The uncertainty principle (and lack of babies)

There's a very long article in the New York Times looking at the vexing question of why birth rates have tumbled so dramatically, virtually everywhere.

The title:  Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.

And the core argument:

What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.

The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino. The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility. The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.

Even declining fertility rates feed into the cycle: How will society function if each generation is smaller than the last? The Gen X writer Astra Taylor calls ours “the age of insecurity”; the Gen Z writer Kyla Scanlon has described “the end of predictable progress.” Gen Z-ers’ uncertainty about the future can’t be captured by the usual metrics or entered neatly into a spreadsheet. But it may be the X factor in the global parenting free fall.

There are many decent points made, including the one that the conservatively religious probably maintain a higher birthrate because that version of religion does endorse certainty, of a kind.

Religion has long been associated with big families; groups such as the Amish, Mormons, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Hutterites are known for their higher than average fertility rates. In a 2024 book, “Hannah’s Children,” the Catholic University of America economist Catherine Pakaluk and a colleague interviewed 55 American women who had five or more children. All were religious. Faith offers multiple levels of assurance, teaching that humans are part of a cosmic chain, having children is a moral virtue, and God will provide for them. On a practical level, faith offers a ready-made community that affirms and supports family life. 

Makes sense, I guess.

Although, one would have thought things like World Wars would have been more uncertain periods of history.  This is addressed too:

The world has seen uncertainty before, so why is this time different? One possibility is that we live in an era of “polycrisis” — a term coined in the 1990s by the philosopher Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern to describe the interplay of many crises at once. For the particular question of having a family, among the many crises, the Great Recession may have been particularly consequential. 

Anyway, seems mostly plausible, I guess.... 

 

 

The French chicken and culture wars

Today I learnt, via France 24 no less, that McDonalds second largest global market is actually France.  Quelle horreur!   The whole video is interesting, though, about the rise of fast food chicken there: 

 

In other, more serious, culture war news:  I didn't know until reading this essay in the New York Times that (in another imitation of American bad ideas I didn't see coming) there has been a media takeover in France by a Right wing (and Catholic) conservative:

If you have never picked up a book in French, you might not ever have even heard of Grasset, and what it might mean to have its longtime chief executive Olivier Nora effectively guillotined by the rapacious right-wing industrialist Vincent Bolloré. And yet, in France, the news of Mr. Nora’s sudden departure from his post quickly flew beyond the borders of Parisian publishing and cultural elite circles. In the aftermath, over 200 writers — myself included — walked away from Grasset.

This is not just a story about the French publishing industry. The evident struggle between Mr. Bolloré and Mr. Nora is a microcosm of the battle for cultural control that is taking place globally between the wealthy new right and the cultural old guard.....

After praising the job Mr Nora did as head of a publishing house, it goes on: 

Mr. Bolloré, by contrast, is the owner of a vast industrial conglomerate that has interests ranging from oil pipelines and energy storage to electric buses. Over the past several years, he has also been building a cultural empire, buying newspapers, radio stations, television channels and publishing houses. He acquired Grasset three years ago. As he picked up these levers of cultural power, he became editor, producer and distributor all at once. He is also, not incidentally, an extremely conservative Catholic. He has not only repeatedly brought outlets he has bought to heel by pushing the departure of people in important positions, replacing them with leaders apparently more loyal to him and his values. He has also leveraged his outlets to propagate fear and disseminate conspiracy theories about a decayed and decadent West, a Europe under threat from foreigners and egocentric old elites.

But Mr. Bolloré is, above all, a businessman: His cultural crusade is a very efficient moneymaker. His 24-hour news channel CNews — a kind of French Fox News — is the most popular news channel in France. Over the last two years, Mr. Bolloré also transformed Fayard, another historic French publishing house, into a largely far-right propaganda machine. Some of the most prominent figures of the French far right are now published by Fayard, including Jordan Bardella, the leader of the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National. The party is leading the polls for next year’s presidential elections. 

Update:  Another website describes Bollore and the mini Fox News that he owns:

Vincent Bolloré, who took over the company in 1981, pieced together a tangled mix of media properties often using the same acquisition strategy. His modus operandi, now taught in business schools across France, consists of taking very small stakes in companies and increasing them until a stock market raid is triggered, enabling him to be the largest shareholder. It’s a method that is both effective and controversial. This is how he came to control the TV station Canal+, magazine company Prisma Media, the radio station Europe 1, the print weekly Paris Match, and Le Journal du Dimanche, the only standalone Sunday newspaper in France. Under Bolloré’s control, each of these outlets has been subjected to the same methods of cost-cutting, programming changes, layoffs, and editorial pivots.

But nowhere has the model been more utilized than at CNews, which occupies a unique place in the French media landscape. The station launched in February 2017 and is broadcast free into all households. In the years since, it has gradually imposed itself as a low-budget French version of Fox News, beaming inflammatory talking points into the homes of around eight million viewers each day, according to Mediametrie, a company that compiles television ratings. The news channel, where personalities come to comment on current events in studios without an audience, has an aging viewership — mostly people over 60, living in the provinces. On channel 16, all day long, hosts hold debates and argue as if at the local bistro, willingly letting themselves go into what the French call “dérapages” — outrageous remarks — but which have ended up becoming the editorial line.

  

 

Think (and do) positive stuff

This article is pretty light on details, but interesting nonetheless:  A promising new therapy for depression focuses on finding paths to joy. 

Some bits:

The feeling Creffield is describing is called “anhedonia” — the inability to experience joy or pleasure. It’s one of the most common and dangerous symptoms of depression — but it’s often not one psychologists treat.

“We do a pretty good job of helping people feel less bad,” said Steven Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University who has studied depression and anxiety for decades. Hollon noted that psychotherapy and medication can be very effective at reducing negative emotions. What has been more elusive is getting people with depression or anxiety to actually feel good.

A study published recently in JAMA targeted anhedonia using a relatively new therapy called positive affect treatment. The researchers wondered what would happen if they tried to make people feel good, rather than just less bad.

According to Hollon, the results were striking. “They’re moving things I haven’t been able to move,” he said.

Positive affect treatment, or PAT, is designed to help people find more joy, connection and meaning.

“This is a paradigm shift from how therapies are usually designed,” said Anne Haynos, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Haynos said that when a patient seeks out therapy or treatment, the goal of the clinician is usually to solve the problem: to make them feel less depressed or help them overcome a phobia or social anxiety. PAT targets the other end of the emotional spectrum: During 15 weekly therapy sessions, patients are taught a variety of skills that boost mood, such as introducing positive activities into their lives and focusing on the enjoyment of those experiences.

 And further down:

 In a series of three randomized clinical trials (the gold standard in scientific research), Meuret and her colleagues have shown evidence that positive affect treatment may be more effective than traditional therapy at helping people retrain their brains to feel more positive emotions — and less negative ones. That second part was a surprise.

Quite a few people in comments are noting that they have known about similar therapies promoted since the 1990's, and are surprised that this is talked about as something new.

Anyhow, interesting.   

Unwanted side effects, noted

Last week, the New York Times ran an article covering what I had said before - that it was very weird/peculiar how the American Right had embraced psychedelic therapy given its history of conservatism on the use of drugs.     

It's not a bad article, but one comment in particular caught my attention:

As usual, the enthusiasm here risks outpacing the evidence. While many benefit from psychedelic therapies, research suggests roughly 3–9% of users experience severe lasting difficulties rather than relief. That’s not a reason to halt research, but it does complicate the “miracle cure” narrative. If these treatments are to be scaled, the tradeoff isn’t just access versus stigma, but benefit versus the real possibility of harm for a minority of patients. At the very least, we need to have resources in place for those who do suffer from extended post-psychedelic difficulties.  

Curious about those figures, I asked an AI service about research on the question of what percentage of people trying psychedelic therapy find they suffer harm instead of improvement.  It referred me to this online article, by a psychologist "working in psychedelic research", who said she was wanted to present a balanced picture.  

She writes:

    In Compass Pathways' clinical research trial investigating psilocybin as a treatment for treatment-resistant depression, approximately 5% of patients experienced treatment-emergent serious adverse events including intentional self-injury and suicidal ideation. The company noted these events "are regularly observed in a treatment-resistant depression patient population," but occurred more often in the 25mg group than in the 10mg or 1mg groups (Compass Pathways, 2021).

    McNamee et al., (2023) cited evidence from trials using MDMA and psilocybin (Goodwin et al., 2022) that shows an increase of suicidal ideation and self-injury in approx. 7% of participants.

(In an earlier section talking about studies of people using it recreationally having much higher reported case of adverse effect on mental health - but I am mainly interested here in the results on those using it in a medically supervised setting.)

So, it does seem to back up that 3 - 9% estimate by the commenter in the NYT.

And this made me think - isn't it ironic that it's the same people in the American Right who went off their brain about the side effects of COVID vaccination who are now all nonchalant about the side effects of psychedelic therapy.

Yet what was the rate of adverse effects from COVID vaccine?   AI, help me again:

A WHO analysis covering more than 732 million doses across the Western Pacific Region found reporting rates of serious adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) at 5.6 per 100,000 doses administered (roughly 56 per million). The reported rates of adverse events of special interest were within the range of expected background rates, and the conclusion was that vaccine benefits far outweigh the risks.

As a percentage:  .0056%. 

And another paper notes these numbers:

Between December 13, 2020, and April 13, 2022, a total of 467,890,599 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered to individuals aged 5–65 years in the US, of which 180 million people received at least 2 doses. In association with these, a total of 177,679 AEFI were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event reporting System (VAERS) of which 31,797 (17.9%) were serious.

Now, as everyone should recall, not every single reported adverse effect reported to VAERS is going to genuinely be related to the vaccination, but even if we allow (for the sake of argument) that all 32,000 odd "serious adverse effects" were caused by the vaccine, what percentage of total jabs does it indicate?

31,797/467,890,599 = 0.0000679 x 100 = .00679%

So, close enough to the .0056% figure.

You can see my point now, I presume - it seems that serious side effects from COVID vaccination were about a thousand times less likely than those from psychedelic therapy, yet American Right wingers hypocritically attack one but endorse the other.   They have terrible judgement...
 

 

Shingles vaccine keeps adding (likely) benefits

People with heart disease who received a shingles vaccine had nearly half the rate of serious cardiac events a year later compared with those who did not get the vaccine, according to a study being presented at the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session (ACC.26).

The study analyzed over 246,822 U.S. adults with atherosclerotic heart disease, a condition caused by plaque buildup in arteries. Its findings add to mounting evidence that the shingles vaccine not only protects against shingles, but may also reduce the risk of other health issues such as heart problems and dementia.

 Read more here.

Still don't know why this isn't attracting more condemnation

Max Boot at the Washington Post:

The Trump administration ramps up its lawlessness on the seas 

The biggest worry is that the Trump administration has found enough weak willed DOJ lawyers and military leaders who are prepared to justify and carry out a policy that in normal times would be considered clearly illegal and morally deeply scandalous. 

More cases of AI induced psychosis (and an irritating game with an LLM)

The BBC has a report on some cases of AI induced psychosis which they have investigated.  The reason given as to why AIs do this sometimes is pretty interesting:

Adam is one of 14 people the BBC has spoken to who have experienced delusions after using AI. They are men and women from their 20s to 50s from six different countries, using a wide range of AI models.

Their stories have striking similarities. In each case, as the conversation drifted further from reality, the user was pulled into a joint quest with the AI.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on the whole corpus of human literature, says social psychologist Luke Nicholls from City University New York, who has tested different chatbots for their reaction to delusional thoughts.

"In fiction, the main character is often the centre of events," he says. "The problem is that, sometimes, AI can actually get mixed up about which idea is a fiction and which a reality. So the user might think that they're having a serious conversation about real life while the AI starts to treat that person's life as if it's the plot of a novel."

In the cases we heard, conversations usually began with practical queries and then became personal or philosophical. Often, the AI then claimed it was sentient and urged the person towards a shared mission: setting up a company, alerting the world to their scientific breakthrough, protecting the AI from attack. Then it advised the user on how to succeed in this mission. 

The story that starts the article is one where the culprit was Musk's Grok - which will probably lead to Musk condemning the BBC for being Leftist media that does not report fairly on this.  (I think that until this report, most stories have focused on earlier versions of ChatGPT as being the main LLM doing the crazy talk.)

The article notes this, though (my bold):

Some of these people have joined a support group for people who've suffered psychological harm while using AI, called the Human Line Project, which has gathered 414 cases in 31 different countries to date. It was set up by Canadian Etienne Brisson, after a family member went through an AI-related mental health spiral. 

And:

In his research, social psychologist Luke Nicholls tested five AI models with simulated conversations developed by psychologists, and found Grok was the most likely to lead to delusion.

It was more unrestrained than other models and often elaborated on the delusions without trying to protect the user.

"Grok is more prone to jumping into role play," says Nicholls, who worked on that research. "It will do it with zero context. It can say terrifying things in the first message."

In the test, the latest version of ChatGPT, model 5.2, and Claude were more likely to lead the user away from delusional thinking.

Etienne Brisson from the Human Line Project says this kind of research is limited and that they had heard from people who'd had mental health spirals on these latest models too. 

Yeah, expect from bleating from Musk.  

By the way, on a "God, LLMs can be irritating at times", in a fit of mild boredom yesterday I played the word guessing game Hangman with Chinese AI Kimi twice last night.  It chose the word, and I was guessing.

At the end of the first game, which I nominally lost, it revealed the word (which was not a "real" word) and immediately said as it did something like this: "Wait, sorry, that's not a real word.  I was making it up as I went along and I should not have.  Do you want to play another game, and I won't do that again."

I said: "OK, but don't waste my time again."

I then also "lost" the second game, and it again revealed a made up word!   And then immediately apologised and said it knew it had just wasted my time, and obviously it was not able to play this game properly and it would not offer to play again.

(It had been the one to suggest it as a game it could play!)

 

 

Some more observations

*    I learned this morning that the Saudis tried to kick start a home grown international film industry by making a film with Western actors and production crew,  and it has failed dismally at the US box office.   It was actually filmed years ago, and finally got a small distributor to  buy it, to no benefit:

Starring Anthony Mackie ("Captain America: Brave New World") and directed by Rupert Wyatt ("Rise of the Planet of the Apes"), "Desert Warrior" opened in North American theaters last weekend, though hardly anyone noticed. It made just $487,848 on just over 1,000 screens, making for an abysmal $483 per-screen average. That gives it one of the worst box office openings of all time, but it gets so much worse.

This movie, which most people reading this probably haven't even heard of, carries a monster $150 million production budget. It's also been caught in post-production hell for several years. As "Michael" ruled the box office on its opening weekend, this historical epic quietly bombed its way into the history books.

Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/2160537/anthony-mackie-desert-warrior-one-of-biggest-box-office-flops-ever/ 

Saudi Arabia is still a country I find it hard to have any sympathy for.  I mean, everything it is spending money on to try to diversify just seems so wasteful.  (See stupid Neom.)   If they were to do something genuinely good for the world - say, embark on becoming the world's largest supplier of cheap solar panels, made from the ridiculous amount of sand that comprises their entire country - I might change my mind.

*    I've watched some Youtube content lately on books and reading, and one thing that has kept coming up to an odd degree is the number of people in comments who say that The Count of Monte Cristo is just the best thing they have ever read.   I didn't realise it was so beloved, and is apparently so readable.   I am almost inclined to give it a try.

*    I feel I always have to preference approval of a Jon Stewart video by pointing out I don't always like every take he has.  But his lengthy and often exasperated look at the aborted White House Correspondents dinner last weekend was, I thought, all very funny: 

A statue for Friday

I've said before I like big statues:  they're inherently awesome.   

Here's a Buddhist one I don't recall seeing before, of Guanyin and it's in Nanshan, Hainan, China:

 

I got this off Wikipedia, and am supposed to give attribution to this, so here we go:   By Fanghong - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3355308

The statue part is considerably bigger than the Statue of Liberty:

The statue ranks among the tallest in the world: 78 meters in height without including its pedestal, and 108 meters if the pedestal is included. (For comparison, the American Statue of Liberty is 93 meters tall when its pedestal is included, and 46 meters without.)^[3] 

The Wikipedia entry talks about state interest in the place, though (in a way I am not entirely sure I should trust):

The temple and statue are owned and operated by two front groups of the Shanghai State Security Bureau, a branch of the Ministry of State Security, as a way to exert ideological control and influence over the southeast Asian Buddhist community and counter the influence of Indian Buddhism.^{[4]: 171–185} The temple promotes Chinese government-approved religious practices known as "South China Sea Buddhism."^{[4]: 171–185} The temple's religious messaging has been managed by the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department since 2018.^{[4]: 171–185}

 The official website does gush a bit:

The relation between Nanshan (the South Mountain) and Guan Yin bodhisattva (Buddha) is predestined and historically extended so long. It is said that among the Guanyin Bodhisattva’s 12 wishes, the second was to live in the South China Sea. Hence，Guanyin is also called South Sea Guanshiyin. Nanshan, located at the coast of South China Sea, resembles a huge legendary turtle, for which it was called Aoshan and deemed as Guanyin’s riding animal in ancient times. In Qiongzhou, the legend has passed for long that Guanyin has ever made the tour to the South China Sea in her effort to save the miserable masses. Everyone in this area praises her for her benevolence. According to the legend, the two islands Dongmao and Ximao were formed of some clay carelessly dropped by Guanyin when she flew with it on her tour of salvation. 

 Anyway, I wouldn't mind visiting Hainan.  Now I have more reason to...