Tradeoffs Vs Failures

Scott Alexander, who is a psychiatrist, discusses the tradeoffs versus failures of schizophrenia as a jumping off point to discuss the phenomenon of tradeoffs versus flat-out failures in genes and interventions. (The title must need editing - doesn't make any sense.) He makes the good distinction that sometimes it is not the expression of a gene that is ambiguous in its fitness, but the risk of it. 

But cancer risk can also be elevated by tradeoffs: for example, with many asterisks and caveats, the higher a person’s risk of cancer, the lower their risk of certain degenerative diseases like Alzheimers, probably because cells can be set to either easy division (maximizing healing and growth) or limited division (minimizing cancer risk).

Walkin' The Dog

I have been thinking of this, because...I've been walking the dog and I can't get it out of my head.*

 *Having written that, I have suddenly switched to "Goin' out of my head." We'll see which one wins.

The Men of the Future

David Foster has a new substack post "Destroying the Passwords," about the erasure of history from a culture, starting with the example of the the Bank of England's banknotes and discussing the larger implications for societies as a whole.  It will no longer be using historical figures - neither traditional nor woke ones - but will feature scenes of wildlife and landscapes.

Because what we are witnessing today is not a debate about the design of banknotes. It’s part of something much deeper and more insidious: a slow but relentless erosion of our national culture, identity, and sense of collective memory. As I wrote nearly two years ago, across the West we are now living through what Professor Frank Furedi has called the ‘War Against the Past’.

Increasingly, a loose alliance of bureaucrats in thrall to the ‘Diversity, Inclusion, and Equality’ agenda, radical left activists, and compliant public institutions are pursuing a cultural project that seeks to delegitimise our history and heritage, and strip away the symbols that once anchored our sense of collective identity and memory. The pattern is now familiar. Statues are toppled. Historical figures are reframed as morally suspect or “divisive”. Public institutions rename their buildings, spaces, even London Tube lines. 

I thought immediately of CS Lewis in The Abolition of Man and his discussion of the Last Men.

And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes — the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct — the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future...

...but even within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. 

As well as George Orwell's words in the mouth of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four 

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past… The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. 

It is frankly unnerving that the atheist and Christian writing at the same time agree on so much that is worrisome about the future of mankind - and that is looks prescient still. 

News With the Sound Off

I watched ABC news with the sound off for a few minutes at someone else's house tonight. I could tell from the images alone what the slant was about the airport lines. There is widespread dissatisfaction with Trump over his handling of this, and he is under increasing pressure to make a deal soon. People are angry and im[patient.  We interviewed a few, plus some Democratic senators. ABC wants that to be true and do what it can to convince you its true.  They still have an audience predisposed to that view, which they will happily reinforce.

Your God is Too Small

We have discussed JB Phillips's book Your God Is Too Small here before, quite a few times in twenty years. But two of the posts, Sentimental Jesus (lots o' comments) and Your God Is Too Small, that includes a list of many small gods we put up as substitutes - including Meek-and-Mild and Heavenly Bosom - I put up here. The limited god we believed in before we encountered the Real McCoy is probably our greatest danger forever, and the one we should work hardest to purge.  If we saw him as healer, we are in danger of seeing that as his central role, and ultimately his only one.  If we shrunk him down to greatest teacher to fit in our backpack, we will have to focus our attention on the mysticism or transcendence - anything but the narrow schoolmaster.

I have one new one to add that is not on JBP's list: Community Organiser. That is a favorite Jesus these days, who talked back to the authorities, disrupted society, and encouraged programs to make the world a better place. Those who arrive with any truncated god may have to forswear that one forever. That grain of wheat must die.

There is a quick excuse that people leap to on any of these small gods: "Oh sure, sure.  Jesus is much more than that of course. I was only saying that it's important to include..." No, it won't do. That one will always be where the demons hide for you, the small god you retreat to when you begin drifting away. 

Magical Mystery Tour

I  never saw the movie, only a few stills. But I could play a record until the grooves wore through to the other side, and of course I read all the liner notes of this one. 

It is probably their least played, least remembered album at this point.

Terence Tao

The Dwarkesh Patel interview with Terence Tao. I am always surprised at how young Patel is: 25. He started this podcast when he was 19.  Tao is my nomination for smartest person in the world, though I admit that is related to name recognition and my bias toward mathematicians. He achieved a 760 on his SAT math when he was 8. I still think of even him as a youngster, but he is 50 now.

Every minute or three during the interview I thought  Huh. I didn't know that. They come in a flood. So I could flood them for you, but I think that would just be a list without context.  I'll try something else. 

Peer review came in an era when there were lots of theories, and we had to sort out signal from noise.* Lots of small experiments looking for signal, with detecting false signal being one of the constant reminders for experimenters and reviewers.  Criticising a study is often an exercise in "that's a false signal." Improved communication, especially the internet reduced the cause the cost of communication to zero. Even just word processing allowed an incredible increase in the number of papers that could be generated, and increased the length of them.  Peer review was overwhelmed by cheap quick communication alone. In the same way, the cost of isolating signal from noise has basically gone to zero from AI.  Perhaps that is not the problem that we think it is. We still need to verify theories against #DATA. But the way that we do that, peer review, may no longer be necessary because it is simply overwhelmed.  AI makes everyone so productive even with its semi-thinking that checking it is impossible. Tao mentioned that  AI excels at  breadth, human intelligence excels at depth, and then they are complementary. He calls this Amazing and Disappointing, and compares it to the search engine, which was a stunning leap forward that became taken for granted just a few years later.

 He considers it something of an accident that AI was developed around thousandfold increases in data such as LLM's, versus first principles reasoning. It's not immediately apparent that that's a good way to go, but it was the one we could do and got in first. He compared it to astronomy, when Kepler could not move forward on his theories without data, and Tycho Brahe had the data. We can't know whether that is going to be more fruitful because we don't know the future.  It still might be worthwhile to focus on teaching AI to reason from first principles instead. It made be think of Yogi Berra "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future."

Bethany, 30 minutes in he discusses how the social aspect of science has a larger effect than we think.  Newton wrote in Latin and did not write engagingly. Everyone was jealous for their discoveries and would not even commit ideas to paper for fear others would steal them. Newton was not well understood and explained in his day because of this. Darwin, OTOH, wrote clearly and in English when there was an existing network of sharing information.  Persuasiveness, having a narrative that could be grasped, even though he admitted there were all kinds of gaps in it, turned out to be key. Ideas bubble up but recede and disappear if they don't get picked up. Tao thought that AI might prove helpful in discovering things already discovered because it does literature review so quickly.  But what occurred to me was the persuasiveness of a True Crime narrative, because it fits preexisting beliefs (see previous confirmation bias post) can quickly overwhelm the data. In your discussion of base rates and known versus suspected data, the effect of AI will change the territory. I don't predict it will fix things, because the situation is dynamic.  But it has to change it.

*Especially in the social sciences, that drove a lot of the replication crisis. It was widely considered respectable to engage in purely exploratory thinking and devise experiments to illustrate that rather than prove it.  Wouldn't it be cool if people did even terrible things because an authority told them to? It would allow us to train humans to be what we want. So give us the power to do that. Or in another area I think matriarchal societies would be less violent. So lets find some and prove that they are, so we can make that part of Western education systems and bring peace on earth. The triumph of preferred narrative over data. Even in hard sciences you get things like String Theory, amyloid hypothesis, or universal grammar infected by preferences that win out for a time because they deny resources to less-preferred theories.

Dark Shadows

I don't usually post literary essays, even when they impact directly on politics or culture, but Rob Henderson's discussion of Dostoevsky's The Possessed (also known as Demons or The Devils was intriguing enough to go forward. 

When these children of affluent liberals come of age, they do not follow their parents into comfortable moderation. Instead, their kids, now in their twenties and early thirties, become enamored with socialism, atheism, and nihilism.

What had been building beneath the surface of Devils erupts in Part 3. Over the course of a few days, everything falls apart. Fires spread across the town. People are beaten, robbed, and executed. Others are coerced into false confessions. The tone shifts from satire to something closer to horror.

At the center of it all is Pyotr, the organizer of the local radical cell who has been pulling the strings from the beginning. As the chaos peaks, he flees the consequences, leaving behind a broken group and a town in ruins.

Decades ago, a very liberal psychologist said to me "We have a generation that proclaims nihilism" - he meant Boomers - "but were mostly raised in churches, even said the lord's Prayer every day in school. This new generation was raised with nihilism. They really mean it."  Neither generalisation was quite true, but it's a good first pass.

The One Bias Underlying the Others

Steve Stewart-Williams at N3 called it "One Bias to Rule them All" and links to Toward Parsimony in Bias Research. 

...the current article seeks to bring a set of biases together by suggesting that they might actually share the same “recipe.” Specifically, we suggest that they are based on prior beliefs plus belief-consistent information processing. Put differently, we raise the question of whether a finite number of different biases—at the process level—represent variants of “confirmation bias,” or peoples’ tendency to process information in a way that is consistent with their prior beliefs.  

It sounds plausible. We give up our ideas slowly, likely for good reason. James once mildly pointed out to me that we can't do a complete examen on all our beliefs every day. We would have no time left over for dinner.

Followup to the Post on Aging

 I tried this strategy on the missus. 

 She's just rescued a dog I don't much like.  I can't explain it.

Ventilator Patients Died?

 Do we know this to be true? Heartbreaking.

2014 Links

Halfway through 2014 already. With the internal links also being interesting, perhaps I should have divided this into two parts.

 

Revisiting the Bicameral Mind and the followup months later about  Circular Time.  Pastor Dave Denis suggested that Helical Time was a better description than Circular Time, and I think that is astute. Seasonal time is also a good descriptor. Linear Vs Circular Time is one of my most-visited posts of all time, if you like following that concept.

Social Justice.  Upon further review, I think my original call on this, and the internal links, are peak AVI. If I rewrote it now I would likely ruin it.

Changes In Prejudice. 

Needles Thoughts about anti-vaxx sentiment, long before Covid.

The Way NH Used to Be.  I so wish I could remember what those latter images were.

A Dog Called Kitty 

Removing the Means of Suicide  I later learned that the numbers were way too high, but the phenomenon still solid.

 

Right in the Mouth

It was thirty years ago that I first caught an glimpse of my grandfather in the mirror, and have seen each of them from different angles a fair bit over the last decade. Neither was unsightly, but also, neither were particularly attractive men. My aging seems to be accelerating the last 3-4 years. I have always thought age had a certain respectability that is nice, and I believe I am less bothered by the reality of aging than the average man.

But the next guy who tells me you're only as young as you feel is getting it right across the mouth. 

Sistine Chapel Exhibition

Tracy and I went to the exhibition in Cambridge of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes. Definitely recommended if it comes near you. Close-ups, many life-sized, all in context and described. Portrayals and techniques used for the first time are highlighted. There was a lengthy video to go with the text and audio about The Last Judgement, pointing out features one would not have immediately noticed.

 I included this view to give size context. 

March Madness

 ...has come a long way.

 

Sumer Is Icumen In

The descriptions in this song sounds more like Spring than Summer, and in fact they are. People thought more in terms of two seasons, summer and winter in the 1200s. They would make the distinction for Spring and Autumn if the occasion called for it, but not reliably.  Those of you who do genealogy or otherwise work with colonial American documents can see that persisting into the 1700s. A new year began on the first day of Spring, even in official records in many places. You will see your ancestress Elizabeth born in 1718-19 and wonder "Didn't they know?  Didn't anyone keep track?" If the month was June it was in 1718.  If it was February, it was in 1719. Old habits die hard. 

This is a nice version I had not heard before. I like that it contains the translation - and the correct one, not the bowdlerized version.