Apropos of nothing much - Gray on Hayek and Keynes

John Gray is usually interesting, if sometimes obviously wrong.   I just stumbled across a piece he wrote in 2015 which gives some brief but interesting biographical details and analysis about Hayek (what he got right and wrong.) 

Unpleasant twits

One of the participants at Catallaxy threads calls himself "Percy Popinjay": in the same tradition, I suppose, of others there who go under names like "Confused Old Misfit" or "Knuckeldragger":  the attempted ironic humour doesn't work as their comments show it's an accurate description.

I am continually gobsmacked at how so many people who comment there do not realise what deeply unpleasant, viciously intolerant and arrogant personalities they have on display.  Here's Percy, talking about his time at the voting booth in Sydney yesterday, handing out how to vote cards for Australian Conservatives:

People continually confused the AusCons HTV with that of the Gliberals. I ended up having to change my script to “Conservatives, they’re not the liberals”, or “Conservatives, the sensible alternative to the liberals”.

About the closest I came to being abused was when some ol’ smartarse had a good look at the HTV and then dramatically recoiled, stating, “I’m not a conservative”. Had to bite my tongue so as not to reply with “so, you’re an unthinking brainwashed imbecile”.

That smarmy ol’ mayor also made an appearance at the booth. The greenfilth HTV distributors were exactly what I expected – smug hypocritcal middle aged white boomer scumbags.

The name and the attitude puts me very much in mind of Monty Python dealing with "upper class twits".  Any of these could be our man Percy:

I think the Australian Conservatives only ran in the Upper House, and I don't think any figures are available for them yet.  (Nor for David Leyonhjelm's run either?)   I may well be amused when the voting numbers are out, to see if twit Percy's efforts counted for much. 

Update:  Percy himself has read the post and thinks I don't get that his name is his attempt at a "pisstake".  He's not very bright.  

Earth instruction manual sent to the Moon

What a neat idea.  Having a lunar lifeboat repository in case the planet gets smashed or nukes itself into near oblivion has always appealed.  Now, we have the start of one:

A 30-million page library is heading to the moon to help preserve human civilization.

The massive archive is aboard Israel's Beresheet spacecraft. 

From the article itself:

Included in the Lunar Library’s more than 200 gigabytes of data are the entire English-language version of Wikipedia; tens of thousands of fiction and nonfiction books; a collection of textbooks; and a guide to 5,000 languages along with 1.5 billion sample translations between them.

All of that information is etched onto 25 stacked nickel disks, each just 40 microns (about 1/600th of an inch) thick.

Since people of the far future will presumably not have a DVD player handy, and might not speak any language now in use, the top of the Lunar Library’s disc is engraved with tiny images of books and other documents explaining human linguistics, along with instructions about how to read the library beneath. The introductory layers can easily be viewed when magnified 100 times under a simple microscope. Then it’s up to our crafty descendants to build the player so they can read the rest of the Library....

The Lunar Library is shielded by a protective layer and insulation, as well as the structure of the Beresheet lander itself. All of that should help safeguard it from micrometeorites that strike the moon on a regular basis. Even so, it may not have anything like the 6-billion-year lifetime that Spivack is targeting. “These objects will not survive for a billion years un-degraded, but they might be intact and unburied after 10 million years, maybe 50 million years,” Davies said.

Me and podcasts; and a movie genesis

My flu-y type sickness made me rest all day Friday, and yesterday, but I am starting to feel better, thanks for asking.

Lying around the house led to me dropping back into Podbean, a podcast app that sees as good as any other.   I had used it to listen to some podcasts on the flight to Singapore and back at Christmas, given that Scoot has absolutely no in-flight entertainment system.  Ah, who needs it on an 8 hour flight if you have a phone with a battery that lasts that long? 

Even though there are so many podcasts available, on lots of topics which I find potentially interesting, I think I have mentioned before that I have trouble getting into this internet phenomena.  Not doing anything other than listening to one feels wrong, and I'm not sure why.   I guess it's like listening to talk radio - I never sit down to just listen to it live, but it's perfectly fine while shaving and ironing and getting ready for work;  or driving.  Yes, a lot of my Radio National listening has happened while driving.  

So, lying in bed and trying to listen to one just doesn't work for me.  I also don't much enjoy ones where there are too many people interjecting - I tried listening to How Did This Get Made, in which a room full of people, including the quite funny Jason Mantzoukas, take apart movies which raise the titular question.   It was too much, for too long.  (It did convince me, though, that the 2018 movie Skyscraper is a real dud in all respects.)  

But then, I had to go pick up my daughter last night and was listening to The Good Place podcast, episode one (it's hosted by the actor who plays the devil Sean in the series) and it quite enjoyable.  It was more just a protracted one on one interview, and it was fine, especially as I was driving at the time.

I also tried the Scriptnotes podcast, by two genuine Hollywood screenwriters with significant credits to their name.   The content seems very directed towards fellow writers, and it sounded like their industry advice was practical and likely very helpful for those trying to get a foot in the door in that business. Not sure that I am going to listen to them that much, but I did listen to an old one they did in which they analysed Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Which led to me to the transcripts of the meeting between Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan in which the ideas for the movie were fleshed out from an outline created by Lucas.

Maybe I had read before, in 2013, that the transcripts were available online - it did attract some attention that year.  But I don't recall going and reading them before.

It's all very satisfying, listening in, as it were, as to who came up with what idea.   It's clear that an awful lot of what ended up in Temple of Doom came from those sessions too.  (Essentially, they had too many ideas for one movie.)   

Some of it sounds kind of racist by today's standards, and some a bit weird.  George suggesting that Marion was only 12 when she fell in love with Indy, for example:

Lucas: He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
Kasdan: And he was forty-two.
Lucas: He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
Spielberg: She had better be older.

 Anyway, the full transcripts go for many, many pages, and I didn't read them all.

Still, it's nice to know they are there.

Is there a mild flu going around?

..because if there is, it sure feels like I have it.   Light headed; feet and calves a bit achy even though I have done no special exercise; nose not blocked but some drip in the back of the throat; and tired.  Stomach not feeling great either.

Not just a cold, I think.  I am going to bed.

What a country...

Sometimes, you have to wonder why there isn't an immigration crisis involving people wanting to get out of the USA, when you read stories like this:

Antivaxxers used to mainly be hippies, but put a dumb Wingnut President in charge, and you get governors happy to announce they gave their kids chickenpox:

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) turned heads this week after saying on a radio show that he had intentionally tried to get his children infected with chickenpox and that he did not support the state’s mandatory chickenpox vaccine.

Bevin, appearing on a radio station in the state, Talk 104.1, said that every one of his nine children had come down with chickenpox — on purpose.

“We found a neighbor that had it,” the first-term governor said. “And I went and made sure every one of my kids was exposed to it and they got it. And they had it as children, they were miserable for a few days, and they all turned out fine.”

As many in comments say, his kids will really thank him when they come down with shingles later in life.  

Then guns.   The figures here for the number of kids killed by them are just extraordinary:

Results of the study, just published in the American Journal of Medicine, show that from 1999 to 2017, 38,942 firearm-related deaths occurred in 5 to 18 year olds. These included 6,464 deaths in children between the ages of 5 to 14 years old (average of 340 deaths per year), and 32,478 deaths in children between the ages of 15 to 18 years old (average of 2,050 deaths per year).

"It is sobering that in 2017, there were 144 police officers who died in the line of duty and about 1,000 active duty military throughout the world who died, whereas 2,462 school-age children were killed by firearms," said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., senior author, first Sir Richard Doll Professor, and senior academic advisor in FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine.

The whining Right doesn't want to own its past commentary

Big God theory

At The Conversation, a discussion of the historical evolution of the idea of a "Big God":

When you think of religion, you probably think of a god who rewards the good and punishes the wicked. But the idea of morally concerned gods is by no means universal. Social scientists have long known that small-scale traditional societies – the kind missionaries used to dismiss as “pagan” – envisaged a spirit world that cared little about the morality of human behaviour. Their concern was less about whether humans behaved nicely towards one another and more about whether they carried out their obligations to the spirits and displayed suitable deference to them.

Nevertheless, the world religions we know today, and their myriad variants, either demand belief in all-seeing punitive deities or at least postulate some kind of broader mechanism – such as karma – for rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. In recent years, researchers have debated how and why these moralising religions came into being....

One popular theory has argued that moralising gods were necessary for the rise of large-scale societies. Small societies, so the argument goes, were like fish bowls. It was almost impossible to engage in antisocial behaviour without being caught and punished – whether by acts of collective violence, retaliation or long-term reputational damage and risk of ostracism. But as societies grew larger and interactions between relative strangers became more commonplace, would-be transgressors could hope to evade detection under the cloak of anonymity. For cooperation to be possible under such conditions, some system of surveillance was required.

What better than to come up with a supernatural “eye in the sky” – a god who can see inside people’s minds and issue punishments and rewards accordingly. Believing in such a god might make people think twice about stealing or reneging on deals, even in relatively anonymous interactions. Maybe it would also increase trust among traders.

So, looking at a big data base, their conclusions thus far:

One of the earliest questions we’re testing is whether morally concerned deities drove the rise of complex societies. We analysed data on 414 societies from 30 world regions, using 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of supernatural enforcement of moral norms to get to the bottom of the matter. New research we’ve just published in the journal Nature reveals that moralising gods come later than many people thought, well after the sharpest rises in social complexity in world history. In other words, gods who care about whether we are good or bad did not drive the initial rise of civilisations – but came later.  

I'm not sure how Jewish belief fits into that - I didn't think their society was all complicated at the relevant time.

Taking it into the future:   seems to me there's a good case to be made for Google being the new Big God - certainly it's all seeing.   If only it had a way of punishing people, we'd have the Real Thing.

Back to cannabis and psychosis

A new study that found that daily use of cannabis (or use of high potency cannabis) greatly increased risk of "first time" psychosis.   Hardly seems surprising, really, but it's another reminder of how medical understanding can take a long time to catch up with lay persons' real life observations:

Dr. Robin Murray, senior author of the study and a professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London, said that "15 years ago nobody thought cannabis increased the risk for psychosis." 

 

Only gradually has evidence come out and shown that to be true, he said. Gradually, too, other explanations have been chipped away, he said: For example, some people might say that perhaps a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia led some people to use cannabis and this is the reason for higher rates of psychosis. But a study from Finland rules this out, said Murray: "There may be some genetic component but it's not the major reason."

Not for the first time, I wonder out loud:  if governments are going to legalise it, why can't they also regulate for potency too?  If you can't (for good reason) hold a liquor licence and pour spirits into the open mouths of customers due to it being a dangerous way to consume alcohol, why can't you legislate for the potency and likely dosage of cannabis too?

The big picture on population

From Club Troppo, a fascinating review of a new book arguing that the rate of population growth is peaking much sooner than expected, with large implications both good and bad:

Even before the arrival of Bricker and Ibbitson’s new work, the population pessimists were overstating their claims. The UN forecasts that population will peak at around 11 billion in 2100 then settle into gentle decline.

But Bricker and Ibbitson assert that the UN has got it wrong. Their investigations suggest that fertility rates are falling much more rapidly around the globe than the UN thinks.

They point out that populations are already declining in two dozen countries – by 2050 it will be three dozen. Japan’s population is expected to fall from 127 million to 95 million by 2053! They say that global population will peak at about 9 billion or less between 2040 and 2060 – a lower and earlier peak than the UN predicts. They also say population post-peak will decline much more quickly that conventionally thought.

Their conclusions are based on published statistics and a series of interviews on every continent supplemented by recent survey data about planned family size.

It has long been known that increasing per capita incomes, economic development and urbanisation led to declining fertility. But in developing countries, fertility rate declines appear to be running well ahead of what could be expected on the basis of their stage of economic development. Why? The answer is female education and information technology. Female school enrolment is rising rapidly and access to information is exploding. Women are being better educated younger, both formally and informally, than ever before. As a result, they are choosing to have fewer babies.

 As for the (rather topical) question of Muslims out-populating the West:

The authors dismiss claims that religion and culture dominate other drivers of fertility rates. Claims that, for example, Muslim countries, have higher fertility rates than elsewhere due to religious factors can’t be sustained. The 2010-15 fertility rates for Iran, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Bahrain and Kuwait are all at replacement (2.1) or below and are probably continuing the fall. Developed Muslim countries have low fertility rates just like non-Muslim developed countries. They also argue that immigrates adopt their new homes’ birth rates in one or, at most, two generations.

 The best thing about a reduced population peak?   It's environmental, of course:

Bricker and Ibbitson point out that “if the UN’s low variant [population growth] model played out, relative emissions would decline by 10 percent by 2055 and 35 percent by 2100.”

 The not-so-great aspect is the unclear economic and geopolitical effect:

Population decline is likely to lead to geopolitical instability. Bricker and Ibbitson says that, following its disastrous one child policy and its prohibition of immigration, China’s population could be, astonishingly, as low as 650 million by 2100 if its fertility rates fall in line with those in Hong Kong and Singapore at 1.0 or lower. The associated changes in economic and military power will redefine strategic priorities.

Economic growth will be slower. AI, rather than being a threat to jobs, may come just in time to complement a shrinking workforce. The economic and social consequences are too complex to predict.

 The reviewer makes some comments following the post which are helpful too:

1. This new book is not an example of ‘apocryphal thinking’. The authors, at no point, argue that this is an end-of-the-world scenario. If one had to reduce the book to one sentence it is: ‘fertility rates are lower than is widely thought, are falling faster and will get much lower sooner than the vast majority think – including politicians, economics, bureaucrats, environmentalists and even, apparently, the majority of demographers – to nominate a few key groups’.

2. Yes, it’s ‘old news’ that fertility rates are below replacement in many countries. The new news is that: that club is growing more rapidly than thought; the falls, after below replacement levels are reached, are continuing, and; falls in developing countries are suddenly getting ahead of the economic development curve. Again, to reduce the book’s story to one short sentence: ‘fertility rates are lower than you think’ – to which some big say ‘big deal’ and they’re right but in the non-sarcastic sense.

This seems an important book, and it was only published in February this year.  I wonder why I haven't noticed it reviewed elsewhere...

Control confusion

That Seattle Times article on the problems with Boeing's certification of the 737 Max reads as a classic of investigative reporting.

If I am understanding it correctly, however, what remains unclear s why the MCAS system was triggered at all during both flights, shortly after takeoff.  (The report says it is only meant to be activated "in extreme circumstances far outside the normal flight envelope".)   Was the single sensor it relied on faulty on both planes? 

The whole rush to get the plane certified, and the FAA's delegation of a large part of that task back to Boeing, all paints self regulation in a poor light, yet again.  

Finishing up on The Alienist

My final impressions after watching the last two episodes of The Alienist last night.

Strangely, the second last episode was really good (with a very unpleasant sense of what it would be like to be hiding while a gory murder goes on next to you) and hinted at a thrilling final episode - but it was not to be.   The last instalment was somewhat confusing, poorly explained and no where near the highlight of the series - did something get lost in the editing?

That said, I never got tired of the expensive, high quality production values:  from costumes to extras, it was about as far as you can get from the underpopulated, cheap feel of any Australian movie or series, whether it be set in modern or historic period.  I also think it fair to say that I grew to like all of the characters in the crime fighting team.  Dakota Fanning (the screaming girl in Spielberg's War of the Worlds) was good, but so were all of the men, really.

It wasn't perfect, as I have explained in past posts, but enjoyable nonetheless.  I'm pleased to see a sequel is being made with the same cast.

Update:  I agree with a lot of what is said in this review of the last episode, or series, and particularly with the comment that lists all of the unexplained things that happened the episode.  I'm glad it wasn't just me - it genuinely was a case of a terrible lack of explanation of what was going on.  Nonetheless, I still feel more generous towards the show than perhaps it deserves.

So, how's Sinclair Davidson's ship of fools going?

Same old, same old.   No care, no responsibility.

After not personally saying anything about the collectivist hatred of Muslims for months (or years) on the blog where he can block or ban people, but chooses not to in 99% of cases, it seems Sinclair gets motivated to make a "hey folks, your take on Islam is over the top" post when the content of his threads might get more attention due to current events.   And, of course, he gets told by 99% of people who comment there that he's being a Left wing idiot for saying so.

I can't be bothered spending the time collecting examples of the support for Fraser Anning's "well, Muslims getting shot up by nutters is what you get when you allow them to migrate here" line that are on Catallaxy.   Let's just say, the collectivist derision and panic attacks over the religion are there just as much as it was before - with the  addition by most that of course, they don't want individual Muslims shot up by a nutter, that's really bad.  Huh.

Would be good if the Human Rights Commission were reading the blog though, and asking for a "please explain".   I half suspect, though, that Sinclair wants to be a martyr for free speech.   Good, let him be.

Anyway, on its other favourite theme, climate change denial, we get this inane piece by an economist sacked by the IPA for being too extreme in his take on Islam:

Apart from the ridiculous take on the status of the science, what this with the "Forces of Evil"?    The version of this in The Spectator doesn't share the same headline.  Who came up with it at Catallaxy?

Sinclair Davidson seems to be very comfortable with the general wingnut vibe of Catallaxy now - in which (following the wingnut Right in America),  anything to the Centre or Left of them policy wise is beaten up into some grand, fake, crisis that will bring down the very continued existence of capitalism and the West.   It's Socialism!   It's Venezuela just around the corner!  It's..pathetic.

This demonisation of even vaguely progressive policies is a dangerous and ridiculous phenomena - and Sinclair Davidson should be pilloried for running a blog where the likes of his pals Kates and Moran get to act like the fact free hysterics that they are.

Nick Cohen on Brexit, and other stuff

Nick Cohen has a "pox on all their houses" column about Brexit and the deeply weird state of British politics.

And did you see what Steve Bannon (expert on everything, obviously) said?: Theresa May is ‘not terribly sophisticated’.

Which reminds me, there was this statement in the presence of Bannon too:

Trump supporter: "Never in my life did I think I'd like to see a dictator, but if there's going to be one, I want it to be trump"

 All completely normal...for a European proto-fascist state, circa 1930's.

Getting to the root of mental illness

The Atlantic has a review of a book Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illnes, (by Anne Harrington) and it's well worth reading. Let's take some extracts:

It follows that psychiatrists also cannot precisely predict for whom and under what conditions their treatments will work. That is why antipsychotic drugs are routinely prescribed to depressed people, for example, and antidepressants to people with anxiety disorders. Psychiatry remains an empirical discipline, its practitioners as dependent on their (and their colleagues’) experience to figure out what will be effective as Pliny Earle and his colleagues were. Little wonder that the history of such a field—reliant on the authority of scientific medicine even in the absence of scientific findings—is a record not only of promise and setback, but of hubris....

As Harrington ably documents, a series of fiascoes highlighted the profession’s continued inability to answer Clark Bell’s question. Among them was the 1973 vote by the American Psychiatric Association declaring that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. The obvious question—how scientific is a discipline that settles so momentous a problem at the ballot box?—was raised by the usual critics. This time, insurers and government bureaucrats joined in, wondering, often out loud, whether psychiatry warranted their confidence, and the money that went along with it.

The association’s response was to purge its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the Freudian theory that had led it to include homosexuality in the first place. When the third edition of the DSM came out, in 1980, its authors claimed that they had come up with an accurate list of mental illnesses: Shedding the preconceptions that had dominated previous taxonomies, they relied instead on atheoretical descriptions of symptoms. But as Harrington points out, they did have a theory—that mental illness was no more or less than a pathology of the brain. In claiming not to, she argues,

they were being disingenuous. They believed that biological … markers and causes would eventually be discovered for all the true mental disorders. They intended the new descriptive categories to be a prelude to the research that would discover them.

The DSM-3’s gesture at science proved sufficient to restore the reputation of the profession, but those discoveries never followed. Indeed, even as the DSM (now in its fifth edition) remains the backbone of clinical psychiatry—and becomes the everyday glossary of our psychic suffering—knowledge about the biology of the disorders it lists has proved so elusive that the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, in 2013, announced that it would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

I wonder if this review (and the book), is exaggerating a bit?   This part, for example:

The need to dispel widespread public doubt haunts another debacle that Harrington chronicles: the rise of the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness, especially depression. The idea was first advanced in the early 1950s, after scientists demonstrated the principles of chemical neurotransmission; it was supported by the discovery that consciousness-altering drugs such as LSD targeted serotonin and other neurotransmitters. The idea exploded into public view in the 1990s with the advent of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, antidepressants in particular. Harrington documents ad campaigns for Prozac and Zoloft that assured wary customers the new medications were not simply treating patients’ symptoms by altering their consciousness, as recreational drugs might. Instead, the medications were billed as repairing an underlying biological problem.

The strategy worked brilliantly in the marketplace. But there was a catch. “Ironically, just as the public was embracing the ‘serotonin imbalance’ theory of depression,” Harrington writes, “researchers were forming a new consensus” about the idea behind that theory: It was “deeply flawed and probably outright wrong.” Stymied, drug companies have for now abandoned attempts to find new treatments for mental illness, continuing to peddle the old ones with the same claims. And the news has yet to reach, or at any rate affect, consumers. At last count, more than 12 percent of Americans ages 12 and older were taking antidepressants. The chemical-imbalance theory, like the revamped DSM, may fail as science, but as rhetoric it has turned out to be a wild success.

I would have thought that the "chemical imbalance" theory still has significant, experimental support, even if flawed;  but I am not expert, just someone who finds the topic interesting.