Effective Altruism

Data Republican believes EA should be banned from AI safety, policy-making, and governance.  That's a pretty extreme position, but she makes a solid case for both the mild and extreme versions.

Fundamentally, EA is a maximizing philosophy: it always tries to price future value. And extinction is the “negative infinity” number in the ledger. Once you are determining outcome by probabilities, just having even a tiny chance of extinction dominates every other calculation.

One such scenario that many conservatives might find sympathetic is: do you do gain-of-function research for a 70% chance that you will prevent the next swine flu, or is the 1% risk that the virus escapes containment in Wuhan and kills 10 million people acceptable? Many of us, having lived through COVID-19, would put our foot down on allowing any kind of gain-of-function research again within our lifetimes. That’s one scenario where conservatives can potentially reason their way to the same answer as EAs.

EAs run that same logic in every calculation. What this means, inside their heads: an extinction level event scenario is the greatest threat vector. 

Scott Alexander, like others, is obsessed with AI, alignment, and its effects. He is very much a supporter of Effective Altruism in general, though not slavishly so. Still, I imagine he would object to such a blanket disallowing of EA from the discussion (or at least, from the decision-making). There are so many discussions and counter discussions over at Astral Codex Ten that I won't even attempt to choose for you. As his commenters are also quite brilliant - I consider it one of the few sites to compete with this one for average IQ - you can either dabble or go hard against them, trying to steelman your own arguments. This would be the major leagues. And yet...

I have felt uncomfortable with Effective Altruism since I first heard of it, though it took me a while to articulate why. Frankly, it probably took reading others who had thought about it more rigorously to be able to articulate it.  One of the consequences of becoming lazier, and thus less intelligent, is not being able to provide some of the service I was designed for. I have excuses. Not good excuses, but at least some things I can say out loud with some earnestness. 

The best arguments against EA are in Data Republican's essay. Pricing future value is a great example. It makes entire sense, but somehow leads to insane conclusions. If a future life is worth the same as a life now, then the sheer volume of future humans and their needs with forever dwarf what is good for us. More interestingly, perhaps, is how that completely devalues our ancestors. There is the (bogus in reality but worth valuing as a myth) Native American belief in Seven Generations, that we owe something to the three generations before us and the three after us. GK Chesterton wrote similarly that tradition is the only way of giving a vote to the dead. CS Lewis, describing the Tao in The Abolition of Man shows that the wise in every tradition teach that we owe something to both our heritage and our posterity. But EA very quickly reveals that it owes nothing to heritage and everything to posterity.  The dead have made their contribution and their suffering is now a sunk cost. 

There is also comparative suffering among species, leading to calculations that the horrible suffering of three chickens or thirty-two shrimp are equivalent to the suffering of one human. The actual numbers are immaterial.  Thirty or three-hundred chickens would be the same. The principle of comparing it to any human suffering is something new in the world. It may be a logically consistent and defensible philosophical and moral position.

But it is not a human position, despite being favored by "humanists." It gives away the game, recognising that humanists are in fact subhumanists, valuing some bare minimum of the species as fungible with any other human.  Dismiss it as a mere prejudice on my part if you will, but the idea of perpetuating humans who are only biologically and not culturally related to me is not just disquieting, it's silly.  

Humanists are actually Subhumanists.  I should probably think about that and post on it.  Yet now that I have said that, I recall that CS Lewis already covered that in the last debate section of Out of the Silent Planet. 

Common Criticisms

Rob Kurzban on discussion of evolutionary psychologists:

Critics assert that evolutionary psychologists are wrong in believing behavior is genetically determined, that every aspect of the organism is an adaptation, and that discovering what is informs what [should] be. Evolutionary psychologists reply that they never made any of these claims, and document places where they claim precisely the reverse. The critics then reply that evolutionary psychologists are wrong in believing behavior is genetically determined, that every aspect of the organism is an adaptation, and that discovering what is informs what should be.

Death Used to Be the Term Limit

 Longevity Threatens Democracy, by Lyman Stone 

Key points in this post: 

Death has historically been the main exit mechanism for unelected rulers, including natural death, but this exit route is vanishing thanks to rising lifespans. 

All else equal, longer lives mechanically produce longer tenures in power. 

Political power compounds over a career, so longer careers mean more concentrated power. 

Older electorates carry a larger cognitive-impairment burden and are further from the experiences a vote is supposed to be able to think about when making electoral decisions. 

As a result, political elites face weaker accountability from less attentive electorates, have longer careers over which to accumulate power, and upon reaching the top are likely to have longer tenures since mortality rates are falling. 

Things You Don't See At The Time

Which is why I'm not a boxing judge.

When you are a fan, looking mostly at the punches and probably rooting for one guy over another, you miss things.  Watching and listening now, I hear the referee telling Tyson to let go, but it is Bruno who is holding Mike on the back of the head rather continually. Yet at the time I would have only noticed that Bruno had a lot of ineffectual punches that count in scoring but do not damage, plus a few that really rock Tyson. Tyson, OTOH, misses a lot but hits more generally solid shots. By rounds 3 and 4 this pattern is almost embarrassingly consistent. That really looks like a home ref at this point. "Last warning. Last warning." he says to Bruno but I haven't heard many warnings since round 2.

Tyson was never a smart man, but was a smart fighter, perhaps by training to channel his amazing instincts into the right avenues. This gradually tips toward the winner, but ends quickly, which is often the case in boxing. As with an economy, a war, or any other collapse. Slowly, slowly, then all at once.

 Did Tyson and Ali ever discuss boxing? I would love to watch that.

Caspar the Friendly Ghost

 I said to myself I couldn't remember the second verse. This turned out not to be a big problem.

 The tune is reminiscent of "Frosty the Snowman" in places.

Grand Am

There has been long suspicion that the variant use of "am" in Black English is a minstrel show fabrication that was never actually used.  "Brother Jones am a fine preacher," or "The corn harvest am a little late this year."

Scholars of AAVE have typically assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in transcriptions of ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the transcribers. 

John McWhorter uncovers enough believable, non-critical and nonsatiric reports of the usage to declare it was not only used in Southern Black dialect in the 1800s, but that it came from nonstandard dialects in England in the late 1700s, which were still in occasional use up until the early 1900s. The 20-min podcast am here.

You Already Know Joseph Henrich

Anthropology Has a Truth Problem Len Gutkin at the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Henrich's critique of his own discipline. J Henrich is the author of The WEIRDest People in the World , famous in the social sciences.  I have mentioned him here before.

Henrich spends some time rebutting the supposed consensus rejecting the existence of a biological sex binary — actually, a significant faction of biological anthropologists consider the question “settled the other way,” a fact which the AAA ignores — but his real interest is in the moral reasoning that permits Rouse and those who agree with her to assume that a technical claim about biology entails a series of political and social prejudices against both gay and trans people. (In her interview with the Chronicle, Rouse expressed incredulity that Kwame Anthony Appiah, who, she noted, is gay, could consider the AAA’s position on biological sex problematic.) Henrich summarizes this extremely weird logic: “If it turns out that natural selection only favors two kinds of gametes, we would have to oppress gay and/or trans people. What?” 

Biblical Censuses

 The Biblical Censuses are Correct Demographic Records, by Lyman Stone

What went wrong was people trying to fix them because they thought they knew better long after the Book of Numbers was composed.  This was fun.

Indexes or Indices?

 We are having a discussion.  Mine is the minority opinion - against librarians. 

In Praise of Obsessive Men

 In Praise of Obsessive Men, by Rosemary Hopcroft at Aporia.  It is a good summary of one side of this discussion about autism. As it is the side I lean to more, I pass it along.  

In short, there is evidence that men are more likely than women to obsessively focus on their chosen area to the exclusion of all else, and this often leads to extraordinary achievement. While the achievements often only benefit the achiever himself, in cognitively demanding areas like science they frequently have tremendous public benefits. Thus, it is likely that extraordinary achievements with the greatest public benefit come disproportionately from obsessive, high IQ men. They deserve our gratitude. 

However there are things worth mentioning that come from another side of the discussion. It is generally agreed that women are in general more attentive to social norms and better at social tasks. This, plus conscientiousness are the prime suspects why they do better at schools as they are designed in most places. I suspect we will find exactly what brain structures are affected by genes being turned on or off by hormones as early as conception, but that is a matter for another day.  For the moment, I stipulate that this is so. Women would thereby have more backup social systems, so that even if they have autism, it is less impairing, and less noticeable. This would explain why it is less often diagnosed.

Secondly, the overlap of symptoms with OCD or Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder makes diagnosis and research less reliable.  I think this is going to be wide open for the next twenty years, as genomic data becomes more available. When we say that something is polygenic, that is even more complicated than we think at first. If there is a variant which makes one 1% more obsessive, it is likely upstream or downstream of variants which make one 0.5% or 2% more obsessive, plus a bunch that are so similar that they also weigh in at about 1%. Each of those is surrounded by nearby SNPs that are similar to others in the population that have a tiny effect or magnifying effect, but most likely no effect at all, yet are along for the ride.  And our target gene is just along for the ride on some other trait near it on the chromosome which is also being selected for. It's all going to be ranges and percentages combined with a hundred other ranges or percentages elsewhere. Some of those are going to be autism, some OCD, some simply anxiety, not to mention a hundred other God-only-knows selection events. 

Funny thing.  The odds for things in genetics are going to turn out looking a lot like the odds for things in real life.  What a concept. Because all these conditions are Mendelian only in their extreme and more destructive versions, it is likely that many are going to be rather obsessed, somewhat obsessed, mildly obsessed, and this will be lessened by women who are more likely to say to themselves "This is just too much.  It costs too much socially" and back off. 

There is a further set of arguments which come from autists who declare that the supposedly scientific claims are weaker than advertised, which they often noticed because the internal experience of autists is ignored and dismissed in favor of that which is objectively measured. There is something to this, but that data is, well, polluted by a very high percentage of the self-diagnosed. When these are female, they borrow heavily from feminist perspectives that science/men/logic itself are antagonistic to women's wisdom. (Which is in turn complicated by women who are striving mightly to argue from an entirely objective and logical perspective. Sigh.)  I can only say that I take the point that the holes in the autism mainstream's position are real, but that does not prove that all opposition to it is correct.  

Destructive Bureaucracy

 David Foster put this up during my trip, but it got buried in my notes.  Sorry to be late.

The French Army in 1940 and the CDC in 2021, 

(And we know what happened to the French Army in 1940).  Mr Foster sees a parallel

I was reminded of this history in early 2022 by a sequence of posts at twitter. Joanna Masel, a theoretical biologist, says the CDC contacted her (following an NYT story) about an app she helped develop to notify people (anonymously) about possible covid-19 exposure. Her group put a very informal preprint on github nearly immediately, and a more formal one on medrxiv soon after. A CDC coauthor was added to shepherd it through MMWR, which is described as “CDC’s primary vehicle for scientific publication of timely, authoritative, and useful public health information and recommendations.”

The preproposal was rejected. Informal feedback was that they liked it but were so backlogged that a peer reviewed journal was likely faster. This initiated 6 months of clearance procedures needed for CDC coauthor to stay on paper.

What CDC staff spend a LOT of time on: rewriting manuscripts with meticulous attention to style guides. Eg, Methods must follow exactly the order they are used in Results, all interpretation must be in Discussion not in Results, etc. to a point truly unimaginable in my field. 

Thanking the Algorithm This Time

St Magnus Cathedral

We expect the attractive balance of the Renaissance and even slavish symmetry post Sir Christopher Wren* in our architecture and are surprised when it is repeatedly violated in earlier buildings. But they were as aware of it as much as we are, they just put it farther down their priority list. If you needed an alcove to put in a special chapel, you just put in an alcove on that side. If someone needed another alcove later they natural gravitated to the matching spot on the other side, but if they never needed one, that was no problem. They wouldn't move an altar a foot to the side, but if it needed to go to the 2/3 mark, that was pretty too. St Magnus in Kirkwall has got a few sections where they moved a wall in a foot or out a foot because of practical considerations. It's still solidly symmetrical, though

 

There's that ubiquitous red sandstone again, that they built everything from. It's a soft stone, so when they started using it for gravestones, families found that the were becoming weathered and unreadable.  Richer people started sending for more durable stone, even when the bones were interred indoors. Sometimes people would put up a wooden marker in anticipation of greater wealth later. I found this Memento Mori fascinating. It is much like a sign for a shop.

The sandstone stills shows signs of being painted over during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Whatever illustrations the Catholics had were now forbidden, to be replaced by plaques commemorating human beings or groups of them, which the Reformers considered Less Idolatrous. 

You get things like memorials to the war dead, which includes their family identifiers, including this one I found humorous. 

Much better than pictures of Biblical stories. Sure.
 

A note on Saints and local gods: Learning two unrelated eras side-by-side can suggest associations you might not otherwise have had. When Orkney was Catholic, the center of its authority was in Rome, a place where few people had ever been. Being able to have your own bishop gave you a chance to send someone you knew to represent you among the great and the wise. The idea was echoed at royal courts as power consolidated and kingdoms grew larger. Having an earl who was married to one of the king's relatives gave you an avenue to be heard. This would have been even stronger before general literacy, but even now, we want someone of our own to advocate for us. God gave other tribes pictures, but to the Jews He gave the captions, rather forcing them to focus on words, which traveled better and were more universal. Yet we iz who we iz, and the Jews got idolatrous about the words themselves, and Christians gladly and self-righteously followed.  It's a step toward abstraction, but it's not foolproof. Jews had Kabbalah, pre-Christians had runes, and Christians dabbled in grammarye, leading to Baptists putting Bibles on secondary altars with a single light shining down on it. For all of them we must say "Not thus, but thank you for your assistance." Asking a saint to pray for you is not that different. When we destroy one idol we secretly build another.

Where was I? St Olaf, who is big in Norwegian thinking and thus in early Orkney, was a pagan convert to Christianity.  His statue in the Kirkwall cathedral has interesting symbolism. And there's that stonework again.

If you look at the serpent he is crushing, it has a human head. The face is in fact his own, representing the death of his old self, or perhaps the constant need to keep killing it.

The scratching is a mason's mark showing which person cut the stones in this section.  There is an identical mark from a very close time in the Cathedral of Durham in the north of England.

Neolithic Legos

As you can see from the second photo, the sandstone of Orkney looks like it could practically be split with few hands and put into place for building in a few minutes."Neolithic Legos," one of our guides called it. The first picture is of a rock structure thousands of years old, the last picture about a hundred, but you can see the second stories are remarkably like the old brochs. The first stories are as well, underneath the stucco-like coating and pebbling to create an extra barrier. It's stacked stones underneath, in nearly every building. Fences and outbuildings do not look like much of a change from Skara Brae or the Broch of Gurness. St Magnus Cathedral is built of much larger pieces of red sandstone, finished more finely, but it's the same thing as well.

Why would they change?  It's right there, it's easy, and it works. One downside is if you use it for standing stones it attracts lightning, which can also split it pretty quickly. The stone circles of Orkney have not held up as well as Stonehenge and Avebury for that reason. Still, 5,000 years is a good innings for any built structure, wouldn't you say?

Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast

This WSJ article is making the rounds, so most of you might have seen it, but I wanted to make sure it got noticed. Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast. The aging of the mainstream denominations, especially the leadership has been pointed out more and more frequently over the last twenty years.

This hasn’t always been the view of the Catholic Church. Mr. Thomas and his fellow activists are drawn to the imagery of the crusades. Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095 to a crowd that responded with cries of “Deus vult” or “God wills it.” That phrase is popular among nativists on social media. Which pope is the greater authority on the gospels, Urban or Leo? I don’t know. But a glance at Christian history shows that the current consensus among church leaders hasn’t always been so. Taking the long view, it is by no means a settled position among Christians that nationalism and militarism are “contrary to the gospel,” as Bishop Hudson-Wilkin put it 

I think bringing in Urban II is a bit of an overshoot, but point taken. There are ideas in church leadership which are treated as obvious but would not even be recognised in other eras of the faith. I always hesitate to begin an argument with "One would think..." because it carries a great danger of subjectivity, but one would think that the leader of an eternal church would ask him/herself whether his opinion owes more to his narrow slice of time than it should. I learned decades ago from CS Lewis that while it is true that all eras have their own biases and cannot be entirely objective, this is nowhere more true than among the moderns who insist this. The thing they preach loudest they seem to think themselves exempt from. He called it Chronocentrism and Chronological Snobbery, giving credit to Owen Barfield for alerting him to the illogic of it.

 Boomer Christians are alarmed and bewildered by a return to the faith of centuries past. They forget that the political priorities of their generation emerged from a very unusual historical moment. Their confident worldview was a gift from a different era. And it will, I fear, die with them.

Have some humility.

 

Welsh Men's Chorus

Just to keep the A capella going. I swear the whole country can sing.  

 

Amazing Marvin Gaye

Strong and solid.  I didn't know this version existed

 

The Ness of Brodgar

Orkney is one of the few places where any knobbed balls have been found in situ. None of the theories of what they were used for has been very persuasive, but they have been found many places in northern Scotland. One was found at the Ness of Brodgar in 2013, and a new one at this summer's dig. This Ness was a community structure between the major standing stones sites, containing houses, cooking areas, and workshops. It was only discovered in 2003 and usual, accidentally by a farmer plowing his field. Though it doesn't make for good tourist photographs, it is much more extensive than the stone circles themselves and tells us more about how the people lived.

A funny thing about experts.  We had international experts, even the decades-long chief archaeologists on some sites.  Because of this story I will not mention any names, though anyone determined could narrow it down to a few persons pretty quickly if they chose. In explaining about the Ness, our guide had a mind-numbing amount of detail at his fingertips and ability to offhandedly point things out that would only be noticed by people who had spent a lot of time at this.  Occasionally there would be another archaeologist in the group and they would talk shop in a manner that was almost incomprehensible. Sometimes they would double back and explain something to the rest of us, sometimes not. In summing up before the Q&A our guide mentioned that there was now some assurance that the very top layer before the site was abandoned not only had some artefacts from the Beaker People, but good evidence that they had used an inhabited the site.

I fancy there were murmurs of appreciation of this, but it may have been only me.  This is the moment of transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.  The Bell Beaker culture was the group that almost fully replaced the previous culture - the one that had actually built Stonehenge, Avebury, Newgrange, and the stone rings around us but were overwhelmed throughout Europe by the Indo-Europeans, the Yamnaya, the wildly violent Steppe tribes who were our ancestors. In most places the male lineages were completely replaced.  Orkney and eastern Scandinavia were two of the few places where that replacement occurred differently or not at all. That's another story, but the short version is that the incoming paternal lines did not replace the Orkney natives, while both groups of females persisted. As this occurred at the far end of their spread, where horses and carts were not the advantage on islands they had been previously, the resident males could mostly hold off the invaders. 

"Ah, this is the part I'm most interested in," I blurted, barely raising my hand to be called on. "The Beaker usually brought the practice of burial in mounds with them, but mound graves were already in place here.  Were they brought at an earlier date by a variation of these people from the Steppes? Are they influenced by Kurgans or completely unrelated?"

"What are kurgans?"

It was as if a mathematicians had said "Who is this Fourier chap you keep talking about?' or an astronomer had said "What do you mean, moons of Neptune?" I was almost too embarrassed to continue, suddenly worried that it was I who had been inhabiting some obscure backwater and thinking it important.  I was able to explain that they were the burial mounds of the Steppe people. He said briefly and generally that the Steppe people had been the Indo-Europeans and "come into" Europe, a rather mild description for complete replacement.  He didn't comment on the any relationship between the two types of mound, and I just dropped it.

All I can think is that the field is so specialised that the experts do not need or desire to keep up with the larger movements in their own area of study. It seems rather like economics, where Nobel winners sometimes seem to have no better grasp on larger issues than other educated people.

So I'm going to say, no, no relation, because if there were he would have been all over it, as obsessed as he was by Orkney information.