the nerves sometimes, lots of people never leave their family homes.
Second, Zanzibar is *low expressed emotion*. Lots of studies have shown that schizophrenics do best in low-expressed-emotion households. Sometimes this is glossed as “people don’t yell at them or criticize them”, but other times it’s taken more broadly, to also include fussing over them and praising them and getting excited about them. At its worst, this line of research sometimes bleeds into the bad old theory that schizophrenia is caused by overly-attached mothers, but some studies suggest it has value - schizophrenics in high-expressed-emotion households seem to have many more relapses, and some studies show that schizophrenics separated from their families do better than those who stay with them (presumably because staff are less emotional).
Anyway, according to scientists, America has the highest expressed emotion, Europe and other developed countries are also really high, and developing countries are mostly really low. 67% of Anglo-American families studied qualified as high-expressed-emotion, compared to 48% of Brits, 42% of Chinese, 41% of Mexican-Americans, and 23% of Indians. I am a little boggled by this - my stereotypes say the opposite. EG New England WASPs who never show any emotion at all, stiff-upper-lip Brits and Germans, compared to exuberant Mexicans and extremely high-pressure Asians. I hear woke people talk about how demanding a calm, quiet, low-expressed-emotion environment is white supremacy because only white people care about that kind of thing. But nope, according to *Crazy Like Us* scientists have determined that white Americans are the highest-expressed-emotion culture in the world. Huh.
Anyway, according to Watters, Zanzibar’s low expressed emotion and lack of differentiation between schizophrenics and neurotypicals suggest that these are part of the “secret sauce” that the developing world uses to beat First World schizophrenia outcomes. As with his other case studies, western psychiatrists are coming to Zanzibar and telling everyone that schizophrenia is purely biological and getting everyone really worked up about it, and probably this is bad.
One background part of this chapter which I enjoyed was the section on biological views of mental illness. Westerners tend to spread these in order to reduce stigma - “has a brain chemical malfunction” sounds better than “is possessed by demons”, or even than “is just inexplicably lazy and weird”. But [studies generally show](https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0603-health-stigma-20180531-story.html) that the biological view of mental illness makes people less sympathetic to the mentally ill, more concerned about them being violent, more interested in avoiding them, etc.
I am skeptical this actually worsens outcomes for schizophrenia; the developed vs. developing world thing is more likely diagnostic differences. Still, oops.
**V. Conclusion: Towards Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns**
Overall I was only moderately interested in the book’s thesis that we are globalizing American concepts of mental health. With the exception of the genuinely interesting anorexia chapter, the depression/PTSD/schizophrenia chapter all showed societies with pre-existing recognizable versions of these disorders. America got really interested in and heavily medicalized these disorders in the mid-20th century, and now these other societies are getting really interested in and heavily medicalizing them. People who like calling things “colonialist” should call this colonialist, and people who like debating whether or not things are colonialist should debate it, but I’m not sure how much extra we can learn about mental health here.
I was more interested in a sort of sub-thesis that kept recurring under the surface: does naming and pointing to a mental health problem make it worse? This was clearest in Hong Kong, where a seemingly very low base rate of anorexia exploded as soon as people started launching mental health awareness campaigns saying that it was a common and important disease (as had apparently happened before in Victorian Europe and 70s/80s America). But it also showed up in the section on how increasing awareness of PTSD seems to be associated with more PTSD, and how debriefing trauma victims about how they might get PTSD makes them more likely to get it. And it was clearest in the short aside about the epidemic of neurasthenia in Japan after experts suggested that having neurasthenia might be cool, which remitted once those experts said it was actually cringe. A full treatment of this theory would go through the bizarre history of conversion disorder, multiple personality disorder, and various mass hysterias, tying it into some of the fad diagnoses of our own day. I might write this at some point.
Of course, the null hypothesis is that there are lots of people suffering in silence until people raise awareness of and destigmatize a mental illness, after which they break their silence, admit they have a problem, and seek treatment. I am slightly skeptical of this, because a lot of mental health problems are hard to suffer in silence - if nothing else, anorexia results in hospitalizations once a patient’s body weight becomes incompatible with healthy life. Still, this is an important counterargument, and one that I hope people do more research into.
This book is about cultures that respond to mental disease very differently than we do, so I find myself imagining a culture that holds Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns. Every so often, they go around burning books about mental illness and cancelling anyone who talks about them. If they must refer to psychiatric symptoms in public, they either use a complicated system of taboos (like Sri Lankans) or maximally vague terms like “an attack of nerves” (like Zanzibaris). Whenever there is a major natural disaster, top experts and doctors go on television reassuring everyone that PTSD is fake and they will not get it. Whenever there’s a recession or something, psychiatrists tell the public that they definitely won’t get depressed, since “depression” only applies to cases much more severe than theirs, and if they feel really sad about losing all their money then that’s just a perfectly normal emotion under the circumstances.
(if anyone asks why there are psychiatrists, the psychiatrists will say they’re sticking around to treat anyone who believes in mental illness, which is a delusion, and incidentally the only delusion that exists. Secretly the psychiatrists will still treat anybody who comes to them, they’ll just make them swear an oath of secrecy first. “Doctor patient confidentiality” will get redefined to mean that the *patient* has to keep it confidential that doctors *exist*.)
I’m not sure if this culture would have more or less mental illness than our own. But we’re trying the opposite experiment now, so I guess we’ll get to see how *that* turns out. | Scott Alexander | 38622262 | Book Review: Crazy Like Us | acx |
# Reader Survey Final Check-In
I accidentally missed some Book Review Contest entries, so I want to make sure I have everything lined up right for the Reader Survey. Below is a list of surveys I’m currently planning to include. If you sent me an email before the deadline, please confirm that your name is there. If it’s not, *please don’t email me about it* - we’ve already established that I don’t get your emails for some reason. Instead, leave a comment below with your information.
The list:
- A on biostasis/cryonics
- T on male homosexuality \*\*\*
- A on health-related quality of life
- N on uniformity illusion \*\*\*
- K on digital literacy
- E on depression (targeted at depressives)
- ...and on weight loss
- S on political compressability
- G on bullshit jobs
- R on moral curiosity
- T on autogynephilia (targeting trans women)
- ...and sexual fantasies
- C on psychedelics (targeting people who have tried them)
- K on business (targeting people in tech)
- D on incest \*\*\*
- M on personality
- D on meditation
- R on gender identity
- ...and rhymes (targeting non-native English speakers)
Surveys with a \*\*\* don’t ask for user ID. While you’re not required to do that, consider adding a question about it in if you want increased demographic information about your respondents.
Please also let me know if I got who to target your survey at wrong.
[This is my preliminary draft of the generic demographics collecting survey](https://forms.gle/wspjcPheNvFDf8kc6). Please check it out if you’re running your own survey here. If it doesn’t collect some demographic you want on your survey, please edit your survey to collect it yourself. If your survey repeats something that this one already collects, you can probably remove it.
I’ll probably get this started this Friday, so make any changes you need before then. | Scott Alexander | 38684663 | Reader Survey Final Check-In | acx |
# Use Prediction Markets To Fund Investigative Reporting
[Hindenburg Research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_Research) has a great business model:
1. Investigate companies
2. ...until they find one that is committing fraud
3. Short the fraudulent company
4. Publicly reveal the fraud
5. Company's stock goes down
6. Profit!
I've been thinking about them recently because of the debate around funding investigative reporting. It goes something like: investigative reporting is a public good. Everyone benefits from knowing about Watergate. But it's hard for investigative reporters to capture the value they produce. Very few of the people who cared about Watergate bought subscriptions to the Washington Post. There's no reason to - you can let the Washington Post uncover Watergate at no cost to you, then hear about it for free on the nightly news. The traditional solution is bundled media. Newspapers have their profitable bread-and-butter in the form of easy things like commentary and sports, then do some unprofitable investigative reporting on the side to gain prestige.
This traditional solution is failing, because the Internet unbundles media. If you want commentary, you can get it here on Substack; if you want to know who won the big game, you can go to espn.com or just Google it.
I feel like this is mostly good. It lets customers pay for things they want and not things they don't want. It diversifies media, preventing a few big gatekeepers from spinning everything to fit their political agendas. And it lets journalists capture the full value of their own labor instead of surrendering most of it to big corporations. But obviously gatekeepers and big corporations are sad about it. And the argument they've come up with for why it's bad is that it threatens investigative reporting. This is honestly a pretty compelling argument.
But: if there were good prediction markets, you could fund investigative reporting the same way Hindenburg Research funds its investigative reporting.
Right now there's about $25 million on Predictit saying that Eric Adams will win this November's election for NYC mayor. Suppose some kind of media property uncovered evidence that Adams took bribes or committed some other career-ending indiscretion. In a world where prediction markets were as liquid as stock markets, they could short Adams, reveal his dirty laundry, crash his election prospects, and collect some portion of $25 million.
Even if their dirt isn't quite that good - even if it only makes Adams seem a little bit worse than people thought - it would probably affect his chances by 1 or 2 percent. And that's still $250K to $500K - more than enough to hire a couple of good investigative reporters.
What if Adams had such monolithic support that nothing a dedicated investigative reporter turns up could possibly shake his chance of winning by 1% or even 0.01%? Maybe then we should just accept that the market is correctly telling people not to bother investigating Adams. If we've gotten so polarized that no conceivable fact could change who we vote for, then investigative reporting should have the same status as golf - a weird activity that rich people like to talk about, but which has no ability to change the world for the better. We wouldn't be trying to think up clever mechanisms to publicly fund golf, so there's no reason to be sad that this particular clever mechanism fails at funding investigative reporting.
But what about important stories that can't easily be translated into prediction markets? I'm looking at the front page of today's Washington Post, which has something about how there's a culture of sexism in some important military school. This could charitably be termed investigative reporting - we can imagine the journalist painstakingly tracked down women at that military school, heard their stories, hunted down documents proving that this school discriminated against women in some way, et cetera. But even assuming it's true, how would you translate this into a prediction market? Maybe some important person is more likely to fire the head of this military school now that they know he allowed a culture of misogyny to continue there? But number one, this would require there to be prediction markets in the careers of every military school principal. And number two, this relies on some pretty strong assumptions about how likely it is that some head honcho really wants to fire anyone who perpetuates a culture of sexism. There are potential ways to get around the second problem - you can imagine that, this having been revealed, the school will take actions to change it, and the self-reported life satisfaction of women in the school will go up - a measurable result. But just brings us back to problem one again - you have to have a pre-existing prediction market on the life satisfaction of every demographic group in every school in the country!
I think I bite these bullets. First of all, of course there should be fire-the-head-of-a-military-school prediction markets! Robin Hanson has long said that if he had a million dollars, the first thing he would do is [subsidize fire-company-CEO markets](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/if-i-had-a-mill.html). Why not give him a billion instead, and have him extend it to military school principals?
And second, yeah, I even think there should be life-satisfaction-of-female-students-at-this-particular-school prediction markets. If current-day schools care enough about gender equality to hire a chief diversity officer (which they definitely do), future schools should care enough about gender equality to subsidize prediction markets in the self-reported life satisfaction of female students. It'll be cheaper than the CDO and more effective. I want a world where protesters march into colleges and ask them why, if they claim to care about female students, they don't have a subsidized female-student-life-satisfaction prediction market, so that they can credibly set targets for gender equality (see [this post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/instead-of-pledging-to-change-the) for more on how that would work).
I realize this system is a weird proposed funding model for a newspaper. I'm sure people will think up lots of perverse incentives it might cause, and some them might even be true. But it's not like our current system doesn't cause a lot of perverse incentives. Prediction-market-moving newspapers would get right a lot of things that our current model gets wrong. For example, our current model incentivizes fake news - if something is exciting and outrageous enough, it'll sell a lot of papers, and even if a few spoilsport researchers come out a few years later with definitive proof it was wrong, by that time nobody will care. In a prediction market, once you're wrong a couple of times, traders will stop updating on your reports and you'll lose most of your power to move the market. You'll have no particular reason to care whether what you write is outrageous or exciting, only that it's true and relevant to something that people care about.
In the far future, the news might diverge into an "infotainment" industry where people try to get clicks by accusing each other of being racist pedophiles, and a prediction-market-movement industry where people try to generate true information on important issues. Then everyone could just ignore the first thing and go about their lives. | Scott Alexander | 38682879 | Use Prediction Markets To Fund Investigative Reporting | acx |
# Open Thread 180
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
**1:** Deiseach is banned for one day, and jstr given a warning, for their exchange in Hidden Open Thread 178.5. Probably many other people should be banned or warned, but given that there’s no Report Comment function here I don’t have a great way of hearing about it. At some point I might try to figure out a solution.
**2:** Thanks to everyone who sent in surveys for the reader survey. My current plan is to process the last few submissions over the next few days, post a final check to make sure everything is as expected on Tuesday or Wednesday, then post all the surveys around Friday. This is not a promise, and sorry for any delays that might pop up here.
**3:** I didn’t know this when writing the [Book Review Winners](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-winners) post, but Boštjan, who wrote [the review of](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-double-fold) *Double Fold*, has a whole blog about book-preservation-related issues, [The Fate Of Books](https://thefateofbooks.wordpress.com/). If you enjoyed the review, consider checking it out. And although I’m posting this one in particular here because I missed it, also check out the blogs of the various other winners and finalists, which are posted on the thread. | Scott Alexander | 38647731 | Open Thread 180 | acx |
# Book Review Contest: Winners
Thanks to everyone who participated or voted in the Book Review Contest. The winners are:
**FIRST PLACE**:
*[Progress and Poverty](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty)*, reviewed by Lars Doucet
Lars is a Norwegian-Texan game designer, and you can read his game design blog [here](https://www.fortressofdoors.com/). He's a pretty serious Georgist and posts regularly in the [Georgism subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/).
**SECOND PLACE**:
*[Down And Out In Paris And London](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-down-and-out-in)*, reviewed by Whimsi
Whimsi blogs [here](https://whimsi.substack.com/people/25790234-hwe), but otherwise asks to remain mysterious.
**THIRD PLACE:**
*[On The Natural Faculties](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-natural-faculties)*, reviewed by ELP.
Ethan Ludwin-Peery is a scientist and historian who writes at [www.mod171.com](http://www.mod171.com).
**READERS' CHOICE AWARD:**
*[Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xexFJ7h0vULMDE7N77q_MIzXoerexfe_CqqGEL6hEoQ/edit)*, reviewed by Misha Saul
Misha is an investor in Sydney, Australia, and blogs [here](https://mishasaul.com/essays/).
---
And congratulations to all other finalists (here listed in order of appearance), whose secret identities were:
*[Order Without Law](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-order-without-law)*, reviewed by [Phil Hazelden](http://reasonableapproximation.net/)
*[Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-are-we-smart-enough)*, reviewed by [Jeff Russell](https://jpowellrussell.com/)
*[Why Buddhism Is True](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-buddhism-is)*, reviewed by [Eve Bigaj](https://evebigaj.com/category/essays/)
*[Double Fold](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-double-fold)*, reviewed by [Boštjan P](https://thefateofbooks.wordpress.com/)
*[The Wizard And The Prophet](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the)*, reviewed by Maryana
*[Through The Eye Of A Needle](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-through-the-eye)*, reviewed by Tom Powell
*[Years Of Lyndon Johnson](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-years-of-lyndon)*, reviewed by Theodore Ehrenborg
*[Addiction By Design](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-addiction-by-design)*, reviewed by Ketchup Duck
*[The Accidental Superpower](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-accidental-superpower)*, reviewed by Jon Boguth
*[Humankind](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-humankind)*, reviewed by Neil Roques
*[The Collapse Of Complex Societies](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-collapse-of)*, reviewed by [Etirabys](https://etirabys.tumblr.com/)
*[Where's My Flying Car](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying)*, reviewed by Jonathan P
*[How Children Fail](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-how-children-fail)*, reviewed by HonoreDB
*[Plagues And Peoples](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-plagues-and-peoples)*, reviewed by Joel Ferris (who is looking for a job, email [here](mailto:joelferris@gmail.com))
All finalists win a permanent free subscription to Astral Codex Ten - since a subscription costs $10/month, this is technically an infinity dollar value! If you already have a subscription, you are now a Super Double Mega-Subscriber, which has no consequences in the material world, but several important metaphysical advantages. I should have already credited this to your email addresses; please let me know if it didn't go through or if I used the wrong address.
People who won the top prizes also get monetary awards. Due to the generosity of subscribers to this blog, I've decided to quintuple the amounts I originally promised - so first place will get $5000, second place $2500, and third place $1250. Readers' Choice will also get $1250. If you won a monetary prize, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com with either a Paypal account, an Ethereum address, or a charity you want me to donate to.
Finally, if you're curious who wrote which runners-up reviews, you can find a list [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vgXd-H7Fk6I7qAG7Dwh6VZn8dYIhV0dQHsI_owPSIIg/edit#gid=0). I’ve tried to include full names only for people who explicitly told me to do that, first name plus last initial to people who gave me their full names but didn't give explicit permission, and pseudonyms for everyone else. I've also included personal websites and blogs for everyone who asked or heavily implied that I should list them. If I made an important error in how I listed your name, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com | Scott Alexander | 38322815 | Book Review Contest: Winners | acx |
# Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Back when everyone was debating lockdowns, I promised I'd come back to it after there was more data. God willing, the pandemic is over enough that we've got all the data we're going to get. So: did lockdowns work?
There’s no way to answer this completely and taking into account every relevant factor, so I’m necessarily going to be simplifying things and focusing on some aspects of the question more than others. Sorry.
**Preliminary Theoretical Issues 1: What Is A “Lockdown”?**
Obviously "lockdown" is underspecified. There are many things you can do to reduce transmission of viruses. Researchers have taken two different approaches here.
First, they've looked at the effects of specific policies (called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” or “NPIs”). A typical categorization system is the one used in [Brauner et al](https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.abd9338), which looks at:
- Banning gatherings > 1000 people
- Banning gatherings > 100 people
- Banning gatherings > 10 people
- Closing schools
- Closing universities
- Closing some non-essential businesses
- Closing most businesses
- Stay at home orders
...and tries to separately evaluate the effects of each. Other studies categorize these slightly differently - for example, they might combine school and university closure. Not all countries implemented exactly these eight policies in the exact same way, so in some cases these are abstractions over more complicated orders. Studying these tends to be very hard, either because different countries are doing different combinations of these at different times, or because countries implement many orders at around the same time and it's hard to figure out which are having any effect.
Second, they've invented a "stringency index", where having each of the above adds a certain number of points to your "stringency score". The advantage of this is that it's a simple statistical test - you can just correlate "stringency score" with R values or cases or deaths or whatever. The disadvantage is that it's kind of made up - you're at the mercy of whatever the person designing the stringency score thinks is "common sense" about how many points everything should be worth. Most people using this method use [the score developed by](https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/covid-19-government-response-tracker) the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, and whenever I refer to "stringency score" without any other specifications, I'll mean that one. I looked it over and it roughly matches my common sense - the US states which everyone knows had stricter lockdowns also had higher stringency scores.
**Preliminary Theoretical Issues 2: What Point Are We Measuring At?**
If, the moment COVID had been reported in Wuhan, other countries had closed their borders tightly, that would have prevented the pandemic (at least for a while). In that sense, lockdowns definitely could have worked.
If, the moment a country started getting cases, it had instituted an extremely strict lockdown where police shot anyone who left their house, presumably this would have prevented the pandemic (at least for a while) too. Only a few countries (eg China) approached anything like this level of strictness, but at this dictatorial extreme, lockdowns definitely could have worked.
Australia and New Zealand managed to do very well by combining well-targeted border closures with very strict early lockdowns. This helped them get cases low enough to the point where their test-and-trace program could manage them, and helped them get through the pandemic relatively gently (so far). This was a great strategy for the countries that were quick-thinking, clear-thinking, and lucky enough to pull it off, ie very few of them.
Most of the debate about whether lockdowns work centers on ideas within the Overton Windows of western countries, after the pandemic had started spreading and test-and-trace had been (maybe unwisely) abandoned. That is, given whatever level of lockdown your average western country had, was the marginal effect of more (or less) lockdown positive or negative? This post will continue the tradition of addressing this depressing and unambitious question.
**Preliminary Theoretical Issues 3: What Is “Working”?**
What would it mean for lockdowns not to work? We know that viruses spread through person-to-person contact. Lockdowns make people see each other less. How could this not reduce viral transmission?
I think there are worse and better cases here. One worse case is that lockdowns weren’t absolutely necessary to “flatten the curve”. That is: during the earliest phase of the pandemic, in March and April 2020, cases were growing exponentially. People were afraid that the virus would soon infect everyone (or more realistically, the 70% of the population it takes before you get herd immunity). But in fact, every country managed to reverse this trend and get cases shrinking again quickly. Some countries did this with strict lockdowns. Other countries had much weaker lockdowns, but after things got crazy enough people panicked and stayed home on their own, and this worked too.
So one anti-lockdown case - a true one - is that you could eventually control the explosive growth phase of the pandemic without lockdowns. But this is asking too little. If you control the explosive growth phase after 20,000 people die, this is obviously worse than if you control it after 10,000 or 0 people die. And the explosive growth phase was followed by further ups and downs, and if you could control those better, that’s obviously better than controlling it worse. So granting that lockdowns weren’t necessary to prevent uncontrolled spread, let’s still ask whether they made things better or worse.
Both Denmark (stricter lockdown) and Sweden (weaker lockdown) were eventually able to control the explosive growth phase of the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean they both did equally well.
More relevant anti-lockdown cases argue that lockdowns just don’t have a great cost-benefit ratio. That is, at least some lockdown policies cause a lot of suffering for very little decrease in R. We know this is possible in principle - some states tried things like closing parks and trails, which in retrospect probably wasn’t too useful since the virus doesn’t spread well outside. Other things like banning large gatherings are more promising, but you might have to argue for each of these individually.
**Preliminary Theoretical Issues 4: How Do You Count Voluntary Behavior Change?**
A lot of anti-lockdown arguments are predicated on the theory that voluntary behavior changes alone are potentially enough to control the virus (though again, this terminology is confusing and would have to be expanded into a claim that involuntary behavior changes have a low marginal cost-benefit ratio).
There’s a lot of evidence that voluntary behavior changes were pretty important in some places. For example, here’s mobility data from the San Francisco Bay Area:
It’s pretty evident from this graph that people were starting to decrease their mobility before any official government action, and that most of the decrease happened before an official shelter-in-place order.
How common was this trend? It’s hard to say, because most governments started panicking around mid-March and instituting lockdown orders then, and most individuals started panicking around mid-March and making their voluntary behavior changes then, and in most places it’s really hard to figure out which of these things happened a day or two before the other. In most European countries, which had lockdowns early, there wasn’t much behavior change before lockdown orders; in some [developing countries](https://kjhealy.github.io/covdata/articles/mobility-data.html), which had lockdowns late, there was a lot of behavior change before lockdowns.
[Goolsbee and Syverson](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27432/w27432.pdf) study the US situation and find that “while overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 of that. Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection.”
Some research papers ignore the possibility of voluntary behavior changes, which makes their conclusions suspect. Others try to include them, but have to figure out a way to incorporate them into their conclusions. Suppose that your country closes all restaurants. The next weekend, you don’t go to a restaurant. You would have voluntarily chosen not to go to the restaurant even if it was open, because you’re afraid of coronavirus, but in fact you didn’t get to make that choice, because the restaurant was closed. If that missed restaurant trip saved your life, should we credit it to the lockdown, or to voluntary behavior change?
It feels to me like the important issue is the counterfactual - how many lives did lockdowns save over the world where there were no lockdowns,
and only voluntary behavior change? But not all researchers feel that way, and so a lot of the lockdown papers, even the ones that admit voluntary behavior change is a thing and include it in their models, have a complicated relationship with this question.
**Preliminary Theoretical Issues 5: Voluntary Behavior Change Is Actually Pretty Complicated, Isn’t It?**
Here in the Bay Area, some parents tried to take their kids out of public school in early March, before the official lockdowns. The schools got angry, threatened to prosecute the parents under truancy laws, and said kids who missed school due to COVID fears wouldn’t be allowed to make up the work later and might fail their classes. Then later on, the government closed all schools and people stopped having to worry about this.
Likewise, my group house tried to shut down two weeks before the official mandate. We failed, because one resident’s company wouldn’t let them work remotely, and they had to take the train to San Francisco every day. Then the government closed all businesses, and that solved that problem.
The moral of the story is that everything not forbidden is compulsory, so you can’t always substitute voluntary behavior change for government mandates.
On the other hand, a lot of government mandates didn’t work because they weren’t enforced. [Leech et al](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.16.21258817v1.full.pdf) investigate the efficacy of masks and find that mass-scale mask wearing decreases COVID transmission significantly. But they’re not able to find much evidence that government mask mandates help. How to solve this paradox?
It looks from the data like mask mandates barely affect the number of people wearing masks - on average, about 64% the day the mandate is enacted, and 75% three weeks later (and even this isn’t necessarily causal!) One possibility is that their data (based on surveying people about whether they wore masks recently) isn’t very good. But another possibility is that people who wanted to wear masks probably were already wearing masks; people who didn’t want to wear masks weren’t going to let the government tell them what to do. This doesn’t mean mask mandates can’t work - a lot of these mandates were poorly specified and poorly implemented - but it does mean you can’t go directly from “policy exists” to “policy is doing what you expect”.
Similarly, there was a really wide diversity of compliance levels with shelter-in-place orders. I know some people who didn’t see their closest friends for months, and others in the same cities who said “screw this” after a week or two and started having (small) parties again.
So some interventions (eg school closure) are very easy for governments to enforce and very hard for individuals to change their behavior voluntarily. Others (eg shelter-in-place) are very hard for governments to enforce and very easy for individuals to change their behavior voluntarily. We might expect mandates for the first group to show more of an effect (beyond counterfactual voluntary behavior change) compared to the second group, even if the second group is the sort of thing that prevents COVID (eg mask-wearing).
Finally, voluntary behavior change and mandates are hard to separate. If you hear the government is thinking of a mandate, that might make you scared and cause you to do things voluntarily (even things not included in the mandate). Or if the government knows that most people are staying at home, it might feel more comfortable issuing a stay-at-home order to mop up the last few holdouts, whereas if no one had been staying at home it might not be willing to do that.
**Preliminary Theoretical Issues 6: The Pandemic As A Control System**
A control system is a thing like a thermostat. When it gets too hot, the thermostat kicks into cooling mode and makes it cooler. When it gets too cold, the thermostat kicks into heating mode and makes it warmer. So the temperature always stays around the same level.
At times, people’s response to the pandemic operated kind of like a control system. When the pandemic started getting worse, everyone panicked, voluntarily self-isolated, and the pandemic got better. When the pandemic started getting better, everyone relaxed, started going out and meeting people again, and the pandemic got worse. This kept R around 1 for a lot of places at a lot of times. R only shifted away from 1 when the control system broke for some reason - maybe because the pandemic started getting worse more quickly than people could hear about it and adjust their behavior.
In a perfect control system, lockdowns would have no effect, because R would stay at 1 no matter what you did. In an imperfect control system, lockdowns would have some effect, but it would be harder to predict. For example, they might decrease the size of peaks and troughs - ie help the control system become more efficient.
**Actual Evidence 1: Extremely Complicated Studies About Europe During The First Phase Of The Pandemic**
Probably the most-cited study (1177 times!) on the effect of lockdowns is [Flaxman et al](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7) from mid-2020. They look at European countries during the first wave of COVID in March 2020, when they instituted various policies, and how that affected virus transmission. They find that nothing except mandatory lockdown (which I think they’re using to mean full shelter-in-place orders) did anything, mandatory lockdown was extremely effective, and that lockdowns saved about three million lives.
This study has been heavily criticized, I think fairly, with especially good critiques coming from [blogger Philippe Lemoine](https://necpluribusimpar.net/lockdowns-science-and-voodoo-magic/), [a Swedish team published in](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3025-y) *[Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3025-y),* and [a German team in](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.580361/full) *[Frontiers In Medicine](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.580361/full)*. They converge on a few points. First, a bug in the model attributes almost all of the transmission reduction in a country to whatever the last intervention was that the country tried. Since most countries started with weaker interventions and then moved on to full lockdown, the model concluded that full lockdown was responsible for almost all the transmission reduction. In the one country that didn't institute lockdown during the period studied, Sweden, there's about the same amount of transmission reduction, but the model attributes all of it to the last thing Sweden tried - a ban on public gatherings - even though in every other country it says such bans had no effect.
But also, the model assumes that, absent lockdowns, there would have been no voluntary behavior change. In fact, we know there was a lot of it. The claim that “lockdowns saved three million lives” is compared to the counterfactual where nobody responds to the virus in any way and it spreads uncontrollably until 70% of the population has been infected. But in Sweden, which didn’t have a full lockdown, only about 1%-10% of the population was infected during the first wave. So the “three million” number is at least an order of magnitude too high. I find all of this pretty damning. I think the pro-Flaxman case is that a lot of these issues were admitted in the paper - eg it says it’s going to assume that all transmission reduction comes from government interventions. But it didn’t admit all of them - and also, if you include very small print saying “by this way, this is based on false assumptions”, it turns out people still make it headline news and base policy on it.
An influential anti-lockdown paper - though cited more in the news than the scholarly literature - is [Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison](https://academic.oup.com/cesifo/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cesifo/ifab003/6199605) by economist Christian Bjørnskov. It avoids the need for complicated models by using an index of lockdown strictness as the independent variable instead of looking at specific interventions, and uses deaths as the dependent instead of estimating transmission rate. Neither of these are a terrible choice, they're just going to be less sensitive. Bjørnskov's excuse is that he's an economist and wants to do this using economic techniques instead of epidemiological ones (the study is called "An Economist's Cross-Country Comparison"), but this makes his analysis less sophisticated.
Anyway, he finds that lockdowns make many *more* people die - which isn’t technically *impossible*, but given how weak his analysis is, I would rather believe he is confusing cause and effect. He claims we don't have to worry about endogeneity (ie countries are more likely to institute lockdowns when many people are dying) because he checked and it takes three weeks for increasing coronavirus mortality to be reflected in lockdowns, but I'm not sure exactly how he did this - the epidemic was growing at a pretty constant rate throughout this period, and policymakers instituted lockdowns once it became impossible for them to miss. As we will see later, everyone who does worry about endogeneity finds it’s actually a big problem. His backup plan of using the degree to which national constitutions allow emergency powers for the executive as an exogenous variable - because the more emergency powers are allowed, the stricter a lockdown a country can do - has way too high a cuteness-to-relevancy ratio for me to trust it.
The study in this group I find most credible is [Brauner et al](https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.abd9338), which -
*[conflict of interest notice: when California legalized marijuana, a friend and I decided to celebrate by getting high. My friend had a bad trip and started freaking out that they were going to die. I told them they weren't, and they told me that I was high and so they couldn't trust my judgment. We started IMing various people we tangentially knew, and finally one of them very kindly agreed to come tripsit my very high friend at 11 PM. That person is one of the co-authors of Brauner et al, and that is my conflict of interest]*
- tries something similar to Flaxman et al, but with better models and assumptions. It looks at eight different types of interventions across 41 different countries, and uses Bayesian statistics to try to merge them into a common picture of how each affects R. Here’s their headline result:
A couple other people try to do something really similar; extra points to [Banholzer et al](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0252827), who have a section comparing their results to Brauner; they find broadly similar effects:
A few large interventions decrease R as much as 40%, most things are between 10 and 25%, and stay at home orders are relatively weak.
I think all of these are pretty plausible estimates, but it’s hard to translate them into performance vs. a counterfactual. If we start with an R of 3 or so, then apply all of the interventions these kinds of papers study, we get an R lower than 1. That suggests that these interventions took countries from a relatively uncontrolled epidemic to a well-controlled one. But we can’t necessarily say that a country that didn’t implement any of these would continue having an R of 3 forever (or until herd immunity kicked in) - probably there would be a lot of voluntary behavior change and the overall results would be unpredictable.
So if you’re asking “did government mandates decrease R in the short term?” these studies provide decent evidence that the answer is yes. If you’re asking questions about how many people would have died with vs. without lockdowns, that’s a much more complicated question.
**Actual Evidence 1.1: CoronaGame**
…which you can get a surprisingly good sense of by playing a quick free online game.
[CoronaGame](https://koronahra.cz/) gives you the role of a Czech health official charged with choosing when to initiate vs. stop various preventative measures. You get points for preventing coronavirus cases and deaths, but also for minimizing economic costs and damage to public morale. The game’s model is based on the Brauner et al data, so if you believe the paper it should be a pretty realistic look at how different policies would have worked.
Here’s a graph of how players have done (economic damage on the vertical axis, deaths on the horizontal).
In [a blog post](https://boundedlyrational.substack.com/p/on-the-dilemma-between-lives-and), one of the researchers who worked on the game talks about how you can view this as a Pareto frontier:
…ie a line of choices representing a particular tradeoff made as effectively as possible. Point A, at the top of the frontier, represents a perfectly effective planner trying to maximize lives saved, without worrying about cost (except that if two plans save the same number of lives, they will use the lowest cost as a tiebreaker). Point B, at the bottom, presents the opposite - minimizing cost perfectly effectively, using lives saved only as a tiebreaker. The rest of the yellow line represents trading off between lives and cost at some exchange rate, while maintaining perfect effectiveness; the higher the exchange rate, the further along the line you go. In a perfect world, we would be debating where on the yellow line to be.
In the real world, where we aren’t perfectly rational and efficient planners, it’s totally possible to end up arbitrarily far away from the Pareto frontier, eg the points in red. These represent various plans that are *not* the result of a perfectly effective planner using some tradeoff between lives and cost - in other words, somebody screwed up. They are bad plans which could have saved more lives while not costing any more money, or else could have saved more money without costing any more lives. For example, Point I is what you get if you just institute every single restriction you can think of, and refuse to ever lift any of them.
(the real Czech Republic ended up at Point C)
One of the morals that the designers of this game were trying to drive home is that the discussion we’re having in this post is unvirtuous. It’s political point-scoring - did Team Pro-Lockdown win more glory than Team Anti-Lockdown, or vice versa? The real question we should be asking is what set of policies countries should have implemented.
On my best playthrough of CoronaGame, I instituted all possible restrictions throughout March, April, and May, kept cases controlled enough to institute test-and-trace, switched to a pretty minimal suite of restrictions in the summer, then instituted school closures, gatherings <10, and high-risk business closures during the winter, relaxing them gradually as more people got vaccinated (I still didn’t quite make it to the Pareto frontier, so there’s room for improvement on this strategy). Trying these same restrictions but at different times turns out to be a disaster, which really emphasizes the point that there’s no single “best level of lockdown”. The right thing to do is whatever combination of policies in whatever order gets you on the Pareto frontier in CoronaGame (I still haven’t figured it out!), which means instituting the exact right set of restrictions at the exact right times to minimize cases, then lifting them at the exact right times to minimize cost.
*Then*, once you’re on the Pareto frontier, you can argue about which direction on that frontier to move - a little further toward stricter lockdowns / more lives saved, or toward looser lockdowns / fewer lives saved. If you’re not on the frontier - if you’re arguing about whether to be at Point F vs. Point G - probably you should shut up and work on getting on the frontier first.
The rest of this post mostly ignores this lesson and continues arguing about which of the various suboptimal policy packages that different states and countries adopted worked better than which other ones.
**Actual Evidence 2: Sweden As Counterfactual**
Sweden famously did not lock down as strictly as some other European countries at the beginning of the pandemic. How did it do?
Before answering, let’s go over some more Preliminary Theoretical Issues - was the Swedish lockdown actually less strict than that of other countries?
Here’s the Stringency Index during the first phase of the pandemic. Sweden is slightly lower than Denmark and the UK (two countries it’s typically compared to), but it doesn’t seem like a big difference, and by June Sweden is stricter than Denmark. What’s going on?
I looked into how the Stringency Index was composed. On April 1 (selected for being a round number in the middle of the pandemic), Sweden had an SI of 59, compared to Denmark’s 72 and Britain’s 80. Sweden had closed some public schools (other countries had closed all of them), restricted large gatherings (other countries had restricted all gatherings), “recommended” closing businesses and staying at home(other countries had mandated it), and closed public events. So Sweden did have a lot of restrictions, but the common sense perception that it had fewer restrictions than most other countries is true.
So how did Sweden do? Here’s the first phase of the pandemic, in spring and summer 2020, comparing Sweden to Norway, Denmark, Finland, the UK, and the European average:
Some people are skeptical of case numbers because it’s very dependent on testing, and prefer death numbers, since deaths are harder to miss. I’m a little skeptical of this, because death numbers get biased by how old a country’s population is and how good its health care system is, but here are death numbers for the same countries:
Cases in Sweden don’t seem to rise faster than anywhere else at the beginning. But while other countries get their epidemics under control quickly, Sweden is only able to level its out, and soon has much higher cases than any other country in the comparison group. In the deaths graph, Sweden does much worse than any other country besides the UK, and still is doing worse than the UK by the end.
Here’s cumulative cases and deaths over the first phase of the pandemic, first with the same comparison group (Sweden in green with a red arrow):
And with lots of other developed, large, or especially interesting countries:
Sweden comes out looking very bad, but not the literal worst.
Still, most places that were worse than Sweden had good reasons to do worse than Sweden. Italy was hit very early and has the highest percent of elderly people in Europe. The US and Brazil were very large diverse countries with bungled federal responses and borderline-COVID-denialist leaders. Belgium [counted its coronavirus deaths in an unusual way](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52491210) that inflated the numbers relative to other countries. In the end, Sweden still ended out with a death rate about double the European average. Seems pretty bad.
But it looks even worse when you compare Sweden to other Scandinavian/Nordic countries. Nobody agrees on exactly what “Scandinavian/Nordic” is, but here’s Sweden vs. Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland:
Sweden had about six times the first-phase death rate of the second-worst Scandinavian/Nordic country, Denmark.
Why did Scandinavia as a whole do so well? An easy guess would be low population density, but [Philippe Lemoine finds](https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/the-case-against-lockdowns/) there was no overall correlation in Europe between population-weighted population density and COVID death rate:
I also checked if Human Development Index explained anything; it didn’t. A more plausible explanation is household size - Scandinavia is remarkable for having more one-person and single-family households, and fewer multi-generational clans living together.
The maximally trollish explanation: Vitamin D causes coronavirus, so only the sunless north is safe.
But it’s also worth mentioning that US states that seemed kind of like Scandinavia (northern, forested, liberal) also had the lowest number of coronavirus cases in the continental US - #1 through #5 were Vermont, Oregon, Maine, Washington, and New Hampshire. And this [isn’t clearly related to household size](https://www.slideshare.net/civilbeat/us-states-household-size), so maybe something else is going on.
Anyway, a reasonable conclusion might be that Sweden had between 2x (if we compare it to an average European country) and 6x (if we compare it to an average Scandinavian country) the expected death rate in the first phase of the pandemic.
Philippe Lemoine is [extremely against this conclusion](https://necpluribusimpar.net/why-did-more-people-die-of-covid-19-in-sweden-than-in-other-nordic-countries-it-probably-had-little-to-do-with-policy/). He first argues that since we don’t know why Finland+Iceland+Norway+Denmark did so well, we can’t assume it’s a “Scandinavia effect” and so we can’t assume Sweden would share it. Therefore, we should be judging it against the European average rather than the (better) Scandinavian average. I would counter that, although we can’t prove that just because X is true of Finland+Iceland+Norway+Denmark and not other European countries, that it should also be true of Sweden, but we should have a pretty high prior on it, in the same way that eg if we know that X was true in every American state except Arkansas (whose value was unknown), and not in any non-American polities, we should have a high prior that X is true in Arkansas. Anyway, even if we don’t compare Sweden the rest of Scandinavia, we would compare it to Europe, which it did twice as bad as.
His second argument is that the epidemic started earlier in Sweden, and therefore had more time to progress before the mid-March period when everyone started panicking and taking various actions. Countries where the epidemic started earlier naturally did worse, so it’s unfair to judge Sweden by the standards of other countries where it started later.
The graphs above don’t look like the epidemic started earlier in Sweden, but this could be because tests missed some of the early cases. Lemoine somewhat convincingly argues that there were more deaths early on in Sweden, which suggests that - observed or not - the epidemic started earlier there.
And that given how early the epidemic started in Sweden, we should expect more deaths before it got under control:
I’m not math-y enough to judge Lemoine’s simulations, so instead I decided to judge Sweden against other European countries where the epidemic started at the same time or earlier - that is, ones that had more deaths per capita than Sweden as of March 21 2020.
Here Sweden is in the middle of the pack. But looking at the graph, it’s really striking how every other country “flattens the curve” by about May 1, but Swedes just keep dying. My reading of this graph is that, since we selected for countries doing *worse* than Sweden as of March 21, we start out with Sweden doing the best, but other countries are able to control their epidemics much faster than Sweden is, and by August Sweden has fallen to around the middle. Contra Lemoine’s picture where Sweden just has an earlier start but eventually does no worse than everywhere else, here Sweden has the same (or better) start as everyone else, but clearly does worse afterwards.
What about in later phases of the pandemic? Here it gets complicated. Until about New Years’, Sweden’s lockdown was less strict than average for Europe, but stricter than for the rest of Scandinavia - presumably the rest of Scandinavia did so well that they relaxed a lot, even more than Sweden did. In the winter, when the second wave started, Sweden tightened some of its restrictions, until the stringency index says they matched the European average (though Europeans I’ve talked to disagree and say Sweden still felt much less strict than elsewhere). Then it had a pretty average-sized second wave (as did Denmark). But unlike other Scandinavian countries (though like France and Germany), Sweden had a severe third wave. Can we attribute this to a looser lockdown? I am nervous about doing this, since the stringency index says its lockdown strictness was average during this period, which is why I’m going to mostly be relying on the first-wave data.
All of this gets really confusing and I think everyone on all sides of this debate should agree to just never mention Sweden again. Not just with respect to coronavirus policy. At all. If anyone asks, there are only two Scandinavian countries, Ikea comes from Denmark, and ABBA was just a weird dream.
In conclusion, the weaker Swedish lockdown in the early phase of the pandemic probably increased the death rate by a factor of two (using other European countries as a counterfactual/control) to five (using other Scandinavian countries as a counterfactual/control). [These people](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249732) investigate this question more formally and find something similar. These changes in death rate mean the policy caused an extra 1,000 to 3,000 deaths in the early phase of the pandemic. There was probably less effect in the later phases of the pandemic because Sweden’s lockdown policy was closer to everyone else’s.
**Actual Evidence 3: Overly Simple Models Of US States During Later Phases Of The Pandemic**
America is the greatest country in the world, at least as far as coronavirus lockdown data are concerned. Its advantages over Europe are many: first, there are 50 states, rather than the 20-something European countries most researchers studied. Second, those states have fewer confounding cultural differences. Third, European countries were pretty practical about what amount of lockdown they had at any given time, reacting to changes in the pandemic. US states mostly had stable and predictable responses based on their internal politics - a nice exogenous factor! The correlation between lockdown strictness in May vs. lockdown strictness in January among European countries was 0.2 (not statistically significant); in the US it was 0.5 and very significant. So instead of having to nitpick over which country instituted the same lockdown policy two days earlier than which other country, we can look at which states stably did vs. didn’t have strict lockdowns through the majority of the pandemic.
Source: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/media/files/files/fba2e32c/bi-report-121620-chb-covid19.pdf
This is an absolutely beautiful graph. It’s showing how lockdown strictness (as of May 5) correlates with death rate over time. We find that early in the epidemic, the stricter your lockdown, the worse you're doing. This is the endogeneity - places (like NYC) that are doing really badly institute strict lockdowns to try to save themselves. Later in the epidemic, the stricter your lockdown, the better you're doing - probably because the strict lockdown is giving good results.
Why May 5? No real reason. It turns out it doesn’t matter which time you measure lockdown, because US states are pretty stable in their rank order of lockdown strictness (eg California is always stricter than North Dakota):
Each of these colored lines represents lockdown strictness measured at a different time, but they all tell the same story.
Are there other explanations? I wondered if states that did worse in the first wave might have done better in the second because most of their vulnerable residents had already been infected/killed. But I don’t think this is a big problem; most places had [only about 5% of the population](https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/21/scitranslmed.abh3826) infected during the first wave, and even the worst states only about 10%. Another possibility: it could be that states which were harder-hit during the early pandemic both instituted stricter lockdowns, and also their residents were scared into more voluntary behavior changes. But it's certainly consistent with lockdowns working. And even the possibility where it isn't lockdowns suggest voluntary behavior changes work on the margin (eg changes which people didn't make in less-hard-hit states, but did make in harder-hit states, were still valuable) which would suggest that forcing those behavior changes with lockdowns should also work.
This graph ends on November 1, before the third wave got really bad. Does its conclusion still hold? I repeated its analysis using current case counts plotted against the stringency index for January 1 2021 (a nice round random day, to prove I’m not cherry-picking). Here’s what I got:
There was a significant negative correlation (-0.55) between the lockdown stringency index as of January 1, and the number of post-first-wave cases a state had. This was robust to different times for the stringency index, and for using all cases instead of just post-first-wave cases (although some of these changes slightly diminished the magnitude of the effect).
This is a victory for lockdowns insofar as the correlation is significant, but strong proponents might be surprised by how small the effect was. A few small isolated northern states like Vermont did very well. But most states - from California and New York to Florida and Texas - clustered in a band between 80,000 and 120,000 cases per million. States at the 75th percentile of lockdown strictness had about 17.5% fewer cases per million than states at the 25th percentile.
A lot has been written about how weird it is that California (with a strict lockdown) had an infection rate around 9.6%, and Florida (with a loose lockdown) had an only slightly higher rate of 10.8%. Here we see that California (marked in green) and Florida (marked in red) are slight outliers in their respective directions, but only very slight.
I made no effort to control for confounders here, but it’s also hard to see how they could be affecting these results too much. Stricter states did have more urban residents and minorities - two groups that got hit especially hard. But Florida and Georgia also have big cities and minority communities, and they fell pretty much in the middle of the weak-lockdown range. State-specific factors might shift this a few percent here and there, but aren’t going to be getting us to a conclusion where lockdowns halve the case count or anything.
Why didn’t lockdowns help more? Part of the answer must be that even weak-lockdown states had lots of voluntary behavior change, and even strong-lockdown states had lots of people ignore the lockdowns. But I think the main answer is that in every state, people panicked and tightened up when cases got bad, then relaxed and got careless once cases dropped again, making it hard for lockdowns to have too much effect - once a lockdown “succeeded”, it just made people go back to being careless.
Does it illuminate anything to plot this over time?
Red is weaker-lockdown states, blue is stronger-lockdown states. The strong-lockdown advantage is pretty consistent. If we can read anything from this, it’s that lockdowns have a bit more of an advantage when things are already pretty stable, and a bit less at dealing with sudden giant spikes. My data source didn’t have the past few months, but if someone does, let me know.
**Actual Evidence 4: The Lockdown Economy**
The benefits of lockdowns are measured in lives saved. The cost is measured in psychological suffering and economic decline. In order to do a cost-benefit analysis, we should figure out how much stricter lockdowns affected the economy.
Lockdown proponents note that under certain situations, lockdowns can *improve* the economy. Voluntary behavior change means that people won’t patronize businesses in the middle of a raging pandemic. So if lockdowns were really successful in limiting the pandemic, they might have indirect pro-economy effects that outweigh their direct anti-economy effects.
What about in Sweden?
Sweden’s economy did worse than Finland’s, the same as Denmark’s, and better than the EU average. Depending on which country you think is a natural control group, you could draw any conclusion you want from this.
What about US states?
Here is an incredibly dumb simple model that takes no account of timing and doesn’t adjust for any confounders:
This correlates the stringency index of a state in January 2021 with the GDP decrease in that state. Correlation is 0.3 and significant. You could argue Hawaii is an outlier - if you remove it (which I won’t), this would go down to 0.2 and not significant.
Suppose we call states in the top half of lockdown strictness “blue states” and those in the bottom half “red states” (this is almost, but not quite, literally correct). The average blue state has a GDP decrease of 3.94; the average red state of 3.34. Multiplying out, if the entire US had had a red state level of lockdown, it might have saved $64 billion. For context, the US’ entire COVID related loss, assuming GDP would otherwise have grown at the same rate as in 2019, was $1.2 trillion, so having all blue states go down to a red state level of lockdown would have saved about 5% of that.
This contradicts the conclusion of [the report discussed here](https://news.yahoo.com/lockdown-states-like-california-did-better-economically-than-looser-states-like-florida-new-covid-data-shows-153025163.html) , which says that lockdown states did *better* than non-lockdown states economically. Unfortunately, the report doesn’t exist at the link in the article, and I can’t find it anywhere. Going by discussion of it, it seems to choose a subset of states to focus on, without giving a great explanation for why. Overall I am not too tempted to replace my extremely simplistic analysis with theirs, even if I could find it.
**Pre-Conclusion 1: Trying To Reconcile European and US Estimates**
The evidence from Sweden suggests that weak lockdowns could increase death rates by 100% or more. The evidence from the US only finds that they increase death rates by about 20%. Why the difference? Might it be because there’s more of a difference between Sweden and other European countries than between red and blue US states?
Nope, doesn’t look that way.
My unsupported guess is that lockdowns were more important in the first uncontrolled-growth phase of the pandemic. Maybe this is a purely mathematical fact - reducing R from 4 to 2 saves more deaths over a certain period of time than changing it from 0.9 to 0.45. It could also have to do with how “primed” populations were for voluntary behavior change. Since the Swedish data is mostly looking at the first phase of the pandemic, and the US data mostly at later phases, that would explain the extent of the difference.
**Conclusion 1: Extremely Naive Attempt To Try To Quantify Economic Costs Vs. Benefits**
Using the naive linear US model, we find that if all blue states had instead had an average red state level of lockdown, it would have cost 50,000 lives and saved $64 billion. Saving 50,000 lives for $64 billion is about $1.3 million per life.
This is much more than it costs to save people in the Third World with efficient charity (probably around $5,000 to $10,000 / life), but lower than the US government uses for various other purposes. For example, when the EPA is determining how worth-it environmental regulations are, they [value one life at $9.1 million](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248058/percent-change-in-us-real-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/); when the Department of Transportation is determining how worth-it road safety regulations are, they value a life at $9.6 million. So this is pretty good by normal First World decision-making standards.
But we might be tempted to count lives saved from COVID less than we would usually count lives saved, since the people who died of COVID were generally older people with multiple comorbidities who might have died soon anyway. [This paper](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hec.4208) finds that the average COVID victim might have lived another 8 QALYs (quality-adjusted life years - a measure of years of life saved, in which years when you are very sick and can’t do anything count as less than a full year) if they hadn’t gotten COVID.
What about nonfatal cases of COVID? Mild cases with no lasting side effects don’t contribute substantially. Suppose that the average case lasts two weeks, and completely ruins those two weeks - the hedonic value of your life during that time is zero. That’s one twenty-sixth of a quality-adjusted life-year. Since cases are 50-100x as common as deaths, plausibly this adds about 50% to our estimates.
What about long-term sequelae of COVID (ie “#LongCovid”)? The extent of these is poorly understood and debatable. [This study](https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/91270) says about a third of people have symptoms six months out, most mild but some severe. But this kind of situation seems tailor-made for reporting bias - everyone has some weird symptom or other all the time, and if you’ve just had COVID you’ll probably attribute it to that (cf. the debate around [chronic Lyme disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease)).
I plugged some plausible estimates based on all this into a [Guesstimate model](https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18599) and got a cost per QALY saved of between basically free (assuming that the correlation between stringency and GDP loss was an illusion and blue states did no worse than red ones) and $300,000 per QALY, with the median estimate at $98,000 per QALY. First World countries usually value QALYs at $50,000 to $150,000. Given the extreme uncertainty in all these estimates, I don’t feel comfortable saying that this was obviously good or obviously bad. It’s just kind of around the number where some people might think it was worth it and other people might not.
Remember, this is the cost vs. benefits of going from an average blue state level of lockdown to an average red state level. Taking no measures at all would probably be much worse.
I don’t feel anywhere close to able to quantify the economic gain/loss in Sweden. But if we stick with our tentative previous conclusion that a counterfactual early Swedish lockdown would have been more effective at saving lives than late American ones, then QALYs might be cheaper in Sweden, approaching the point where almost everyone would say it was worth it.
**Conclusion 2: Extremely Naive Attempt To Try To Quantify Emotional Costs Vs. Benefits**
Consider again the question of whether Sweden should have implemented a more European-typical lockdown during the first wave of the pandemic.
(remember again that “no interventions at all” isn’t on the table, just the slightly weaker Swedish lockdown vs. a slightly stricter Europe-typical lockdown)
This would have made 10 million Swedes be under stricter lockdown for the three months of so of the first wave. By our calculations above, it might have saved about 2500 lives, but let’s be really generous and extend the confidence interval to 6,000 - ie it might have prevented every single case in Sweden. Here’s what the Guesstimate model says:
10 million people x 3 months = 30 million lockdown months. Between 2500 and 6000 lives saved, by our previous estimates each life is worth about 15 QALYs (by combination of deaths, associated nonfatal cases, and associated long COVID cases), and each QALY contains 12 months, for a total of 720,000 QALMs. So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me.
Might this be because these numbers are off, and the lockdown would have saved more lives than the model allows? I don’t think that could change things very much. Remember, our confidence interval included the scenario where strict lockdown has 100% efficacy and prevents every single COVID case. Even if this is true, that just means it’s 21 months of stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. Again, seems pretty harsh.
How about in the US? Here’s the relevant model:
It should be pretty straightforward, except that I’ve set the number of months in lockdown to be an unknown variable between 3 and 9, since I’m not sure how many crucial months it would have taken to get red states down to the blue state average. As before, I’ve made the confidence intervals include the possibility that a stricter lockdown would have saved every single life in US red states, even though this is absurd (it only saved ~20% of lives in blue states).
Here, having US red states switch to a blue-state typical level of lockdown would save one month of healthy life per 51 person-months in stricter lockdown. Again, seems pretty harsh. Another way of looking at this is that each person who spent a month in slightly stricter lockdown would have saved someone else about 15 hours of healthy life.
Is there any counterargument to these somewhat pessimistic conclusions?
One possibility: even if we agree that almost all of the cost of COVID comes from the emotional burden of strict lockdowns, and not from death and disease, looser lockdowns now might mean stricter lockdowns later. Sweden started with a looser lockdown than Norway, but ended with a stricter one after Norway’s strong lockdown ended the first phase of the pandemic quickly and Sweden’s weak one didn’t.
And even if Sweden had decided to double down and weaken their lockdown despite high case levels, people would probably have voluntarily stayed home more because the pandemic was so bad - inflicting most of the same costs that a state-mandated lockdown would.
This argument seems less convincing in the US, where red states mostly just consistently had weaker lockdowns than blue states did, and never really got stricter to compensate.
Source: [here](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/18/us/covid-state-restrictions.html)
**Conclusion 3: Complicated Things I Am Not Accounting For**
We couldn’t have known any of this at the beginning of the pandemic, and had to make choices from a position of uncertainty.
If we had let the virus spread more, it would have gotten more chances to mutate. The more infectious variants we’re seeing now would have appeared earlier, and vaccines might have been less effective.
If we had let the virus spread until we reached herd immunity (implausible, would have required no voluntary behavior change), we wouldn’t have bothered creating vaccines, and vaccines are going to be really important for the Third World which has very different tradeoffs.
If we had done lockdowns differently, it might have unpredictably caused different levels in voluntary behavior change. Or it might have caused people to lose trust in government in ways that would be bad (or possibly good?) later on.
If there had been looser lockdowns, more children would have had to go to school, which would have been either good or bad depending on how you feel about school.
People dying or getting sick is bad not just for those people, but for their friends and loved ones, and the companies and institutions that depend on them.
Usually economic costs measured in QALYs are used to represent government expenditure, but in this model they’re representing costs incurred by real people, some of whom are poor and a lot worse off when they lose money than the government is. Technically, you could think of a $64 billion economic loss as “Jeff Bezos pays half his fortune, everyone else is fine”, or as “one million middle class people who usually make $64,000/year now make zero for one year”, and these have very different utilitarian costs, and the usual way of thinking of economic costs probably underestimates them in this case.
Economic costs of COVID aren’t just a one-time dollar loss, but also involve businesses closing (which might not reopen), institutional knowledge getting lost (which might be hard to regain), people losing jobs (who might have trouble getting a new job), etc. They could also represent a form of “creative destruction” that does unpredictable things to the industrial landscape.
I am assuming that vaccines will mostly work and the pandemic will gradually get better from here. If new variants emerge that are genuinely vaccine-resistant, and the whole process starts over again, that could change the calculations - though I’m not sure in what direction.
Maybe this was a dress rehearsal for a much worse pandemic later on, and the most important effect of our choices now will be setting the defaults and expectations for how we respond to that one.
**Conclusion 4: Summary**
**1:** Various policies lumped together as “lockdowns” probably significantly decreased R. Full-blown stay-at home orders were less important than targeted policies like school closures and banning large gatherings. Talking about which ones were “good” or “bad” is an oversimplification compared to the more useful questions of when countries should have started vs. stopped each to be on some kind of Pareto frontier of lives saved vs. cost.
**2:** If Sweden had a stronger lockdown more like those of other European countries, it probably could have reduced its death rate by 50-80%, saving 2,500+ lives.
**3:** On a very naive comparison, US states with stricter lockdowns had about 20% lower death rates than states with weaker ones, and about 0.6% more GDP decline. There are high error bars on both those estimates.
**4:** Judging lockdowns by traditional measures of economic significance, moving from a US red-state level of lockdown to a US blue-state level of lockdown is in the range normally associated with interventions that are debatably cost-effective/utility-positive, with error bars including “obviously good” and “pretty bad”. It’s harder to estimate for Sweden, but plausibly for them to move to a more European-typical level of lockdown in the early phase of the pandemic would have very much cleared the bar and been unambiguously cost effective/utility-positive.
**5:** It’s harder to justify strict lockdowns in terms of the non-economic suffering produced. Even assumptions skewed to be maximally pro-strict-lockdown, eg where strict lockdowns would have prevented every single coronavirus case, suggest that it would have taken dozens of months of somewhat stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. This might still be justifiable if present strict lockdowns now prevented future strict lockdowns (mandated or voluntary), which might be true in Europe but doesn’t seem as true in the US.
**6:** Plausibly, really fast and well-targeted lockdowns could have been better along every dimension than either strong-lockdown areas’ strong lockdowns or weak-lockdown areas’ weak lockdowns. We should celebrate the countries that successfully pulled this off, and support the people trying to figure out how to make this easier to pull off next time.
**7:** All of this is very speculative and affected by a lot of factors, and the error bars are very wide.
*Many people helped me navigate through these issues. Thanks to subscribers for reviewing an early draft of this post, to Philippe Lemoine (who [blogs here at CSPI](https://cspicenter.org/war-on-science/)) for helping me understand the case against lockdowns, and to a researcher who prefers to remain anonymous, for helping me understand the case for (well-targeted) lockdowns.* | Scott Alexander | 37964932 | Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | acx |
# Model City Monday
Happy belated Fourth of July! This potentially-recurring column is about modern-day independence-seekers: charter cities, utopian communes, secessionist movements, and the like. I’ve always found these fascinating, and finally remembered that nobody can prevent me from talking about them.
I want to start by making it clear that, as the old saying goes, retweets ≠ endorsements. Some of these projects violate my ethical beliefs. Some of them are scams. Some of them are very nice, very earnest people, who will very earnestly all move to a godforsaken desert and then very earnestly starve to death. I’m trusting you all not to do the thing where you say “I saw it on a blog, so it *has* *to be* a good idea!”
Franklin Webster Smith’s [proposed redesign for the US National Mall](https://www.thedailybeast.com/franklin-webster-smith-wanted-to-redesign-dcs-national-mall-it-ruined-him). A really neat project which was not, in retrospect, a good idea.
That having been said…
---
Maybe you've heard of the [Free State Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project). Some American libertarians, tired of always losing at everything, decided to all move to the same state, so they could be a substantial part of that state's population and maybe win some elections or at least be able to commiserate with each other in person. They chose New Hampshire, 5000 people moved (with 15000 more claiming they'll move eventually) and they managed to elect a dozen or so state representatives (including a friend of mine who has some amazing stories). In general the project seems to have gone well, plus or minus some [bear-related snafus](https://www.amazon.com/Libertarian-Walks-Into-Bear-Liberate/dp/1541788516/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=libertarian+walks+into+a+bear&qid=1625349811&sr=8-1.).
Now some Europeans are thinking: why not do the same thing in Europe? Europe has many countries, just as the US has lots of states. Libertarians always lose there too. If everyone went to the same country, maybe they could change it for the (?) better.
The "Free Society Project Europe" [proposes Montenegro](https://montelibero.org/en/2021/03/17/free-state-project-europe/). It’s only got 600,000 people, it's cheap, and it's controlled by centrists (which is about as close to libertarian as Europe ever gets). Their site claims that "This project is not some abstract theory, but is already being realized by the first pioneers who have moved and begun to naturalize in Montenegro".
Problem: Montenegro isn't technically in the European Union, which makes it hard to move to (although it is expected to be accepted in soon). Also, if you did move there, you would be a resident and not a citizen, which limits your ability to influence the political process. Also, European libertarians are kind of like cryptids: often rumored to exist, rarely spotted.
And also, how real is this project? It's getting signal-boosted by some big-name libertarians, but it was announced on [a Medium blog with four followers](https://medium.com/@cramz882/free-state-project-europe-ef3b89da964), and everything I've seen is compatible with it being one very dedicated person. There's a Discord server, but the invite has expired and I can't find it. There’s a Telegram chat, but I don’t have Telegram and don’t want to get it to check it out. So it might be more of a cool idea than an actual plan that's moving forward.
Still, it *is* a cool idea. Having a lot of influence in a country seems better than having a lot of influence in a US state. Montenegro has fewer people than New Hampshire. And digital nomadism and the aftereffects of the pandemic are making it increasingly easy to move places.
Also, Montenegro looks really pretty and maybe we should just take any excuse to go there.
On the other hand, countries are often associated with ethnic groups who *like* having their own countries. Also, if they decide you are annoying, they can just ban you from immigrating. Most likely the Free Society Project Europe never reaches a size where anyone in Montenegro notices it, but if for some reason it did they could sink it pretty easily (although it might become harder once they are EU members). FSPE notes that Montenegro is already multiethnic and maybe libertarians could slip in while everyone else is squabbling with each other, but "Balkan country with lots of ethnic squabbles" actually sounds like a pretty big turnoff.
Still, cool idea.
---
For a while now, the [Charter Cities Institute](https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/) has argued that donating to them (or to charter cities in general) might be one of the most effective things you can do with your money, maybe even orders of magnitude better than any other charity. Their argument, seen [here](https://assets.website-files.com/5d253237e31f051057dc0a2b/5d88effe42420361c5e0c3c2_The%20Case%20for%20Charter%20Cities%20Within%20the%20Effective%20Altruist%20Framework.pdf), is based on the idea that charter cities might grow significantly faster than their home countries and lift hundreds of thousands of residents out of poverty. If a few million dollars can successfully lobby someone to start a charter city, that’s pretty cost-effective.
Now institutional effective altruism has evaluated those claims, in the form of [an analysis by trusted EA think tank Rethink Priorities](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EpaSZWQkAy9apupoD/intervention-report-charter-cities). They conclude that “it is unlikely that charter cities will be more cost-effective than GiveWell top charities in terms of directly improving wellbeing”.
They bring up the usual reasons to think charter cities are hard, but their most damning point is that even if a city gets successfully founded, it might not actually increase growth. There aren’t enough existing charter cities to draw firm empirical conclusions, but the closest existing analogue is Special Economic Zones. A [World Bank study](https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/29054/P154708-12-07-2017-1512640006382.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) finds that SEZs don’t consistently grow faster than their host countries. Some very conspicuously do (eg Dubai, Shenzhen), but these are matched by a few that grow less quickly, and overall it’s kind of a wash. The study tries to analyze whether there are consistent features of SEZs which make some do better than others, but it can’t really find any.
Keep in mind potential biases - countries might make underperforming regions SEZs to fix their underperformance, or might make especially promising regions SEZs because they’re best placed to take advantage of better regulations.
It then fine-tunes some of CCI’s models, incorporating the sort of pessimistic assumptions about growth that make sense in the context of the World Bank study, and finds that although they are nice, they don’t reach the same level of cost-effectiveness as other GiveWell top charities, even on time scales of decades.
But they add a caveat: this is just the really direct, easy-to-model effects from the people in the city getting richer. There are still potential indirect effects from charter cities serving as “laboratories of government” (eg one of them might try a new policy, it might be great, and then bigger countries might adopt it). The obvious example is that the Shenzhen special economic zone did well enough that it convinced the Chinese leadership to try capitalism more generally, with world-changing results.
Mark Lutter of CCI [broadly supports the research](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EpaSZWQkAy9apupoD/intervention-report-charter-cities?commentId=aZeCDYQ3TkaSHPonB), but argues that the World Bank study might underrate CCI’s work. The study only investigated SEZs between 0.5 and 10 square kilometers. This is more like a neighborhood than like a real city (Central Park is 3.5 square kilometers, Manhattan is 87, Shenzhen is 320). But Lutter thinks that “a city is the smallest unit that can support economic development”. He also thinks the SEZs were comparatively weak - slightly lower taxes or something boring like that, compared to the total overhaul involved in charter cities. He comes up with a reference class that includes Shenzhen, but not a lot of SEZs that don’t work, and says this is the proper comparison.
The Rethink Priorities analysis is a great mathematical model, and a good counterbalance to inflated estimates of charter city donation cost-effectiveness. But like all models, it’s only as good as the assumptions that go into it and the degree to which desirable effects can be easily quantified, and right now both of those are iffy enough that I doubt it’s the final word on the matter.
---
Model cities are usually associated with libertarians, but that doesn't have to be true. Anyone can make a model city. You just have to try hard and believe in yourself! Well past the point where it becomes delusional!
[Black Hammer](https://blackhammer.org/) believes in themselves. They are a US group which describes themselves as "a symbol of hope for the colonized working class". Their enemies describe them as "a cross between racial reparations and multi-level marketing", which is a heck of a thing to describe people as, but, well, see their website:
> Are you white? Do you want to help? Do you want to be a good person, on the right side of history?
>
> The only way you can wash the blood off your hands is through following the leadership of African, Indigenous, and Colonized people and paying reparations for all that’s been stolen in your name.
>
> Right now, Black Hammer Organization is offering several ways to pay reparations […]
>
> **Mao Level – $199 minimum**
>
> Sign up for the entire 8-week bootcamp and get fully certified as someone who is united under Colonized leadership. By completing this level, you’ll get the chance to provide your skills to the organization *a*nd be an active recruiter to make sure that other people are continuing to pay reparations and support the masses of poor and working class Colonized people. Upon completion, you will also receive a Reparations Corps uniform!
>
> Mao Level + : Pay an additional 25% in reparations and receive an exclusive piece of Black Hammer gear!
>
> **Sankara Level – $99 minimum**
>
> Sign up for the 4-week bootcamp and get halfway there to falling under the leadership of Colonized people. Although you won’t be able to contribute to the organization at this level, you will still receive valuable skills necessary to help advance anti-colonialism and organize people to return and liberate the land of Colonized people around the world. If you wish to continue the full 8-week bootcamp, simply pay reparations for another Sankara Level bootcamp.
>
> **Sankara Level +** : Pay an additional 25% in reparations and receive an exclusive piece of Black Hammer gear!
>
> **Che Level – $40**
>
> Sign up for a single session of the bootcamp and get a view of the experience and work it takes in order to disunite with your people’s worldwide acts of genocide and terror. Take that first step into creating a world where no one lives at the expense of another and show others that you have what it takes to make a material, not just ideological, difference in the lives of others.
>
> The next 8-week bootcamp will begin on March 12th, 2021! That means you need to sign up today to claim your spot and begin YOUR journey.
>
> **GROUP PRICE** – Does your organization/company, activist group, or group of friends want to pay reparations and learn about anti-colonialism or anti-racism in the world and in the workplace? Contact us directly at reparationscorps@protonmail.com for pricing options!
What are they going to do with this money? One of their projects is *Hammer City*, a city with “Jobs, housing, food, healthcare, no cops, no rent, no Coronavirus, and no white people.” The plan is to [locate it in Colorado](https://blackhammer.org/2021/01/22/press-release-land-liberators-announce-change-of-location-for-hammer-city/) and pay for it with [crowdfunding](https://blackhammer.org/hammercity/) (so far they have $90,000 of their $500,000 goal). Here are some pictures of how it could look:
And [here’s its proposed constitution](https://blackhammer.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Constitution-of-Hammer-CIty.pdf), which is big on denunciations of things but short of details on how anything will actually be governed - the closest I can find is “the council and residents of Hammer City will establish a method for elections”.
The latest progress report is this tweet:
…but there are continuing requests for donations from as recently as last week on their Twitter account, which incidentally is a work of art:
I am sure they will rule their new domain peacefully and with great sagacity.
---
Getting back to CCI, Mark Lutter thinks [The State Of Charter Cities Is Strong](https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/post/the-state-of-charter-cities-is-strong).
I mean, of course he would say that, it’s his job. But hidden in between the platitudes is a bit of a warning.
In his response to Rethink Priorities (mentioned above), Lutter said the World Bank’s study on SEZs wasn’t applicable because charter cities were going to be bigger and better than SEZs’ 0.5 - 10 km^2. But two of the most promising existing charter city projects, Prospera and Ciudad Morazan, are starting on land of 0.25 km^2 (though they could get larger). Lutter is suitably concerned:
> Both Próspera and Ciudad Morazán are closer to charter towns than charter cities. Their medium-term target populations are in the thousands. The benefits of charter cities come from both the charter/governance, and the city/agglomeration. The benefits scale quadratically. One charter city with 100,000 residents is better than 10 comparable charter cities with 10,000 residents each […]
>
> Paul Romer’s original case for charter cities included the fact that cities are the smallest unit which can have sustained economic growth. Will Ciudad Morazán with 10,000 residents be a better place to live than San Pedro Sula? Probably! Will it generate widespread economic development for Honduras? Probably not.
He goes on to express optimism that at least Ciudad Morazan can scale (Prospera seems to be trying to attract remote workers, and it’s harder to see how to leverage that into agglomeration effects).
[Ciudad Morazan](https://www.morazan.city/) is aiming at a more down-to-earth and scaleable kind of development than the snazzy high-tech island city of [Prospera](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera).
But also:
> Broadly speaking, [charter city] governance can be split into the [propertarian camp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propertarianism#:~:text=Propertarianism%2C%20or%20proprietarianism%2C%20is%20a,the%20right%20to%20own%20property.) and the [state capacity](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/what-libertarianism-has-become-and-will-become-state-capacity-libertarianism.html) camp. The propertarians define the relationship with the government and residents in a contract, clearly defining the rights and responsibilities of both. The state capacity followers believe that property rights are important, but a strong state is also crucial for building a successful city and generating sustained economic growth […]
>
> The state capacity approach defines the rights and responsibilities of both residents and the government but offers a wider range of flexibility in dealing with unforeseen challenges. The emphasis is not on the state as a contractual service provider, but instead on the state as a positive actor in the development of the city. The Singaporean government, for example, plays an [active role](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/the-rise-of-hybrid-governance) in Singapore’s development, building industrial parks, attracting investment, and focusing on the growth of specific industries.
>
> The propertarian approach gives residents and businesses more security. The hands of the state are tied. This security comes at the expense of flexibility. I tend to lean towards the state capacity approach. Aligning the incentives of the city government with the residents can minimize the risk of government action harming the residents while preserving the possibility of positive government action.
I’ve been thinking about this after reading *[How Asia Works](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works)*. If Studwell is right, financial hubs are a completely different thing from large-scale development. The great charter city success stories - Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong - are all stories of cities that became financial hubs. These are great, but you can only have so many financial hubs in a certain region before it gets kind of saturated. If eg Prospera becomes a financial hub for Central America, that’s great and they can be really proud of themselves - but it wouldn’t necessarily be a scaleable plan to lift all of Latin America out of poverty.
Lots of charter cities want to be Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. But could a charter city be Park Chung-Hee’s Korea? Sounds like a harder problem, especially since it won’t be immediately profitable (and in fact will be actively less profitable than doing other things in the short-term). Still, it might turn out that that’s what you need if you want to end poverty at scale. | Scott Alexander | 38351704 | Model City Monday | acx |
# Open Thread 179
Happy Fourth of July! This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** There's another [online ACX meetup](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/od3i5t/bram_cohen_at_the_acx_online_meetup_july_11/) next Sunday, special guest Bram Cohen, inventor of BitTorrent and the Chia cryptocurrency. Fill in [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe0lk3h6fF6yYOJJMqHhTtVVf72nQpfvYgqayCahA_NJ5MfXQ/viewform) to get an invite.
**2:** Comment of the week is [Gene Smith on polygenic screening](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies#comment-2300538), especially the attempt to calculate cost-effectiveness. "My overall conclusion is that if we somehow end up banning pre-implantation genetic testing it will be one of the worst decisions we have ever made. The impact would be on-par with a worldwide ban on vaccines or sewage systems. It would likely cost the average person around 5 years of healthy life." And many people brought up this [anti-screening](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr2105065) *[New England Journal of Medicine](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr2105065)* [article](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr2105065) that came out the same day as my post, although I can't find a good unpaywalled link.
**3:** In [my review of PIHKaL](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/11/book-review-pihkal/) a long time ago, I mention that Ann Shulgin claimed to, as a child, have a very odd series of specific visions almost every time she went to sleep - and also claimed to have met other people with similar experiences. I asked if any readers had this, and nobody spoke up. I recently met a friend who had done jhana meditation, and says that some aspects of Shulgin’s experience remind her of that. I’ve heard things about kids potentially experiencing jhanas when falling asleep, though most of them seem to grow out of it, so I consider this a pretty satisfying solution to this weird mystery.
**4:** I should have book review contest winners up later this week - sorry for the delay. | Scott Alexander | 38377551 | Open Thread 179 | acx |
# Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
I made a mistake in the email notifications, so if you didn’t know I wrote [a review of Joe Studwell’s](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works) *[How Asia Works](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works)* earlier this week - well, now you know.
Erusian [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2275793):
> 1.) Three things stick out here. Firstly, Studwell vastly overstates how damaging land reform has to be to landlords. Taiwan and Japan both bought out landlords with bonds. The bonds became worth less because since government bonds grew more slowly than the economy. But there are still a fair number of wealthy old families around in both countries. The important thing is not the destruction of landlords as a class: it's putting land into the hands of people (whether smallholding peasants or professional farmers) who own the land, have an incentive to improve it, and whose primary income is gained not by owning land but by producing agricultural products. The two are ultimately equivalent at equilibrium. How you get there is not especially important and paying off the landlords is fine if it works. Likewise, giving land to collectives or to peasant groups (as opposed to individual peasants) doesn't work very well because it keeps it out of the power of enterprising farmers.
>
> Secondly, he completely ignores the many times land reform failed. East Asia is not unique in its attempts at land reform. It was fairly common in Africa, Eastern Europe, etc. Ukraine and Romania had incredibly fertile soil and it's hard to think of regimes that eliminated their landlords harder. Yet they haven't really seen similar effects.
>
> Thirdly, he ignores that peasants will vote for land reform overwhelmingly in any democratic system. His focus on outside institutions is horribly misguided. From the CCP to 19th century Japan, peasant ability to make demands of the political system lead directly to land reform. If land reform is no longer viable in nations where the peasantry is still common, the question I'd ask is why that is. Are they all dictatorships? If so, it's a problem of democratization. Have they got other political goals? Then that's a separate issues.
>
> 2.) There are some countries which are increasingly skipping directly to service export. However, an industrializing country has a huge internal market for industrial goods (roads, bridges, telecommunication infrastructure, etc) which in turn creates a construction/manufacturing boom even when the primary export paying for the imported machinery is (for example) software development services. This is the case in some of the wealthier Indian provinces. But on the whole, manufacturing is still a pretty good bet.
>
> Another thing: the importance of export markets. These countries need to have markets willing to purchase their goods. If they don't, export lead industrialization fails. Big imperial nations have options that modern nations don't. Where do these nations export their goods? To the US. Korea had special deals with the US. So did Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore. And even China got special deals (enough to cause Russian complaints). This may be changing, especially for big countries like China with internally developed markets. But this advocacy for ELI should mention the politics of finding places to sell their goods. Otherwise the idea of "protected at home competing abroad" fails.
>
> In Malaysia, Studwell veers into the shaky ground of being against capital per se. Letting partners get equity in firms is not an issue. Did you know huge percentages of Korean companies were owned by Americans? South Korea was not just stealing their technology, they were moving up the value chain. In partnerships where it didn't make sense, by learning through transfer deals where it didn't. There is, of course, an issue with letting companies offshore high tech work and using your people only as menial labor. But this is an issue of structuring the deals and regulations. But of the successful cases, only China broadly prevents you from owning minority stakes in companies. The rest, at most, limited the percentage of foreign ownership. Which is still admittedly not a full free market policy.
>
> 3.) Again, he's ignoring the US here. South Korea's "crazed" borrowing was underwritten by the US for security reasons. The US actually used its might to get SK cheaper debt at some points. Malaysia was on its own.
>
> Also, he doesn't mention how this method leads to huge problems in the last stage. Japan's lost decade was in part due to heavily controlled and underdeveloped financial markets.
>
> Overall, I'm sympathetic to the idea of Export Led Industrialization including tariffs. Though it's worth pointing out the IMF has a better track record than it's critics want to admit. You just have to realize first it's primarily a firefighter: you call the IMF when things have gone wrong. (As, indeed, many of these countries did in the late 1990s and then saw bumper growth.) However, this argument ignores (imo) a lot of factors and tells a story of economic destiny being primarily about internal decisions. Which are necessary but insufficient. It's right there in the idea of export lead industrialization: you are exporting to OTHER COUNTRIES which means they matter for your internal story.
Nifty775 [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2276091):
> Good comment. I came here to point out the dreaded counterexample of Latin America, which tried to do a number of things the East Asian countries did, but mostly failed. Mexico basically carried out the greatest land reform initiative known to man outside of Communism, but did not get the benefits Studwell describes. Argentina & Chile also carried out large-scale land reform, to lesser effect. More importantly, Latin America is very protectionist and has been trying to nurture infant industries for decades- Argentina's still working on that car industry after 30+ years, not exactly to great results....
>
> I also agree with your point about the asymmetry of 'free trade'. The US tolerated a number of these countries being highly protectionist while also importing their goods here- developing countries get a special dispensation. Arguably the US still does with China, incredibly! And even India, which is now approaching being the world's 5th largest economy. I'm not sure that this combination of 'we tariff foreigners but they accept our goods pretty freely' can necessarily be replicated.
>
> I greatly enjoyed Studwell's book, I just think that the East Asian countries simply executed on their plans much better than a number of other countries have
---
I mentioned in the post how Japan used to be known for shoddy manufacturing, but is now considered a paragon of high-quality manufacturing like Germany. Jack C [adds](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2276631):
> At one point German manufacturing was known for shoddy quality, hence the phrase "on the fritz".
I’m a sucker for cool etymologies, but the experts are [skeptical of this one](https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ont4.htm), since Fritz didn’t become a nickname for Germany until a decade or so after the phrase was first used.
---
Kevin [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2275730):
> Studwell’s discussion of industrial policy is broadly convincing but he massively overstates his case rhetorically. The anti IMF position is probably his least defensible point. In the 50s-80s, the IMF indeed recommended free market policies, generally. But the anti IMF position then was Industrial Substitution Industrialization. Their belief was that to develop, newly independent countries should cut themselves off entirely from world trade, to develop new industries behind their own borders. Pretty much everyone agrees now that this approach was a disaster. Even if Studwell were 100% correct in every sentence of the book, it would prove that the IMF critics were totally wrong, and the IMF only needed a change of emphasis.
>
> Then we get the question on how widely his advice could be adopted. He briefly mentions in the Philippines section that, citing from memory, “Some people think they can do nothing, but condemning millions to poverty is no option at all” Well in some moral sense sure, but in a policy sense doing nothing is obviously an option. Elites have almost never pursued industrial policy for altruistic reasons: The success stories are all cases where elite interest lined up with the public interest. For example, South Korea was racially and ideologically homogeneous. Marshall Park in other words required industrialists to make SK rich and defended but didn’t care who they were. Studwell mentions that industrial policy failed in Malaysia in part because of affirmative action, and then ignores that point entirely. The East Asian countries that succeeded only did so because of their homogeneity allowing focus purely on industrialization, plus the fact that the US leaned heavily on them. It’s very unclear that a country could implement the Studwell program against the will of its elites. It isn’t the case that where there’s a will there’s a way. Finally, all of this requires a high quality bureaucracy, which East Asia has a long history of and the rest of the world lacks.
>
> For finance, once again Studwell has a good narrow point but greatly oversells his case. There are two market failures that have been identified with international finance: First, that if developing countries take on debt in foreign currency they will be bankrupted en masse if the exchange rate changes. Second, that banks might pursue unproductive loans (real estate and consumer debt, basically). These could be fixed with narrow laws targeting these problems directly and individually. There isn’t very good evidence that the financial repression associated with East Asian development had a very large impact and it’s likely that you couldn’t convince many countries to adopt it anyway. When it comes to industrial loans, there are tons of studies showing that private banks are much more efficient at making loans than the state. The East Asian approach also leaves tons of overhang, for example in China there are tons of state run banks that are riddled in debt and low quality loans. SK and Japan have had this problem with their banks and massive corporations to a significant but lesser degree.
>
> Studwell believes that since the East Asian approach is good we must convince the entire world to adopt all of it. I would tend to think that since there is very little chance of convincing the world to adopt it, and since it comes with major drawbacks over the long term, we should amend the current system. Developing countries should likely support exporting more and implement a few rules to prevent financial crises. The discussion of the IMF is the most dishonest part of the book: he deals so nicely and only by insinuation towards the IMF economists because if he had to defend the position that the international financial system bankrupted the world, it would be obvious that he is wrong. In fact the current international economic system is exceptionally generous - WTO rules explicitly allow poor countries to subsidize industrialization but forbid rich countries from doing the same. The current system likely needs amendment, but not replacement.
---
Pseudonymous economic historian Pseudo-Erasmus, who I mentioned in the article as somebody I usually trust on these kinds of topics but who hadn’t weighed in specifically, kindly contributed his thoughts:
He also has a longer thread discussing Chinese land reform a little further back; click on the starting tweet for more:
---
Navin Kumar [writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2276327):
> India is probably the best counter-example to what Studwell is talking about.
>
> For decades, India practiced a variant of socialism in which (among other things) industries were sheltered from international and even national competition for reasons that basically line up with the infant industry argument. The resulting companies weren't even bad, but when they were eventually exposed to world competition, they collapsed, and others took their place.
>
> Similarly, India had (and still has) a robust set of national banks. The problem was that when the government does get them to give unprofitable loans, it wasn't to subsidize industrial learning but also to support small farmers, weavers etc. It was as much redistribution as investment.
>
> The argument seems to be "there are knowledge externalities generated when firms start manufacturing" but it's hard for countries to actually implement this insight (assuming it's correct) because they don't know which sectors will generate them, what the right policies are to generate them, and when to stop protecting the firms and expose them to global competition.
>
> (Land reforms are amazing, and the closest thing to a consensus that I can think among developmental economists. It's one of the few policies that don't have the "equity-efficiency trade-offs" that one learns about in Econ 101.)
Studwell doesn’t really talk about India, but I think his answer here (which several commenters bring up) would be that India didn’t have “export discipline” (ie force companies to manufacture for the external market in order to make sure they can compete in non-captive markets) and internal competition.
[Polscistoic](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2284988) also brings up Esping-Andersen’s “Three Laws Of Sociology”, which are:
> 1. Some do and some don't
>
> 2. It is always different in the South
>
> 3 It never works in India
---
Nicholas Weininger [brings up](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2276582) the counterexample of Britain, which had a kind of anti-land-reform - kick peasants out and give land to wealthy landlords - but then industrialized very successfully. Eric Rall [speculates](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2282716):
> I also thought about the Enclosure movement and the Highland Clearances in Britain as counterexamples to the Land Reform as a precondition to Industrialization thesis. But after considering a bit, I think we can salvage a variation of the thesis if we conclude that Studwell misunderstood the active ingredient of Land Reform here.
>
> Studwell seems to arguing that the active ingredients are 1) breaking the power base of the great landlords, allowing a durable shift away from a feudal social model, and 2) converting peasants into more productive and more economically-empowered yeoman farmers. But this clearly doesn't apply to British "Land Reform", and @Erusian's earlier comment argues that #1 at least doesn't apply to Japan, either. My proposed modification of the hypothesis is that the active ingredient is actually replacing traditional systems of land tenure with Freehold tenure or something like it (Fee Simple, Allodium, etc).
>
> Pre-reform land tenures in most places probably resembled the utterly illegible traditional land tenure systems James Scott described in "Seeing Like a State", where the landlord might "own" the property, but the tenants had a complex mix of vested rights to the land and obligations to the landlord. These systems probably worked decently well within the context of the societies in which they developed, but they tend lock those involved into the social and economic structure whose assumptions are baked into the land tenure system, and their illegibility means nobody has the power or the incentives to improve or restructure them for the better.
>
> Freehold tenure, on the other hand, gives whoever the freeholder is both the power and the incentives to maximize the economic value of the land. It also makes the land title much, much more legible. Contra James Scott, legibility doesn't just benefit the State: it also benefits the owner by allowing them to engage in transactions with distant strangers, i.e. to buy, sell, or mortgage land rather than just making static traditional use of it or at most handing it off to a relative or neighbor.
>
> The Enclosures at least (I'm less familiar with the Highland Clearances) fit the bill under this hypothesis. When the primary direct beneficiaries of Enclosures were generally the landlords, the Enclosures still served to convert illegible feudal tenure into legible Freehold tenure.
>
> Among the Asian countries under discussion, I think China's the closest to a counterexample to my hypothesis, since China reformed first to collectivized agriculture (which is legible to the state, but lacks the non-state benefits of the legibility of freehold tenure, and which terminally diffuses the power and incentive of the owner to improve the land), and then to something more like Leasehold tenure than Freehold. But China's economic expansion came after collectivization was deemphasized, and the modern system of very long-term leases from the State still has a lot of the advantages of freehold: as with freehold, the leaseholder can make improvements and benefit from them for decades at a time, and the leaseholder can buy, sell, or mortgage leased property.
---
From [Will](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2276692):
> A negative outlook for the South Asian foils (Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines) seems unjustified considering how quickly they are growing at present despite not following the book's advice. Also they are still richer than their historically more-centrally-planned neighbors Vietnam and Cambodia. In the past 20 years, all the foils have increased their GDP per capita by at least 2.8x, which is a CAGR of at least 5.2%.
Yeah, this depends a lot on how you look at it. Here’s OWID on absolute GDP growth since 1950:
Here’s relative GDP growth (ie as a percent of starting point) since 1950:
And here’s relative GDP growth with the starting point in 1990:
And here’s relative GDP growth with the starting point in 2005:
Because China, Vietnam, and Laos started so late, they don’t look great on the 1950 plot. They look a lot better on the 1990 plot, and it seems justified putting them in a separate “winner” category compared to “losers" Philippines/Indonesia/Malaysia/etc (South Korea, Taiwan, etc are already too rich to be able to grow fast by this point). If you switch the start date to 2005, then a lot of the gap closes.
I’m not really sure what to do with this. My impression is that the period since 2005 has been a pretty good one for most developing countries, so this might just be the “everyone’s a genius in a bull market” phenomenon. Or it might be that whatever Studwell was picking up on either wasn’t true, or was only true for a certain period.
I should add that including Laos and Vietnam in the same category as Studwell’s other “winners” is my own inference, and not really mentioned in the book, so Studwell would be entirely within his rights saying that China, South Korea, Taiwan, etc had already done well, and Malaysia/Indonesia etc haven’t caught up with them, and nothing that’s happened since 2005 changes that.
---
There’s a discussion of IQ that retraces all the expected talking points. For example, [Alvaro de Menard](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2275712):
> Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan all have national IQs >=105
>
> Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, etc. are in the 85-90 range.
>
> There's an extremely simple theory to explain the development differences we observe. Even if we accept the arguments about industrial policy and land reform, can it really be a coincidence that these policies were only "correctly" applied in the high-IQ countries?
Slight correction - the first list of countries are very high but not quite >105. But more important, [Lietadlo](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2275790) asks:
> Or is it that developed countries are able to afford better environment for their children and thus produce populations with higher IQ? European IQ scores improved by something like 15 points since WW2. I would guess that Korean IQ scores were abysmal in 1950s as well.
Followed by some examples of this working or not working. Alvaro brings up [Gulf states](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2275882), which got very rich without this changing their national IQ much. Somehow people missed bringing up Ireland, which is the [best example](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/raceiq-irish-iq-chinese-iq/) of a country whose measured IQ changed a lot after it developed.
Probably the best thing to do is just to check if IQ changed a lot in East Asian countries during their rise to success. The Japanese data (and valiant attempts to extend it to Korea) [suggests yes](http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/nijenhuis2011ip_FE_Korea.pdf). I don’t think we have the very fine-grained data it would take to try to see how much of these gains are “hollow” vs. important, but in their absence I think it’s fair to speculate that most of the northern vs. southern Asian IQ difference is just that northerners are more Flynn-ified.
On the other hand, if you compare PISA scores (probably an okay proxy for IQ here) to GDP per capita, you get [this](https://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/which-region-world-has-smartest-kids-according-oecd-it-s-east-asia):
All East Asian countries are way above the line of best fit, and Vietnam (GDP per capita of like 500) does better than Switzerland (GDP per capita of like 60,000). Meanwhile, Thailand/Malaysia/etc are all much richer than Vietnam and do much worse.
Also of note - if you look at those popular [List of Countries By IQ](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country) pages, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam all come out about the same! Plausibly PISA is picking something up that whatever terrible methods people use to make those rankings aren’t (or Vietnam cheats on its PISA scores somehow - [plausibly China does](https://thediplomat.com/2013/12/china-cheats-the-pisa-exams/)!) I don’t know if the statistics we use to prove that Japan etc had a Flynn Effect are more like PISA or more like those lists.
---
Noah Smith is overall a big fan of *How Asia Works*, but took this review as an opportunity to write about [What Studwell Gets Wrong](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-studwell-got-wrong). His first point:
> Studwell views South Korea as the development success *par excellence*. Though he holds up Taiwan’s land reform program (the “land to the tiller” policy) as the world’s best, he believes that Korea executed export discipline more effectively. This, he argues, is why South Korea sits ahead of Taiwan in the [per capita GDP rankings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita).
>
> But those rankings are calculated at market exchange rates. When you instead adjust for purchasing power parity, it turns out that Taiwan is about $6700 richer than South Korea in per capita terms, and that this disparity has existed for quite some time:
I don’t know enough about PPP to have an opinion on this. What I find most interesting is that Taiwan was about 10% richer than South Korea in 1920, and in the past century, as both economies have grown by 3000%, the entire time Taiwan has stayed about 10% richer than South Korea (except maybe a blip around 1942,
Noah then mentions the same thing some commenters did - that southern Asian economies seem to be doing better since *How Asia Works* got published - and asks:
> What should we conclude if this continues for another decade or two? We might look at the particulars of Southeast Asian industrial policy, and how it changed since earlier times, and ascribe its success to those changes.
>
> …Or, we might start to wonder if successful development policies simply determine countries’ place in a queue. My longtime readers will also know that in addition to *How Asia Works*, I love Krugman, Fujita, and Venables’ *[The Spatial Economy](https://www.amazon.com/Spatial-Economy-Cities-Regions-International/dp/0262561476)*. And in the final section of that (highly technical) book, the authors turn what was a humble theory of urbanization into a grand theory of global development. And the upshot of that grand theory is that countries have to basically *wait in line* to get rich. There’s just no way for them to all hop on the rapid industrialization train all at once. Better policy can let you cut to the front of the line, but then the countries you cut in front of are out of luck.
>
> To be sure, this is a highly stylized, pretty speculative theory, which is even harder to prove than Studwell’s. But it kinda-sorta fits the observed pattern in Asia — first Japan and Hong Kong and Singapore grew quickly, then Taiwan and South Korea, then China, now Vietnam and Indonesia. Malaysia and Thailand got a head start on China but then slowed down after the financial crisis of ‘97, while China accelerated — perhaps because China “cut in line” in front of the Southeast Asian tigers. But now, with China [slowing down](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-gdp-instantview/instant-view-chinas-economic-growth-slows-to-6-1-in-2019-near-30-year-low-idUSKBN1ZG092), perhaps Malaysia is back at the front of the line.
>
> Anyway, this would be a depressing, fatalistic sort of world, where development is a zero-sum-game in the short term. Hopefully it’s not true — I’d much rather believe in a Studwellian world where the right smart growth policies can boost lots of countries at once. But we may never know which is right.
This is something I’ve wondered about before, in an even more disturbing way. How much of US wage stagnation has been that we “exported” our potential wage growth to China (or other developing countries)? Relocating a lot of US factories to China is surely good for Chinese factory workers and bad for US factory workers. Then once China becomes less attractive, those same factories relocate to Vietnam or Ethiopia or somewhere.
In a sense, this would be good - it means that everywhere in the world will get rich eventually, free markets are doing their job, and US wage stagnation is (in some sense) nothing to worry about. It would be bad if - well, if people learned it was true and then everyone started demanding tariffs to keep all their country’s wage growth for themselves.
But this is extremely unsupported speculation off of Noah’s already pretty unsupported speculation, and probably some economist will show up to tell me why it’s definitely not true.
---
Salemicus [asks](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works#comment-2275384):
> But what about the Middle Eastern countries who tried very similar policies in the 60s and 70s, and it didn't help them at all?
>
> You can't just pick successful countries who all have X in common and write a Just-So story about how X is the cause. You have to look at all countries with X.
You can find more about the specific Middle Eastern countries and what they did on the thread and in the resources recommended there.
One possible defense of Studwell’s “cherry picking” is that, as per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap), “Since 1960, only 15 economies have escaped the middle income trap, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Japan”. So Studwell is picking a pretty decent fraction of the limited number of cherries that exist.
I tried tracking down the original source, and I think it’s [this paper](https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/965511468194956837/pdf/104230-BRI-Policy-1.pdf), although it lists only 13 countries: Equatorial Guinea, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mauritius, Portugal, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan.
Equatorial Guinea struck oil. Puerto Rico is not a country. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Greece are European countries that missed the general First Worldification of Europe for various reasons which then went away. Israel is [chosen by God](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-smith-on-jewish-selective#comment-2186006). That leaves just the East Asian countries and Mauritius (which sounds fascinating, and which I should try to learn more about).
The one thing I know about Mauritius. I guess a rising tide does not lift all boats. | Scott Alexander | 38248584 | Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works" | acx |
# Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies
Another thing I missed during my hiatus last year: [the birth of the first polygenically-screened baby](https://www.ivfbabble.com/on-the-40th-anniversary-of-the-first-ivf-in-the-usa-the-first-baby-elizabeth-jordan-carr-looks-at-how-science-today-has-produced-a-new-world-first-baby-aurea/).
[*conflict of interest notice: [LifeView](https://www.lifeview.com/), the company that handled the screening, was co-founded by [Steve Hsu](https://infoproc.blogspot.com/). I’ve known Steve for many years now, he is very nice to me, always patiently answers my genetics questions, and sometimes comes to SSC/ACX meetups]*
During *in vitro* fertilization, a woman takes drugs that make her produce lots of eggs. Doctors extract the eggs and fertilize them with sperm from a partner or donor, producing lots of embryos. Hopefully at least one of the embryos looks healthy, and then the doctors implant it in the woman or a surrogate parent.
For a while now, if the process produces enough embryos, doctors have used some simple low-tech genetic tests to choose the healthiest. For example, they might look for Down syndrome or other obvious chromosomal abnormalities, or for very severe monogenic diseases like sickle cell anemia. All of this is routine.
But most interesting traits aren't chromosomal abnormalities or single genes. They're polygenic, ie controlled by the interaction of thousands of genes. You need to record basically the entire genome and have a good idea what all of it is doing before you can predict these. Right now we're at an inflection point where we can sort of do this for a few traits, and some companies are starting to apply this to the embryo selection process.
I often have patients ask me something like: "I have a history of schizophrenia in my family. I'm really concerned my kid might get schizophrenia. What can I do to prevent this?" Right now I don't have a lot of answers, besides just staying generally healthy during pregnancy and making sure the kid has a healthy upbringing. But with polygenic screening, you start to get more options. You can IVF lots of embryos, test all of them for genetic schizophrenia risk, and implant whichever one gets the lowest score. How much does that help? LifeView, the pioneering polygenic screening company, has some helpful calculators:
It won't let me calculate this one for more than two embryos, or for people with a family history of the disorder, but with enough embryos probably you could cut your risk by half or more.
What if you have a family history of multiple conditions, like schizophrenia and breast cancer? Wouldn't that mean decreasing returns on selection? Unless by coincidence the embryo with the lowest schizophrenia risk also has the lowest breast cancer risk, you have to choose to minimize one or the other, right?
Sort of. You can also just try to minimize serious disease. This is the idea behind [genomic indexing](https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/11/6/648/htm), which calculates an embryo's risk of every disease we know how to screen for, weights them by how likely they are and how bad they are, and tries to pick the embryo with the best chance of an overall healthy life. So for example, if Embryo 1 has high risk of breast cancer but low risk of high blood pressure, and Embryo 2 is the opposite, then the algorithm knows that cancer is worse than high blood pressure, and will select Embryo 2. Here's what you can do with genomic indexing:
Are these levels of reductions “worth it”? I think the company has a pretty good pitch, which is - if you’re doing IVF, you have to choose an embryo anyway. If you don’t screen, you’re going to choose one at random. So why not instead choose one in a way that halves your future kid’s risk of serious diseases? Of course, “worth it” depends on the price, which the company is kind of coy about, but [an earlier version](https://www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/genomic-prediction-raises-45m#.YM7qArBlBaQ) seems to have cost `~`$1400 plus some extra per embryo, which is a fraction of overall IVF costs and pretty cheap for a US medical procedure
You'll notice that all the traits being measured here are pretty serious medical conditions. In theory, you're not supposed to use polygenic screening to produce designer babies. What about in practice? Screening companies will give you the raw data if you ask for it, so if you want to screen for an embryo with green eyes, all you need to do is find some third party algorithm that can screen genomes to figure out the baby's eye color and plug in your data. Does anything like this exist? I don't think so, but I think it would be trivial for a genetics PhD student to make.
[edit: existing polygenic screening companies might not read enough genes to do this. Although it would be easy to offer a more complete service that reads most genes, banning the more complete version might be one way regulators could prevent this otherwise hard-to-prevent thing.]
What about IQ? There are definitely scientists who have figured out how to do [polygenic analyses](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3) to predict a modest amount of variation in IQ, though I don't know if their algorithms are public, and they're certainly not convenient for amateurs to use. If you had them, would they work? Gwern has done some calculations and finds that with ten embryos (a near-best-case scenario of what you're likely to get from egg extraction) and modern (as of 2016) polygenic scoring technology, you could get on average +3 IQ points by implanting the smartest. If polygenic scoring technology reached the limits of its potential (might happen within a decade or two) you could get +9 IQ points. Embryos from the same parents only vary a certain amount in IQ, and about half of IQ variation is non-genetic, so you can't work miracles with this (if you want to know how to work miracles, read [the rest of Gwern's article](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection)).
Prediction markets say to wait fifteen years
Getting back to reality - the first polygenically screened baby was born last year to a family with a history of breast cancer, which screening + selection can make less likely. Her name was Aurea, meaning "dawn" - which may or may not be a coincidence.
And either she looks like this, or else this was a stock photo of a baby someone used on [the article about her](https://www.ivfbabble.com/on-the-40th-anniversary-of-the-first-ivf-in-the-usa-the-first-baby-elizabeth-jordan-carr-looks-at-how-science-today-has-produced-a-new-world-first-baby-aurea/). She shares an unusual last name with a commenter on this blog, so maybe we’ll get some updates! | Scott Alexander | 37805403 | Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies | acx |
# Book Review: How Asia Works
What was the best thing that ever happened? From a very zoomed-out, by-the-numbers perspective, it has to be China's sudden lurch from Third World basketcase to dynamic modern economy. A billion people went from starving peasants to the middle class. In the 1960s, sixty million people died of famine in the Chinese countryside; by the 2010s, that same countryside was criss-crossed with the world's most advanced high-speed rail network, and dotted with high-tech factories.
And the best thing that ever happened kept happening, again and again. First it was Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Then it was Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s. Then China in the 90s. Now Vietnam and others seem poised to follow.
(fun trivia question: ignoring sudden oil windfalls, what country has had the highest percent GDP growth over the past 30 years? Answer, as far as I can tell: [the People's Democratic Republic of Laos](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?stackMode=relative&time=1988..latest&country=LAO~CHN~USA~VNM~SGP~RWA~KOR~ARE~EST).)
There was nothing predetermined about this. These countries started with nothing. In 1950, South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo. But they managed to break into the ranks of the First World even while dozens of similar countries stayed poor. Why?
Joe Studwell claims this isn't mysterious at all. You don't have to bring in culture, genetics, or anything complicated like that. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc, just practiced good economic policy. Any country that tries the same economic policy will get equally rich, as China and Vietnam are discovering. Unfortunately, most countries practice bad economic policy, partly because the IMF / World Bank / rich country economic advisors got things really wrong. They recommended free markets and open borders, which are good for rich countries, but bad for developing ones. Developing countries need to start with planned economies, then phase in free market policies gradually and in the right order. Since rich country economists kept leading everyone astray, the only countries that developed properly were weird nationalist dictatorships and communist states that ignored the Western establishment out of spite. But now the economic establishment is starting to admit its mistakes, giving other countries a chance to catch up.
*[How Asia Works](https://amzn.to/3y2p3XM)* is Studwell's guide to good economic policy. He gives a three-part plan for national development. First, land reform. Second, industrial subsidies plus export discipline. Third, financial policy in service of the first two goals.
**1. Land Reform**
Land reform means taking farmland away from landlords and giving it to peasant farmers.
Undeveloped countries are mostly rural (for example, Korea was about 80% rural in 1950). Most people are farmers. Usually these countries are coming out of feudalism or colonialism or something and dominated by a few big landowners. In one region of the Philippines (Studwell's poster child for doing everything wrong) 17 families control 78% of farmland. Landowners hire peasants to work the land, then take most of the profit.
This system is immiserating and soul-crushing:
> It was William Hinton, an American Marxist writer conducting research in the 1940s, who produced the classic outsider-insider’s tale of life in a Chinese farming village [in] Shanxi province. Hinton wrote about the mundane realities of death by starvation during the annual ‘spring hunger’ when food reserves ran out, and of the slavery (mostly of girls), landlord violence, domestic violence, usury, endemic mafia-style secret societies and other assorted brutalities that characterised everyday life. One of the most striking aspects was the attention paid to faeces, the key fertiliser. Children and old people constantly scoured public areas for animal droppings. Landlords demanded that day labourers defecate only in their landlords’ privies; out-of-village labourers were preferred by some because they could not skip off to their own toilets.
And:
> In the 1920s, when 85 per cent of Chinese people lived in the countryside, life expectancy at birth for rural dwellers was 20-25 years. Three-quarters of farming families had plots of less than one hectare, while perhaps one-tenth of the population owned seven-tenths of the cultivable land. As in Japan, there were few really big landlords, but there was sufficient inequality of land distribution and easily enough population pressure to induce high-rent tenancy and stagnant output.
>
> A rather typical landlord of the era was Deng Wenming, father of future Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who owned ten hectares in Paifang village in the hinterland of Chongqing in Sichuan province. Deng Wenming lived in a 22-room house on the edge of his village and leased out two-thirds of his fields. He, like so many other landlords, was not a man of limitless wealth. But he controlled the land of more than half a dozen average families.
>
> R.H. Tawney, the British economic historian, wrote after a visit to China in the late 1920s that the precariousness of Chinese agriculture was such that: ‘There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him ... An eminent Chinese official stated that in Shanxi province at the beginning of 1931, three million persons had died of hunger in the last few years, and the misery had been such that 400,000 women and children had changed hands by sale.’
But it's not just a humanitarian problem, it's an economic one. Landlords want to extract as much as possible from tenants. When they succeed, tenants have no extra money to invest in improving their land (and no incentive to improve their land, since the landlord would just take the extra). Although in theory a self-interested but clever landlord could come up with some incentive scheme to make peasants improve land, in practice self-interested landlords can make more money faster by various shady lending practices or by buying up more land, and they never get around to yield-improvement schemes.
When peasants receive their own small plot of land, they start figuring out how to improve it. The difference between cursory land-tilling vs. an inventive peasant family trying to maximize yields on their small plot is huge Studwell uses the analogy of the hobbyist gardener vs. the giant commercial farmer. The hobbyist gives loving care to every single plant, hand-weeds their plot, arranges pots and planters and trellises and poles in the right positions, and knows weird tricks like intergrowing tall plants that produce shade and smaller plants that thrive in it. Meanwhile, the giant commercial farmer just runs his tractor over the land and calls it a day. As a result, the gardener's plot is much more productive; Studwell calculates that a carefully-tended garden in the US might produce $16.50 per square meter per year; a commercial farm would produce $0.25. This doesn't mean the commercial farmer is doing anything wrong! He ends up making much more than the gardener, because he has an entire giant farm; it would be impossible to tend the whole farm as carefully as the gardener tends his tiny plot. Both are maximizing a certain type of efficiency: the gardener is treating labor as cheap and maximizing yield per unit land; the farmer is treating land as cheap and maximizing yield per unit labor.
Farming when land is cheaper than labor, vs. farming when labor is cheaper than land
Land reform shifts the dynamic from landlords who act like commercial farmers to freeholders who act like gardeners. Asia is at no risk of running out of people, so treating labor as cheap and maximizing yield per unit land is the right choice. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China all implemented land reform at the beginning of their successful development pathways, and all four countries saw yields per hectare increase by 40 - 70%.
(China messed up by later switching to large-scale collective farming, which is the opposite of what you want at this developmental stage. And if this is starting to remind you of [James Scott](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/), remember that his day job is studying Asian peasant farmers.)
Increased rice yields aren't as sexy as electric cars or semiconductors, but Studwell considers this step absolutely essential. First, this early in development, agriculture is most of your economy, so changes to agriculture are a big deal. Second, once you have more than enough crops to feed your people, you can export the rest and get the valuable foreign currency that you'll need to buy factory parts and stuff. Third, if you don't get agriculture right, your population might buy some of their luxury crops from foreign countries, depleting your valuable foreign currency reserves. Fourth, the more agriculture you have, the easier it will be for people to move to the cities and do industry. Fifth, at the beginning of industrialization your country's industries will be terrible, the main way they'll sell anything at all is having a captive customer base behind your tariff wall, and the best captive customer base is successful small farmers who want to buy tractors or whatever.
But even beyond this, Studwell talks up the almost spiritual benefits of land reform. In a typical land reform measure, an equal amount of land gets allotted to every peasant family. This is about as close as anything ever comes to the completely fair starting position that eg John Locke liked to fantasize about. Everyone gets to work for themselves in their own little small business, reaping the consequences of their own decisions. The generation who grow up immediately after a land reform tend to be thrifty, hard-working, honest, and civic-minded. They go on to found all of the giant world-spanning Toyota-style companies you get in the next round of development. Maybe this is just a coincidence; most people are farmers, and most farmers are affected by land reform, and the land-reform stage of the development pathway is separated by the found-giant-companies stage by about a generation. But Studwell thinks it's more than this, and maybe it's more than a coincidence that Asia and America have come to fetishize the virtues of small farmers in pretty much the same way.
Despite all these benefits, land reform rarely happens. Landlords naturally resist expropriation, and no country at this stage has the money to pay them market value. The Asian countries got their land reform through convoluted pathways. Japan's happened first in the Meiji Restoration, but didn't stick; the final version was rammed through by Douglas MacArthur, who acted as a dictator and didn't care what Japanese elites thought. China's happened under communism, and South Korea's and Taiwan's happened as part of an American-led effort to defuse the appeal of communism by giving peasants and workers an unusually fair deal under capitalism.
The American efforts owe a lot to US diplomat Wolf Ladejinsky, one of the heroes of this book. He was a Russian immigrant to America whose experiences under communism gave him a better idea what peasants wanted than most of his colleagues, and he pushed for land reform when everyone else thought it sounded too communist. His work was crucial in East Asia, but the US establishment sidelined him before he could influence the rest of the world.
*How Asia Works*'s success stories are always Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Its foils are always Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. These last three countries resisted calls for land reform, sometimes violently (when a Thai economist published a study saying land reform was needed, the king responded by banning the study of economics!) But as usual, the Philippines takes last place. It passed a series of laws that had "LAND REFORM" in the title, but all managed to be completely useless. In particular, they often said that landlords had to give workers their land, *or some other mutually-agreeable concession of equal value*. Landlords were legally savvier than tenants, and had nearly unlimited power over them, and the Filipino government was too corrupt and useless to monitor any of this, so landlords found ways to get workers to agree to various things which were legally worker ownership but realistically meaningless. According to a 2007 survey, "seven out of ten 'beneficiaries' of land reform on the island of Negros said they were no better off than before reform". Filipino farming remains centralized and low-yield.
But really pretty!
In contrast, in Japan land reform was done by village committee with landlords in a tiny minority; in Taiwan, they bought out the landlords with government bonds that quickly became nearly worthless; in China, they murdered the landlords in cold blood.
Studwell says land reform is absolutely vital for development:
> Klaus Deininger, one of the world’s leading authorities on land policy and development, has spent decades assembling data that show how the nature of land distribution in poor countries predicts future economic performance. Using global land surveys done by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), he has worked out that only one significant developing country has managed a long-term growth rate of over 2.5 per cent with a very unequal distribution of land. That country is Brazil, the false prophet of fast growth which collapsed in a debt crisis in the 1980s in large part because of its failure to increase agricultural output. Deininger’s two big conclusions are that land inequality leads to low long-term growth and that low growth reduces income for the poor but not for the rich. In short, if poor countries are to become rich, then the equitable division of land at the outset of development is a huge help. Japan, Korea and Taiwan put this in place.
Unfortunately, it's not on the table anymore, which means we might not see many more East Asian - style economic miracles:
> Will we witness an economic transformation like Japan, Korea, Taiwan or China’s again? The answer is quite possibly not, for one simple reason. Without effective land reform it is difficult to see how sustained growth of 7-10 per cent a year - without fatal debt crises - can be achieved in poor countries. And radical land reform, combined with agronomic and marketing support for farmers, is off the political agenda. Since the 1980s, the World Bank has instead promoted microfinance, encouraging the rural poor to set up street stalls selling each other goods for which they have almost no money to pay. It is classic sticking-plaster development policy. The leading NGO promoting land reform, US-based [Landesa](https://www.landesa.org/), is today so pessimistic about the prospects for further radical reforms in the world’s poor states that it concentrates its lobbying efforts on the creation of micro plots of a few square metres. These plots supplement the diets and incomes of rural dwellers who work in otherwise unreformed agricultural sectors. From micro interventions, however, economic miracles will not spring.
**2. Industrial Policy and Finance**
East Asian countries got rich by manufacturing. First it was "Made in Japan", then "Made in Taiwan", then "Made in China". At first each label was synonymous with low-quality knockoffs. Gradually they improved, until now "Made in Japan" has the same kind of prestige as Germany or Switzerland, and even China is losing some of its stigma.
Not every rich country gets rich by manufacturing. Studwell divides successful countries into three groups. First, small financial hubs, like Singapore, Dubai, or Switzerland. This is good work if you can get it, but it really only works for one small country per region; you can't have all of China be "a financial hub". In the 1980s, everyone was so impressed with Singapore and Hong Kong that they became the go-to models for development, and people incorrectly recommended liberal free market policies as the solution to everything. But the Singapore/Hong Kong model doesn't necessarily work for bigger countries, and most of the good financial hub niches are already filled by now.
Second, "high-value agricultural producers". Studwell gives Denmark and New Zealand as examples. Again, these countries are very nice. But they also tend to be small and sparsely populated, and they also don't scale. New Zealand's [biggest export category](https://www.worldstopexports.com/new-zealands-top-10-exports/) is "dairy, eggs, and honey". Imagine how much honey you would have to eat to lift China out of poverty that way. It would be absolutely delicious for a few years, and then we would all die of diabetes.
Third, manufacturing, eg everyone else. Every big developed country went through its manufacturing phase. Britain, Germany, and America all passed through an era of sweatshops, smokestacks, and steel. Most developed countries gradually leave that phase, switch to a services-based economy, and offshore some of the worse jobs to places with cheaper labor. But they can't skip it entirely.
England in the 19th century, around the time Blake wrote of “dark satanic mills”
Kawasaki, Japan in 1970 ([source](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2019/05/11/environment/reading-air-tokyo-still-work-air-pollution/))
China today. Or maybe not, it’s hard to tell.
And every big developed country that passed through a manufacturing phase used tariffs (except Britain, which industrialized first and didn't need to defend itself against anybody). Economic planners like Friedrich List in Germany and Alexander Hamilton in the United States realized early on that British competition would stifle the development of native industry without government protection. Once their industries were as good as Britain's, they removed their tariffs, which was the right move - but they never would have been able to reach that level without protectionism.
Imagine having to start your own car company in Zimbabwe. Your past experience is "peasant farmer". You have no idea how to make cars. The local financial system can muster up only a few million dollars in seed funding, and the local manufacturing expertise is limited to a handful of engineers who have just returned from foreign universities. Maybe if you're very lucky you can eventually succeed at making cars that run at all. But there's no way you'll be able to outcompete Ford, Toyota, and Tesla. All these companies have billions of dollars and some of the smartest people in the world working for them, plus decades of practice and lots of proprietary technology. Your cars will inevitably be worse and more expensive than theirs. Every country that's solved this problem and started a local car industry has done so by putting high tariffs on foreign cars. Locals will have to buy your cars, so even if you're not exactly making a profit after a few years, at least you're not completely useless either.
This will become a problem if it shelters companies from competition; they'll have no incentive to improve. Successful East Asian countries avoided this outcome by having many local car companies. The most successful ones went a bit overboard with this:
> In the Korea of 1973 - which at the time boasted a car market of just 30,000 vehicles per annum - government had offered protection and subsidies to not one but three putative makers of 'citizens' cars: HMC, Shinjin, and Kia. Inasmuch as the market was too small for one producer, the licensing of three companies was ridiculous. HMC posted losses every year from 1972 to 1978, despite very high domestic car prices. However, the government sanctioned multiple car makers not to make shot-term profits - which would have come much sooner to a monopoly manufacturer - but rather to force the pace of technological learning through competition.
In addition to domestic competition, these governments enforced "export discipline". In order to keep their government perks (and sometimes in order to keep existing at all), companies needed to sell a certain amount of units abroad each year. At the beginning, they might have to sell for way below-cost to other equally poor countries. That was fine. The point wasn't that any of this was a short-term economically reasonable thing to do. The point was to force companies to be constantly thinking about how to succeed in the "real world" outside the tariff wall. And the secondary point was to let the government know which companies were at least a little promising, vs. which ones were totally unable to survive except in a captive marketplace. If a company couldn't export at least a few units, the government usually culled it off and gave its assets to other companies that could.
Aren't there good free-market arguments against tariffs and government intervention in the economy? The key counterargument is that developing country industries aren't just about profit. They're about learning. The benefits of a developing-country industry go partly to the owners/investors, but mostly to the country itself, in the sense of gaining technology / expertise / capacity. It's almost always more profitable in the short run for developing-world capitalists to start another banana plantation, or speculate on real estate, or open a casino. But a country that invests mostly in banana plantations will still be a banana republic fifty years later, whereas a country that invests mostly in car companies will become South Korea. The car company produces a big positive externality - in the sense of raising the country's level of development - which isn't naturally captured by the owners/investors. So development is a collective action problem. The country as a whole would be better off if everyone started car companies, but each individual capitalist would rather start banana plantations.
So the job of a developing country government is to try to get everyone to ignore profits in favor of the industrial learning process. "Ignore profits" doesn't actually mean the companies shouldn't be profitable. All else being equal, higher profits are a sign that the company is learning its industry better. But it means that there are many short-term profit opportunities that shouldn't be taken because nobody will learn anything from them. And lots of things that will spend decades unprofitable should be done anyway, for educational value.
**2b.**
In 1961, General Park Chung-Hee took power after a military coup in South Korea. I don't know much about Korean religion, but if some heavenly Scriptwriter wanted the perfect hero for an industrial development story, they might come up with someone who looked a lot like General Park.
After graduating college, he joined the occupying Japanese military, where he served in Japan's drive to industrialize its occupied territories. By the time Japan was defeated and withdrew, he had absorbed all the economic knowledge of the only successful non-Western economic power up to that point.
But also:
> ...he was an amateur historian who specialised in the histories of rising powers. He was well read on German development, and followed closely that country’s swift, state-led re-industrialisation after the Second World War. He also knew in detail the stories of Sun Yat-sen, Turkey’s Kemal Pasha and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and their efforts to nurture modern, large-scale industries. Nine months after taking power in Korea, the peasant-born Park published a book of his own, *Our Nation’s Path: Ideology for Social Reconstruction*, which contained a road map for what Park described as ‘co-ordination and supervisory guidance, by the state, of mammoth economic strength’. The next year Park published *The Country, the Revolution and I*, with chapters on ‘The Miracle on the Rhine’ and ‘Various Forms of Revolution’ in which he discussed different historical revolutions from an economic and developmental perspective. (He always referred to his own coup as a revolution.)
Park pushed an odd mix of free competition and heavy economic planning:
> He stressed that, as in Japan, the Korean state would do the planning while the private sector would lead the investment: ‘The economic planning or long-range development programme must not be allowed to stifle creativity or spontaneity of private enterprise,’ Park wrote. ‘We should utilise to the maximum extent the merits usually introduced by the price machinery of free competition, thus avoiding the possible damages accompanying a monopoly system. There can be and will be no economic planning for the sake of planning itself.’ He gave as his historical cue the co-opting of private capitalism by the Meiji oligarchs: ‘Millionaires... were allowed to enter the central stage, both politically and economically, thus encouraging national capitalism,’ he wrote. ‘The case of the Meiji imperial restoration will be of great help to the performance of our own revolution.’
Twelve days after taking power, General Park ordered his officers to imprison all of South Korea's leading businessmen, then forced them to sign agreements promising to give the government all their property. Then he gave them all their property back and freed them. He wasn't actually anti-business, quite the opposite. He just wanted everyone to know who was in charge.
> Once he established the basic rules of the game, Park informed Korea’s businessmen that they were free to make as much money as they could so long as they stuck by the rules. Most of the businessmen were released from prison during 1961. But if they thought Park’s regime would ease off once they were out, it soon became clear that this was not the case. One early exchange that sent a crystal clear message occurred after the chief of Lucky-Goldstar (now known as LG), Koo In Hwoi, was released. One of Park’s colonels responsible for industrial policy told him to organise a foreign loan (which the government would guarantee) and technology transfer for a cable factory. When Koo tried to wriggle out of the task, pleading that he knew nothing about the cable business, the colonel told him that whereas he had been thinking of making Koo sort the whole thing out in a week, as a special dispensation he would let him do it in two weeks. Ten days later, Koo was sufficiently chastised to produce a technology transfer deal with a West German firm and the requisite financing arrangements. One of Korea’s richest businessmen had gotten the message.
One gets the impression that Park thought of great entrepreneurs and leaders the same way he thought of eg construction cranes. They were a useful tool which could be used to produce great things, and you would happily pay a lot of money to continue to have them. But you had to direct them at useful projects, otherwise they would be wasted.
Useful projects like making thousands of people form a giant picture of your face by holding up placards. What is it about Korean dictators?
Not that workers were treated any more leniently:
> Each day workers at Pohang [steel factory] were lined up in front of the main, corrugated-iron site office and told that Japanese reparations money was being used for the project and that it was preferable to die rather than suffer the humiliation of wasting the money.
After doing this kind of thing long enough, you start to see results. When General Park seized power in 1961, South Korean GDP was less than 100 dollars per person. When he was assassinated in 1979, it was about $2000. But his influence lingered:
> Korean bureaucrats were reading not the rising American stars of neo-liberal economics, or even Adam Smith, but instead [German development expert and tariff proponent] Friedrich List. The Korea and Taiwan scholar Robert Wade observed when he was teaching in Korea in the late 1970s that ‘whole shelves’ of List’s books could be found in the university bookshops of Seoul. When he moved to the Massachussetts Insitute of Technology, Wade found that a solitary copy of List’s main work had last been taken out of the library in 1966. Such are the different economics appropriate to different stages of development. In Korea, List’s ideas for a national system of development were being adapted to a country with a population far smaller than Germany’s or Japan’s, and with a mid-1970s GDP per capita on par with Guatemala. The ideas were implemented in the teeth of the worst international trading conditions for a generation featuring two unprecedented energy crises. It did not matter. Park motored on regardless. Each time the US, the World Bank and the IMF urged him to back away from his state-led industrial policy he agreed - and then did precisely nothing (or occasionally a very little ). Park was a leader of conviction, and his convictions were based in history.
By 2013, when Park's daughter Geun-hye was elected president, the country's GDP was almost $30,000 per capita.
**2c.**
In contrast, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines never achieved this level of growth. Studwell focuses his attention on Malaysia, the country that tried hardest. In 1981, Malaysia's new prime minister Mahathir bin Mohamed made a deliberate effort to imitate Japanese/Korean developmental success. Although he got a few things done, results could most charitably be described as "mixed". Studwell blames a few things.
First, Mahathir didn't enforce export discipline. "This not only engendered an acute balance of payments problem, it left Mahathir to make critical investment decisions without the market-based information that export performance provided to Park Chung-Hee. Instead of counting exports, Mahathir trusted his own judgment about the firms and managers he was backing. He tried to know more than the market."
Second, instead of letting entrepreneurs compete, he tried to create state-backed monopolies. This made more sense given the small domestic market his companies were selling to, but it forced the state to pick winners and losers, and the state turned out to be bad at this. When the state-backed steel company floundered, Mahathir replaced the CEO with a guy who turned out to be kind of a con man.
Third, Mahathir let foreign partners lead the way, or get equity in Malaysian firms. Studwell thinks this was a bad decision. Sure, working with foreign companies who already have the technology you need seems like a good way to get a leg up. But they usually try to do all the exciting high-tech stuff themselves and just use you for menial labor. Remember, when you get a steel company to produce a million tons of steel, you're mostly not buying steel, you're buying learning. If a foreign company makes and runs the factory, they're the ones learning more about steel, on your dime. Park Chung-Hee had a simple, straightforward strategy for dealing with foreign companies: partner with them only long enough to steal all of their technology. Malaysia tried actually partnering with them, and so a lot of foreign companies produced large parts of Malaysian goods and Malaysia barely benefitted.
Fourth, Mahathir was committed to affirmative action. Most of Malaysia's businesspeople are from the Chinese or Tamil minority groups, and a lot of Malaysian politics is about trying to lift up the less successful Malay majority. This meant Mahathir had to support native Malay firms, native Malay entrepreneurs, etc. But this blocked him from using a lot of his best people. It also committed him to a more centralized strategy; he didn't want to support the development of existing businesses, because existing businesses were owned by people of the wrong race. He didn't want to let the free market pick winners, because it might pick people of the wrong race. This forced him to be more hands-on, and his government wasn't up to the task.
Fun Mahathir Mohamad fact: all of this stuff happened during his first term, from 1981 to 2003. After losing, he bided his time for 15 years before retaking power from 2018 - 2020. By the end of his second term, he was 95, making him the oldest head of government in the world.
Finally, he wanted to be exciting and high-tech. When he ordered the construction of Malaysia's first steel plant, he wanted it to be more efficient than the best foreign factories. But number one, this required hiring foreign contractors to build it - there was no way Malaysia was going to build a super-efficient steel plant itself when it didn't even know how to make regular steel plants. And second, the super-advanced technology crashed and burned, and the project had to be scaled back at great cost. Mahathir started a bunch of high-tech cyber investment parks, all of which failed when nobody in Malaysia was actually able to do high-tech-cyber stuff very well. Park Chung-Hee started with crappy steel mills and barely-functional cars and worked his way up.
The book blames most of this on Mahathir listening to McKinsey consultants and globalization advocates - especially Japanese theorist Kenichi Ohmae, author of *The Borderless World*. Ohmae was right that globalization would happen. He was even right that Japan - which at that point was a First World country - could benefit by taking part in it. But what works for developed countries isn't right for developing ones, and at that point it was the wrong advice for Malaysia. During Park Chung-Hee's 18 years in power, he increased his country's GDP by a factor of 17; during Mahathir's 22 years, ending in 2003, he barely doubled it.
**3. Finance**
Studwell devotes a separate chapter to finance, but it's really a corollary of the industrial policy section. Developing country financial systems need to support industrial policy by preferentially offering great loans to industrial learning projects. This won't work under a free market system. Under a free market system, banks will offer the best loans to whatever is most profitable, probably some short-term resource extraction scheme that nobody learns anything from.
Not only will the free market banks get it wrong, they'll make it harder for the state banks to get it right. First of all, the free market banks will be giving entrepreneurs easy access to credit for short-term schemes, which will make the entrepreneurs less likely to go into industry. Second, ordinary savers will put their money into the free market banks, which can offer good interest rates (since they're making profitable loans) instead of the state banks, which will offer low interest rates; this will deprive the state banks of capital. During Korea's economic miracle, Korean banks offered savers negative interest rates; savers put their money in the banks anyway, because they had no good alternative.
All successful Asian countries have instituted strict capital controls to keep foreign money from flowing in and changing the incentives. Japan had capital controls until 1980, Korea until 1993, Taiwan until the late 1980s (also, breaching Taiwanese capital controls was "punishable by death"). China still has heavy capital controls, which not even cryptocurrency has made fully permeable.
On the other hand, all developed Asian countries opened their markets at some point. Studwell thinks this is good. He says that once you can compete on an even footing with everyone else, capital controls go from a bonus to a liability, and all the regular arguments in favor of free trade start to make sense again.
Aside from capital controls and a focus on industrial policy, Studwell doesn't really care what kind of financial policy you have. The economic establishment recommends prudent borrowing, but he isn't really seeing it. Malaysia borrowed very prudently and never really got anywhere. On the other hand, Korea's borrowing was described as "crazed" and they did fine. China's level of debt is frankly terrifying, but they seem to have pulled it off so far by growing faster than they borrowed, even though they borrowed a lot. It turns out you can pay back a lot of loans when your GDP doubles every few years.
**4. Conclusions**
This book was really convincing, but I don't know much economic history so maybe convincing me is too easy. After Steven Pinker wrote *How The Mind Works*, Jerry Fodor wrote a counterbook called *The Mind Doesn't Work That Way*. What would be in *Asia Doesn't Work That Way*?
One basic version appears in [State Development Planning: Did It Produce An East Asian Economic Miracle?](http://www.benjaminwpowell.com/scholarly-publications/journal-articles/East-Asian-State-Development-Planning.pdf). The author gives some theoretical reasons why planning can't work, points out some serious mistakes made by planning boards, and notes that in 1970, Japan was considered the 7th freest economy in the world, Taiwan the 16th freest, and South Korea #31, which is still pretty good. Also, Hong Kong was #1, had very little state planning, and still did great. He argues that this is a standard free market success story, and that state planning mostly made things worse but luckily not worse enough to prevent a miracle.
I don't find this too convincing. The theoretical arguments about planning (socialist calculation problem, necessity of price signals) make some sense, but East Asia used internal competition and export discipline to get around this; they weren't planning in the sense of trying to second-guess the market. The development-as-coordination-problem frame makes it clearer why the usual free market arguments wouldn't completely apply here. More relevantly, the recent success of China and Vietnam, which are not economically free by any stretch of the imagination (#100 and #128 on one index) make a strong argument that industrial planning without free markets can still succeed.
(though I agree the success of Hong Kong is awkward here, and I wish that Studwell had spent more time fleshing out his "some countries are just financial hubs and don't count" position)
I think there are stronger counterarguments to Studwell scattered throughout journals that I haven't quite figured out how to navigate and collect. The [infant industry argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument) seems to be a going controversy within economics and not at all settled science. The picture is complicated by [studies showing that](https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/12/25/bairoch/) countries with lower tariffs have had higher GDP growth since 1945. Studwell could respond that tariffs only work as part of a coherent and well-designed industrial policy; if you just tariff random things to protect special interests, it will go badly in exactly the way free marketeers expect.
But overall I think the book's thesis is at least compelling, and I understand it's supported by lots of people whose opinions I trust, like [Noah Smith](https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1029783616098787328?lang=en) and [Bill Gates](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/How-Asia-Works). [Pseudoerasmus](https://pseudoerasmus.com/), my usual go-to source for economic history opinions, doesn't give a specific opinion of this book but seems to think a lot of its points are at least plausible.
Studwell does a good job casting doubt on a lot of alternatives to his theory. Lots of people tout parliamentary democracy, human rights, and rule of law as key to development success. But Japan industrialized under an emperor, Korea under a dictator, Taiwan under authoritarian nationalists, and China and Vietnam under communists. None of them had much in the way of human rights, and the level of rule of law was consistent with Park Chung-Hee imprisoning every single businessman in Korea just to get their attention. Probably you need a minimum level of all of these things to function at all - death squads going around burning random stuff is bad for business. But successful East Asian countries don't seem to have had spectacular levels of these things, or even better than average.
He doesn't have as clear an argument against geographic, biological, and cultural factors. Minus a sea or two, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China are basically contiguous. It seems weird that all the countries with good policies would be right next to each other. Also, is it just a coincidence that Chinese / East Asian people in Malaysia and Singapore (and now the US) are known for being especially smart, rich, and good with money? Just a coincidence that these areas have hosted some of history's greatest and richest civilizations? Don't these push more in favor of the geographical/biological/cultural theories?
I'm not sure. It's worth noting that Korea and Taiwan were both Japanese colonies, and heavily influenced by Japanese economic philosophy. This seems especially clear in the case of Korea, whose economic miracle was led by Park Chung-Hee, a former Japanese officer who had studied Japanese economic theory. It's less obvious with Taiwan, which was occupied by Kuomintang unconnected to its Japanese colonial tradition. But of course the China of the time was also heavily influenced by Japan. Maybe the common factor among these three countries' economic policies was the heavy Japanese influence. And then mainland China had lots of reasons to be influenced by them, especially by Taiwan, and then Vietnam was influenced by mainland China.
Or maybe it's the land reform. China and Vietnam got land reform because they were communist, and Japan/Korea/Taiwan got it under an American policy of anti-communist pre-emption. I don't know about other regions, but maybe none of them had a similar enough situation to overcome vested interests and get that passed.
The glorious history and Confucian culture might have mattered *through* the good policy? Japan/Korea/Taiwan weren't completely corruption-free, but overall it was surprising how well their bureaucracies worked. Programs intended to reward companies that exported successfully really did reward companies that exported successfully, unlike in eg Malaysia where they rewarded companies based on connections or race. Ordinary citizens were surprisingly willing to go along with plans that required they work very hard in factories their entire lives and earn negative interest rates on their savings. Entrepreneurs mostly did as they were told instead of trying to cheat the system, and weren't powerful enough to take over the government and torpedo the industrial plan in favor of one that let them make more profit. Overall, even if it was the good policy that made the difference, all the policy-makers involved deserve a lot of credit for implementing the policy fairly and efficiently and sticking to it even when it got hard.
One thing I appreciated about this book is that Studwell expects his audience to be classical liberals and takes care not to offend their (okay, my) sensibilities. He says again and again that he expects free-market-ish policies to be optimal for developed countries. He says again and again that certain aspects of free market policy, for example competition and entrepreneurship, are vital for the developing world. He treats his free market readers as reasonable people who are trying to do good economics but need to understand how the requirements of the developing world differ, and not as evil monsters who need to be shamed. So although both he and [David Harvey](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-brief-history-of-neoliberalism) make some of the same points about how the Washington Consensus in favor of free market reforms harmed developing countries, I felt like Studwell effectively explained where it went wrong and how to do better, whereas Harvey just sort of screamed that anyone who supported it was part of a conspiracy. I felt abused and confused after reading Harvey, I felt enlightened (and actually changed my mind) after reading Studwell.
But even though he puts it excruciatingly kindly, Studwell is kind of accusing the global economic establishment of impoverishing several dozen major countries. He goes through the recent history of Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and shows how in each case, the global economic establishment (especially the IMF and World Bank) convinced them not to protect infant industries, not to institute capital controls, and not to stress manufacturing too much. Then each of those countries suffered financial crises and their development stagnated. It really is striking how the countries that did the best were the ones that gave the world establishment the middle finger (unless of course this is cherry-picking and there are lots of big countries that followed IMF advice and did great). To whatever degree this is true, it belongs on the list of [science failures](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/02/how-common-are-science-failures/) that should keep us up at night, alongside all those people saying not to wear masks for COVID. Except that the COVID mistake lasted a few months and killed a 5-6 digit number of people, and the IMF advice lasted decades and kept hundreds of millions in poverty.
What now? Studwell uses the last chapter to warn China that its development model can only go so far. Dictatorship and state planning can lift a country from poor to middle-income, but so far everywhere that's become truly rich has also been free and democratic. He doesn't think that's coincidence; it takes a more decentralized approach to explore the technological frontier than to play catch-up (see also [Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history)). *How Asia Works* was written in 2014, a more optimistic time, and I don't know whether he still thinks this.
He concludes on a pessimistic note: the land reform -> industrial policy -> very late liberalization model followed by East Asia is the only thing that has ever worked at scale for catch-up development. But nobody seems interested in it anymore; either they're still following bad advice to liberalize early, or they act like they "missed the boat" and have to try half-measures. He doesn't see a lot of hope other than pushing countries towards least-bad policies, stopping the flow of bad advice, and seeing if it helps a little:
> Will we witness an economic transformation like Japan, Korea, Taiwan or China’s again? The answer is quite possibly not, for one simple reason. Without effective land reform it is difficult to see how sustained growth of 7-10 per cent a year - without fatal debt crises - can be achieved in poor countries. And radical land reform, combined with agronomic and marketing support for farmers, is off the political agenda. Since the 1980s, the World Bank has instead promoted microfinance, encouraging the rural poor to set up street stalls selling each other goods for which they have almost no money to pay. It is classic sticking-plaster development policy. The leading NGO promoting land reform, US-based Landesa, is today so pessimistic about the prospects for further radical reforms in the world’s poor states that it concentrates its lobbying efforts on the creation of micro plots of a few square metres. These plots supplement the diets and incomes of rural dwellers who work in otherwise unreformed agricultural sectors. From micro interventions, however, economic miracles will not spring.
>
> South-east Asia (like India) is a region in which serious land reform is off the political agenda, even if the farce that is the Philippine reform programme continues. Given this, can the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand do anything else to improve their economic performance? Most obviously they could make the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) work as a vehicle for effective industrial policy. There is no reason why the four core economies of ASEAN (and indeed Vietnam, the important economy omitted from this book) could not run an effective manufacturing infant industry policy in what is a market of 500 million people. But there is no sign of this happening. Rather than raising barriers and promoting exports to nurture local manufacturing enterprise, ASEAN is engaged in signing free trade agreements with industrially more developed states, including China. There is very little cohesion, or substantive dialogue, between the political leaders of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. And the considerable influence of the offshore financial centre of Singapore in ASEAN is developmentally deeply unhelpful. It is as if Switzerland or Monaco had been granted a seat at the table when post-war European industrial policy was being planned in the 1950s. South-east Asia remains a beacon for what not to do if you want economic transformation. Allow landlordism and scale farming despite the presence of vast numbers of underemployed peasants capable of growing more. Do not worry too much about export-oriented manufacturing, which can happily be undertaken by multinational enterprises. Leave entrepreneurs to their own devices. And proceed quickly to deregulated banking, stock markets and international capital flows, the true symbols of a modern state. That is how its politicians constructed the south-east Asian region’s relative failure.
>
> The rich world cannot be expected to save poor countries from bad politicians. But the likes of Mahathir and Suharto were not so terrible. What seems most wrong in all this is that wealthy nations, and the economic institutions that they created like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, provided lousy developmental advice to poor states that had no basis in historical fact. Once again: there is no significant economy that has developed successfully through policies of free trade and deregulation from the get-go. What has always been required is proactive interventions - the most effective of them in agriculture and manufacturing - that foster early accumulation of capital and technological learning. Our unwillingness to look this historical fact in the face leaves us with a world in which scores of countries remain immiserated; and in which rural poverty nourishes terrorist groups that echo those suppressed in south-east Asian countries, but which now directly threaten the citizens of rich nations. It is not easy to implement the policies discussed in this book, especially land reform. However I repeat what others concluded after the Second World War: that to turn away from such policies indicates that the world is acceptable to us as it is. Take a look at south Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and ask yourself if it is. | Scott Alexander | 36736777 | Book Review: How Asia Works | acx |
# Open Thread 178
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
1. Noah Smith responded to my post on Jewish achievement. I'll look over it more closely later and maybe have more of a response, but for now you can [read it here](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-response-to-scott-alexander-on).
2. In case you missed it, I'm planning on [letting people survey the ACX readership](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-reader-research-survey-call-for), especially researchers doing some kind of psychology/social sciences project. Somebody mentioned that my previous timeline might have been overly ambitious because some people might need to run questions by an IRB first. If that's you, please send me an email saying so, so that I can consider whether to lengthen my timeline. | Scott Alexander | 38109725 | Open Thread 178 | acx |
# ACX Reader Research Survey: Call For Submissions
Now that the book review contest is winding down, I want to start another big project: the ACX Reader Research Survey.
I used to do regular December surveys with questions I was interested in. Some people would ask me to include questions for their own research projects. I always declined, because if I said yes to everyone it would take a whole new survey to fit all the questions on. Eventually I realized I should actually just do the whole new survey, so this is that.
This blog has a lot of readers in in specific demographics, like:
- the tech industry
- science
- involved in meditation/drugs/biohacking
- with unusual genders/sexualities
- with psychiatric issues
…so this would be a good way to learn about those demographics. The main inspiration for this project was that meditation researcher Daniel Ingram asked if he could piggyback on my yearly survey to ask people about their meditation experiences, and although I was excited about this I shut SSC down before we got a chance to make this happen. This is for him and everyone else with similar needs.
If you're a researcher (professional or amateur) who wants to ask questions to the ACX readership, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com, by July 10, with:
- a description of who you are and what project you’re interested in
- a description of whether you want to aim your survey at any particular demographic
- a link to an un-password-protected Google Form that has your questions on it. Recommended < 25 questions per project, but if you have a really exciting project that absolutely needs more questions, talk to me about it. I’m not sure yet whether I will end up linking to your Google Form directly or adding your questions to a centralized Form, but have your Form prepared so that if I do link to it, it does what you want it to do. Start with a question asking for User ID (description below)
Sending an email doesn’t guarantee inclusion in the survey. I may not include projects that seem unprofessional or boring, and I might triage projects if I get too many of them and become overwhelmed.
Sometime July 10 - July 15 I should come up with some way to tell people whether they’re included or not and confirm that I received all appropriate emails, and then sometime around July 15 I'll post the survey.
I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to structure this. One likely way is that I start with a Google Form that assigns everyone a User ID and asks basic questions like age, sex, country, race, and education level. Then I’ll ask people to fill out X randomly selected Google Form surveys from the ones people have sent me, and include their User ID on each (where X depends on how long each form is and how much time they have). At the end of the survey, I’ll share the form with the User IDs with all researchers. The survey will end sometime before August 1 and I’ll share the User IDs with researchers around then.
I’m also willing to have nonrandom surveys aimed at particular demographics, for example people who struggle with depression. If you have a survey for a particular demographic only, let me know and I’ll figure out how to fit you in.
If researchers discover something interesting, they can send it to me. I might write up some of the things people find (not all of them) into blog posts, and if any of this leads to papers I’d be interested in reading them and linking to them.
I'll be reading the comments here so I can answer any questions. | Scott Alexander | 38049781 | ACX Reader Research Survey: Call For Submissions | acx |
# Links For June
*[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]*
**1:** Zoologists search for the [Higgs Bison](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/18/498281083/higgs-bison-is-the-missing-link-in-european-bison-ancestral-tree)
**2:** “The cult deficit” is the theory that we don’t have as many cults as we used to and this says something important about our society. Here’s some data, courtesy of the [Secretum Secretorum](https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/the-cult-deficit-analysis-and-speculation) Substack:
Also confirming what everyone secretly already knows - number of cults in the dataset by country/US state:
Also interesting, from the same blog: [The Myth Of The Myth Of The Lone Genius](https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-myth-of-the-lone)
**3:** [The Obesity Wars: A Personal Account](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033062021000670#bb0145). A CDC researcher accuses Harvard School of Public Health of launching a campaign to harass and discredit her after publishing a paper showing overweight wasn’t as dangerous as previously thought. Probably my favorite of this month’s links for the “how the sausage gets made” perspective, though the writer is hardly an unbiased source.
4:
Related: [this study finds](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03623319.2020.1728506?journalCode=ussj20) that there’s only a correlation of 0.2 between different reviewers’ ratings of social science grant proposals - I wonder what this is like in other fields.
**5:** SSC’s former sparring partner Mencius Moldbug seems to be doing well, with Fox News’ Ben Domenech adopting his term “Cathedral” for the progressive establishment ([see full video here](https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/04/domenech-our-leaders-are-oz-and-its-time-to-pull-back-the-curtain/))
Domenech says he got the term from Michael Malice, who’s done podcasts with Moldbug, so no mystery here - it’s just weird to see on mainstream TV.
**6:** [No Causal Associations Between Family Income And Subsequent Psychiatric Disorders, Substance Misuse, And Violent Crime Arrests: A Nationwide Finnish Study Of >650,000 Individuals And Their Siblings](https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyab099/6288123). This study finds that without adjusting for confounders, it looks like poverty causes negative life outcomes (eg psych disorders, drug abuse, and arrests) - each extra $15,000 your family has lowers your risk of these things by 9%. After adjusting for the usual set of measurable confounders, that decreased to 4.5%, and after using a novel sibling-based method to adjust for confounders, the effect completely disappeared. If true, this would mean that growing up poor doesn’t cause these negative outcomes and is just correlated with them (eg parents with genes for drug abuse are poorer than average, maybe because they’ve been abusing drugs, so their kids grow up poor and then also abuse drugs). My main concern is that I don’t entirely understand their sibling-based adjustment. My impression is that they looked at siblings raised at different times in a family’s financial history (eg you grow up when your family is poor, but your sibling grows up later after your family has become rich). But most siblings are pretty close together and most families don’t have their incomes swing too wildly, so this would require a lot of assumptions about when the “critical period” at which income affects children is, which I don’t really see laid out explicitly. I wonder if it also assumes that factors adjust very quickly (eg if your parents get a better job and start making more money, they might not immediately move to a better house, and if living in a better house is what prevents negative life outcomes, this wouldn’t show up). Also, standard disclaimer that this was done in Scandinavia where poverty works differently.
Related: genes associated with income [are probably causal](https://papers.tinbergen.nl/20053.pdf), since siblings with more of them do in fact earn more money than siblings with fewer of them. And here’s [a FAQ about the study by the coauthors](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dfPp3ag5G5KzNiMb_b2UQ06F7ImhhBUjfsciJ56xddI/edit).
**7:**
**8:** [Skepticism about claims that having pets makes people healthier](https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1100&context=aniubpos).
**9:** Upset that the Atlanta Braves unfairly stereotype Native Americans? Apparently Atlanta is an equal opportunity offensive-sports-team-haver: their team used to be called the [Atlanta Crackers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Crackers) (and their Negro League team was the [Atlanta Black Crackers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Black_Crackers)!)
**10:** I’d previously been pretty sure that visual imagination was just about engaging the visual cortex in the absence of a stimulus, but [here’s a study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763420307041) using research on stroke patients and MRI images to argue that it’s probably based in the temporal lobe.
**11:** Claim: Paul Krugman’s infamous prediction about the Internet having the same scale of effect as the fax machine was right in the context it was made:
(edit: possibly not true, see [this comment](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june#comment-2239250))
**12:** [United Airlines agrees to purchase 15 supersonic passenger jets](https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/united-airlines-agrees-to-purchase-15-boom-supersonic-airliners/) from aerospace start-up Boom, which expects them to be ready in 2029.
**13:** Claim: [very high support (80% of Americans) for requiring ID to vote](https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_062121/); non-whites more likely to support ID requirements than whites are.
**14:**
More [here](https://twitter.com/ne0liberal/status/1395798259914919939). Also from the world of pretty great anti-US Chinese cartoons (h/t [Steve Hsu](https://twitter.com/hsu_steve)):
Still trying to figure out who the black bird and the frog are supposed to be, or why Australia seems to have replaced Germany in the G7.
**15:** Related: in case you wondered what would make the oppressed people of China rise up in revolt, apparently it’s [having their colleges merged with vocational schools in a way that dilutes the value of their degrees](https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/college-merger-protest-06082021144646.html).
**16:** [Theory on why Waymo hasn’t established its driverless car program yet](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/why-hasnt-waymo-expanded-its-driverless-service-heres-my-theory/). TL;DR: they’ve solved driving in very easy cities like Chandler, Arizona, but all the profitable markets are in very hard cities, so they’re going to try to master hard cities before going public at all.
**17:** Claim: counties where the seminal pro-KKK movie *Birth Of A Nation* was played on its five year “tour” [had more lynchings and race riots](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/ang/files/ang_birthofanation_nov2020.pdf) after the showing. Somewhat less believable claim: counties where it played still have more hate crimes today. I bet this turns out to be one of those persistence studies that doesn’t replicate.
**18:** From [Language Log](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3546), self-explanatory:
…except that some of the article’s earlier claims about “what normal people don’t notice in language” seem really wrong to me. Normal people don’t notice that truth is just true+th, or depth is deep+th, or that horror is related to horrify? I had never even considered the possibility that people might *not* notice these things. Is the Language Log author crazy, or am I?
**19:** I’ve really been appreciating Glenn Greenwald lately. I think of myself as a pretty informed news consumer, but as the Garfield meme says, I am not immune to propaganda, and Greenwald has been doing a great job telling me which of the things I believed aren’t true. For example, the story that the police violently cleared a park in front of a DC church last year so Trump could do a photo op there [was false](https://greenwald.substack.com/p/yet-another-media-tale-trump-tear) (edit: [see here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june#comment-2239500) for some debate). And apparently there was [no link between the Pulse gay nightclub shooting and anti-LGBT hate](https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-enduring-false-narrative-about) - it was just an Islamic terrorist randomly choosing a place to shoot up to make his geopolitical point. Weird.
**20:** [Three Point Shooting In The NBA And Meritocracy](https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/05/three-point-shooting-in-the-nba-and-the-meritocracy). Ignore “meritocracy” in the title - you have to claim to be critiquing meritocracy to get clicks these days, but it’s actually about the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The article claims that NBA teams systematically took many fewer than optimal three-point shots for thirty years, and have only recently realized that taking many more is a better strategy.
**21:** Claim: despite its pro-sex-worker image, [Sweden actually persecutes sex workers plenty](https://www.reddit.com/r/SexWorkers/comments/n11oqk/the_ongoing_witchhunt_for_fssw_in_sweden_the/), they just find stupider ways to do it. EG if you (a sex worker) pay half the rent for your two-person apartment, they can arrest your roommate for “profiting from sex work”. Or they can arrest your landlord for the same (which means landlords won’t rent to anyone they know is a sex worker).
**22:** David Graeber claimed that between 20% and 50% of workers are in “bullshit jobs” with no social value. But in [research intended to test the claim](https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/one-in-twenty-workers-are-in-useless-jobs-far-fewer-than-previously-thought), only about 5% of workers felt this way about their position. And contra Graeber’s claim that this is increasing over time, the percent of people who self-identify this way has fallen substantially over the past decade. Also, the jobs where people admit to this are the opposite of the ones Graeber pointed to. Obvious self-report bias is obvious.
**23:** Last year, Rutgers Law School instituted a requirement that all student clubs that they must hold at least one event promoting critical race theory or related topics, or else lose most of their funding. After [pressure from FIRE](https://www.thefire.org/rutgers-law-student-government-to-student-groups-promote-critical-race-theory-or-lose-funding/), a pro-free-speech-in-education advocacy group, they now [appear to have backed down](https://www.dailywire.com/news/rutgers-law-drops-policy-requiring-student-groups-to-promote-critical-race-theory).
**24:** Related: In addition to all the usual reasons, studies with unwoke conclusions are now being removed from journals because people make [“serious and credible threats of personal violence”](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2017.1369037) against the editors of journal editors who keep them up.
**25:** Related: [when surveyed privately, most Saudi men support women working outside the home](https://twitter.com/timurkuran/status/1289421238801010689). But in public they oppose it because they think everyone else opposes it and don’t want to get in trouble! Relevant [Scott Aaronson lecture](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2410) and [SSC story](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/).
**26:** Contra every evolutionary psychologist ever, there is [no evidence of nutritional benefit for being or marrying a well-reputed Hadza hunter](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.24027) , probably because everyone shares food communally anyway. Usual disclaimer that not all hunter-gatherer groups are the same, modern hunter-gatherers are unrepresentative of ancient ones, etc.
**27:**
**28:** Related: [Ultra-Orthodox trans women](https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51928077). How do you like that free will now?
**29:** ACalifornia bill that would decriminalize psychedelics (and make them legal for doctors to prescribe!) has [passed the state Senate](https://www.kqed.org/news/11873841/decriminalizing-psychedelic-drugs-in-california-as-senate-considers-bill-debate-continues), but still has to pass the Assembly before becoming law. Also, it was sponsored by Scott Weiner, who’s also responsible for YIMBY legislation and a bunch of other things. Is there some story behind why California has 120 legislators but every interesting proposal I hear about is sponsored by the same guy?
**30:**[Does Critical Flicker-Fusion Frequency Track The Subjective Experience Of Time](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DAKivjBpvQhHYGqBH/does-critical-flicker-fusion-frequency-track-the-subjective)? Okay, this is a really weird one, but bear with me. We can imagine experiencing time at a different subjective rate - for example, stories of people who feel like they lived an entire decades-long alternative life in a dream, then wake up to find that only a single night has passed. How do we know that other people (or other animals species) are experiencing time at the same rate we are? One possibility is to track what’s called critical flicker fusion frequency - how close together do two flashes of light have to be before they appear as a single flash? Turns out animals differ a lot in this! Toads have a CFF of about 10% of humans, and so might experience the world in fast-forward; bees have a CFF about 3x humans, so might see the world in slow-motion. This potentially has ethical implications; if we measure utility in days or years of happiness or suffering, should we be multiplying by these numbers to get subjective experience? See the link for much more than you wanted to know about this.
**31:** From Skeptics StackExchange: contra inflated claims, [playing grandmaster-level chess doesn’t burn as many calories as running](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7527/does-playing-chess-burn-as-many-calories-as-running/7568#7568). I’m actually surprised these numbers are as high as they are; I’d previously thought the brain burned a pretty constant amount of calories regardless of how much cognitive load it was under, but these figures seem well above resting metabolic rate.
**32:** [Why did we stop having ticker tape parades?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q3JY4iRzjq56FyjGF/why-haven-t-we-celebrated-any-major-achievements-lately) (metaphorically and literally)
**33:** A common polyamory talking point is “you wouldn’t be jealous if your friend had other friends”. Now psychologists find that [people definitely get jealous if their friends get other friends](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-57189-001).
**34:** A study finds that [higher testosterone makes people more willing to consider minority positions](https://sci-hub.st/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550620945116?journalCode=sppa). Are you man enough to believe it?
**35:** Claim: [Sci-Hub needs your help](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_mission_for_scihub_and_open_sci)
**36:** I was linked to [this Telegraph article](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/09/oxfam-training-guide-blames-privileged-white-women-root-causes/) after being told it was relevant to [my post](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture) discussing conflicts between race-based and feminism-based social justice, and it does not disappoint: “In the wake of sex scandals that have rocked the charity, Oxfam has produced guidance which states that: 'Mainstream feminism centres on privileged white women and demands that 'bad men' be fired or imprisoned.' Accompanied by a cartoon of a crying white woman, it adds that this 'legitimises criminal punishment, harming black and other marginalised people.'”
**37:** [Resolutions Of Mathematical Conjectures Over Time](https://aiimpacts.org/resolutions-of-mathematical-conjectures-over-time/). “In 2014, we found conjectures referenced on Wikipedia, and recorded the dates that they were proposed and resolved, if they were resolved. We updated this list of conjectures in 2020, marking any whose status had changed. We then used a Kaplan-Meier estimator to approximate the survivorship function…The data is fit closely by an exponential function with a half-life of 117 years.”
**38:** Porn site xHamster surveys 15,000 viewers to learn about [the intersection between politics, sex, and porn](https://xhamster.com/blog/posts/9992641). Again, the headlines write themselves:
Much more at the link.
**39:** [Extremely ambitious study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016762962030076X?dgcid=coauthor) aims to show that the FDA placing an extra warning on antidepressants in 2009 decreased US labor force participation 0.2 percentage points, presumably because it scared people away from taking antidepressants and then people got more depressed and couldn’t work as much. I call BS despite apparently high significance levels: partly on priors, partly because there was too much leeway to cherry-pick when the warning started mattering, and partly because the effect was only in older women even though the FDA’s warning only applied to adolescents.
**40:** The cutest cognitive bias: people overestimate their own IQ by 30 points (!), [but overestimate their romantic partner’s IQ by 40](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289618302150?casa_token=RPSeQsJ9yYMAAAAA:nDM8JkfUtejNB3als2vHYFWXZBumIwentp-vMKR6OkuEL8dhKKQO1mBo5klIloCxYn_LqcsTyw). The same study also claims there’s no correlation between “intellectual compatibility” and relationship satisfaction within relationships; ie you’re not more likely to have a happy relationship if your partner has a similar IQ to you (but see comment [here](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june#comment-2239227)).
**41:** The tendency for Supreme Court Justices to move left over time is known as the [Greenhouse Effect](http://epstein.wustl.edu/research/ReplacingJusticeGinsburg.pdf), after former *New York Times* legal correspondent Linda Greenhouse.
**42:** The worst infographic ever? ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisugly/comments/eqmum5/this_graph_comparing_average_womens_height_around/)) | Scott Alexander | 37915425 | Links For June | acx |
# Mantic Monday 6/21/21
Among this month’s interesting Metaculus predictions:
**If Puerto Rico gets statehood, will their first two senators both be Democrats?** [50%](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7243/1st-senators-from-puerto-rico-both-democrats/). I’d seen accusations that the Democrats want Puerto Rican statehood to seize a Senate advantage, and counterarguments that no, PR isn’t as solid-blue as people like to think, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen the “risk” of a PR Republican Senator quantified. Higher than I thought!
**Will Jeff Bezos make a big investment in anti-aging this year?** [25%](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7208/jeff-bezos-to-shake-up-longevity-by-september/)
Aubrey de Grey has hinted that somebody really big is about to get into the anti-aging/longevity field, and speculation has centered on a newly-retired and not-getting-any-younger (so far!) Jeff Bezos. This prediction resolves as true if Bezos puts at least $50 million into anti-aging.
**Will crypto sites default before 2023?** Bitmex [26%](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7238/what-is-a-counterparty-risk-of-bitmex/), Binance [15%](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7235/what-is-a-counterparty-risk-of-binance/), Coinbase [5%](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7237/what-is-a-counterparty-risk-of-coinbase/)
Not many predictions here, so don’t take these numbers too seriously. I also don’t know what a “default” would mean in this sense - default to at least one customer, but everyone else is okay? Lose all its money to a hack?
**What will Prospera’s population be in 2035?** [Approximately 0](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7110/pr%25C3%25B3spera-population-in-2035/)
Prospera is a charter city taking shape in Honduras; see [here](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7110/pr%25C3%25B3spera-population-in-2035/) for more. They’re planning to have 10,000 residents by 2025, and 100,000 by some unspecified point in the future. Metaculus doesn’t think it will happen; more than half of forecasters say they’ll have fewer than 100 residents in 2035 (presumably because they have failed and ceased to exist) and only 10% of forecasters think they’ll have more than 10,000, which would be a bare minimum for partial success. So far no predictions on Ciudad Morazan, the other incipient Honduran charter city.
---
I’m happy to report that getting money into Polymarket has gone from impossible to merely annoying. Non-Americans can apparently do it directly with a credit card; Americans will have to send USDC, separately send Ethereum to a different address to cover transaction fees, then wait ~10 minutes for everything to percolate through. My level of crypto knowledge is “can use Coinbase” and I was able to figure it out. There’s also apparently an easier way with a Metamask wallet, which I didn’t try.
Here are some of the more interesting Polymarket markets open:
For comparison, PredictIt has Adams at 64%, so some good convergence going on here. PredictIt’s NYC mayor market says “17 million shares traded” - if an average share is 50 cents, that means PredictIt has about $8.5 million in volume. Polymarket works a little differently and has yes/no markets for each candidate; the vast majority (a little over $1 million) is on the Yang market. So Polymarket has a little over 10% of the liquidity of PredictIt on this one.
---
Charles Dillon of [Rethink Priorities](https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/) has a post on the [Effective Altruism Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/): [Data on forecasting accuracy across different time horizons and levels of forecaster experience](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hqkyaHLQhzuREcXSX/data-on-forecasting-accuracy-across-different-time-horizons).
It looks mostly at [PredictionBook](https://predictionbook.com/), a site where people record their own predictions without a lot of the aggregation or betting functions of traditional markets, and it mainly addresses two questions. First, do more experienced predictors do better? Second, how does accuracy change over longer time horizons?
The answer to the first question is a simple yes:
People who made 100+ predictions had a lower Brier score (lower = better) than people who made fewer, and were less overconfident. This doesn’t prove that experience helps; it could just be that smarter people were more likely to use the site more. But it probably *suggests* that experience helps. No surprise here.
You’ll also notice that the 100+ group’s score of 0.153 is pretty close to μE[Brier], aka the score they would get with perfect calibration. These people may not know everything, but they are super well-calibrated.
Look at that beautiful peak at 0% overconfidence!
What about the second question - do people do better or worse on longer-time-horizon predictions?
They do better! Since the set of questions people answered was kind of random, Dillon suggests that maybe people asked themselves easier questions about the far future than the near future. This feels intuitively plausible - think about the year 2075 and you might ask questions like “Will the US still exist then?” - think about next month and your questions might be more like “Will the market go up or down?” If it’s easier to predict long-term trends than short-term fluctuations, this might cause a general pattern of people doing better at longer-term questions.
---
Speaking of market fluctuations, the big econ news this month has been inflation. This is exactly the sort of thing where prediction is simple and potentially really useful, and sure enough many people are trying to predict it.
Chris of [Karlstack](https://karlstack.substack.com/p/polymarket-prediction-will-inflation) says he bet on high inflation on Polymarket (and presumably won, given last month’s data). Matt Yglesias [admits he got a previous low inflation prediction wrong](https://www.slowboring.com/p/inflation-georgia-checks) (at 90% confidence, no less!). These people are good and deserve praise.
I’m concerned about everyone else. Lots of celebrity economists seem to have some position on inflation. I take it that Larry Summers and Tyler Cowen are a bit more worried, and Jerome Powell and Matt Yglesias a bit less so. So by the end of the year, we know that inflation was some amount, and then who’s right?
Partly because of my superficial reading and partly because of my poor understanding of macroeconomics, I don’t have a good sense of where exactly everyone’s views diverge. If we have 3.5% inflation but employment numbers look good, is this a victory for Cowen and Summers? For Yglesias and Powell? Do both of them secretly agree on everything and they’re just looking at it from different angles? Where do other people whose opinions I’m told I should care about, like Paul Krugman, fall here?
I worry that five years from now, something will happen or not happen, and everyone will say it’s *basically* what they predicted or at least they didn’t rule it out, and I won’t get any extra information from this.
I don’t always insist that people make formal predictions with percent confidence. But this would be a great time for economists and econ pundits to do that.
I would also be interested in someone putting together a web page with every famous person’s opinion on how this is going to play out, and what it implies, so that in five years when things do or don’t happen, and people say they predicted this all along, we can say “we made a good-faith effort to figure out what your opinion was back in 2021, and decided you thought X, and put it up on this webpage, and you didn’t object that it was a false representation of your views, so probably you thought X”. | Scott Alexander | 37250439 | Mantic Monday 6/21/21 | acx |
# Open Thread 177
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
1: You probably saw this already, but [voting is open](https://forms.gle/cHmGt859uyBb6Nns5) for Book Review Contest winners.
2: I asked subscribers to review and comment on a draft post for this week. I got lots of good suggestions for things to change, so many that it might take me a while. Don’t expect it up for another week or two, sorry. | Scott Alexander | 37830338 | Open Thread 177 | acx |
# Vote In The Book Review Contest!
Thanks for reading the entries in this very delayed (and then very protracted) book review contest.
Please [vote for your favorites here](https://forms.gle/cHmGt859uyBb6Nns5), using approval voting (ie vote for however many you want).
I’ll probably keep voting open until the end of June in case you want a chance to go back and re-read your favorites. In case you’ve forgotten, the finalists are:
1: [Order Without Law](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-order-without-law)
2: [On The Natural Faculties](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-natural-faculties)
3: [Progress And Poverty](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty)
4: [Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-are-we-smart-enough)
5: [Why Buddhism Is True](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-buddhism-is)
6: [Double Fold](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-double-fold)
7: [The Wizard And The Prophet](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the)
8: [Through The Eye Of A Needle](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-through-the-eye)
9: [The Years Of Lyndon Johnson](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-years-of-lyndon)
10: [Addiction By Design](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-addiction-by-design)
11: [The Accidental Superpower](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-accidental-superpower)
12: [Humankind](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-humankind)
13: [The Collapse Of Complex Societies](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-collapse-of)
14: [Where’s My Flying Car?](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying)
15: [Down And Out In Paris And London](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-down-and-out-in)
16: [How Children Fail](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-how-children-fail)
17: [Plagues And Peoples](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-plagues-and-peoples) | Scott Alexander | 37766844 | Vote In The Book Review Contest! | acx |
# Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples
[*This is the seventeenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. This one was chosen out of the reviews I somehow missed the first time around. There were four other such essays, which you can see in [a supplementary runners-up packet here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IrvVgLa6-TEP81UD1-eW5gz1sEJ53Ar88IG0J5i4jQs/edit#). I’ll make a post about how to vote tomorrow. - SA*]
Biological evolution was hijacked by cultural evolution; tools and language allowed humankind to upset the ecological balance in incredible ways. We should all know the story by now. Human grunts to other human and they agree to kill a wooly mammoth together and then grunt and agree to share the meat and then grunt and learn to make a spear and grunt and form a complex society and worldwide dominant species.
Parasites and viruses are invisible and hard to grunt about. A lion, in contrast, is difficult *not* to grunt about.
This book, *Plagues and Peoples* written by William H. McNeill in 1976, frames the entirety of human history and prehistory in the context of humankind’s relationship with microparasites and viruses. Communication, culture, tools, clothes, and shelter allowed humans to hunt dominantly, live anywhere, and deal with most ecological challenges- but microparasites remained elusively hard to deal with until modern times. This uneasy relationship with the invisible unconsciously shapes where human’s live, how civilizations form, and how societies are organized.
At every step of humanity’s evolution, McNeill sees microparasites and viruses being one of the ‘fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.’
**Out of Africa**
McNeill does not think it is coincidence that the cradle of humanity also has the most variety of human parasites and remains one of the most balanced ecosystems in the world. Humans evolved into the ecosystem, along with the parasites and wildebeests and lions.
> “...the extraordinary variety of human parasites that exist in Africa suggests that Africa was the principal cradle for humankind, for nowhere else did the adjustment between human and nonhuman forms achieve anything like the same biological elaboration.”
Even when humans could grunt about predators and prey, parasites were there to put an exploding population in check. McNeill points to trypanosome, which causes sleeping sickness, and is carried by antelope, transmitted by the tsetse fly. The parasite does not affect antelope or the fly, but causes “drastic debility” in humans- McNeill calls this “an example of a stable, well-adjusted, and presumably very ancient parasitism.” To this day “within the tsetse’s range, something resembling a pre-human ecological balance survives.”
Many parasitic worms and protozoa in Africa do not provoke immune reactions. When too many humans get together they spread these parasites more and suddenly the population drops again. This ecosystem that ancient humans evolved into had a population check that even language and spears and fire could not overcome.
Until some enterprising early humans discovered the Mediterranean and the comparative lack of parasites in global temperate climates. Clothes and shelters, fires and families allowed humans to flourish in new climates. Leaving Africa allowed human’s cultural hijacking of biological evolution to truly become dominant because humanity left most of those pesky tsetse flies in Africa. That’s when humans decimate macro fauna populations across the globe, entirely disrupting most every ecosystem that is touched by human’s cultural ingenuity from roughly 40,000 to 10,000 BC. When you kill all the wooly mammoth and giant sloth and buffalo, you keep walking and find more to kill. Until humanity experiences maybe it’s first resource depletion and needs a new way to find, or maybe grow, food.
**Ebbing and Waning**
As society gets more complex, so does the relationship with microparasites.
The ecological population check of anciently co-evolved parasites in Africa didn’t work when humans left Africa. After killing all the big game in the world, people (independently across the globe) decided to domesticate an animal and grow some vegetables in their backyard. Eventually humans decided that instead of dealing with weeds and unpredictable backyard gardens, they will collaborate and build irrigation systems and monoculture. Humans escaped the tropical jungle to eventually settle down in warm, wet, dense irrigation farms.
Here McNeill points to the blood fluke that causes schistosomiasis, “a nasty debilitating disease, affecting as many as 100 million people today.” Mollusks and humans are the fluke’s hosts, which swims around in water looking for the next snail or farmer. In humans, the disease is debilitating in childhood and is less acute, although still semi-debilitating, thereafter. Again, like trypanosome (and also malaria), blood flukes' very complex life cycle seemingly indicates a lengthy evolution in respect to humans. Maybe blood fluke emerged from tropical Africa, but it spread widely through irrigation farming.
Here, it starts to get interesting.
> “It seems reasonable to suspect that the despotic governments characteristic of societies dependent on irrigation agriculture may have owed something to the debilitating diseases that afflicted field workers who kept their feet wet much of the time, as well as to the technical requirements of water management and control…. The plagues of Egypt, in short, may have been connected with the power of the Pharaoh in ways the ancient Hebrews never thought of and modern historians have never considered.”
What if *Seeing Like a State* misses what the Hebrews missed? Farming grains indeed allowed a storable and quantifiable good to be taxed, but the blood fluke made it so it was easy to take away from the sickly farmers.
If you have enough blood fluke sickly irrigation farmers to rule, you can start to sustain a city. And then viruses become a problem.
**Diseases of Civilization Par Excellence**
Viruses really have two options- spread to a new host or die. When they infect a host, immune response will eliminate the virus or eliminate the host. For a virus to spread prolifically it will need, more or less, an ever growing population of hosts that have not had the virus. McNeill calls infectious viral diseases that pass directly from human to human the “diseases of civilization par excellence; the peculiar hallmark and epidemiological burden of cities and of countryside in contact with cities.”
Probably all viruses transferred to humans from animal herds. There have been uncountable false starts when the human hosts or invading virus die out locally and cut off the chain of infection. But at certain thresholds of human population, growth, and density allow re-infection rate to sustain and the virus to evolve interesting abilities to sustain further re-infection, such as latency.
Chicken pox (related to cow pox) infects kids and all the other kids in their kindergarten. They are itchy for a while and then the virus retreats to the tissues and is dorman for fifty years, only to reappear as shingles. This is genius on the part of chicken pox. By then there are plenty of new kindergarteners to infect. McNeill, again, points out that ‘the mildness of the disease for most people and the remarkable latency pattern it exhibits suggests this is an old viral infection among humankind.”
Establishing this type of diffusion of disease, he says, requires several thousand years. Through statistical analysis of the modern spread of measles, McNeill claims that the minimum population size to keep a virus going is about half a million people. Coincidentally, the world’s oldest civilization, the ancient Sumeria population was approximately half a million.
**Macroparasitism**
The host-parasite relationship mirrors subject-government relationship. “The entire process of adjustment between host and parasite may be conceived as a series of wavelike disturbances to pre-existing biological equilibria.” As McNeill paints the complexly evolving relationship between humans and parasites, he introduces government as humanity’s macroparasite.
McNeill again,
> “Only when civilized communities had built up certain level of wealth and skill did war and raiding become an economically viable enterprise. But seizing the harvest by force, if it led to speedy death of the agricultural workforce from starvation, was an unstable form of macroparasitism.”
The violent ‘macroparasites’ had to learn how to coexist with their agricultural workforce ‘hosts’. There have been many wavelike disturbances in the evolution of this relationship. Achieving this political balance of growing enough surplus to feed an army while not effectively starving your farmers also took thousands of years and multiple false starts and population thresholds. I personally like this framing.
McNeill extends the metaphor maybe a bit too much describing how successful governments immunize their rent paying subjects by protecting them from other macroparasites. “Disease immunity arises by stimulating the formation of antibodies and raising other psychological defenses to a heightened level of activity; governments improve immunity to foriegn macroparasitism by stimulating surplus production of food and raw materials sufficient to support specialists in violence in suitably large numbers and with appropriate weaponry.” Both micro and macro parasites are burdensome but also guard against sudden lethal disasters.
Early humanity’s macroparasites used to be lions and tigers and bears. Apex predators would take your child but probably not your whole family. In a similar way humans evolved into an ecosystem alongside microparasites in Africa, there were macroparasites in the system as well. Using language, technology, and culture let us escape the micro and macro parasitism that humanity evolved into, but at a certain scale of society these micro and macro parasitic ‘forces’ came in new forms. Viruses instead of parasites and human violence instead of apex predators.
These new forces share a similar attribute- human ingenuity does not guard against them. Viruses (and other microparasites) because they were hard to see and understand until recently. Human violence, and government control thereafter, because human ingenuity creates a positive feedback loop that strengthens the ability of human violence and government control. This framing of why government macroparasitism is such a sticky problem is a very solid fundamental reason to find importance in freedom of speech, rule of law, and other cultural checks on macroparsitic power. Once agricultural city states started to pop up, humanity stumbled between avoiding too much microprasitic malay and macroparsitic violence.
It just sucks if you’re the farmer finding a balance between the microparasites, viruses, and the macroparasite government, both taking just enough energy to hopefully not kill you while you’re still useful. The systems evolving until the hosts and parasites find mutually tolerable accommodation.
**Finding that Balance as a Chinese Rice Paddy Farmer**
Around 600 BC extensive farming started in the Yellow River Valley. It took enormous collective engineering effort to build canals, irrigation systems, and flood controls to turn the vast flood plain into a productive carpet of rice paddies. Chronic warfare ended around 200 BC with consolidation of power in the Han Dynasty. This introduced a double layer of macroparasitism: private landowners and the Emperor both demanded taxes be paid. This was still better than tumultuous chronic warfare. This coincided with another powerful factor in the macroparasistic balance: Confucianism. The ideals propagated “a culture among imperial officials and private landowners internalized an ethic that strenuously restrained arbitrary or innovative use of power.”
This system seemed to work. “A remarkably stable and long-lasting balance was achieved within Chinese society between peasant farmers and the two social classes most directly parasitic upon them. This balance survived, with some important elaborations but not real structural breaks, until the twentieth century. The system flourished throughout the Yellow River Valley, and eventually beyond.
Yellow River Basin
The Han Dynasty never made it very far south towards the Yangtze. Political and military obstacles were relatively unimportant, and the climate and land meant longer and more productive growing seasons for agriculture. The Yangtze also has more predictable and manageable flood plains. [Yangtze Valley is prettier too](https://www.synotrip.com/sites/default/files/styles/900x900/public/gary_he/09102513147943c7218a4a890d.jpg?itok=v2C1e672). Why not extend civilization southward?
In McNeill’s words “for in moving southward and into better farming regions, Chinese pioneers were also climbing a rather steep disease gradient!” The climatic gradient is steep, like New England to Florida, in a shorter geographic distance. For a Chinese peasant, the mutually tolerable accommodation with the state and with the microparasites of the Yellow River Valley was maintainable. But more microparasitic intensity made the balance unmaintainable. The Han Dynasty and Confucianism really only worked at a certain latitude.
By the way, guess which major Chinese city is on the Yangtze? (You can look back at the map.)
In contrast to the Ganges Valley in India, with a civilization and farming starting around 600 BC but remained unstable and never consolidated. The Ganges Valley is hugely productive agriculturally but also warmer and wetter than China’s southern Yangtze Valley. “Classical Indian civilization thus took form under climatic and (presumed) disease conditions that the early Chinese found too much to bear.”
It took a long time for China to populate the Yangtze River basin- biological accommodation to a microparasitic climate will take a long time. By that time, around 1200 AD, there is also evidence the Sung Dynasty was a less powerful and less demanding macroparasite. “To achieve such a mass population [100 million by A.D.1200] two things were needed: a suitable microparasistic accommodation to the ecological conditions of the Yangtze Valley and regions farther south, and a regulated macroparasitism that left enough of their product with the Chinese peasants so that they could sustain a substantial rate of natural increase over several generations.”
**Epistemic Status: A convincing narrative with zero evidence**
McNeill explicitly and regularly reminds the reader that this overarching thesis has little to no evidence. But it does have lots of examples. It’s the same problem that most overarching histories of humanity face: lack of documentation. Except this time it’s lack of documentation 10,000 years ago of something we discovered existed 300 years ago and is invisible without a microscope. In some way, though, this complete lack of documentation makes his case stronger- the invisible forces are stronger than the visible ones.
We all kind of knew the narrative that the Spanish decimated the Aztecs and Mayans with help of smallpox. I just never extended that logic towards humanity’s escape from Africa, the march of civilizations into the countryside, and what type of social structures worked best at certain ‘disease gradient’ latitudes. The documentation of the conquistadors was almost adequate to infer disease as a massive influence. But earlier medical records and writings lack such detail. When McNeill contrasts this force of microparasitism balancing with and against the adequately vague force of macroparasitism, it’s hard not to nod your head and agree.
McNeill provides as much detail and admits lack of detail as possible. The book is about on fifth footnotes. But the most convincing arguments for his narrative is the sum of parts that make up the narrative. I’m going to just list a few more examples that fit his framework because they are all interesting and also paint a more convincing picture of the importance microparasitism played in human history.
* The way that Europeans decimated Native Americans with smallpox blankets has been a key driver in ancient civilization expansion. The moment the city folk come in contact with tribes, smaller towns, anyone in the countryside they also bring the city folk diseases. This makes civilization expansion fundamentally easier.
* India’s caste system is a relic of living in a high disease gradient area and cohabitating between city folk, farmers, and others. The ‘untouchables’ makes a lot of sense in that framework.
* Many weird religious things that you’ve probably heard of fit in this framework like not eating pork and washing hands. In the year 2245 Martian kids will wonder why members of Church of the Crypto Spaghetti Monster on Earth all wear cloth over their mouths in public.
* Mongol caravans introduced the plague to rats and then spread the plague rats across the world. The plague probably existed in say Yunnan, China where the locals had developed a complex set of myths and traditions to say, not eat rats. When the Mongols came they trapped the rats, got the plague and spread it in China. China’s population decreased from around 123 million in 1200 to around 65 million in 1331. Then the Mongols brought the rats to Europe 1346.
* The long term effects of the plague in Europe include anti semitism, less use of Latin, better painting, good European sensibilities of government, and more religious rigidity. No, I do not want to explain further.
* Since the Mediterrean is relatively disease free and overall pleasant, the Roman civilization ended up relatively top heavy and parasitic. It was too top heavy when epidemics arrived and the microparasites disrupted the balance.
* Certain religions and forms of government evolve in certain disease gradients.
* [Australian rabbit populations](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-rabbit-outbreak) provide a fascinating view of virus-host evolution in fast forward.
* An entirely new pace of urban growth coincides with dramatically improving medical practices.
**William H. McNeill versus Jared Diamond**
I never read *Guns, Germs, and Steel*, but constantly wondered how parallel Diamond and McNeill thought about diseases. Luckily, they had a public debate! McNeill criticizes *GGS*, Diamond responds, and then McNeill further replies! How lucky we are.
McNeill’s [opening paragraph](https://nicspaull.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/guns-germs-and-steel-critique-mcneill.pdf) includes “Not bad for an ameteur historian” and “...is not an intellectual success.” I am unsure how self aware McNeill is when he criticizes Diamond for being a ‘big picture historian.’ I am pretty sure McNeill is jealous of *Guns, Germs, and Steel’s* success though. All these punches are really to describe *Guns, Germs, and Steel* as overly geographic deterministic. An ‘East-West Axis’ as the penultimate factor in Eurasia’s success is too broad of a claim. McNeill also quibbles that continents should not be the unit of analysis.
[Diamond responds](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/06/26/guns-germs-and-steel/) that he is answering adequately broad questions like: Why was there civilization in Europe and not in Australia? Closing with “Historians’ failure to explain history’s broadest pattern leaves us with a huge moral gap. In the absence of convincing explanations, many (most?) people resort, consciously or unconsciously, to racist assumptions: the conquerors supposedly had superior IQ or culture.”
McNeill responds “that some few historians are trying to do so [explain history’s broadest patterns], among them myself, and with more respect for natural history than Diamond has for the conscious level of human history. He wants simple answers to processes far more complex than he has patience to investigate. Brushing aside the autonomous capability of human culture to alter environments profoundly—and also irreversibly—is simply absurd.”
Where Diamond sees geography first, McNeill sees biogeography’s interaction with culture first. As far as big picture histories go, I think McNeill has a very convincing and important narrative. However, framing governments versus diseases with individuals in the middle, while interesting, seems to not give the individual too much agency. McNeill could make his narrative more convincing by, at least sometimes, shrinking his ‘unit of analysis’ closer to individuals.
A lot of these big picture histories of humanity start with sometimes conflicting premises. How happy were hunter gatherers? In *Sapiens* Yuval Noah Harrari frames humanity as a slow deterioration of individual happiness at the expense of building a greater society starting from the carefree hunter gather and ending in the far AI future of civilizational greatness and individual obliteration. Jared Diamond calls agriculture “[the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”](https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race) Other narratives paint individuals crawling out of the dark neanderthal caves into utopian agricultural societies and everyone is more or less getting happier as modernity progresses. The distinction is foremost a narrative tool which seems to have important implications, but I have been unresolved on which side I adhere to. *Plagues and Peoples* kind of has it both ways in a way that seems truer. Human individuals are constantly finding the balance between their environment and society towards something... mutually tolerable.
I wonder what McNeill versus Yuval Noah Harrari would look like.
**Ok, now I’ll talk about COVID-19**
I happened across this book last summer, literally on the floor of Buckeye Bend Books in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. An overarching history of humanity framed through the importance of viruses written in 1976 was exactly what I needed. Something to put the year 2020 in context and not hitting refresh on the [John Hopkins’ virus tracker](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html). While reading with the intent of relating everything to COVID-19, not too much really correlates super well.
Buckeye Bend Books
*Plagues and Peoples* does not talk too much about the flu. But his remarks are both prescient and a bit gloomy.
> “Another sort of epidemic disease whose future among mankind remains at least potentially significant is well illustrated by the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. Influenza has been around a long time.\*” His ninetieth footnote indicates that “no fewer than ninety-four epidemics of influenza between 1173, the earliest he [August Hirsch] thought he could identify, and 1875. Of these he calculated at least fifteen had been pandemic, i.e., effected Asia as well as Europe… There is no reason to suppose that influenza was new in 1173, however… the history of the disease remains irrecoverable.”
It really drives home what we all knew but did not want to talk too much about: COVID-19 and it’s mutations will be around for a long time. With public health, modern medicine, massive quarantining, and a vaccine in production we have quickly found what might be called a mutually tolerable relationship already. At least a bit more tolerable than in 1918 when the flu infected almost the entire world’s population and killed over twenty million people. The tricky part is that this virus is not mutating or evolving towards becoming ‘more mutually tolerable’; the virus just mutates at random and sometimes it is more deadly and more contagious. We could easily, it seems, have a COVID-24 pandemic.
The idea of disease gradients is interesting in the geographic variabilities of COVID-19. India has ten times less of a death rate than the United States, to which a Mayo Clinic Professor recently [pondered](https://twitter.com/VincentRK/status/1361849917086572545) “cross reactive immunity from prior corona virus and other infections” as a main reason. Another interesting parallel to ponder is how humans have had such trouble adapting to microparasites because they were invisible and how that mirrors some of today’s issues of how our society deals with COVID-19.
The microparasite-macroparasite balance is also a good frame to see what is happening. When COVID-19 is destroying the productivity and ability to afford food, governments have not only taken less taxes but immediately started giving us money. I would say that governments were surprisingly quick to counterbalance societies' mutually tolerable position. One could use this framework to argue governments will all trend ‘less parasitic’ in at least the mid-term. mRNA vaccine production, once fully operationalized, could tip the balance towards much more tolerable relationship.
The book does not offer explicit expectations of what comes after COVID-19. He talked about European life after The Black Death but most of the implications were because of such a substantial amount of death, not because Europeans couldn’t go to bars. Through his telling of history there is not a huge correlation between plagues and technological progress or social progress. Reading the book, though, offers some solace. Humans have struggled, coped, and evolved with parasites and viruses since before humanity. This relationship is not new. As powerful of a force COVID-19 seems today, microparasites of the past have definitely been more influential on human history. At least now we know what they are. McNeill makes an adequately vague prediction about the future:
> “For the present and short-range future, it remains obvious that humanity is in course of one of the most massive and extraordinary ecological upheavals the planet has ever known. Not stability but a sequence of sharp alterations and abrupt oscillations in existing balances between microparasitism and macroparasitism can therefore be expected in the near future as in the recent past.”
**Meta Micro/Macro Parasitism**
The themes from this book that I keep coming back to are not so much in the COVID-19 framework, but more in a [Daniel Schmachtenberger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh7qvXfGQho) way of systems thinking. Thinking a bit more meta about micro and macro parasitism gives a decently coherent model of the world. There are weaker forces and things that when outnumbering an individual extract a certain amount of energy. And there are stronger forces and things that a group of individuals may outnumber but still extract some energy. This eventually looks like a dynamin hierarchy. Millions of virions can make a person sick while millions of people will pay taxes to a government.
This model is enticing because it seems, in McNeill’s narrative, persistent since the dawn of humanity. It also seems a bit Marxist. Like any overarching model of reality, it will overfit and underfit. Regardless, models can be useful or at least beautiful. When picturing this dynamic, oscillating system I keep coming back to a [Ranier Maria Rilke poem translated by Joanna Macy:](https://onbeing.org/poetry/widening-circles/)
> *Widening Circles*
>
> *I live my life in widening circles
> that reach out across the world.
> I may not complete this last one
> but I give myself to it.
> I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
> I’ve been circling for thousands of years
> and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
> a storm, or a great song?*
The most interesting part of this model is how a human, or humans, adapt to these forces. Collaboration and innovation propelled us out of the biological ecosystem dynamic. Once societies reached a density threshold to harbor viruses, customs and religions practices evolved to help control the spread. Once technology created a macroparasitic positive feedback loop by creating forms of control and violence oppression, eventually concepts of democracy and human rights evolved. Eventually collaboration- collective acceptance of human rights or wearing masks- is more important than the newest technology. A collective narrative- a convincing model- is what seems to elevate humanity into a more ‘mutually tolerable’ situation. | Scott Alexander | 37699359 | Your Book Review: Plagues And Peoples | acx |
# On Cerebralab On Nutt/Carhart-Harris On Serotonin
[*epistemic status: extremely speculative*]
George at CerebraLab has a [new review](https://cerebralab.com/Stress_and_Serotonin) of [Nutt and Carhart-Harris's paper on serotonin receptors](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0269881117725915) (I previously reviewed it [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/10/ssc-journal-club-serotonin-receptors/)). Two points stood out that I had previously missed:
First of all - predictive coding identifies suffering with prediction error. This conflicts with common sense. Suppose I tell you I'm going to stab you in the arm, you agree that I'm going to stab you in the arm, and then I stab you in the arm, and it hurts a lot. You predicted what would happen correctly, but you still suffered. The theory resolves this with a distinction between common-sense-level and neurological predictions: your brain is "set" to expect normal neurological feedback from your arm, and when it gets pain signals instead, that's a violated prediction, and this is the level on which prediction error = suffering. But there are other cases where the common-sense and neurological sense of predictions are more congruent. When you first step into a cold shower, you feel suffering, but after you've been in it a while you adjust your "predictions" and it's no longer as unpleasant. If you unexpectedly lost $25,000 it would come as an extremely unpleasant shock, but when you predictably have to pay the taxman $25,000 each year you grumblingly put up with it.
The theory of "active inference" adds another layer of complexity here; it posits that sometimes your brain automatically resolves prediction error through action. If you were expecting to be well-balanced, but actually you're off-balance, you'll reflexively right yourself until you're where you expected to be. At its limit, this theory says that all action takes place through the creation and resolution of prediction errors - I stand up by "predicting" on a neurological level that I will stand up, and then my motor cortex tries to resolve the "error" by making me actually stand.
(one remaining problem here is why and how some prediction errors get interpreted as rewards. If you get $1 million one day because you're a CEO and it's payday and that's how much you make every payday, you will not be especially happy. If you get $1 million because you're an ordinary middle-class person and a crypto billionaire semi-randomly decides to give you $1 million one day, you will be very happy. This has been traced to reward being dopamine-based prediction error in the nucleus accumbens, and the CEO was predicting his windfall while the gift recipient wasn't. This suggests there's still something we don't understand about prediction error and suffering).
So one question is: for some given prediction error, how much do I suffer vs. adjust my predictions and stop feeling it vs. take action to resolve it?
George's take on Carhart-Harris & Nutt is that this is influenced by the balance of 5-HT1A vs. 5-HT2A receptors - two different kinds of serotonin receptor. 5-HT1A is (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of antidepressants. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more likely you are to resolve prediction error by adjusting your predictions - the equivalent of stepping into a freezing shower, but then acclimating so that it feels okay. Suppose you're depressed/anxious/upset because your boss keeps yelling at you. With enough 5-HT1A activation, you're better able to - on a neurological level - adjust your world-model to include a prediction that your boss will yell at you. Then when your boss does yell at you, there's less prediction error and less suffering. This is good insofar as you're suffering less, but bad insofar as you've adjusted to stop caring about a bad thing or thinking of it as something that needs solving - though it's more complicated than this, since suffering less can make you less depressed and being less depressed can put you in a more solution-oriented frame of mind.
5-HT2A receptors are (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of psychedelics. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more active your inference gets. George argues that this means psychedelics are more likely to get you to try to solve your problems. But is this really true? The average person on shrooms doesn't spend their trip contacting HR and reporting their abusive boss, they spend it staring at a flower marveling at how delicate the petals are or something. What problem is this solving? I think Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and maybe George think that this "active coping" isn't necessarily physical action per se, it's rejiggering your world model on a deeper level so that it's more creative and risky in generating strategies. It's a bias towards thinking of problems as solveable. This could potentially fit with the thing where people who do too much LSD become yogis or transhumanists or whatever; they're biased towards believing \*all\* problems are solveable, even the tough ones like suffering and mortality.
(this mostly, but not completely, meshes with Carhart-Harris' other work on psychedelics as [relaxed beliefs under uncertainty](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/))
All of this was in the paper and my review, but I like the way George ties it together with problems of active inference and the adjusting-predictions vs. changing-the-world tradeoff. If true, this should be testable on the very small scale, with predictions around perception and movement.
"The high 5-HT1A activation-man adapts himself to the world; the high-5-HT2A-activation-man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the high 5-HT2A activation man" - G. B. Shaw, sort of
[infohazard warning: this next section posits some things that it might be dangerous to think about while on LSD. If you expect to do LSD and obsess over not wanting to think about those things, don't read further]
The second interesting thing George says is this:
> I think for most people it's pretty obvious why H1A activity can be bad. But why can H2A activity harm? I point back to the diagram above:
>
> - Optimism
>
> - Plasticity
>
> - Sensitivity to stimuli
>
> - Ease of learning
>
> These in of themselves are not things that solve problems, they are things that put you in a problem-solving mindset, looking at the world with fresh eyes, openness, and renewed energy.
>
> This actually seems to reinforce an old bias of mine that people take psychedelics for the wrong reasons, i.e. they take psychedelics to solve "existential" problems that have no real solution other than some form of "accepting", when instead psychedelics are particularly good for solving a hands-on problem like studying the behaviour of ants, figuring out how your mind works or learning to play an instrument.
>
> I found it curious that people who take psychedelics for introspection usually end up as religious cranks or burnouts. While people that take psychedelics because "they are fun" don't seem to experience many negative side effects. Under this framework, it makes perfect sense, activate highly conceptual functions in the cortex and tell them to solve an intrinsic and emotional, you'll end up with some very weird conceptual scaffolding.
I keep wondering [how early psychedelicists got so weird](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/") - but, equally importantly, how come the 10% of Americans who use psychedelics mostly *don't* end out as weird as they did. I'd previously assumed the answer was dosing (though I haven't done the research into what kind of doses the early pioneers used) or confusion/surprise (since nobody had done LSD before, they didn't know what to expect and so were more weirded out by the results). But maybe the problem is that the early pioneers were psychologists doing research on themselves, and probably doing a lot of really careful introspection. Maybe these are the people who do worse, and just dropping acid for fun when you go to a dance party is less dangerous than trying to understand your own LSD-addled brain.
Thanks again to George for a new perspective on this interesting paper. | Scott Alexander | 37603831 | On Cerebralab On Nutt/Carhart-Harris On Serotonin | acx |
# Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration
Noah Smith [asks whether Jews are really disproportionately successful](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/how-successful-are-jews-really).
(in case it shapes the way you read any of this, both he and I are Jewish)
By the numbers, it would seem they are. US Jews have [a median household income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_and_religion#/media/File:Income_Ranking_by_Religious_Group_-_2000.png) about 50% higher than US Christians, a [net worth about 6x that of Christians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_and_religion), and are [about twice as likely as Christians](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/) to make more than $100K/year. They're about [twice as likely as Christians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_education#/media/File:Educational_Ranking_by_Religious_Group_-_2001.png) to get college degrees, and about 15x more likely to win Nobel prizes. These numbers are of about the same magnitude as the gap between blacks and whites, so if you take those numbers seriously, you should probably take these ones seriously too.
But Noah wonders if this really needs an interesting explanation, or if it's just a series of boring things on top of each other. He gives five reasons why maybe Jews could do unusually well. I’m going to concentrate on selective immigration, then briefly touch on the others.
**1. Selective immigration** - Maybe only the smartest/richest/go-getter-est Jews made it to the US, which makes American Jews seem extra impressive. We know something like this happens for some groups of modern immigrants - for example, Indian-Americans are very successful, earning about twice as much as whites on average. But everyone knows that it's mostly Indian elites who emigrate, so this isn't too surprising. Might Jews be the same? Noah writes:
> Most Jews came to America to escape repressive regimes in Europe. It stands to reason that more successful and/or wealthier Jews would have a better chance of making it out. So American Jews are not a random sample of all Jews; they're going to be biased toward the smart, the rich, and the risk-tolerant.
This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history; family lore usually focuses on how our ancestors were the poorest of the poor. My great-great-grandfather was a chicken farmer in Poland. He first emigrated to Germany, but felt like the German Jews were too stuck up and contemptuous of poor Polish Jews like himself, so he booked passage to America. I asked my Jewish housemate, whose family has millions of dollars and all went to Ivy League schools; she says her emigrant ancestors were "a Kosher butcher in Minsk and some guy who floated logs down the Dneiper River".
(her parents also say they might be descended from the Vilna Gaon, but every Jew says their family might be descended from the Vilna Gaon)
This also isn't how Eastern European Jews at the time saw immigration. [This paper](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.jstor.org/stable/27563679?seq=1) describes the situation in more depth. On first-generation Jewish immigrant Marcus Ravage:
> He recalls that as a young boy in Vaslui, Romania, he had the impression that America was a place for those who had gone into bankruptcy, for deserting soldiers, absconding husbands and the like - "an exile which men fled to only in preference to going to prison". Ravage's parents relinquished him [ie let him immigrate], albeit reluctantly, because their once middle-class standing had eroded to something resembling genteel poverty. His father still made an effort to send his boy on his way in some kind of self-respecting style, to keep up appearances, although it took the sale of the family cow to do so.
>
> Lest accounts by Ravage and other memoirists be dismissed as suspect late reconstructions, it is instructive to compare very similar accounts reported in real-time proximity to the events by disinterested sources, which tend to corroborate memoiristic accounts. One such example occurs in a 1905 study conducted by Emily Greene Balch, the American ethnographer, who did fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Balch noted that the first Jew to emigrate from a town she visited was a Jewish cloth merchant who had gone bankrupt. Likewise, in a social survey of a shtetl in the Kiev Province (Ukraine), we read of an elderly storekeeper, once quite well off, reduced to a hole-in-the-wall shop, selling goods on consignment for a larger firm. Apart from two spinster daughters who helped out by sewing linens, all this man's children and their families (twenty-five people in all) had left for America within the space of six years.
This matches reports from native-born American Jews, who kept sending angry letters to European Jewish leaders about how all their immigrants were crap and frankly American Jewry was offended to be getting such crap immigrants and the European leaders needed to start sending higher-quality immigrants somehow. There is a whole sordid history of this kind of thing, detailed [eg here](https://sci-hub.st/10.2307/43058715). Among messages that American Jewish organizations sent European Jewish organizations:
> We believe that many of these immigrants are sent over here purposely, merely to relieve the European communities.
> We, as a Society, and as American citizens, cannot and will not be parties to the infliction upon our community of a class of emigrants, whose only destiny is the hospital, the infirmary, or perhaps the workhouse.
> They are a bane to the country and a curse to the Jews. The Jews have earned an enviable reputation in the United States, but this has been undermined by the influx of thousands who are not ripe for the enjoyment of liberty and equal rights, and all who mean well for the Jewish name should prevent them much as possible from coming there. The experience of the charity teaches that organized immigration from Russia, Roumania, and other semi-barbarous countries is a mistake and has proved a failure. It is no relief to the Jews of Russia, Poland, etc, and it jeopardizes the well-being of the American Jews.
> America is not a poor house, and that we would not be made an asylum for the paupers of Europe. They [the Jews of Europe] may ask us what they are to do with the sick and aged and infirm. This reply would be: "That is your business; we take care of our own sick, aged, and infirm, and ask assistance of no one."
Do we have hard data? There's a census of Jewish occupations in the Pale of Settlement available [here](https://yannayspitzer.net/2012/09/30/jewish-occupations-in-the-pale-of-settlement/), a breakdown of what occupations Jewish immigrants had before coming to the US [here](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2119326?seq=1), and an apples-to-apples comparison in Table 2 [here](http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp172.pdf), but they’re hard to interpret - partly because they all draw category boundaries differently, and partly because I don't know which occupations were higher status than others in those days. It seems like about 5% of Jews in the Pale were professionals, compared to only 1% of Jews who immigrated to America, which suggests these elites were less likely to immigrate. 30% of Jews in the Pale were involved in "commerce" compared to only 10% of immigrants; "commerce" sounds high-paying, but a lot of these people were probably peddlers so I don't know what to make of this. Men who were "laborers" or "servants" were much more likely than average to come to America, but women with those descriptions were less likely. Finally, everyone involved in manufacturing, and especially garment manufacturing, was more likely to come to America - but [Lederhendler warns us](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/abs/classless-on-the-social-status-of-jews-in-russia-and-eastern-europe-in-the-late-nineteenth-century/C664883649A9AD75A82E55BE2D9C8C65) not to trust any of this - apparently the rumor among Jewish immigrants was that to maximize your odds of Americans letting you in the country, you should pretend to be a tailor, and so "the large majority of [Jewish immigrant] tailors had probably never before held a needle and thread in their lives".
Overall I don't feel super-confident in these data, but I think they're consistent with Jewish immigration being somewhat disproportionately from the lower classes. Also, I never hear about actual Jewish elites - Rothschilds, big-shot rabbis, etc - immigrating. As far as I can tell, it was mostly the poor.
Also, why should Jews be special here? Every immigrant group has come to America seeking a combination of economic opportunity and political/religious freedom. If Jews selectively immigrated, why didn't Germans, or Poles, or Italians, or all the other groups that didn't end up with the same kind of achievements Jews did? I think the strongest argument you could make here is that Germans/Poles/Italians were coming more for economic opportunity (and so it was mostly the poor who emigrated) whereas Jews were coming more for political/religious freedom (and so it was mostly the rich), but no, [Jews mostly came for economic reasons too](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/lboustan/files/research06_jewishmigration.pdf). Although their economic plight was in large measure caused by discrimination, it still mostly affected the lower classes, who have the least cushion for discrimination-inflicted economic costs.
Finally, selective immigration of Jews to America should only affect American Jews. Are Jews who never immigrated anywhere also unusually wealthy, educated, and successful?
There...aren't a lot of European Jews left to survey, but a lot of pre-Holocaust Europe's greatest geniuses seemed to be Jewish. The [Fifth Solvay Conference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_conference) was a 1927 meeting of Europe's top physicists, including Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrodinger, etc. 17% of attendees were from Jewish backgrounds, compared to about 3% Jews in the overall European population (and the vast majority of European Jews were very poor Jews in Russia, which was not really developed at the time, so realistically maybe 1% of the population in the kind of countries these people were coming from).
The Jewish community survived in Russia until relatively recently. Here is a list of which ethnicities produced the most Soviet scientists per capita (image has been cropped to show the top ten ethnicities only, original [here](https://www.unz.com/akarlin/soviet-scientists/), source is lost somewhere in the Russian-language blogosphere, some of the people involved are far-right Russian nationalists but if anything their incentive to lie goes the other way):
Jews are about six times more likely to end up as scientists than the average Russian.
I conclude American Jews aren't just the product of selective immigration.
**2. Urbanization**
Noah continues:
Jews in Europe were famously clustered in big cities. Probably this was in part because they weren't allowed to own a lot of land. But whatever the reason, the trend persisted when Jews immigrated to America. Sure, there are some Jewish hillbillies out there (I have some cousins in Arkansas who fit the bill), but you find Jews mostly clustered in big cities like New York and L.A.
> It's a well-known fact that people in cities have higher productivity and higher incomes, on average, than people outside of cities (part, but not all, of that goes to pay higher rents). Although the causality can obviously run both ways, there is evidence that simply moving people to cities gives them an immediate productivity boost. So Jews' statistical success is probably exaggerated due to their tendency to be city folk.
In 2000, the median household income of US Jews was $72,000. The median household income of people who lived in New York City [was $40,000](https://www.statista.com/statistics/205974/median-household-income-in-new-york/); in San Francisco, [$55,000](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MHICA06075A052NCEN). So I don't think you can explain Jewish success by saying they are more likely to live in places like New York City and San Francisco.
About [15% of Ivy League students](https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing-ivy-league-jew) are Jewish (it used to be more). About [30% of top computer scientists](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.05636.pdf) are Jewish. But only about [5% of people](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/largest-jewish-populated-metropolitan-areas-united-states) in America's largest cities are Jewish. Even if only people from the top ten largest cities could go to college or become computer scientists, Jews would still be 3-6x overrepresented.
Also, 82% of Americans live in cities, and a bunch of ethnic groups are almost entirely urban (are there a lot of Haitian-American farmers?) I don't think this really makes Jews particularly special.
**3. One Drop Rule**
Noah writes:
> The "one-drop rule". In Jewish tradition, you're a Jew if your mom was Jewish, or if you convert to the faith. But in the modern world, that definition is often...stretched, to include people with Jewish-sounding last names, people with a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, etc. That can distort the statistics in a variety of ways.
>
> First, the "one-drop rule" may be applied selectively more to successful people than to unsuccessful people; see the footnotes in this list of "Jewish" Nobel Medicine Prize winners, for example. Or see this song by Adam Sandler ("Harrison Ford's a quarter Jewish; not too shabby!").
>
> Second, we may engage in confirmation bias and attribution error; upon seeing a successful person with one Jewish parent, we may attribute her success to the Jewish parent, but upon seeing an unsuccessful person with one Jewish parent, we may ignore her Jewish ancestry completely.
This is possible. I confess to doing this when listing the Solvang Conference attendees above. But this is why we have objective data. The income, net worth, and education numbers all come from self-report, which shouldn't be vulnerable to this problem. Or you can look at [Nobel prizes won by Israel vs. other countries](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/), using Israeli residence as a non-one-drop-rule-biased proxy for Judaism. Or at the Russian numbers, which were presumably based on the Russian census. Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is vulnerable to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
**4. Temporary Group And Country Effects**
Noah writes:
> Jewish "success" became noticeable mainly after 1800 (perhaps not coincidentally, when Jews started migrating to big cities in Europe). Among the famous scientists and writers and mathematicians and thinkers of pre-1800 Europe, there are notably few Jews. Who is to say that Jewish achievement is not a temporary blip? In America, Jewish achievement seems to fit the pattern of overachievement among recent high-skilled immigrant groups, Indians and Filipinos being other examples. Already, many have talked of a reversion to the mean in Jewish achievement; [here's Slate in 1996](http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/1996/06/jews_in_second_place.html), and here's [Ron Unz more recently](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/11/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy-how-corrupt-are-ivy-league-admissions.html).
>
> It would not be the first time something like this happened. The 1700s and 1800s are sometimes called the ["Scottish Golden Age"](http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Scotland-Ruled-World-Exploration/dp/0007100019). Scottish people were extraordinarily over-represented in Britain and the former British colonies during that time, in science and academia, in business and industry, in politics, and even in the upper ranks of the military. Anecdotally, people in the 1800s [compared Scots favorably to Jews](http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/mtwain/bl-mtwain-concerningjews.htm). Today, though I suspect Scots would still stand out somewhat on average if anyone was able to track ancestries carefully, Scottish overachievement is not really a hot topic. I can easily see the same happening to Jews, especially given ultra-low Jewish fertility rates (sure to be lower among the rich and educated), and the [trend toward outmarriage among non-Orthodox Jews](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_marriage_in_Judaism); the Jewish upper crust will simply evaporate away from the Jewish group identity.
This is a kind of weird argument - we don't have to think about or explain something, because maybe it will stop happening in the future. Do we accept this for any other social question? For all we know, maybe in a few decades black people will earn exactly as much money as white people - does that mean it's not worth talking about racial inequality today?
And sure, maybe if Jews intermarry so much, and have very low fertility rates, they'll stop being a distinct ethnicity, and then there won't be any more interesting puzzle about Jewish achievement. This doesn't seem like an "answer" anymore than "if we bombed Stonehenge, it wouldn't be there anymore" "answers" the question of how and why Stonehenge was built.
But I guess you could also try to rephrase this into something like: there was a Scottish Golden Age for a few centuries, then the Scots stopped being so golden. Maybe sometimes groups of people just become very interesting and successful for a while, and then that dies down again. This doesn't solve the mystery of Jewish achievement, but it contextualizes it and makes it less unique.
On the one hand, I agree that this question has lots of interesting context - though I would have chosen the history of other "market minorities" like the Lebanese or the Chinese in Southeast Asia. On the other, I'm not sure that the Scottish Golden Age is really appropriate. I'm not an expert in this period, but it sounds like the kind of thing that had something to do with increased economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland. Just to randomly speculate, Scotland had just joined in a Union with England, right as England was inventing industrialization - surely a good climate for a Golden Age to start in. It's much harder to explain Jewish achievement through similar means, because Jews are so intermixed with other populations. Whatever political and economic currents were affecting Albert Einstein or Noam Chomsky or whoever else, ought to also be affecting their Gentile friends and neighbors too. How come they didn't? To me that's a much bigger mystery than whatever happened in Scotland.
Noah concludes:
> Now, I'm not saying that these factors explain 100% of Jewish overachievement. I'm simply saying that A) all of these factors make the original hypothesis of Jewish special-ness seem somewhat less interesting, and B) some, though not all of these factors will tend to bias upward any statistical measures of Jewish achievement.
And I'm not saying they explain zero of it. Both of us agree that they explain somewhere above zero and less than 100% of Jewish overachievement. So how come I'm arguing with Noah?
Noah admits that his goal is to make the hypothesis of Jewish specialness sound "less interesting". I'm against this. I would like it to remain interesting and something that people pay attention to.
Why? The Standard Model of American Ethnicity says that there are whites and non-whites, whites are rich, non-whites are poor, and this is because of structural racism where whites are oppressing everyone else. Reality gets beaten and twisted until it can be shoehorned into this model - gifted programs that are 80% Asian "perpetuate whiteness", etc. The reality is that every ethnic group is different from every other ethnic group, including in socioeconomic status, with white people usually somewhere around the middle.
(source: [Zach Goldberg](https://zachgoldberg.substack.com/p/exposing-the-group-disparities-discrimination))
If you dismiss every group that does better than whites, then you can tell a story where all inequality is caused by white people controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favor whites. If you don't dismiss those groups, the story becomes harder. Anti-Semites had their own story about problems caused by Jews controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favored Jews. Nowadays we rightly reject that story. But in order to continue rejecting it, we have to come up with strained explanations to make Jewish achievement less interesting, because we've already committed to using the structural racism explanation for every group difference that seems relevant to us. I’m glad most people aren't Nazis, but I would like them to be consistent, principled non-Nazis, who are able to remain non-Nazi for reasons other than that they scrupulously avoid thinking about the parts of their principles that inevitably imply Nazism.
(I realize that the people trying to maintain the Standard Model are also trying to make Nazism less attractive, by denying the existence of successful minorities that people could get angry at and try to persecute. I think this was a potentially reasonable strategy back when you could argue it would distract people away from getting too fired up about racial resentment. But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors outweighs than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”)
Greg Cochran explains Jewish overachievement through genetics, although his exact mechanism (individual alleles related to sphingolipidoses) is looking less promising these days. If he's right, I think it suggests genetic engineering. People act like genetic engineering would be some sort of horrifying mad science project to create freakish mutant supermen who can shoot acid out of their eyes. But I would be pretty happy if it could just make everyone do as well as Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone, it would easily qualify as the most important piece of social progress in history, even *before* we started giving people the ability to shoot acid out of their eyes.
But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural. If that's true, I think it would be even more interesting - it would mean there's some set of beliefs and norms which can double your income and dectuple your chance of making an important scientific discovery. I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview. But if I'm wrong, figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!). Far from trying to make this sound "less interesting", we should be recognizing it as one of the most interesting (and potentially socially useful) problems in the world. | Scott Alexander | 37145417 | Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration | acx |
# Open Thread 176
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is even-numbered, so go wild - or post about whatever else you want. Also:
**1:** I've heard from five people who, despite sending me entries (and in some cases having me get back to them saying I'd gotten them), somehow didn't get entered into the Book Review Contest. The people I know about are the ones who wrote reviews of The Beginning Of Infinity, Gulag+Kapital+Totalitarianism, Plagues And Peoples, Essay On Man, and Origin Of The Human Mind. If you entered but didn't end up either as a finalist or in the Runners-Up Packet, you're also in that category and should send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com ASAP so I can fix it. Send it from a different address than you used originally, in case the problem was that your emails end up in my spam filter. My plan is to speed-judge all of them, then pick one extra finalist which I'll present to you next Thursday, then start voting next Friday.
**2:** I asked you all to vote on entries from the Runners-Up Packet to promote to finalists. There were three clear winners - the two reviews I posted last week, and a review contrasting Peter Zeihan's Disunited Nations with Bruno Macaes' Dawn of Eurasia. I've already posted a Zeihan review, and I worry readers are getting tired of these reviews and don't have the patience for a semi-duplicate, so I'm awarding the new Zeihan review...some prize to be determined later, like "People's Choice" or something, that doesn't involve me making it a finalist. Don't worry, there will be money involved. If you want to read it, you can find it [here](http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/brunnersup1.pdf) as "Disunited Nations (2020) vs. Dawn of Eurasia (2017)"
**3:** Remember, ACX in-person Bay Area meetup **today**, Sunday 6/13, at 2 PM at 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 (a private residence, vaccinated people only). You are welcome even if you’re a new reader, even if you’re not in “typical” ACX demographics, even if this is your first meetup, and even if you’re boring and bad at socializing. Come celebrate that we’re allowed to gather again and that our community has made it through mostly intact.
**4:** Comments of the week were on Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs, where many people pointed out that cocaine works this way too. Coca tea is an over-the-counter stimulant in Peru, which [Zach describes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-of-drugs#comment-2152575) as "so smooth, so much less 'buzzy' than with caffeine, that it seems criminal it's not legal in the US", and [Harry Deuchar](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-of-drugs#comment-2153653) calculates that the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg of cocaine, whereas the average addict gets about 900 mg a day. This helps put a lot of things in perspective for me, like how Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it - probably this was completely reasonable and a fine choice! (this last sentence is *so* not medical advice)
**5:** My father, a professor of medicine working at a VA hospital, is trying to do a study and looking for a biostatistician. He can't pay you unless he gets a grant, which he probably won't, but you could get your name on a potentially pretty interesting paper. Interested candidates should know how to mine data from Vinci/Dart, and preferably have some existing relationship with the VA that can save them a painful and potentially impossible onboarding process. If interested, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I'll give him your name. | Scott Alexander | 37528839 | Open Thread 176 | acx |
# Your Book Review: How Children Fail
[*This is the sixteenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. This entry was promoted to finalist status by readers; thanks to everyone who voted! - SA*]
**1:**
Why are all children so bad at learning in school?
Seriously, they’re terrible at it, and nobody ever calls them out as a group. We call out individual children as failing. We call out individual schools and school systems as bad. But the much more dramatic contrast is between learning in school and learning in any other context.
In their first five years, kids learn to understand 25,000 words, even if nobody is actively helping them, at the same time as they’re learning most of what they’ll ever know about physics, psychology, and how to pilot a human body. They then struggle to match this vocabulary acquisition rate over their next ten years, despite expert attention, a wealth of resources, personal encouragement, and even prizes.
After weeks of trying, my teacher gave up on getting me to correctly label the countries and capitals in a map of South America. Yet I quickly learned to navigate the New York City Subway.
Through involuntary cultural osmosis, I could probably pass a test on the characters, plot, and setting of Twilight, despite having never read any of the books or watched any of the movies. Yet there are books I read in school (good books, written to be enjoyed!) where I now couldn’t tell you the main character’s name.
(I was a straight-A student, by the way. Everybody fails at least this hard.)
As an adult, when I’m in the middle of researching something, and I get hungry, I get up, go to the kitchen, get a snack, come back, and keep researching. In most classrooms, children are absolutely forbidden from leaving to go get a snack because they would always claim to get hungry and they would never come back.
Which is not to say that children don’t try, or don’t care. They sweat and cry over tests. They care so deeply that they have nightmares about missing class that last well into adulthood. But by any standard other than comparing them to other schoolchildren, they universally fail. Why?
**2:**
In 1958, John Holt was trying to teach math, writing, and French to a class of ten-year-olds. It was going as this normally does--a large proportion were absolutely terrible at it. He wrote to a colleague,
> If you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in the dorms, in their private lives, at their recreations, sports, and manual work, you can't escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time than they are at other times. Why? Why should a boy or girl, who under some circumstances is witty, observant, imaginative, analytical, in a word, *intelligent*, come into the class-room and, as if by magic, turn into a complete dolt?
He collected the memos and essays he wrote that year into a book, How Children Fail, meant to be read by educators and parents to help them understand what is going wrong in schools, as a first step toward figuring out ways of fixing it. Holt was a big believer in “hold off on proposing solutions until you’ve really analyzed the problem.” When I first read this book, though, I wasn’t in its intended audience. I was nine years old, which meant it was a handbook, not on education, but on rationality.
**3:**
More than thirty years after those students were frustrating Holt, I was the dolt in another small, private school. At home I was teaching myself to code in HyperTalk. At school I was exactly this kid from a Holt memo:
> …his school papers are as torn, smudged, rumpled, and illegible as any I have ever seen. The other day the class was cleaning out desks, and I was "helping" him. We got about a ream of loose papers out of the desk, and I asked him to put them in the notebook. As always, when he is under tension, his face began to get red. He squirmed and fidgeted, and began to mutter. "They won't fit, the notebook's the wrong size"-- which wasn't true. Finally he assembled a thick stack of papers and began to try to jam them onto one of the rings in his notebook, not noticing that the holes in the papers were at least a half-inch from the ring. As he pushed and fumbled and muttered, I felt my blood pressure rising until, exasperated almost to rage, I said loudly, "For heaven's sake, leave it alone, do it later, I can't stand to watch any more of it!"
My school held an annual fundraiser--parents donated used items, and the school sold them to other parents. There was always a pavilion full of unorganized boxes of old books. At the end of the day, students were allowed to take home any unsold books. We were told that any we didn’t take would be destroyed, sent to a landfill. This was probably true (it viscerally horrifies me to this day), but if it was a lie it was a really clever tactic. It certainly motivated me to pick out books by the dozen that were out of my comfort zone--if they ended up unread on my shelf, that’d be no worse a fate than otherwise awaited them. It was a great engine of serendipity, and my reading this book was its best product--a book that no adult would have bought for me and that I probably wouldn’t have ever checked out from a library.
Holt describes the bad habits of thought that schoolchildren fall into, many of which will be familiar to readers of 21st-century rationality texts. On positive bias,
> Sometimes we try to track down a number with Twenty Questions. ... They still cling stubbornly to the idea that the only good answer is a yes answer. This, of course, is the result of the miseducation in which "right answers" are the only ones that pay off. They have not learned how to learn from a mistake, or even that learning from mistakes is possible. If they say, "Is the number between 5,000 and 10,000?" and I say yes, they cheer; if I say no, they groan, even though they get exactly the same amount of information in either case. The more anxious ones will, over and over again, ask questions that have already been answered, just for the satisfaction of hearing a yes.
On failing to think concretely or across domains,
> A friend was studying for a chemistry test. He was trying to memorize which of a list of salts were soluble in water. Going through the list, he said that calcium carbonate was soluble. I asked him to name some common materials made of calcium carbonate. He named limestone, granite, and marble. I asked, "Do you often see these things dissolving in the rain?" He had never thought of that. Between what he was studying for chemistry and the real world, the world of his senses and common sense, there was no connection.
And he makes similar claims, similarly argued, to those of [Paul Graham](https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/”http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html”) and [Eliezer Yudkowsky](https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/”https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/48WeP7oTec3kBEada/two-more-things-to-unlearn-from-school”), that the strategies that lead to nominal success in school are often the ones that stop at superficial understanding of the subject--hacks to be able to get to the correct answer quickly, without ever really looking at the problem.
These lessons were helpful to me at the time. As someone generally much better than peers at getting the right answer on a test, I’d been eager to believe that that’s what merit in school *was*. Holt taught me that I could get more out of class if I let myself be, nominally, a worse student: one who avoided memorization, who questioned what was being taught, who reached for generalizations beyond what would help with the next test. And for the areas where I already knew I was failing, Holt helped me a little to cope with the shame, anxiety, and avoidance spirals that grew out of and perpetuated that failure. Eventually I was able to use a 3-ring binder.
Per the last demographic survey of the readership of this blog, you are most likely not nine years old. However, you are almost certainly a *former* nine-year-old, and that’s another excellent audience for this book. Holt, like Graham and Yudkowsky, sees school as instilling permanent cognitive biases--habits that are best unlearned whenever you can.
**4:**
Holt identifies three broad categories of failure modes.
*Strategy* - Perhaps uniquely for a rationality text, Holt identifies thinking strategically as a failure. Not in general--he encourages adults to ask themselves more often where they are trying to get, and then whether their current approach is getting them there. And he taught, often, through strategy games. But for a child, learning due to disinterested curiosity is much more effective than learning due to incentives. We’re born with powerful drives to learn (learning could hardly start as a learned behavior). Replacing that with a desire to gain reward or approval, or to avoid punishment, or to even to Be A Good Student, distorts behavior. Children, consciously and unconsciously, start trying to maximize their perceived score. They seize on the most reliable way of figuring out the right answer, even if that’s something overfitted to the classroom, like reading the teacher’s face. They find a level of achievement they can reliably hit, then manage expectations to make sure they’re never pushed to a higher one. If they’re punished for giving wrong answers in class, they’ll stop talking and disengage when they think they might not understand something. It’s a familiar problem across domains--once you attach incentives to a convenient measurement of something, it stops being a good measurement. Readers of this blog may remember examples from machine learning or centrally planned economies. Holt’s revised edition gives a quick one from the Navy:
> I remember an old chief machinist on an obsolete training submarine in Key West saying bitterly about his worn-out engines, which he had spent many hours polishing up for an official inspection, "They shine, don't they? Who the hell cares if they don't work?"
*Fear* - The more visibly dysfunctional response to incentives. Fear is the mindkiller, as another U.S. Navy veteran would write in a book published the year after Holt’s. A student afraid of failure cannot acknowledge their own mistakes, and therefore cannot learn from them. Students labeled “Gifted” are so terrified of losing that label that they panic when they encounter something they’re not excellent at, end up doing even worse, and try to avoid that whole area whenever possible. Holt describes a lot of his students as “emotionally incapable of checking their work”--not as a rational response to any incentive, but because looking for mistakes is like checking under the bed for monsters.
*Boredom* - Holt talks at length about children being bored in schools, but I’m going to skip over that for the same reason people rarely yawn in plays--you don’t want it to spread to the audience. I don’t think I need to sell you on the notion, anyway.
**5:**
All of these failure modes have the same cause. Learning in schools is externally imposed, not intrinsically motivated. School requires a power structure, with incentives and accountability, to cause children to reliably learn, to learn the Right Things, and to be able to prove that they did. In 1998, you didn’t need to assign chapters to get one out of three kids to read *Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets*--they read it because they wanted to see what happened next. You didn’t need to test them in order to find out how much they’d read and understood--they would insist on telling you about the book’s plot, and ask questions about anything they didn’t understand. You didn’t need to find any way to get them to reliably sit still for it--they could be allowed to set their own schedule.
But say you wanted *every* kid who could to read and understand it. Then you’d need a school.
Similarly, you really don’t need a school to get a decent percentage of children to learn math. I was as ravenous for extracurricular algebra as I was for extracurricular Harry Potter. But to get [Scott Alexander](https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/”https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/”) to learn any not-directly-useful math, you seem to need a school. (If you replace “math” with “maps”, our positions are reversed.)
The basic concept of school, then, requires incentives, fear, and boredom. And the fear component really isn’t optional, says Holt, speaking from experience. In one of his memos, he wrote
> The other day I decided to talk to the other section about what happens when you don't understand what is going on. We had been chatting about something or other, and everyone seemed in a relaxed frame of mind, so I said, "You know, there's something I'm curious about, and I wonder if you'd tell me." They said, "What?" I said, "What do you think, what goes through your mind, when the teacher asks you a question and you don't know the answer?" It was a bombshell. Instantly a paralyzed silence fell on the room. Everyone stared at me with what I have learned to recognize as a tense expression. For a long time there wasn't a sound. Finally Ben, who is bolder than most, broke the tension, and also answered my question, by saying in a loud voice, “Gulp!" He spoke for everyone. They all began to clamor, and all said the same thing, that when the teacher asked them a question and they didn't know the answer they were scared half to death. I was flabbergasted--to find this in a school which people think of as progressive; which does its best not to put pressure on little children; which does not give marks in the lower grades; which tries to keep children from feeling that they're in some kind of race. I asked them why they felt gulpish. They said they were afraid of failing, afraid of being kept back, afraid of being called stupid, afraid of feeling themselves stupid. Stupid. Why is it such a deadly insult to these children, almost the worst thing they can think of to call each other? Where do they learn this? Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time. This is a hard fact of life to deal with. What can we do about it?
Nothing, per the conclusion of the book:
> The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don't do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape. You can, as many skilled teachers do, learn to tap with a word, a gesture, a look, even a smile, the great reservoir of fear, shame, and guilt that today's children carry around inside them. Or you can simply let your own fears about what will happen to you if the children don't do what you want, reach out and infect them. Thus the children will feel more and more that life is full of dangers from which only the goodwill of adults like you can protect them, and that this goodwill is perishable and must be earned anew each day.
**6:**
Holt never stopped looking for ways to make school incrementally better, but the basic tragedy seems baked into the very concept. We have things we want all children to learn, so we need institutions to teach them. Children on their own are curious, but not driven to learn exactly those things, so we need ways to encourage them. Institutions need accountability, so we need ways to prove that the children are learning those things. So we impose incentives and legible performance metrics, and that kind of breaks kids. And we tend to stay broken for the rest of our lives.
Holt wasn’t always explicit about this, at least until the revised edition. He was still employed by schools, still trying to make schools work, and therefore reluctant to characterize schools as outright destructive. But not *that* reluctant, and the connections are inescapable. Failing students blindly follow “recipes” to solve math problems, too insecure to stop and think about why the recipes exist or whether they’re moving in the right direction. Failing teachers use traditional pedagogy even when it’s demonstrably not working, too insecure to even consider they might be making things worse. Fear and insecurity beget fear and insecurity down the generations, with bullied students growing up to become bullying teachers. Students conditioned to think of schoolwork as an abstract character-building exercise become parents who don’t care whether what’s taught in school has any meaning or utility. I suspect this is at least a little true and is why it took a frustratingly long time for me to persuade my parents to let me drop out of school. (I ended up “self-schooling” for three years, from 15 to 18, before going to a traditional four-year liberal arts college. It was great.)
**7:**
The long-term psychological effects of school are, as far as I know, ambiguous. Perhaps it damages our rationality or disinterested love of learning. Perhaps that’s just a natural part of growing up, and schools help us develop the skills that we’ll need to do work we’re not always interested in. The child welfare case against directed learning is also hardly a slam dunk. Plenty of children like the control structure in school; it’s gamifying something that’s already fun. But if we set those issues aside for a moment and zoom out, there seems to be a clear tradeoff between efficiency and control. Children are naturally learning at high velocity, but may not be learning the most useful or important things they could be. You can exert control to optimize the set of topics they’re learning, but at a cost of reduced velocity.
Holt gives an anecdote of a fifth grader caught sneakily reading a science book when he was supposed to be learning about “Romans in Britain.” By forcing him to put the book away, the teacher traded an hour of high quality science education for an hour of low-quality history education, during which the child is less engaged and will remember less. But perhaps the marginal value of the latter was still higher; maybe knowing one thing about Romans in Britain, rather than zero, will be more valuable than knowing a hundred more things about a scientific topic you’ve already gone deep on. When you take away the babysitting and socialization benefits of school (as has happened recently) this marginal value proposition is what’s left. You might not buy it for the Science vs. Romans story, but surely forcing kids to learn just a little reading, writing, and arithmetic is worth it in the long run, no matter what else they’d rather be learning. But we’ve taken this to an absurd extreme, where self-directed learning becomes a tiny part of a typical childhood, something you carve out a little time for during your nth year in state-mandated courses of study you have no interest in. Why did we all have to learn that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell? That’s not even the most interesting or useful fact *about mitochondria*. Society does not depend on universal lifelong literacy in cell biology; we could get along just fine if 5% of us knew the powerhouse thing, and the other 95% had skipped bio class that year. I assert we would, in fact, be better off, because those 95% would have learned more. Our desire for scalable, testable instruction leads, by middle school, not to ensuring breadth of learning, but to forcing identical amounts of depth in the same set of somewhat arbitrary subjects.
**8:**
How Children Fail was published sixty years ago, when the most exciting piece of educational technology was [a set of wooden blocks](https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods”). John Holt wrote a revised edition of How Children Fail in 1982, after becoming an advocate for homeschooling and child emancipation. The original edition ended by calling for reform of the school system, saying it should provide buffet tables for students to browse, rather than force feeding. The revised edition adds a postscript:
> [E]xcept in very rare circumstances the idea of special learning places where nothing but learning happens no longer seems to me to make any sense at all. The proper place and best place for children to learn whatever they need or want to know is the place where until very recently almost all children learned it--in the world itself, in the mainstream of adult life. If we put in every community, as we should (perhaps in former school buildings), resource and activity centers, citizens' clubs, full of spaces for many kinds of things to happen-- libraries, music rooms, theaters, sports facilities, workshops, meeting rooms- -these should be open to and used by young and old together. We made a terrible mistake when (with the best of intentions) we separated children from adults and learning from the rest of life, and one of our most urgent tasks is to take down the barriers we have put between them and let them come back together.
He also notes in passing that computers (“though *only* if very different from present ones”) might be able to help children clarify their thinking. Well. Tragically and frustratingly, Holt died only three years later, and so he didn’t quite get to see computers become that mixed-age community center he’d envisioned. I was a privileged kid, and when self-schooling I had access to all sorts of resources. But all I really needed, back in 2000, was AOL. Technology provides education in attractive snack form and allows special interests to scale.
Screens are an incredibly strong draw to anyone over, say, four or five years old. You can get a four year old passionately interested in learning to read by making literacy tools the only video game available. I don’t know if Holt would fully approve, but you don’t really need a control structure anymore to get kids to study the exact thing you want them to--you just need to make the only sophisticated electronic device readily available be one programmed to teach it. Then, a little later, introduce them to the concept of edutainment videos on YouTube, and for better or for worse, The YouTube Algorithm will take it from there.
The internet’s collapse of scale also removes much of the need for standardized education. Holt talks about a fifth-grader who was fascinated by snakes, wanted to know everything about them, and learned more math when it happened to be incidentally involved in snake facts than in a math class. Snake Kid’s school couldn’t be expected to create a whole Snake Curriculum just for this one student, so if Snake Kid wanted an adult to explain things to him, those things would not be Snake Facts. But today, an endless series of snake videos is just a click away.
And the internet is a far more powerful engine of serendipity than a pavilion of unwanted books.
**9:**
School is an institution. We come to depend on it, it defends itself, it’s not easy to change from inside or out. I mostly believe the critiques in Holt’s book, but I generally haven’t felt that radical reforms were possible. I’ve encouraged children who don’t need as much socialization or supervision to consider getting parental support for dropping out of school, and that’s been more or less it, reform-wise. But we maybe do have a moment here, in 2021. We’ve had a massive disruption in traditional schooling, which could be an opening to escape from inertia. We’ll at least have a natural experiment as different schools physically reopen at different times.
What would happen if we let kids choose how to allocate more of their time, and gave them the support and resources we could? What if the free daycare provided by state schools wasn’t as coupled to regimented instruction, but still included books, computers, and adults who would help explain things if asked? A lot of kids would spend their time in ways that didn’t look very productive to us--binge watching TV, inventing new sports, making a thousand paper cranes. Almost all of them would end up with educational deficiencies that looked shocking to us. I am skeptical that in this day and age the consequences would be dire, though. It’s really easy to catch up when you need to (did you know you can just *look up* what the powerhouse of a cell is?). With less Educational Attainment gatekeeping down the road, we could more safely test this. And I really think we should, because while the benefits of schooling are ambiguous, some of the costs are not. Kids are definitely less free to pursue their passions. Unless you have a really exceptional amount of energy and parental support, school puts a ceiling on your personal productivity as a child. And long-term consequences aside, school is just not maximally fun. Your greatest capacity for joy was as a child. The time of a ten-year-old is just as valuable to her as the time of an adult is to the adult. And yet, even when a classroom format isn’t working well for a ten-year-old and they need some kind of other instruction, we often still stash them in a classroom to kill time being miserable and frustrated in between actual study sessions, as if there’s no benefit in them having fun.
Suppose you were asked to spend a day as a fifth-grade student. Six hours, with breaks, getting taught things you mostly already knew, with an adult in the room who will try to catch you not paying attention and at minimum be offended if she does. You might do it for the novelty or nostalgia, I suppose. For a day. How much would someone have to pay you to do it for a week? For a month? How good a case for the social utility of the thing would somebody have to make for you to do it for nine months, for free? I was a lower-case-g-gifted fifth grader in a school without a Gifted program, and when I complained that my time was being wasted this way, nobody cared as much as I thought they should, because nobody thought there was anything else worthwhile I could be doing. I’m glad I had this book back then to tell me they were wrong. | Scott Alexander | 37502358 | Your Book Review: How Children Fail | acx |
# Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
[*This is the fifteenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. This entry was promoted to finalist status by readers; thanks to everyone who voted! - SA*]
George Orwell’s *Down and Out in Paris and London* is at least three things; a highly entertaining, almost picaresque tale of rough-and-tumble living in Europe, a serious attempt to catalogue the numerous humiliations and injustices impoverished people were exposed to in Orwell’s time, and a stark comparison between life as a tramp who makes use of robust, if hellish and kafkaesque welfare resources, and as one who tries to get by working terrible jobs and living in disgusting places.
A young(ish) Orwell sporting a very Orwellian mustache
Orwell begins in Paris, where a long period of intermittent employment followed by a robbery have reduced him from poor-to-middle-class-expat to actual poor person. This is Orwell’s first published book, and he’s quite young (23-25) at the time of writing. I mention this only because, suprisingly, Orwell utterly lacks romantic notions about living an impoverished, bohemian life in a world-class city. Instead he characterizes his plunge into the Parisian underworld as a means of purging himself of the predjudices he aquired as an upper middle class Etonian. His descriptions of the characters in the run down hotel where he starts out are about as close as he gets to Kerouacish gushing about the wacky beatitude that arises out of a life in poverty:
> *There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.*
>
> *There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too late, and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.*
I can’t resist including another of these little characterizations. It’s amazing what Orwell can pack into a paragraph:
> *Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall, melancholy man with curly hair, rather romantic-looking in his long, sewer-man's boots. Henri's peculiarity was that he did not speak, except for the purposes of work, literally for days together. Only a year before he had been a chauffeur in good employ and saving money. One day he fell in love, and when the girl refused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked the girl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight they lived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri's money. Then the girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper arm and was sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbed the girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two made up their quarrel and agreed that when Henri came out of jail he should buy a taxi and they would marry and settle down. But a fortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri came out she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew out all his savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in another month's imprisonment; after that he went to work in the sewers. Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he worked in the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists to signify handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards the prison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.*
Orwell rarely stops to inject political or sociological speculation. Rather he tells the story as it happened, and keeps his more academic conlusions to just a couple chapters at the end. I’m going to attempt to honor this structure by going through the book chronologically, and then analyzing his actual arguments for and against such-and-such-solution at the very end.
Orwell’s greatest strength as a writer, wry detachment, also tends to be greatest weakness. Occasionally it feels like his digust, or else his commitment to a somewhat journalistic tone stop him from confronting the sheer grotesquity of some of the people and situations he’s met with. Take his profile of fellow British ex-pat Charlie. He recalls Charlie getting drunk and raping a young prostitute, and then later raphsodizing over the experience:
> *And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness, the highest and most refined emotion to which human beings can attain. And in the same moment it was finished, and I was left—to what? All my savagery, my passion, were scattered like the petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full of vain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt a kind of pity for the weeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we should be the prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again; my sole thought was to get away. I hastened up the steps of the vault and out into the street. It was dark and bitterly cold, the streets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow, lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of a taxi fare. I walked back alone to my cold, solitary room…but there, messieurs et dames, that is what I promised to expound to you. That is Love. That was the happiest day of my life*
And what does George ‘Conscience of His Generation’ Orwell have to say about this?:
> *He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to show what diverse characters could be found flourishing in the Coq d'Or quarter.*
Disappointing, to say the least. I wonder if Orwell is attempting to be funny, using his callousness to reflect the callousness of everyone who sits around sipping their drinks as Charlie tells poetic stories about raping prostitutes. Or perhaps he thought the story spoke for itself and required no further comment. Luckily Orwell doesn’t do this very often. Most of the time he holds the camera on scenes of degradation and injustice far past the point where we as the reader would prefer to look away, and the book is all the better for it. Such scenes aren’t necessarily disgusting or dirty. Instead, Orwell indulges in an almost Nietzschean interest in the psychological impact of petty humiliations:
> *You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it—you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there are your meals—meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day's food. All day you are telling lies, and expensive lies…one could multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.*
You might say these humiliations stem from Orwell’s sudden fall from low-middle-class respectability. But later Orwell will stress that proud, life-long tramps are fairly rare. Most of the people he encounters were also respectable low-to-middle-class people once. So this fall from grace and the obsession with some degree of keeping up appearances is shared by most tramps. Later, when Orwell watches his friend Boris prepare for a job hunt, we see the level of skill some tramps(I’m going to use this word as Orwell does) have acquired in transforming themselves into phantoms of their respectable pasts:
> *All the clothes he now had left were one suit, with one shirt, collar and tie, a pair of shoes almost worn out, and a pair of socks, all holes. He had also an overcoat which was to be pawned in the last extremity. He had a suitcase, a wretched twenty-franc cardboard thing, but very important, because the patron of the hotel believed that it was full of clothes—without that, he would probably have turned Boris out of doors. What it actually contained were the medals and photographs, various odds and ends, and huge bundles of love-letters. In spite of all this Boris managed to keep a fairly smart appearance. He shaved without soap and with a razor-blade two months old, tied his tie so that the holes did not show, and carefully stuffed the soles of his shoes with newspaper. Finally, when he was dressed, he produced an ink-bottle and inked the skin of his ankles where it showed through his socks. You would never have thought, when it was finished, that he had recently been sleeping under the Seine bridges.*
Orwell and Boris share a pretty cute bromance for most of the Parisian section, spending nights together in terrible cheap rooms, discussing their future prospects. Usually, Boris(a Russian expat whose parents were murdered by the Bolsheviks) serves as the brains of the operation:
> *What things a man can do with brains! Brains will make money out of anything. I had a friend once, a Pole, a real man of genius; and what do you think he used to do? He would buy a gold ring and pawn it for fifteen francs. Then—you know how carelessly the clerks fill up the tickets—where the clerk had written "en or" he would add "et diamants" and he would change "fifteen francs" to "fifteen thousand". Neat, eh? Then, you see, he could borrow a thousand francs on the security of the ticket. That is what I mean by brains…For the rest of the evening Boris was in a hopeful mood, talking of the times we should have together when we were waiters together at Nice or Biarritz, with smart rooms and enough money to set up mistresses. He was too tired to walk the three kilometres back to his hotel, and slept the night on the floor of my room, with his coat rolled round his shoes for a pillow.*
The two of them carry on like this for some time, drifting aimlessly though Paris, hoping for work. At one point they get scammed by a fake Bolshevik cell that dissapears once they pay their membership dues. Orwell’s underrated and understated sense of humor is on full display after he and Boris return to the cell office to find it deserted and totally sans Lenin posters:
> *And that was the last we ever heard of the secret society. Who or what they really were, nobody knew. Personally I do not think they had anything to do with the Communist Party; I think they were simply swindlers, who preyed upon Russian refugees by extracting entrance fees to an imaginary society. It was quite safe, and no doubt they are still doing it in some other city. They were clever fellows, and played their part admirably. Their office looked exactly as a secret Communist office should look, and as for that touch about bringing a parcel of washing, it was genius.*
Eventually Orwell does manage to find work, as a scullion in a large, upscale hotel’s underground kitchens, and so begins the *Kitchen Confidential* section of the book. I love that Orwell feels free to devote such a big section of the story to describing his day-to-day in this horrible, hellish job. There seems to be no doubt in his mind that readers would find it interesting. And his writerly instincts are soon proven out. I first read this book years ago, and whenever it randomly comes to mind, it’s because of these images of Orwell the scullion. Here he is going down into the depths of the hotel for the first time:
> *He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deep underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly hot and very dark, with only dim, yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages—actually, I suppose, a few hundred yards in all—that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like the whir of engines. We passed doorways which let out sometimes a shouting of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once a shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we went along, something struck me violently in the back. It was a hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blue-aproned porter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on his shoulder, his cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh. They shoved me aside with a cry of 'Sauve-toi, idiot!' and rushed on. On the wall, under one of the lights, someone had written in a very neat hand: 'Sooner will you find a cloudless sky in winter, than a woman at the Hôtel X who has her maidenhead.' It seemed a queer sort of place.*
The ‘it seemed a queer sort of place’ succeeds at Monty Pythonesque humor where his similar treatment of Charlie the rapist seemed to fail. Or perhaps Orwell isn’t being funny, and I think of this attitude as Monty Pythonesque because Python sought to mock the stiff upper lip types of Orwell’s generation. Who knows? I don’t know enough of the nuances of British humor to be sure.
Orwell’s work as a scullion turns out to be less a merciful reprieve from the life of a starving tramp, and more a daily tour of hell. He works 7 am to 9 pm everyday except sunday, with a work flow like this:
> *I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen miles during the day, and yet the strain of the work was more mental than physical. Nothing could be easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs—it is like sorting a pack of cards against the clock. You are, for example, making toast, when bang! down comes a service lift with an order for tea, rolls and three different kinds of jam, and simultaneously bang! down comes another demanding scrambled eggs, coffee and grapefruit; you run to the kitchen for the eggs and to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as to be back before your toast bums, and having to remember about the tea and coffee, besides half a dozen other orders that are still pending; and at the same time some waiter is following you and making trouble about a lost bottle of soda-water, and you are arguing with him. It needs more brains than one might think. Mario said, no doubt truly, that it took a year to make a reliable cafetier.*
On top of that, there’s a quaint(in retrospect)race hatred between all the employees, who tend to be sorted into their various positions by ethnicity:
> *The office employees and the cooks and sewing-women were French, the waiters Italians and Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the plongeurs of every race in Europe, beside Arabs and Negroes. French was the lingua franca, even the Italians speaking it to one another.*
Luckily, none of it seems to matter much once orders stop coming in and everyone is indiscriminately screaming insults at everyone else. If you’ve ever seen on of those Gordon Ramsay cooking shows, what Orwell describes is no different. He admires the order that emerges from the chaos of dozens of people who share no common background or language screaming at one another to hurry up with the damn sauce already. And in his words, all the hustle and hubbub is ‘the good side of hotel work’.
So what’s the bad side?
> *-it is this—that the job the staff are doing is not necessarily what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the boulot—meaning, as a rule, an imitation of good service. The result is that, though hotels are miracles of punctuality, they are worse than the worst private houses in the things that matter.*
>
> *Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hôtel X, as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters, was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario. 'Why kill the poor animals?' he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we recognized cleanliness as part of the boulot. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.*
I think we ACX readers might jump at the chance to call this ‘a misalignment between th ereal interests of the customers and the incentives of the employees, or else as an ‘optimizing for optics over that which those optics are presumed to represent’ (though maybe that second one is redundant). But neither of those reframings cast much light on the situation for me. Instead I’m left wondering at the real value of kitchen cleanliness as such, in contrast to ‘cleanliness’ as measured by number of people made sick by food from that kitchen. My thinking is that all the grime in the world shouldn’t matter so long as it doesn’t result in any form of customer dissatisfaction, but then so much of that dissatisfaction is determined by how much information a customer gets about the process of food preparation. It’s a tree falling in the forest problem, isn’t it? Cleanliness matters if you have means to judge cleanliness. If you have no means, the way your food is made hardly matters at all(I guess that makes me a consequentalist?)This leads me to wonder if the popularity of television programs showing how processed foods are produced have any effect on their performance in the market.
But then, that’s the funny thing about cleanliness: a person who eats big macs probably has a vague understanding of the way that they’re made, and that it isn’t a very attractive process. They know that frozen patties are placed in a heating tray. That’s all well and good. But god forbid there’s a bit of *grime* on the tray that heats up the processed meat paddy…now that would be unforgivable. I get the sense that people who lived before the mid-twentieth century had opposite feelings about cleanliness: if your chicken shank falls in the mud, who cares? Wipe it off and eat it. But if that chicken led a wretched life and fell sick before it was slaughtered, you’d better be careful. We moderns don’t seem to give a damn about that kind of thing, so long as our notions of visible cleanliness are maintained. We make a good foil for Orwell’s hotel patrons. But I digress:
> *Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply 'une commande' to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply 'a case' to the doctor. A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, 'This toast is to be eaten—I must make it eatable'? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything. The only food at the Hôtel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff's, and the patron's. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: 'Look out for the patron, and as for the clients, s'en f—pas mal!' Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered—a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man's body.*
Earlier I mentioned that this section is reminescent of Anthony Bourdain’s *Kitchen Confidential*, a book whose very success proves that we cleanliness obsessed moderns get a voyeuristic kick out of stories such as Orwell’s. I think it’s this same voyeuristic kick that makes *Down and Out* an appealing book in general. Just as we all go to restaraunts and know almost nothing of what goes on behind kitchen doors, all of us see tramps most everyday and know little about how they live and think. And just like in the case of the kitchens, as much as we get a kick of being let in on the secrets of the unknown underworld, we also have very little desire to actively seek out that information for ourselves. Because a lot of the time, that information hurts.
Orwell ends this rather disturbing expose of hotel restaraunts with some good-natured and utterly English needling of the American palate:
> *According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Paris hotels, or at least in all the big, expensive ones. But I imagine that the customers at the Hôtel X were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English—no French—and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves with disgusting American 'cereals', and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vermouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. One customer, from Pittsburgh, dined every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not.*
This, at least, was comforting. As were all the colorful tales of criminal hijinks:
> *There were tales of dope fiends, of old debauchees who frequented hotels in search of pretty page boys, of thefts and blackmail. Mario told me of a hotel in which he had been, where a chambermaid stole a priceless diamond ring from an American lady. For days the staff were searched as they left work, and two detectives searched the hotel from top to bottom, but the ring was never found. The chambermaid had a lover in the bakery, and he had baked the ring into a roll, where it lay unsuspected until the search was over.*
And depsite all of that, Orwell says he was reasonably satisfied with his life at the time. Anyone who has lived the life of a manual laborer, even for a very short time, will be familiar with this feeling:
> *I had no sensation of poverty, for even after paying my rent and setting aside enough for tobacco and journeys and my food on Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four francs was wealth. There was—it is hard to express it—a sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple. For nothing could be simpler than the life of a plongeur. He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the Métro, a few bistros and his bed. If he goes afield, it is only a few streets away, on a trip with some servant-girl who sits on his knee swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day he lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt, throws dice for drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing is quite real to him but the boulot, drinks and sleep; and of these sleep is the most important.*
Yet I don’t quite believe that Orwell, a highly educated man, and, well, *George Orwell*, was quite as content as he makes himself out to be. If there is any privilege or classist blindspot that Orwell himself fails to acknowledge here, it is that throughout this book, there is a sense of inevitablity around Orwell’s eventual escape from this life. I can’t point at a specific passage where this makes itself apparent, but I find it permeates the entire text; Orwell knows that eventually he will get out of this, someway, somehow. The bloke went to *Eton*, after all. That will come up again later on, but suffice it to say, Orwell’s situation never feels really, truly desperate to me. But perhaps that’s just testament to his complete and utter lack of self-pity…and to the intense but fleeting pleasures of a working class life, characterized by back breaking work punctuated by long bouts of drinking:
> *By half past one the last drop of pleasure had evaporated, leaving nothing but headaches. We perceived that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine, but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly nauseating. One's head had swollen up like a balloon, the floor rocked, one's tongue and lips were stained purple. At last it was no use keeping it up any longer. Several men went out into the yard behind the bistro and were sick. We crawled up to bed, tumbled down half dressed, and stayed there ten hours.*
>
> *Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.*
Never underestimate the power a regular and reliable debauch can have on the endurance of people without prospects. For most of human history, it seems to have been enough to keep peasants pushing their ploughs. At least, that’s what I get from Orwell’s descriptions of the roughly six-hours-a-week of bachnallian fun he and the other residents of his quarter seemed to have attended with almost religious fervor and regularity.
Time wears on, and Orwell finally gets a position at a newly opened restaraunt that he’d been promised several months previous. The most notable character here is the ardent-communist-by-affiliation-and-temperment whom Orwell(a socialist himself) regards with passing interest. Here’s him scolding Orwell for daring to work:
> *Put that brush down, you fool! You and I belong to proud races; we don't work for nothing, like these damned Russian serfs. I tell you, to be cheated like this is torture to me. There have been times in my life, when someone has cheated me even of five sous, when I have vomited—yes, vomited with rage.*
>
> *'Besides, mon vieux, don't forget that I'm a Communist. À bas la bourgeoisie! Did any man alive ever see me working when I could avoid it? No. And not only that I don't wear myself out working, like you other fools, but I steal, just to show my independence. Once I was in a restaurant where the patron thought he could treat me like a dog. Well, in revenge I found out a way to steal milk from the milk-cans and seal them up again so that no one should know. I tell you I just swilled that milk down night and morning. Every day I drank four litres of milk, besides half a litre of cream. The patron was at his wits' end to know where the milk was going. It wasn't that I wanted milk, you understand, because I hate the stuff; it was principle, just principle.*
This new job, still as a scullion, but now in a small restaraunt frequented by Russian expats(who, because this is 1920s Paris, have all lived extraordinary, tragic, lives) turns out to be even worse than the one at the hotel. He works from:
> …*seven in the morning till half past twelve the next morning—seventeen and a half hours, almost without a break. We never had time to sit down till five in the afternoon, and even then there was no seat except the top of the dustbin. Boris, who lived near by and had not to catch the last Métro home, worked from eight in the morning till two the next morning—eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Such hours, though not usual, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.*
I found this almost too extreme to believe, simply because of the limits of the human body…until I moved to Japan. Now it seems a given that so long as 14+ hour working days are fairly ubiquitous, they will be endured without hesitation or complaint. On the surface, the causes of overwork in 1920s Paris and 21st century Japan appear quite different, but in the end they’re basically the same: people work this way because if they don’t, they’ll soon be replaced by someone who will. Only in the last couple of decades has Japan realized that more than a labor issue, this is a public health crisis: people die if they carry on working like this for too long, even very young people(and the proof is in the pudding—most of my male high school students here in Japan have noticable greying in their hair. I’m talking 15-17 year olds.)
But of course in Orwell’s Paris, no one kept track of that sort of thing. Yet such a life does have it’s compensations:
> *At half past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry out. The patron, bland as ever, would stop me as I went down the alley-way past the bar. 'Mais, mon cher monsieur, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of accepting this glass of brandy.'*
>
> *He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously as though I had been a Russian duke instead of a plongeur. He treated all of us like this. It was our compensation for working seventeen hours a day.*
I suppose this is the plaque-and-a-rolex of the restaraunt life. Unfortunately, it’s not quite enough to keep Orwell working seventeen hour days in a cramped, dirty kitchen. Soon he writes to a friend in England and begs for a job, and actually receives a reply that sends Orwell into daydreams about a more lesiurely sort of employment:
> *[I] was to look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes, knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender.*
But before moving on to England, Orwell gives a chapter of analysis of his life as a scullion, and what its greater social significance might be. He quickly labels the Paris scullions a class of modern slaves, and then wonders why such horrible conditions are allowed to exist in a city such as Paris. His answer isinteresting: he sees the problem as basically one of public complacency. The people of Europe see the scullions’ work as something that simply must be done, much like work in the sewers, coal mines etc. But Orwell doesn’t see the scullion’s work that way, at least, not in it’s current state:
> …*it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.*
>
> *As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries, take an extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger calls them bahinchut. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold cheap as having a few years' work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation—whip plus food equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.*
Orwell served for five years an an imperial policeman in Burma(now Myanmar), and so isn’t speaking from some vague antipathy towards asian customs here. He saw such sights everyday for years on end, and it’s no suprise that he would question their essential usefulness. But as brutal as the practice sounds, I find myself questioning his conclusion. Parts of India are punishingly hot, and many of the cities are large and spread out. It makes perfect sense to me that in a time before the wide spread use of cars, another cheap means of transportation would arise to meet the needs of the upper and middle class(because the rides are so cheap, they are not just a privilege of rulers)who want to avoid trudging miles across a large city in the middle of summer. To imply that rickshaws should be banned or phased out because they afford only “a small amount of convenience” strikes me as overreaching at best, and outright authoritarian at worst. But I find Orwell’s basic argument much more compelling when applied to his own situation:
> *Similarly with the plongeur. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the real need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency, plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day instead often or fifteen.*
I see Orwell’s dream as having come true in a limited sense. Upscale restaraunts that serve terrible food made by people working for pennies are relatively rare now( except on cruise ships). Their two primary aspects (hellish working conditions and bad food)have split and diverged and now exist in different food industry niches: on the one hand we have the modern fast food restaraunt, where the work is “done with simple efficiency…[scullions] might work six of eight hours a day” and true mid-to-upscale restaraunts, where a higher level of cleanliness and quality in preperation and ingredients is assumed, and I think in most cases, delivered upon. In these sorts of places, which Bourdain describes in [Kitchen Confidential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Confidential_(book)), the chefs work in hellish conditions, but are paid relatively well and work more reasonable, if irregular and nocturnal, hours. In fast food places, people are paid less but are subject to a form of basic protection borne out of the sheer size and visibility of corporations like Burger King and McDonalds. No doubt Orwell would find this situation ghastly in it’s own way, but I doubt he’d deny the life of restaraunt and hotel workers has markedly improved since the 1920s.
Trouble is, Orwell doesn’t see these horrible working conditions are merely a result of people’s misguided desire to eat overpriced, low-quality food:
> *I am trying to go beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people—comfortably situated people—do find a pleasure in such thoughts…I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:*
>
> *'We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don't expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.*
And once again, my experiences in Japan stop me from dismissing Orwell’s rather sinister notion of upper-classes motives outright. The following situation has occured too many times:
Me: So why do Japanese people work so much? Teachers in the US usually go home at 4 or 5. Why do you stay until ten or eleven?
Japanese Colleague: Well, you know, I have to stay because everyone else does. It would look bad if I was first to leave.
Me: Okay, but what if that social pressure was removed?
Colleague: \*Expression of shock and horror\* but then, I wouldn’t know what to do. I think people need to work, you know. If people have too much time, well…
Please don’t think I’m exaggerating about Japan. I’m really, really, not. But in contrast to Orwell, I’d assert that everyone, including the mob themselves share this same fear of the mob. Everyone is afraid of too much improvement, if that improvement means more ‘idle’ time for poor people. We can spot this now whenever UBI is brought up. I count myself among the skeptics of UBI, but I recognize that much of my initial skepticism amounted to, “But what will all those people do without their horrible jobs to keep them busy?” And I see this mob-fear in the eyes of my Japanese friends whenever I question them. They would probably still see it in my eyes if they asked me about UBI. Orwell sums up the whole, messy, tangled situation far better than I could:
> *A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the plongeur because it is his case I have been considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only my own ideas about the basic facts of a plongeur's life, made without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one's head by working in an hotel.*
And with that, on to London!
**II.**
After a long, mostly uneventful third-class trip by boat, Orwell arrives at his friend’s office, bright-eyed and bushy-taled about his future prospects as an imbecile chaperone:
> …*and his first words knocked everything to ruins. 'I'm sorry,' he said; 'your employers have gone abroad, patient and all. However, they'll be back in a month. I suppose you can hang on till then?'*
>
> *I was outside in the street before it even occurred to me to borrow some more money. There was a month to wait, and I had exactly nineteen and sixpence in hand. The news had taken my breath away. For a long time I could not make up my mind what to do. I loafed the day in the streets, and at night, not having the slightest notion of how to get a cheap bed in London, I went to a 'family' hotel, where the charge was seven and sixpence. After paying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.*
Using [this converter](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/#currency-result) I see that ten and two pence in 1930 is equivalent to roughly 32 (2017) US dollars. Our friend Orwell was in a pretty tight spot. Yet it was never quite so tight as it seems. From my edition’s introduction:
> *When Orwell left Paris in December 1929 he did not, in fact, immediately live as a down-and-out in London. Instead, he spent Christmas with his family, whose joy was confined when their penniless son—now aged twenty-six and seemingly an unqualified failure—suddenly reappeared. Defensively he announced to all and sundry that he was working on a book about his time in Paris. But meanwhile he had somehow to earn something and tutoring jobs were found for him near Southwold. Also, he soon began to establish a reputation as a courageously independent-minded reviewer who was not overawed by such ‘Big Names’ as Edith Sitwell or J.B. Priestley.*
From this and other research into Orwell’s life at this time, I think we can surmise that his life in Paris was in no way a performance, a LARP, or even an intentional bit of journalism, at least at first. Orwell simply had no other options. On the other hand, his life in London was, at least somewhat, chosen. Orwell’s first published work would end up being an essay on conditions in ‘Spikes’ or, what basically amounted to state run shelters for tramps. But he had family willing to take him in, and shameful though it would be for a twenty five year old Eton graduate to resort to that, there was no real need for him to live as he did in London. But he did live in that way, and I think his reasons are mostly immaterial in regards to his experiences and insights. When class comes into play, Orwell readily acknowledges it. Yet it turns out to be less a factor than he’d first expected. He rarely receives special treatment, but it only adds to his sense of personal degradation:
> …*I dared not speak to anyone, imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I discovered that this never happened.) My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone's demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. 'Thanks, mate,' he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life—it was the clothes that had done it. For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man's clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp's clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in prison.*
He finds cheap lodging in a “kip” wherein eight men sleep in a room fifteen feet square by eight high. As vivid and horrible as his descriptions of the subterranean kitchen, I somehow find this even worse:
> *When I got into the bed I found that it was as hard as a board, and as for the pillow, it was a mere hard cylinder like a block of wood. It was rather worse than sleeping on a table, because the bed was not six feet long, and very narrow, and the mattress was convex, so that one had to hold on to avoid falling out. The sheets stank so horribly of sweat that I could not bear them near my nose. Also, the bedclothes only consisted of the sheets and a cotton counterpane, so that though stuffy it was none too warm. Several noises recurred throughout the night. About once in an hour the man on my left—a sailor, I think—woke up, swore vilely, and lighted a cigarette. Another man, victim of a bladder disease, got up and noisily used his chamber-pot half a dozen times during the night. The man in the corner had a coughing fit once in every twenty minutes, so regularly that one came to listen for it as one listens for the next yap when a dog is baying the moon. It was an unspeakably repellent sound; a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man's bowels were being churned up within him. Once when he struck a match I saw that he was a very old man, with a grey, sunken face like that of a corpse, and he was wearing his trousers wrapped round his head as a nightcap, a thing which for some reason disgusted me very much. Every time he coughed or the other man swore, a sleepy voice from one of the other beds cried out:*
>
> *'Shut up! Oh, for Christ's—sake shut up!’*
I’ll take the Parisian kitchen over that any day. His description of the old man’s cough, in particular, makes me never want to sleep in a room with another person ever again. And Orwell seems to share this notion, because he quickly starts to drift from house to house, even “sleeping” in the outdoors sometimes, though in those cases sleep is actually impossible due to harassment by police. Instead he and the other tramps are forced to sit on benches, nodding in an out of consciousness, never really resting. It’s this that sends them into the horrible flophouses. Orwell points out that three or four hours of bad sleep is still a significant improvement over a night apent out on the street.
In general, Orwell’s life as a London drifter is far more dreary and depressing than his time in Paris. Largely because he has nothing to do, nowhere to be…and he’s slowly starving due to the tramp’s diet of “tea-and-two-slices” which he describes as such:
> *You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.*
In fact, Orwell rightly spends quite a lot of time describing the impact of hunger on a man’s will, and identifies it as perhaps the chief means by which respectable people are debased and turned into aimless, wandering tramps. I find these to be among the most moving passages in the whole book:
> *You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.*
And earlier, speaking on the consolations of poverty:
> *For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I shall be starving in a day or two—shocking, isn't it?' And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.*
I’ve experienced this myself during deliberate periods of fasting. Once your body starts burning fat for fuel, and you’re no longer subject to the energetic highs and lows that come from a high-glucose diet, a queer sort of emotional stability sets in. I didn’t like it at all, precisely because of that ‘shocking, isn’t it?’ atttiude that Orwell points out. Not to say that the psychological changes one feels during deliberate fasts approach those experienced during long periods of real starvation. Especially when one considers all the counterintuive changes in attitude that accompany a real transition into the state of desperate poverty all people, in all times have so feared:
> …*there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.*
And yet that same, dulling hunger pushes Orwell and other London tramps to take charity from religious organizations, where the petty humiliations reach their ultimate climax:
> *Uncomfortably we took off our caps and sat down. The lady handed out the tea, and while we ate and drank she moved to and fro, talking benignly. She talked upon religious subjects—about Jesus Christ always having a soft spot for poor rough men like us, and about how quickly the time passed when you were in church, and what a difference it made to a man on the road if he said his prayers regularly. We hated it. We sat against the wall fingering our caps (a tramp feels indecently exposed with his cap off), and turning pink and trying to mumble something when the lady addressed us. There was no doubt that she meant it all kindly. As she came up to one of the north country lads with the plate of buns, she said to him:*
>
> *'And you, my boy, how long is it since you knelt down and spoke with your Father in Heaven?'*
>
> *Poor lad, not a word could he utter; but his belly answered for him, with a disgraceful rumbling which it set up at sight of the food. Thereafter he was so overcome with shame that he could scarcely swallow his bun. Only one man managed to answer the lady in her own style, and he was a spry, red-nosed fellow looking like a corporal who had lost his stripe for drunkenness. He could pronounce the words 'the dear Lord Jesus' with less shame than anyone I ever saw. No doubt he had learned the knack in prison.*
Orwell and a large group of other tramps later attend a church service where they outnumber the worshippers, and so they indulge in stamping their feet and openly heckling the preacher and congregation:
> *It was so different from the ordinary demeanour of tramps—from the abject worm-like gratitude with which they normally accept charity. The explanation, of course, was that we outnumbered the congregation and so were not afraid of them. A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.*
Yet we soon meet a man who performs charity in a way the tramps approve of. I suggest you stop right now and try to form a picture of ‘charity done right’ before reading on. It made perfect sense to me in hindsight, and corresponded to instances of unpretensious generosity I’d seen before, but I doubt I would’ve been able to form a clear idea of what it might look like:
> *Presently the clergyman appeared and the men ranged themselves in a queue in the order in which they had arrived. The clergyman was a nice, chubby, youngish man, and, curiously enough, very like Charlie, my friend in Paris. He was shy and embarrassed, and did not speak except for a brief good evening; he simply hurried down the line of men, thrusting a ticket upon each, and not waiting to be thanked. The consequence was that, for once, there was genuine gratitude, and everyone said that the clergyman was a—good feller. Someone (in his hearing, I believe) called out: 'Well, he'll never be a—bishop!'—this, of course, intended as a warm compliment.*
This in contrast to the state-run generosity of the Spike:
> *It appeared from what they said that all spikes are different, each with its peculiar merits and demerits, and it is important to know these when you are on the road. An old hand will tell you the peculiarities of every spike in England, as: at A you are allowed to smoke but there are bugs in the cells; at B the beds are comfortable but the porter is a bully; at C they let you out early in the morning but the tea is undrinkable; at D the officials steal your money if you have any—and so on interminably. There are regular beaten tracks where the spikes are within a day's march of one another. I was told that the Barnet-St Albans route is the best, and they warned me to steer clear of Billericay and Chelmsford, also Ide Hill in Kent. Chelsea was said to be the most luxurious spike in England; someone, praising it, said that the blankets there were more like prison than the spike. Tramps go far afield in summer, and in winter they circle as much as possible round the large towns, where it is warmer and there is more charity. But they have to keep moving, for you may not enter any one spike, or any two London spikes, more than once in a month, on pain of being confined for a week.*
Basically, spikes are homeless shelters spread out all over England, wherein tramps can stay and recieve a little food, a place to sleep, and an absolutely revolting bath:
> *The scene in the bathroom was extraordinarily repulsive. Fifty dirty, stark-naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square, with only two bathtubs and two slimy roller towels between them all. I shall never forget the reek of dirty feet. Less than half the tramps actually bathed (I heard them saying that hot water is 'weakening' to the system), but they all washed their faces and feet, and the horrid greasy little clouts known as toe-rags which they bind round their toes. Fresh water was only allowed for men who were having a complete bath, so many men had to bathe in water where others had washed their feet. The porter shoved us to and fro, giving the rough side of his tongue when anyone wasted time. When my turn came for the bath, I asked if I might swill out the tub, which was streaked with dirt, before using it. He answered simply, 'Shut yer—mouth and get on with yer bath!' That set the social tone of the place, and I did not speak again.*
And this, I think, is why Orwell is about as popular with the right as with the left: he takes an almost libertarian pleasure in describing(and in the case of *1984*, inventing)the most grotesque forms of governmental overreach and mission failure imaginable. And basically no matter where you stand politically, it’s hard not to enjoy that kind of stuff.. No horrific detail escapes him. You can see his future as a great writer of dystopian fiction in his depiction of the Spike’s dining-room:
> *In the morning, after breakfast and the doctor's inspection, the Tramp Major herded us all into the dining-room and locked the door upon us. It was a limewashed, stone-*floored *room, unutterably dreary, with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison smell. The barred windows were too high to look out of, and there were no ornaments save a clock and a copy of the workhouse rules. Packed elbow to elbow on the benches, we were bored already, though it was barely eight in the morning. There was nothing to do, nothing to talk about, not even room to move. The sole consolation was that one could smoke, for smoking was connived at so long as one was not caught in the act. Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by Cockney out of Glasgow, was tobaccoless, his tin of cigarette ends having fallen out of his boot during the search and been impounded. I stood him the makings of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, thrusting our cigarettes into our pockets, like schoolboys, when we heard the Tramp Major coming.*
>
> *Most of the tramps spent ten continuous hours in this comfortless, soulless room. Heaven knows how they put up with it. I was luckier than the others, for at ten o'clock the Tramp Major told off a few men for odd jobs, and he picked me out to help in the workhouse kitchen, the most coveted job of all. This, like the clean towel, was a charm worked by the word ‘gentleman'.*
>
> *At three I went back to the spike. The tramps had been sitting there since eight, with hardly room to move an elbow, and they were now half mad with boredom. Even smoking was at an end, for a tramp's tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and he starves if he is more than a few hours away from the pavement. Most of the men were too bored even to talk; they just sat packed on the benches, staring at nothing, their scrubby faces split in two by enormous yawns. The room stank of ennui.*
I couldn’t find any pictures of a Spike’s interior, but I expect one of a workhouse will serve. Just imagine this, but with worse decor and food:
When Orwell tries to speak to one of his companions(also a tramp)of improvements that might be made, the fear of the mob rears it’s ugly head once more:
> …*I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tone instantly. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the others, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather that given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.*
>
> *'They have to do it,' he said. 'If they made these places too comfortable, you'd have all the scum of the country flocking into them. It's only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These here tramps are too lazy to work, that's all that's wrong with them. You don't want to go encouraging of them. They're scum.'*
>
> *I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:*
>
> *'You don't want to have any pity on these here tramps—scum, they are. You don't want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They're scum, just scum.'*
>
> *It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated himself from 'these here tramps'. He had been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps.*
This causes Orwell to wonder at the reasons for the fall of all these once respectable, wandering people. He gives several, along with reasons for their entrapment within such a wretched life:
> *It is a curious thing, but very few people know what makes a tramp take to the road. And, because of the belief in the tramp-monster, the most fantastic reasons are suggested. It is said, for instance, that tramps tramp to avoid work, to beg more easily, to seek opportunities for crime, even—least probable of reasons—because they like tramping. I have even read in a book of criminology that the tramp is an atavism, a throw-back to the nomadic stage of humanity. And meanwhile the quite obvious cause of vagrancy is staring one in the face. Of course a tramp is not a nomadic atavism—one might as well say that a commercial traveller is an atavism. **A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night, he is automatically kept moving.** He is a vagrant because, in the state of the law, it is that or starve. But people have been brought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and so they prefer to think that there must be some more or less villainous motive for tramping.*
This seems reductive on its face, but Orwell isn’t talking about poverty as a whole here, but rather the particular English phenomenon wherein the impoverished are basically on a neverending walkabout around the countryside. As for the actual cause of poverty, Orwell is anything but reductive. Again and again he states that these are normal men, whom due to an accident, a crime, or one poor decision, have been reduced to tramping. He draws a destinction between what he observes and the American ‘hobo’ culture that was prevalent at this time:
> *Deliberate, cynical parasitism, such as one reads of in Jack London's books on American tramping, is not in the English character. The English are a conscience-ridden race, with a strong sense of the sinfulness of poverty. One cannot imagine the average Englishman deliberately turning parasite, and this national character does not necessarily change because a man is thrown out of work. Indeed, if one remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes. I am not saying, of course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I am only saying that they are ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than other people it is the result and not the cause of their way of life.*
I have little doubt that this was true in Orwell’s time, but I think of all his assertions about the nature of poverty and homelessness, this one is the most dated. In Orwell’s time the ‘tramp culture’ was not a drug culture. At least in the United States, it now most certainly is. The National Coalition for the Homeless reports that “38% of homeless people are alchohol dependant, and 26% are dependent on other harmful chemicals.”[1](#sdfootnote1sym) And how does Orwell describe his fellow tramps, in terms of substance use?
> …*take the idea that all tramps are drunkards—an idea ridiculous on the face of it. No doubt many tramps would drink if they got the chance, but in the nature of things they cannot get the chance. At this moment a pale watery stuff called beer is sevenpence a pint in England. To be drunk on it would cost at least half a crown, and a man who can command half a crown at all often is not a tramp.*
No other drugs are even mentioned. But that isn’t even the most shocking absence from Orwell’s picture of poverty. What struck me first about Orwell’s companions is that despite all of them being unemployed, half-starving wanderers without any social ties…none of them seem to be (extremely)mentally ill. Orwell never once suggests that these men are homeless because of any mental deficiency or disorder. He always maintains that they are just like people he knew in his ‘respectable life’, but poorer. Some are eccentric in the extreme, but nothing like many of the homeless one now sees on the streets of American cities.
This is likely because in 1808, English parliament authorized every county to build it’s own asylum, and in 1845 it became compulsory for the counties to do so. And “by the end of the century there were as many as 120 new asylums in England and Wales, housing more than 100,000 people.”[2](#sdfootnote2sym) Now as to the conditions within these asylums, please consult someone who knows more about the history of mental illness than I do. Maybe you could start with Scott’s review of [Madness and Civilization.](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/04/book-review-madness-and-civilization/) But it at least seems a likely explanation for the utter and complete absence of the (extremely) mentally ill from Orwell’s Paris and London. Orwell never even mentions the problem. Likely it was a given to him that ‘tramps’ were mostly sane, able-bodied men, and that anyone that was truly insane would’ve been immediately locked up. I can’t be sure, because he never mentions mental illness or the asylum system at all. It’s as if it’s not even worth mentioning.
After a brief discussion of the sexual politics of trampdom (men outnumber women about ten to one, and all tramps are celibate unless they are lucky enough to come into the money needed for the cheapest prostitutes). Orwell assets that sexual starvation is every bit as degrading to the tramps as physical starvation. I find it fascinating that he fixates on celibacy as an indignity reserved for “cripples and imbeciles” whereas now it is an indignity reserved for…lots and lots of people across each and every social class. No doubt people from Orwell’s time would marvel at the modern paradox, wherein sexual liberation has resulted in unprecedented rates(and still growing!) of celibacy in prosperous countries like the US and Japan. And there seems to be no doubt in his mind that the tramps’ lack of sexual and romantic access plays a significant role in their growing alienation from respectable society as a whole. Huh. I think this aspect of homelessness probably isn’t discussed enough. In contast to our image of highly social hobos huddled around campfires, there’s likely a large portion of homeless who live like hikkimoris without a room.
Finally we come to Orwell’s proposed improvements to the system. And to his credit, the proposed changes are concrete, modest, and presumably attainable:
> *Granting the futility of a tramp's life, the question is whether anything could be done to improve it. Obviously it would be possible, for instance, to make the casual wards a little more habitable, and this is actually being done in some cases. During the last year some of the casual wards have been improved—beyond recognition, if the accounts are true—and there is talk of doing the same to all of them. But this does not go to the heart of the problem. The problem is how to turn the tramp from a bored, half alive vagrant into a self-respecting human being. A mere increase of comfort cannot do this. Even if the casual wards became positively luxurious (they never will)\* a tramp's life would still be wasted. He would still be a pauper, cut off from marriage and home life, and a dead loss to the community. What is needed is to depauperize him, and this can only be done by finding him work—not work for the sake of working, but work of which he can enjoy the benefit. At present, in the great majority of casual wards, tramps do no work whatever. At one time they were made to break stones for their food, but this was stopped when they had broken enough stone for years ahead and put the stone-breakers out of work. Nowadays they are kept idle, because there is seemingly nothing for them to do. Yet there is a fairly obvious way of making them useful, namely this: Each workhouse could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen garden, and every able-bodied tramp who presented himself could be made to do a sound day's work. The produce of the farm or garden could be used for feeding the tramps, and at the worst it would be better than the filthy diet of bread and margarine and tea. Of course, the casual wards could never be quite self-supporting, but they could go a long way towards it, and the rates would probably benefit in the long run. It must be remembered that under the present system tramps are as dead a loss to the country as they could possibly be, for they do not only do no work, but they live on a diet that is bound to undermine their health; the system, therefore, loses lives as well as money. A scheme which fed them decently, and made them produce at least a part of their own food, would be worth trying.*
Equally modest is the book’s brief conclusion:
> *My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a travel diary is interesting. I can at least say, Here is the world that awaits you if you are ever penniless. Some days I want to explore that world more thoroughly. I should like to know people like Mario and Paddy and Bill the moocher, not from casual encounters, but intimately; I should like to understand what really goes on in the souls of plongeurs and tramps and Embankment sleepers. At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.*
>
> *Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.*
But unfortunately, though this might have been a beginning for Orwell, it wasn’t much of a beginning for the rest of the literary world. Though careful studies of homelessness have been made, there’s no other popular book that attempts to do what Orwell did, unless you count stuff like *On the Road,* which I think obscures more than illuminates what a life in poverty is actually like. I can’t fully convey how much I think a book like *Down and Out in San Francisco, Portland, Honolulu and Every other American City that has a Homelessness Crisis* needs to be written, because I think our collective attitude towards homelessness isn’t so different from the one Orwell notices in his middle-to-upper-class fellows. It is something that everyone knows knows about as a general phenomenon, but that almost no one knows about in its particulars. We tend to regard it as something inevitable, unchangeable, or at least, unchangeable by *us*. Like litter and terrible traffic. But then, there are plenty of places on earth that don’t have much litter *or* traffic.
I wish the chapter on life in the Spike, in particular, could be read by every politician creating legislation that attempts to combat homelessness. At the very least, it might serve as a cautionary tale for anyone trying to create a shelter system. Beyond that, I wish this and all the rest of Orwell’s excellent non-fiction wasn’t quite so overshadowed by *1984* and *Animal Farm*. There’s so much here that even a thirteen thousand word review can’t hope to cover.
As for Owell’s own proposed improvements to the Spikes…I can at least say they are improvements over locking hundreds of hungry men in an empty room for ten hours. Perhaps they are even good improvements, but I find myself uncomfortable with turning these homeless shelters into more workhouses. Ironically enough, workhouses were formally abolished by a law passed the very year Orwell probably came up with these ideas. But he at least gestures at the main failings of the system; chiefly that they are by their very nature nearly inescapable because they enforce idleness, and treat men who are desperate for work like parasites, instead of as men who are desperate to work.
The chapters on Paris make no mention of any welfare system that Orwell might’ve drawn upon, and instead stress the desperate search for work and food as absolutely paramount for survival. I can’t find any evidence for a robust welfare system in 1920s Paris, outside of a few laws passed forcing employers to provide insurance in the case of illness, maternity, etc. In this contrast Orwell provides some potent ammunition for opponents of welfare; for on the one hand we have Orwell toiling away in a kitchen but otherwise living a vibrant, interesting life, and on the other we have him drifting from one Kafkaesque state-run welfare prison to the next in order to survive. What’s great about Orwell is that he sees no real dichotomy here; to him these are both symptoms of the same problem, that being upper-class snobbery and fear of the mob, along with an unwillingness to take the suffering and toil of poor people as a real impetus for change, whether it be top-down or bottom-up. He views these problems as stemming from tractable moral failings at the indivual level. And though he goes a long way in making the classism of his time real and palpable to we moderns, I still don’t think we can really understand it, in the same way we can’t really understand a number like a googolplex. We have no means of understanding it, because classism today is so obscured by it’s manifestations, whereas in his time you simply were part of a class, deep in your soul, and were treated accordingly. Appearances and even habits were divorced from your class, which was something invisible, bound to you from birth, like a ghost or a horcrux or something. Take this interaction Orwell has with a soldier-turned-Spike-overseer:
> *'So you are a journalist?'*
>
> *'Yes, sir,' I said, quaking. A few questions would betray the fact that I had been lying, which might mean prison. But the Tramp Major only looked me up and down and said:*
>
> *'Then you are a gentleman?'*
>
> *'I suppose so.'*
>
> *He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,' he said; 'bloody bad luck that is.' And thereafter he treated me with unfair favouritism, and even with a kind of deference. He did not search me, and in the bathroom he actually gave me a clean towel to myself—an unheard-of luxury. So powerful is the word 'gentleman' in an old soldier's ear.*
The notion that Orwell might be lying never occurs to the major. The fact that Orwell is now a tramp like all the others doesn’t matter either. What matters is that he *was* a gentleman, and therefore *still is* a gentleman, deep down in chakras. I suppose this is the cultural groundwork for the income-independent classism dicussed at length in Scott’s review of *[Fussell on Class](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class)*. I imagine Orwell was laughing at himself on the inside, dissapointed in the knowledge that even months of starving and working as a scullion couldn’t change the fact that he was a upper middle class Etonian that served in the imperial police. But of course it’s that tension that makes this and all the rest of Orwell’s non-fiction so interesting. Whether he’s taking down a stampeding Burmese elephant in *[Shooting an Elephant](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/shooting-an-elephant/)* or fighting Franco’s fascists alongside anarcho-syndicalists in *[Homage to Catalonia](http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/HomageToCatalonia/catalonia_ch_1.html)*, there’s alway a sense that he’s somewhere he’s not supposed to be, bringing back forbidden knowledge from unexplored moral territory, so that it might sit comfortably on middle-class and public school library bookshelves. Orwell’s genius, as I see it, is in *not being a genius.* He was merely among the first to realize that ugly, uncouth, and unconscionable places and people might be worth a closer look, and that the lives of such people had much broader political and social significance than the reading public had yet dared to imagine. If nothing else, *Down and Out in Paris and London* should serve as inspiration to journalists and writers everywhere; it’s proof that if one wishes to write an important book, one need only write truthfully about the vaguely terrifying parts of society that the average person often sees, but never enters.
[1](#sdfootnote1anc)https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/
[2](#sdfootnote2anc)https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/disability-history/1832-1914/the-growth-of-the-asylum/ | Scott Alexander | 37453757 | Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London | acx |
# Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs
**I.**
If you look at any [list of side effects](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326038#side-effects) for the FDA-approved version of s-ketamine (Spravato), you see things like urinary tract problems, bladder problems, pain on urination, feeling of urgency to urinate. You can find a bunch of papers like [Ketamine: An Important Drug With A Serious Adverse Effect](https://medcraveonline.com/JPCPY/JPCPY-09-00598.pdf), where they say that ketamine is potentially great for depression, but that the risk of bladder injury needs to be taken really seriously.
When I first considered prescribing ketamine, the bladder injury stories scared me so much that I asked a bunch of veteran ketamine prescribers how I should monitor it. They all gave me weird non-commital answers like "I've prescribed ketamine to thousands of patients and never had a problem with this, so I guess don't worry". But why not? There are all these papers saying we *should* worry, and all these reports in the literature of ketamine-induced bladder injury!
A standard psychiatric dose of ketamine might be 0.5 mg/kg IV, 2x/week, for four weeks. So a 70 kg patient would get about 280 mg over the course of a month. [This Chinese study](https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016517811731291X) and [this UK study](https://sci-hub.st/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.02761.x) analyze recreational ketamine users, and both find they take about 3g daily, every day. That's 90,000 mg over the course of a month. Again, that's 280 mg for the psych patients and 90,000 mg for the recreational users (and you wouldn't believe how many hoops the psych patients have to jump through to get their 280, or how terrified their doctors are that something could go wrong). Drug users use a lot of drugs! So why don't psychiatric patients get bladder injuries? It's because you get bladder injuries when you're taking more like 90,000 mg of ketamine a month, and not when you're taking 280 mg.
There is one (1) [case report](https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.urology.2007.11.141) in the literature of somebody getting a bladder injury after taking prescription ketamine in a clinical setting (though also rumors of three other cases that were mentioned on a mailing list I can't access). That person was prescribed a dose 10x higher than ordinary psychiatric patients. I hesitate to say the risk of bladder injury from a normal psychiatric dose of ketamine is literally zero. But I’ve never heard of it happening.
Same with the cognitive risks of ketamine. See eg [Controversies of the effect of ketamine on cognition](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4809869/), which is speaking for the psychiatric consensus when it says that "Although ketamine might seem like a promising antidepressant that could relieve treatment refractory depressive symptoms, the induction of memory impairments in the longer term is of concern". Against this, I present [Morgan, Muetzelfeldt, and Curran](https://sci-hub.st/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.02761.x), who study ketamine abusers for one year. They find that severe abusers, who are taking an average of 60,000 mg/month, experience cognitive problems. But mild abusers, who take more like 3,500 mg/month, don't. Again, psychiatric patients are taking about 280 mg/month. I think this is pretty strong evidence that the psych patients shouldn’t worry that much.
**II.**
Every so often somebody realizes that there's not much chemical difference between methamphetamine and Adderall. Then they freak out that we give ADHD kids Adderall all the time. Isn't that like giving them crystal meth?
See eg [Shoblock et al](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10983202_Neurochemical_and_behavioral_differences_between_d-methamphetamine_and_d-amphetamine_in_rats):
> Despite the repeated claims of METH being more addictive or preferred than AMPH, proven differences between METH and AMPH in addiction liability and in reward efficacy have evaded researchers. Animals self-administer METH and AMPH at comparable rates (Balster and Schuster 1973) and humans prefer similar doses (Martin et al. 1971). Also, neither humans nor animals discriminate between equal doses of METH and AMPH (Huang and Ho 1974; Kuhn et al. 1974; Lamb and Henningfield 1994). Furthermore, while METH is commonly believed to be a more potent central psychostimulant than AMPH, no direct comparison on the potency of the two drugs to stimulate central processes have been verified. In addition, no previous study has directly compared the acute effects of the two drugs on locomotor activity, an important central process that contributes tothe definition of psychostimulant. Moreover, there are no known neurobiological differences in action between METH and AMPH that would account for the putatively greater addictive, rewarding, or psychomotor properties of METH.
So should we be less concerned about methamphetamine? More concerned about Adderall? Or what?
The average crystal meth addict [uses](https://sci-hub.se/10.1300/j069v21n01_04) about 500 mg a day. And they snort it, which probably produces about double the peak plasma level as taking it orally. So they're getting the equivalent of 1000 mg oral amphetamine daily. The average Adderall patient takes 20 mg. The most important reason meth makes your teeth fall out and ruins your life but Adderall just makes you study a little harder is that the meth users are taking 50x higher doses (yeah, okay, there are also some pharmacokinetic differences, but those are less important). Drug users really do use a lot of drugs!
I recently had a patient stop their Adderall after reading [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5307374/) on how amphetamines appear to accelerate cardiovascular aging. The study was done on polysubstance abusers who were probably taking 50x higher doses than they were. [This Reuters article on the study](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-amphetamines-heart-aging/speed-and-other-recreational-stimulants-tied-to-heart-damage-idUSKBN15U2FO) actually gets this exactly right, and has an interview with an expert saying the doses are so high that it can't be extended to clinical practice. I don't want to claim total victory here, because nobody's done a study on clinical users proving they *don't* get accelerated aging. But given the high doses necessary to produce the small effects found in the original paper, I'm not losing sleep.
**III.**
In general, recreational drug users take their drugs at doses so much higher than psychiatric patients that they're basically two different chemicals. A lot of our impressions of drugs, what side effects they have, and how dangerous they are, get shaped by the recreational users, not the patients. This is sometimes even true for the doctors who are supposed to prescribe to the patients and give them good advice. While studies of recreational user populations can sometimes be helpful in flagging an issue for consideration, we should be judging the clinical risks based on studies of clinical populations.
This isn't medical advice. Don't go out and take a mix of ketamine and amphetamine, then tell the cops that it was "just a clinical dose" and "this blog on the Internet told me it was okay". | Scott Alexander | 37403450 | Drug Users Use A Lot Of Drugs | acx |
# I Will Not Eat The Bugs
From [the comments on Moral Costs Of Chicken Vs. Beef](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef#comment-2093413):
> As far as moral concern goes, I think it's right to act your rational conviction, but I can't honestly surmount my own doubt that it makes sense to care about animal well-being...if I really am to say that chickens have moral worth, I don't see any easy spot to get off that train between chickens and insects.
Don't worry, you're not getting off the train. The train has already left the station and gotten halfway to Vladivostok.
Last month the EU food safety regulator [officially approved](https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2021/05/20/eating-insects-will-the-approval-by-the-eu-of-beetle-larvae-for-human-consumption-open-doors-for-sustainable-bug-based-snacks/) mealworms as safe for human consumption, sparking a bunch of articles on how bugs are the food of the future (see eg *The Guardian*: [If We Want To Save The Planet, The Future Of Food Is Insects](https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/08/if-we-want-to-save-the-planet-the-future-of-food-is-insects)). And although it’s not a massive groundswell of outrage or anything, it’s also sparked a little bit of concern from [animal welfare](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jbR9XrZbsqCsnR3vy/thoughts-on-the-welfare-of-farmed-insects) [advocates](https://twitter.com/lewis_bollard/status/1391838534265307136).
In order to produce a kilogram of bug-based food, you need about 10,000 bugs (mealworms weigh about 100 mg). On the one hand, bugs probably don't matter much morally. On the other hand, 10,000 is a lot. If bugs had any moral value at all, factory-farming and killing 10,000 of them would be really bad.
*Do* bugs have moral value? Everyone will answer this question differently. I think of Shakespeare, who has his Jewish character Shylock argue for his own moral value like so:
> Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
And don't bugs have eyes, limbs, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, and passions? Don't they eat the same food as us, especially if we forget to put it in the refrigerator? Aren't they subject to the same diseases - malaria, Lyme, bubonic plague? Aren't they [healed by the same means](https://medium.com/@gabrielbonis/insects-are-great-at-killing-bacteria-can-they-help-us-find-new-antibiotics-70eac9463d87)? If you prick them, do they not bleed creepy black [hemolymph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemolymph)? If you tickle them, [do they not hiss](https://patch.com/california/millvalley/bp--ticklish-cockroaches-whip-scorpions-and-more-at-sdb865053bd)? If you poison them, do they not die? And if you wrong them - say, by throwing a stone at a hornets' nest - will they not revenge?
Less poetically: don’t some insects (though not others) have nociceptors, ie nerve receptors that specialize in feeling pain? Sneddon, Elwood, Adamo, and Leach, in [their paper on defining and assessing animal pain](https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=acwp_arte), write that "there is evidence that nociceptive information reaches higher learning centres in the insect brain". If you hurt an insect in a particular place, they can eventually learn not to go to that place. Does that mean they feel pain? Here's [one paper](https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=animsent) arguing probably yes; here's [another](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-entomologist/article/is-it-pain-if-it-does-not-hurt-on-the-unlikelihood-of-insect-pain/9A60617352A45B15E25307F85FF2E8F2) saying that "the likelihood that insects experience pain is low". I'm not qualified to resolve this dispute, but there seem to be good scientists on both sides. See also [this summary](https://was-research.org/writing-by-others/reducing-suffering-amongst-invertebrates-insects/), which quotes entomology professor Vincent Wigglesworth as saying he is “sure” insects can feel pain.
("Wigglesworth" is obviously a great name, but it's even better than that - "wiggle" is cognate with "[wigga](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wicga#Old_English)", the Old English word for "bug", which survives in modern "earwig". So someone named Wigglesworth studying bugs' [eg wigga]'s moral value [eg worth] is kabbalistically exactly correct. Also, this is related to my pet theory that Orson Scott Card knew exactly what he was doing and the name "Ender Wiggin" was meant to convey "ender of bugs".)
Suppose you meet someone who might or might not be an android; there's a 50-50 chance either way. If they're an android, they have no subjective experience and no moral value; if they're a human, they have normal human moral value. Is it okay to murder/maim/torture them? Seems obvious the answer is no, at least not until you're sure they're the android. What if there's a 99% chance they're an android? Still seems like you should avoid the torture-murder, for the 1% chance they're human. 99.9999999% chance? At this point I think it becomes less pressing, but it's still a *little* bad to hurt them.
In the same way, even if there's only a 50-50 chance insects have moral value, or a 1% chance, still seems like you should avoid factory-farming and killing ten trillion of them, which is about how many we currently farm (see also [here](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Db5SpsqtYoncBxEou/animal-welfare-fund-may-2021-grant-recommendations): “insect farms would raise many more animals in one year than all other forms of factory farming have in their history to date.”)
I will be honest - I swat flies and only feel a little bad about it. That's fine. If we act like we can use neuron number to estimate intuitive moral value (see [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/26/cortical-neuron-number-matches-intuitive-perceptions-of-moral-value-across-animals/) for some discussion of why we might do this), a fly has less than 0.1% the moral value of a cow, and I don't really care about cows a super huge amount either. Really any normal person should be able to take care of all their insect-harming needs without going over whatever moral budget they set for themselves - the same kind of venial sin as buying a banana even though this is probably bad for the rainforest somehow. It's not a problem *unless you're factory-farming ten trillion insects*, at which point it really starts to add up.
On the other hand, there are [25 million insects per hectare](https://reducing-suffering.org/crop-cultivation-and-wild-animals/#Importance_of_insects), which means ten trillion insects = 400,000 hectares = about the size of Rhode Island. I'm not sure what to do with this information. It's tempting to say something like "crop farming kills more insects than insect farming, because it occupies way more than 400,000 acres and involves lots of pesticide". But Brian Tomasik, who [analyzes this issue heroically thoroughly](https://reducing-suffering.org/crop-cultivation-and-wild-animals/), says that if you're trying to prevent insect suffering, crop farming is probably net positive, because cropland has fewer insects than wild land, and most insects that exist suffer most of the time, with pesticide-related suffering being swiftly over and not very relevant. It's also tempting to say something like "if the scale of wild insect suffering dwarfs the scale of factory-farmed insect suffering so much, who cares?", but this doesn't really seem right. The scale of the Xinjiang genocide dwarfs the scale of the latest mass shooting, but we are still against the latest mass shooting, and all else equal we would prefer it not happen.
Overall it’s hard for me to make myself care very much about insect suffering, but I find it interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, people keep trying to say you should eat insects to save the environment / help animals / be vegan. I don't want to do this. That makes it very convenient that it also seems to be potentially morally wrong. Usually moral wrongness prevents me from doing things I want to do, like eat cheeseburgers. When moral wrongness prevents me from doing things I don't want to do, like being guilted into eating mealworms, this is much more fun. Realistically this shouldn’t be a big consideration - most factory-farmed insects [are being raised as animal food](https://mailchi.mp/0d9c51072475/the-promise-and-perils-of-insect-farming) and not for humans - but it’s hard not to think about.
Second, it's good for me to remember that there are people like Brian Tomasik and Vincent Wigglesworth who care a lot about insect suffering and try to prevent it. Most people are only about as moral as the average of the other people they hear about and interact with - if the rest of your society feels okay with slavery, probably you will too. But it can be hard to cultivate a community full of people exactly as moral as you want to be. One helpful trick is knowing a couple of people who are much *more* moral than you're aiming for, so that even when you average them out with all the jerks you know, you land somewhere close to where you want to be. People who care a lot about insect suffering fulfill that role for me. I am probably not able to care that much, but if they can work that hard to help insects, I can at least remember not to kick a dog or something.
Third, it helps me understand and test the cows vs. chickens calculation. In general, animal neuron number scales up slower than animal weight. If the principle holds, then all else being equal you should generally prefer getting the same quantity of meat by eating fewer larger animals (eg one cow) rather than many smaller animals (eg 100 chickens). Thinking about insect farming is useful to test this hypothesis at the limit and see if our moral intuitions hold up.
What about the other limit? Plausibly the most morally correct action, short of becoming vegetarian, would be to eat the largest animal there is. And according to the Talmud - [Baba Bathra 74b](https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Batra.74b)- the righteous in Heaven dine on the flesh of Leviathan, which suffices to feed all of them forever. Hypothesis confirmed!
[UPDATE: a group called the [Insect Welfare Project](https://www.entsoc.org/executive-director-insect-welfare-project) is taking shape to think about some of these considerations more; they don’t have a website or much information yet, but I’ll keep you updated] | Scott Alexander | 37367797 | I Will Not Eat The Bugs | acx |
# Instead Of Pledging To Change The World, Pledge To Change Prediction Markets
In April, Joe Biden [pledged to halve US emissions](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/22/president-biden-pledge-reduction-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions/7307038002/) (from their 2005 max) by 2030.
This is nice, but I can't help but remember eg Australia's 2009 Copenhagen summit pledge to decrease emissions 5% by 2020 (in fact, they increased 17%). Or Brazil's pledge at the same summit to cut emissions 38% by 2020 (in fact, they increased 45%). Or Canada's pledge for -20% (they got +1%). I'm not cherry-picking bad actors here, I'm just going through the alphabet ([pledges source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference#Listing_of_proposed_actions), [outcomes source](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?tab=chart&country=AUS~BRA~CAN)) . For that matter, what about George W. Bush's [pledge to return Americans to the moon](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/15/us/bush-backs-goal-of-flight-to-moon-to-establish-base.html) by 2020?
All of these pledges have one thing in common - they expire long after the relevant officials are out of power (and in Biden's case, probably dead). As hard as it is to hold politicians accountable in normal situations, it's even worse here. Sure enough, prediction aggregator Metaculus shows that forecasters [only give a 15% chance](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7155/us-climate-emissions-halved-by-2030/) that we reach Biden's emissions target by 2030.
What if instead of pledging anything about emissions, Biden pledged to shift the prediction aggregator?
No, seriously, hear me out. Biden pledges that by the end of his term, Metaculus will predict a 51%+ chance that emissions will be less than half their historic maximum by 2030. If Metaculus gives a lower number than this, we can consider Biden to have failed in his pledge, and we can hold it against him when he tries to get re-elected.
In order to get Metaculus (or some alternative prediction market) to show a 51% chance of meeting emissions targets, Biden would have to pass a credible package of legislation that puts us on the path to achieving that goal, and makes everyone think it’s more likely than not.
Imagine Biden pledges that some prediction market will have a 51% chance of reaching his 2030 emissions target by the time he leaves office. He passes a carbon tax, and the market shoots up from 15% to 30%. Now he knows he’s on the right track, but still has to do more. So he bans a bunch of coal power plants, and it goes up to 45%. He's still not quite there, so he gives big subsidies to solar panels a few days before the campaign season kicks off, the prediction market reaches 51%, and he's able to say he fulfilled his pledge.
Objection: even if Biden does everything right, whoever succeeds him could repeal his plan and ruin everything. So the prediction markets might hesitate to give him a high chance of success even if he had a great plan. One way around this is to use a conditional prediction market - "what’s the probability that emissions will be below X, given that Biden's plan is enacted and stays in place until 2030?" Another way around this is to suck it up, admit that politics is hard, and accept that part of the work of making a global warming plan is figuring out how to prevent your successors from dismantling it.
Second objection: once the prediction becomes a target, aren't a lot of people going to try to distort it in order to make their candidate look good or bad? Probably. This is why we need good prediction markets. If a prediction market is big enough and liquid enough, it should be robust against these kinds of distortion attempts. Suppose that Biden passed some very strong law banning all carbon emissions, and it was obvious that the US would meet and exceed his goals, but the Republicans threw a hundred million dollars into the prediction markets to bring the price of "Biden reaches his goal" down to 1%. Wouldn't you buy lots and lots of shares of this one cent prediction which is virtually guaranteed to pay out a dollar? If yes, that's the mechanism which corrects the market. Mitch Hedberg used to say that “escalators can’t break, they can only become stairs”; in the same way, prediction markets can’t break, they can only give you free money.
(this isn’t true for Metaculus in particular, which doesn’t use real cash and relies on participant honesty plus a complicated algorithm. If the algorithm doesn’t hold up, future pledgers should use a different market.)
Third objection: is this disrupting some important natural part of the political process? If Biden knew people would grade him on his goals, might he just not make them, or make them artificially low? Or is the ability for politicians to avoid accountability some sort of important check on special interests and mob rule? I’m just cynical enough to take these concerns seriously. But I feel like having to worry about them at least beats the status quo, where Biden says a random number, everyone praises him for having set such an ambitious target, and then nobody ever thinks about it again. | Scott Alexander | 37312588 | Instead Of Pledging To Change The World, Pledge To Change Prediction Markets | acx |
# Open Thread 175
This is the weekly visible open thread. Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed. This one is odd-numbered, so be careful. Otherwise, post about anything else you want. Also:
**1:** A few people have emailed me saying they submitted entries to the Book Review Contest that neither ended up as a finalist nor in the runners-up packet. All reviews should be in one of those two places, so if that happened something went wrong. In two cases it was your fault for sending me inaccessible Google Docs, and in a few cases it might have been the spam filter, but in at least one case it seems to have been a clerical error on my part. If this is you, I'm sorry. In compensation, if you choose to put your review up somewhere, I will link to it from an Open Thread. I'll also let you include it in any future book review contests here even if you put it up elsewhere in the meantime. If this is you, please send me an email about it. If you've already sent me an email, I've lost your name, so please remind me about it.
**2:** The most recent example of this is Homemade Multibody Dynamics' [review of Ernst Cassirer's Essay On Man](https://hmbd.wordpress.com/2021/06/05/review-of-ernst-cassirer-an-essay-on-man-1944/). Go there and read it so I feel less guilty about screwing up.
**3:** The [comment policy and register of bans](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans) is back This was a beloved SSC institution and you have worked hard to earn its reinstatement (this is not a compliment, don't feel good). So far most of the bans have been for talking about how wrong somebody is without providing any arguments against them. Check the register if you don't know what I mean.
**4:** This is your last chance to vote for book review runners-up. Check out the runners-up packet (A-R [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xexFJ7h0vULMDE7N77q_MIzXoerexfe_CqqGEL6hEoQ/edit?usp=sharing), S-Z [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M1m8o1HInGYJR3cEMYZ6TQgNmeBOWo98YC6djNnFWf0/edit?usp=sharing)), choose a review at random, rate it on a scale of 1-10 [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4foaWb8Dj4Y1ffoarBclaZxn0XfqXLVCY9wrhnDA9sxbzKw/viewform?usp=sf_link), rinse and repeat as many times as you care to. I’ll probably promote two runners-up to finalists, close voting and post them this Thursday and Friday, then have final voting next week. Thanks for your patience with this protracted contest. This year’s survey will include a section on whether you enjoyed the book review contest and whether we should do it again.
**5:** I haven’t noticed the same number of political blowups here as on SSC. Should we lift the no-politics-on-odd-numbered-open-threads restriction? | Scott Alexander | 37280592 | Open Thread 175 | acx |
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