Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs

 The review convinced me that Lee, the topic, is fascinating, but the book isn't. Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs at Astral Codex Ten, part of ACX's yearly series. Lee was the determined genius who rescued Singapore, taking it from Third-World hellhole to economic powerhouse.

There’s an irony in that while Japan lost World War 2 pretty badly on the field, their actual stated goals in the war were to free Asia from western colonialism, and those goals they achieved amazingly well. They may have lost by direct force, but Lee and others like him didn’t forget how weak and disorganized and cowardly the British ruled in defeat. Western empires ruled Asia more through their aura of invincibility than through their technological advantage, and once that was lost their days were numbered and they knew it. The fall of Singapore was the single greatest military defeat the British ever had in terms of soldiers lost; it was also the battle that struck the deathblow to their Empire. 

But also

Something like half the book is Lee listing every world leader he ever talked to as PM. This is another part that mostly gets kind of dull (especially if you don’t follow the details, although this case is much easier to track than the internal politics chapters since you’ll probably recognize the characters’ names, or at least their countries). They’re all described as “tough” and “vigorous”, occasionally as “warm”, and usually with some other positive descriptors. This is probably a mix of sincere respect and diplomatic language for most of them.

Except Jimmy Carter. Lee spends an entire chapter making fun of Jimmy Carter for being shallow, undermined, weak-willed and inauthentic. And then takes an aside in the next chapter, when he’s complimenting Reagan, to mention how smart it was of the American people to replace Jimmy Carter with this guy. If you ever want to see someone who’s not a giant swimming rabbit attacking Jimmy Carter, this is the book for you 

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. 

Introducing Plan A

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten Introducing Plan A, a proposal for AI safety built on agreements that recognise the principals do not trust each other. It is offered as an overall plan, but also as a stand-up comparison model 

... it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better. 

The full plan comes from AI Futures, which had an uncannily good prediction in 2021 of what would happen from then to now. It includes a link to the actual Plan A. The ACX essay linked above is Scott's sales pitch for it. 

I don't know enough to have a credible opinion beyond the observation that these people are much smarter than I am, have good credentials that they are well-meaning, and have spent a lot of time on what could go wrong and how we prevent/fix that. 

Perceptions and Career Choice

From Slate Star Codex over a decade ago, concerning ability versus perception in career choices.

Okay. Imagine a study with the following methodology. You survey a bunch of people to get their perceptions of who is a smoker (“97% of his close friends agree Bob smokes”). Then you correlate those numbers with who gets lung cancer. Your statistics program lights up like a Christmas tree with a bunch of super-strong correlations. You conclude “Perception of being a smoker causes lung cancer”, and make up a theory about how negative stereotypes of smokers cause stress which depresses the immune system. The media reports that as “Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer, Stereotypes Do”. 

Relatedly, a recent discussion of Tradwives and career choices. N3 is on a roll lately.  I hope it continues.

ACX Links

Astral Star Codex puts out links every month. I will link to a few specifically, but you might like the whole batch.

AI Non-Update

I do not link to or discuss many AI articles.  I think it is getting beyond this dinosaur enough that I am no longer interested. That is my lack, I suppose, rather like discovering you are beginning to top out in mathematical ability and deciding you don't want to major in it after all.*

But Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten is still going full bore. His Links for February starts off with variety, but settles into a pattern of most articles being about some aspect of AI, and today's post is an update on Bio Anchors. If you want to keep up, I recommend you make that a regular stop, both for his own thoughts and those he links to. Steve Hsu's Information Processing (or Manifold, sidebar) is another, and might be more interesting to those who also want information about Chinese technology, geopolitics, and technical military capabilities.

*Had I stayed in, I suspect I would have been in Number Theory or Transforms, though the fascination even there was waning in 1972. 

The Mississippi Miracle

A few South Central states - Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama - have all seen recent gains in measured school testing.  They have been among the worst for years and are now average or better. I am suspicious of any education miracles, because they tend not to scale up, or persist, or measure what they say they do.  OTOH, even small well-distributed improvement is much to be desire. 

Here is some of the debate, courtesy of Astral Star Codex

Kelsey Piper stresses that it is literacy and continuing education for teachers focused on curriculum.

Freddie deBoer reminds us that there are no education miracles. (And he's got a list, which probably includes your favorite solution that you are just sure would work)

Derek Deek thinks there might be a little something to it, but not much. 

Natalie Wexler insists that phonics only gets you so far She likes the better teacher training, though.

Kelsey Piper shares some of the critics' doubts but still defends the strategies 

So many good observations and arguments were made that I don't want to muddy the waters much. I will note the following:

Some of the data is over more than a decade of (slower but sustained) improvement.  Some of it is flashy but only a few testing seasons.

Improvement was concentrated among but not confined to the worst students. 

Teacher training has included untraining - stressing that some popular things have been shown to be ineffective.  Note that these are not necessarily damaging, as critics sometimes accuse, but simply ineffective. 

Frog Update

I have been thinking about Earl's comment that the purpose of the frog and other cute inflatable costumes is to make the police and enforcers look ridiculous for subduing a children's toy. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten thought they looked cringe and disapproved for other reasons, but several of his commenters echoed exactly that sentiment. Others pointed out that the meaning is different in places like Portland and Chicago where there has been actual violence, and the majority of other places where violence never looked like it was going to be much of an issue. In Portland, the violence is after dark. I thought that could be used as an argument in either direction, that it was dangerous disguise in some places, but just silly in others.  But people protesting in safe places can have a few reasons for wanting to imitate those in more danger. It was an interesting discussion. 

After it all, I still didn't like it but wasn't quite sure why. It may be that I see it as a tactic that the already-convinced think really pwns MAGA, but independents are unlikely to be moved by, and thus, signifying nothing. But that can't be it either, because if it truly signified nothing, I wouldn't be annoyed, would I?

 

Gurwinder

I will be adding Gurwinder to the sidebar. This post of his, and the conversation that follows, is a good example why. It begins 

In a 2022 newsletter, I gave one reason why I think leftists are more likely than rightists to celebrate opponents’ deaths...

Some people try to keep their sidebars thorough, as a friendly nod to the many writers they find stimulating or agreeable.  I have been increasingly weeding mine, limiting it to people I actually go and read. I derived great pleasure from Dwarkesh Podcast for a few months, but seldom find the interviews all that engaging these last few months.  I have learned so much from Manifold and Conversations with Tyler over the years that I am reluctant to remove them, but I click through and listen only about 20% of the time that a new episode drops now, and I don't listen to those all the way through.

Please go and check those two, looking at the recent topics BTW, to see if the interviews attract you. Talk me out of dropping them. I don't know if it is because they have used up their best material* or that my dilettante mind has just tired of their favorite topics. I dropped Maggie's Farm during Covid because of too many annoying people in the comments - too much of a temptation for me. But I go there all the time, so it is went back on.  Just be warned about the comments.  Even the people I agree with I skip in irritation now.  

Even Astral Codex Ten seems less gripping. Yet ironically, because of that I will be adding it on. I have enthused about it so often that I resisted plumping for it further, as I have a couple of issues on which I disagree sharply, and didn't want to fully endorse it.  Now that it is lower down my list, the objections bother me less.

When I go to a site I like I often check out their recommended list as well.  I am far more likely to do this if the list is short. Also, I know your time is short and I want to put my best goods out front. 

*I suspect this is why The Great Books podcast shut down. When you are over 300 books you could do one more Shakespeare,  but the drive is less.

 

The Claude Bliss Attractor

Astral Codex Ten discusses the fascinating topic of when AI characters are recursive, so that slight, even invisible biases get magnified and cause us to wonder what is under the hood.  Recursion is an excellent strategy for testing bias. In typical fashion for him, Alexander goes through every possible explanation for why this is happening, saving me the trouble of working it out for myself. It's interesting enough stuff in its entirety that I won't comment much and won't link to a particular section.

The concept that other, seemingly unrelated traits get carried along under recursion reminded me of The silver fox domestication experiment carried out over decades. Also, the effect of the gravitation of the shooter of a billiard ball on the speed and angles nine collisions out is crazy large, as NNT described in The Black Swan. 

Ordinarily this would just be a curiosity of the more extreme effects of recursion.  But as AI's speak to themselves and each other more and more, without supervision, so to speak, this is increasingly the world we live in.

Autism Theories

Sometimes I try too hard to give you one-stop shopping on an idea...

 Autism Is Bad by Sebastian Jensen, recommended by Aporia. I dislike the title, but it is clearly in reference to mythbusting the idea that autism is an intellectual advantage that makes geniuses.

Both of these mythical views of autism are wrong: autistic people are not more likely to be right wing and the link between genius and autism is overblown.

I had not heard of "dimensionality" but the concept is discussed in a internal link and took only a little pondering to pick up.  I will not fully define it here in order to encourage you to go on the essay "Autism as a Disorder of Dimensionality," but it has to do with neuronal branching and complexity of brain architecture. And Johnson thinks the intelligence link is quite possible.

Neuronal density is a plausible candidate for the strongest factor underlying both genius and madness: it both drastically reduces canalization (normalcy), allowing the brain to be wired in strange ways and pointed in odd directions, and offers many more parameters — the raw stuff of achievement. This can lead to madness, genius, or both.

Also included is a chart of where various diagnoses are associated along the political spectrum. Spoiler alert: Most cluster around the center on both the social and economic axes. Both essays go into controversial territory, particularly the one at Opentheory.net. Some of it rather took my breath away. "Are you sure you want to go there?" Sometimes I get the feeling that they just don't like autists, and are trying to get back at someone. OTOH, sometimes they seem to defend them too much. All of this in a package of neurological research and solid grounding. 

This links in turn to  'Just Emil Kirkegaard Things ' A theory of Ashkenazi genius: intelligence and mental illness.

Perhaps I should have started with something more reliable: Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know by Scott Alexander at ACX (then Star Slate Codex).  I am surprised I have not linked this before.  At least, I can't find it at present. Plenty of theories there as well.

These numbers should be taken with very many grains of salt. First, IQ tests don’t do a great job of measuring autistic people. Their intelligence tends to be more imbalanced than neurotypicals’, so IQ tests (which rely on an assumption that most forms of intelligence are correlated) are less applicable. Second, even if the test itself is good, autistic people may be bad at test-taking for other reasons – for example, they don’t understand the directions, or they’re anxious about the social interaction required to answer an examiner’s quetsions. Third, and most important, there is a strong selection bias in the samples of autistic people. Many definitions of autism center around forms of poor functioning which are correlated with low intelligence. Even if the definition is good, people who function poorly are more likely to seek out (or be coerced into) psychiatric treatment, and so are more likely to be identified.

Conflict Theory Vs. Mistake Theory

From the continuing series of People Smarter Than Me.

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten (ACX): Why I Am Not a Conflict Theorist .

I had not heard the phrases conflict theory and mistake theory before, but we have been over similar territory many times here.

Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people...I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.

As usual, I do find myself wishing there were someone smart enough to serve as an editor for Dr. Alexander, but he is thorough. He goes issue by issue that our beliefs cannot stem only from self-interest - not on either side, whatever we accuse our opponents of - nor can they be solely attributed to being uniformed or untrained. SALT taxes, vaccinations, climate, immigration, Ukraine, lockdowns, Gaza, the deficit - the self interest is there for a few, and for many of us to a small degree. But in general, no.  He does identify a few issues that might be more a product of self-interest.

It is related to CS Lewis's Bulverism, focusing on some status of the speaker rather than the reasonableness of the argument. Alexander finds that where we stand on issues is more related to psychological factors. I said in the 80s that 50% of all political positions are performative.  By the 90s I had upped that to 75%, and by the 00s I said more than half seriously that I now believed that 90% of our political beliefs are performative, to fit in, or show off, or belittle others. Human beings are not that unreasonable.  In pure situations where they are motivated for real results they can strategise.  But we take shortcuts, because our real purpose is not to arrive at the right answer.  

At this point I just hope that some residue of my beliefs, when subjected to consuming fire, turn out to have their origin in desire to find the truth.

For Joe and Kyle

I cut and pasted this from Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander's site.  Alexander is a San Francisco psychiatrist and every conservative's favorite liberal.  He comes out of the early 2000s online humanist/New Atheist groups and catalogued its descent into simple angry wokeness over a very few years. He is an atheist who quotes GK Chesterton and says that CS Lewis "almost persuaded" him. I thought you would find it fun.

******** 

I linked FWLAB’s criticism of David Hume’s argument against ever believing miracles. Joe James argues that FWLAB, myself, and other critics are misunderstanding Hume’s argument. FWLAB says no he isn’t. They continue the “discussion” in the comments, but both sides kind of embarrass themselves and don’t get anywhere. I am unfortunately still confused - there are many cases where something that never happened before happens for the first time. For example, nobody had ever seen a grizzly-polar bear hybrid until recently, so “the universal testimony of mankind” was that this didn’t happen. But when a reliable person did see it, we had little trouble imagining that we were wrong and it was simply very rare, or a new thing happening now because of climate change. If nobody has ever seen a sea part before, but then many people say they saw Moses part the Red Sea, what is different about this such that “the universal testimony of mankind” suddenly becomes a disqualifier? Hume seems to be trying to make this same distinction in his eight days of darkness example, but there it seems like he is only saying he will accept non-religious anomalies, but rule out religious ones, because religious people often lie. But then what happened to the “universal testimony of mankind” argument? I kind of get the impression that he’s groping towards Bayes’ Theorem, but hard-coding in a belief that the prior probability of lots of religious people lying is higher than the probability of a miracle. If that’s his belief, then fair enough, but I guess I expected the much-vaunted Hume’s Argument Against Miracles to be something more than this. 

You Don't Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books

I don't want to link to anything that even hints that polyamory is an acceptable alternative, but unfortunately, it's Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten, making some powerful arguments about who gives relationship advice in general, and some approval of such things is thrown in along the way. He claims he knows happy people in polyamorous relationships, but they aren't the sort who write books about it. I deeply want him to be mistaken on this. In fact, he notes, people who write advice books in general are often those who don't do very well at relationships.

Included...

There are probably some acceptable times to write a memoir, like when you’ve just conquered Gaul.

 Yes, this exactly.  It may be that all the people who write memoirs shouldn't have, while a host of others whose example would be more edifying never will. 

One thing I learned during the Nostalgia Destruction Tour is that there are few witnesses or none to all those events now, and even those witnesses remember them poorly or not at all. So I could write a memoir that paid very little attention to the truth if I liked, so long as I avoided making claims for which there exist contradicting documents. Because then even if I was challenged, it would be my word against theirs. Hmm...

Unfortunately, my wife is one of the people who has a good memory...no wait, she doesn't either...

Adversarial Collaboration

Thanks to Astral Star Codex for picking up on this research. 

Really excellent adversarial collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Killingsworth on the relationship between income and happiness. Kahneman previously found that more money didn’t make people happier past about $100K/year. Killingsworth previously found it did. They worked together and found that Kahneman was right for the least happy 20% of the population and Killingsworth was right for everyone else. This is a rare but welcome example of going from a failed replication to an actual understanding of what went wrong and what the truth is - well-written and highly-recommended.

Hyperstitious Slur Cascade

The phrase was a new one on me, though I picked pretty quickly what Alexander was talking about when I started reading.  I doubt I'll be using the word hyperstitious much, though I like the feel of that "slur cascade" phrase. Scott Alexander over at Astral Codex Ten discusses how words become slurs, and whether there is any sense in fighting such trends. Apparently Whoopi Goldberg just got suspended for using the word "gypped," because people who know precisely no Roma people and have never inquired whether any are offended (or even recognise that is where the English word comes from), have complained about the egregiousness of the offense.

In discussing words becoming slurs, he notes early on

Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.

This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern - World War II - is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.

But what about when a word is not a slur, but a few people are trying to get everyone to start treating it like one? We see a fair bit of that these days.  Use of pronouns is an area where I am wondering how much energy I am willing to spend on a pointless rearguard action. If history is any indicator here, I will spend too much energy on pointless actions and not be especially repentant about it. Though sometimes I have seen the point and switched immediately. 

Yet we also accept that some phrases that used to be used commonly are in fact offensive, and others have become offensive by sheer weight of popular demand, and would never use them now.  Alexander discusses where along that line do you get off one train, how long do you just stand around on the platform waiting to see where the population is going, and when do you get on the train headed back in the opposite direction?

If you are an early adopter of taking offense, everyone starts to roll their eyes (or clench their buttocks) whenever you come in the room, but if you are one of the last holdouts, you really are intentionally offending people in order to make your point that no one should ever have been offended five (or twenty-five? or a hundred?) years ago and you are going to insist on purity of language. 

He gives an estimate that is not based on measurable data, but is probably still better than most people's estimate and decides that's where you will be happiest.  As always, it is fun to watch his reasoning and wonder if you agree.  I imagine he is right if we want to live at piece with all mankind, but it does seem to be giving in too easily sometimes.

Quite The Audience, Here and There

I have always been impressed by the audience I have attracted here, so that even though the numbers have gone down over the last few years (My snarky take is that I was not pure enough on Trump support and Covid skepticism - which is ironic because Trump was not very pure on Covid skepticism),  I still have some amazing folks. Some of you I know personally, and others I can make guesses about your intelligence from your vocabularies and abstract thinking or your education/employment/accomplishments.  I wondered if IQ 150 was actually the average here.  I decided that was too rich, but 141, which is 99th percentile is the likely centerpoint here. Remember that because that distribution tails off as it moves along the graph, we do not take the mean for such things, but the median. Even if you have no test scores from ASVAB or SAT/ACT to back it up, if you are following along her, you are at least at the margin for Mensa (130 or 132, depending on SD).

I feel very proud for having a site visited by such as thee.

So it did set me on my heels a bit when I looked at the survey data for Astral Codex Ten, where he was only secondarily looking for IQ but was instead trying to compare different schooling outcomes among public. private, religious, homeschooled, and unschooled readers. The survey data indicates that his average audience has an SAT around 1500+, which is about IQ 146 new scoring. (Old scoring, add 50 SAT or 5 IQ points). Well, people lie, and they misremember in once direction more than another, and they describe things very carefully and technically (I have have done that) in a misleading way - such as Chuck Schumer's supposed 1600 SAT, which is suspect. He is likely very high but not that. People also self-select for surveys and other concrete-answer request.

Well, that's just an amazing number, up into the range of 99.75th percentile.

The audience here also seems to be harder-working and more judicious than I am, which are force-multipliers for IQ. Also probably nicer and under better emotional control. Wisdom, both in the Medieval and D&D sense, is better than all. Put your energy there.

Chatbot Propaganda

Astral Codex Ten has, as if often the case, a calm and rational take on this: Mostly Skeptical thoughts on the Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse. For example

4: Propagandabots Spreading Disinformation Is Probably The Opposite Of What You Should Worry About

News articles about this problem always start with the same scenario: what if someone made a propagandabot to spread COVID disinformation, ie the most unpopular topic in the world, which every government and social media corporation and AI corporation is itching to censor?

Here’s a crazy thought: maybe the side that has 10x more people on it and 100x more support from the relevant actors is the one that will win the race to use this technology. You can already get an off-the-shelf chatbot that mouths liberal pieties; I’m not sure there are any that are much good at disinformation production. The liberal-piety-bots will be on version 10.0 before the first jailbroken disinformation-bot comes out.

He looks at various scenarios where chatbots could do Very Bad Things on social media. He also quickly realises the steps we take to prevent Very Bad Things might ultimately be worse than the VBT's themselves. To take a recent example, government efforts to censor some types of Covid information created a backlash in which some people stopped believing the government when they said the sky is blue. None of these things is static. The interaction of people's voluntary actions plus their response to government* recommendations plus their response to (various) expert advising plus their response to government mandates plus their response to other people's responses to everything above is so fluid that it defies easy measure. Plus, social scientists and government agencies were maybe not the people you wanted to have in charge of that anyway. 

Plus I recommend reading what he says about getting spam from Nancy Pelosi, that just won't go away.

Covid is only the beginning, of course.  It gets more complicated every year. Except...is disinformation more of a problem than in Pick a Country/Pick a Century/Pick a Topic? Maybe.  Maybe finally yes, after all the times we have previously invoked the nothing-new-under-the-sun argument. 

I keep recalling from a prepper thread over a decade ago a person from South America who had been through an actual societal breakdown while being on the wrong side of an insane government. He stated in the strongest terms that what is key in those situations, much more than your weapons, alarm systems, and canned food is a network of people you have great certainty you can rely on. It does not fix everything, witness the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, but a stash of rifles, gold fragments, and water filters wasn't getting you through that either. So too with whatever imagined apocalypse you see from AI and swollen government and nefarious actors. If you have a network of people you can trust, you can, in the direst emergency, at least decide that the older children and young parents will get the food and have people you love around you as you go. Lots of humanity never had those choices.

And most likely, the biggest problem of your next decade will be something medical that happens to us or a near relative. Wine will still gladden the heart. Young people will still fall in love. Music will continue to inspire, chatbots be damned.

*And it very much matters what level of "government" we are talking about.  Not only local, county, state, federal, but school district/ WHO.

Moral Views

Astral Codex Ten is doing its yearly survey of who its readers are.  One of the questions is a multiple choice of what type of moral approach we favored. I have never seen such a question on a reader survey and was impressed for that alone. The choices were

Consequentialism 

 Deontology

Virtue Ethics 

Natural Law

Contractualism

I like them all myself, just being happy these days if anyone has anything going, and seeing some advantage in each approach.  I was surprised that utilitarianism was not on the list, but I think it might be out of intellectual favor these days. I like to keep it in the mix even though I think it has serious problems, largely because I think it is what most of us use as a shortcut 90% of the time for everyday use if a question doesn't catch our attention as difficult, even if we say we subscribe to one of the others.

The Media Very Rarely Lies

The Media Very Rarely Lies over at Astral Codex Ten. Scott Alexander shows how the NYT and Scientific American do exactly the same sort of thing as Infowars - not providing context rather than flat-out lying. He then turns and applies this to the censorship debate about misinformation and disinformation

But lots of people seem to think that Infowars deserves to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse vaccine data claim, but NYT doesn’t deserve to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse police shooting claim. I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here. Maybe you disagree and do think that one is worse than the other. But I would argue this is honest disagreement - exactly the sort of disagreement that needs to be resolved by the marketplace of ideas, rather than by there being some easy objective definition of “enough context” which a censor can interpret mechanically in some fair, value-neutral way.

How To Lie With Statistics shows up immediately in the comments, which also warmed my heart. I almost gave it to the oldest granddaughter this Christmas, but I think it contains enough abstraction that it would be little fun for at least another year. And it's the sort of thing that I want to be enjoyable at first exposure, precisely because it's so important.

There is an internal link to an SSC post from 2015 about a study he took apart about the perception of required ability versus the actual required ability, and that the study failed to account for the very basic fact that the perception that some activities require special ability might in fact be accurate, and not just a made up stereotype. 

Okay. Imagine a study with the following methodology. You survey a bunch of people to get their perceptions of who is a smoker (“97% of his close friends agree Bob smokes”). Then you correlate those numbers with who gets lung cancer. Your statistics program lights up like a Christmas tree with a bunch of super-strong correlations. You conclude “Perception of being a smoker causes lung cancer”, and make up a theory about how negative stereotypes of smokers cause stress which depresses the immune system. The media reports that as “Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer, Stereotypes Do”.

This is the basic principle behind Leslie et al (2015).

I said in another context earlier this evening, about men vs women analysing actions and motivations, that stereotypes tend to be half-true. Both romance and mystery novels include a lot of why people are doing what they are doing, however different they may be in style, and women dominate both genres in both authorship and purchasing. I will think about other types of media consumption to see if the other areas where there is a sharp difference between men and women there is also this element that "why people do what they do" is a prominent piece. Right off the top of my head, literature and psychology majors were predominantly female when I was in school - though that was decades ago.

ACX also has it's typical followup after the discussion of something controversial, Sorry, I Still Think I'm Right About the Media Very Rarely Lying. Which is why I love this guy.  Some of the outrage was predicatble.  It is one thing to say that the NYT and Scientific American don't do the job they should about context and slant, but to even breathe their names in the same paragraph as Infowars is Not Allowed. Well, it's why Alexander is every conservative's favorite liberal.