The problem with daughters

I hadn't heard of this before:  from the start of an article at The Economist, before it slips behind the paywall:

 DAUGHTERS HAVE long been linked with divorce. Several studies conducted in America since the 1980s provide strong evidence that a couple’s first-born being a girl increases the likelihood of their subsequently splitting up. At the time, the researchers involved speculated that this was an expression of “son preference”, a phenomenon which, in its most extreme form, manifests itself as the selective abortion or infanticide of female offspring.

Work published in the Economic Journal, however, debunks that particular idea. In “Daughters and Divorce”, Jan Kabatek of the University of Melbourne and David Ribar of Georgia State University, in Atlanta, confirm that having a female first-born does indeed increase the risk of that child’s parents divorcing, in both America and the Netherlands. But, unlike previous work, their study also looked at the effect of the girl’s age. It found that “daughter-divorce” risk emerges only in a first-born girl’s teenage years (see chart). Before they reach the age of 12, daughters are no more linked to couples splitting up than sons are. “If fathers were really more likely to take off because they preferred sons, surely they wouldn’t wait 13 years to do so,” reasons Dr Kabatek. Instead, he argues, the fact that the risk is so age-specific requires a different explanation, namely that parents quarrel more over the upbringing of teenage daughters than of teenage sons.

And, sorry to blame daughters in my post title...

A Jim Holt review that considers future lives

Oh!  I haven't read anything by Jim Holt for ages - he was a favourite writer on science matters for a long time.

But on a whim I checked New York Review today, and he has an interesting review entitled The Power of Catastrophic Thinking.    Actually it's a review of a cheery sounding book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by one Toby Ord.

The basic question the book and review addresses is the extent to which we should value future lives, and at what cost to our current lives if some sacrifice is needed.  All very relevant to the question of climate change, which does get a mention, with this somewhat surprising statement:

Could global warming cause unrecoverable collapse or even human extinction? Here too, Ord’s prognosis, though dire, is not so dire as you might expect. On our present course, climate change will wreak global havoc for generations and drive many nonhuman species to extinction. But it is unlikely to wipe out humanity entirely. Even in the extreme case where global temperatures rise by as much as 20 degrees centigrade, there will still be enough habitable land mass, fresh water, and agricultural output to sustain at least a miserable remnant of us. 

Gee.  I would not have thought global average of 20 degrees would barely be survivable unless you were living in a airconditioned dome anywhere on the planet - but I really don't know what the daily temperature at the poles in summer or winter would be like under those conditions.    

He does point out the runaway global warming idea next:

There is, however, at least one scenario in which climate change might indeed spell the end of human life and civilization. Called the “runaway greenhouse effect,” this could arise—in theory—from an amplifying feedback loop in which heat generates water vapor (a potent greenhouse gas) and water vapor in turn traps heat. Such a feedback loop might raise the earth’s temperature by hundreds of degrees, boiling off all the oceans. (“Something like this probably happened on Venus,” Ord tells us.) The runaway greenhouse effect would be fatal to most life on earth, including humans. But is it likely? Evidence from past geological eras, when the carbon content of the atmosphere was much higher than it is today, suggests not. In Ord’s summation, “It is probably physically impossible for our actions to produce the catastrophe—but we aren’t sure.”

Anyway, the rest of the review goes into the more philosophical and analytical issues with thinking about the value of future lives, and Holt points out some of the flaws in certain ways of thinking about it.

It's a bit too complicated to do it justice here, but here is a key section:

Ord cites both kinds of reasons for valuing humanity’s future. He acknowledges that there are difficulties with the utilitarian account, particularly when considerations of the quantity of future people are balanced against the quality of their lives. But he seems more comfortable when he doffs his utilitarian hat and puts on a Platonic one instead. What really moves him is humanity’s promise for achievement—for exploring the entire cosmos and suffusing it with value. If we and our potential descendants are the only rational beings in the universe—a distinct possibility, so far as we know—then, he writes, “responsibility for the history of the universe is entirely on us.” Once we have reduced our existential risks enough to back off from the acute danger we’re currently in—the Precipice—he encourages us to undertake what he calls “the Long Reflection” on what is the best kind of future for humanity: a reflection that, he hopes, will “deliver a verdict that stands the test of eternity.”

I guess I have always felt a similar way:  and if you are keen on an Omega Point idea, it makes it particularly important that humanity doesn't stupidly kill itself, just in case it's the only way it can be reached.

But if this is the sort of thing that interests you - just go read the whole review article (set up an account to be able to read it for free).

Good fat news

Big news for a weight loss drug:

One third (35%) of people who took a new drug for treating obesity lost more than one-fifth (greater than or equal to 20%) of their total body weight, according to a major global study involving UCL researchers.  ...

Professor Batterham (UCL Medicine) said: "The findings of this study represent a major breakthrough for improving the health of people with obesity. Three quarters (75%) of people who received semaglutide 2.4mg lost more than 10% of their body weight and more than one-third lost more than 20%. No other drug has come close to producing this level of weight loss—this really is a gamechanger. For the first time, people can achieve through drugs what was only possible through weight-loss surgery."

I wonder if it has side effects that mean it won't be used as a general diet pill.

Good anti-Trump news

Axios reports:

Prosecutors in Georgia have launched an investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results, including a phone call with the state's top elections official in which the former president asked to "find" enough votes to declare he won Georgia.

Driving the news: The Fulton County District Attorney's office on Wednesday sent letters to a number of state officials — including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was on the other end of the call — asking them to preserve any documents related to Trump's efforts, DA spokesperson Jeff DiSantis confirmed.

Also good news:

Donald Trump’s ban from the social media platform Twitter is going to stick even if he runs for the White House again – and even if he won again, a senior executive said on Wednesday.

Reason for optimism, reason for pessimism

First, the Washington Post notes that the (presumably) soon to leave this world Rush Limbaugh has a really ageing audience anyway: 

Rush Limbaugh, the most successful talk-radio host in history, is ailing. And so is the medium he helped revolutionize over the past 30 years.

Faced with aging and shrinking audiences, competition from newer technologies and financial problems for the biggest station owners, talk radio is in decline — both as a business and a political force. Once a leading platform for popularizing conservative candidates and policies, talk radio is on the verge of becoming background noise, drowned out by a cacophony of voices on podcasts, cable TV and social media.....

But conservative talk radio’s foremost problem isn’t so much how many people are listening as who.

The audience that grew up with Limbaugh is now quite gray, largely people 65 and older. Fewer than 8 percent of those who regularly listen to talk radio (including public radio) are 25 to 54, according Nielsen’s research.

But, on a more pessimistic note, it looks like Fox News had a strategy meeting and decided that the way to grab back the pro-Trumpers from Newsmax and OANN is to run hard on one of the worst bits of Trump popularism - encouraging rabid fear of illegal immigration: 

 

It's really dispicable the way they try to personalise all politics in such a nasty, fear based, fashion.  It's not just "policy X will be bad for the country in this way"; it's always "the Left hates you and despises you and wants to punish you and you should be scared."

Yes, the greatest Zoom meeting accident in history

It's perfection - like it was scripted for one of those mockumentary style TV shows (like The Office) where the reaction to stupid things happening is just deadpan and no one laughs. 

Texas lawyer trapped by cat filter on Zoom call, informs judge he is not a cat

 

And maybe that's how the problems with China end?

Pandemics aren't great for birth rates, it would seem:

The number of newborn babies in China registered with the police fell by double digits last year, a sign that the birthrate is continuing to decline and worsening demographic pressures in the rapidly aging nation.

There were a total of 10.04 million babies registered with the government in 2020, 14.8% lower than in 2019, according to data released by the Ministry of Public Security on Monday.

Haven't I read that birth rates in Western countries have dropped off last year as well, even though some early thoughts were that bored couples in lockdown would resort to sex to pass the time?   Yes -  I have read that.  Perhaps they didn't take into account the dis-incentivising effect of being in lockdown with children you already have?    

Back to China:  how big is the expected demographic decline, even without COVID assistance?  Very big:

The population of China is projected to decline from 1.4 billion in 2017 to 732 million by 2100, a drop of 48%, according to a new report published in the medical journal The Lancet and authored by University of Washington School of Medicine Professor Stein Emil Vollset and 23 coauthors. The number of people of working age in China is expected to plummet. The report forecasts a decline of 64% for China's population aged 20–24 years. That is the prime age for a country’s military, the authors note.

Prison watching

I'm late to the party (it's up to season 5, I see), but I have started watching Inside the World's Toughest Prisons on Netflix.    

I've only watched a few episodes, and so far I have learned:

*  Columbian prisoners may be tough thugs, but they take very good care of their hair grooming;

*  Greenland is trying the "college group house" style of prison running which seems popular in Scandinavia, and it seems every prisoner is in there for some offence related to hashish.  

*  Papua New Guinea treats its remand prisoners to accommodation worse than my local RSPCA gives to its stray dogs.   

Each episode is pretty formulaic, I suppose, and there is something of a "meta" fascination with how the prisoners (and guards) seem to ignore the cameraman, and don't seem to "act up" to being filmed.  (OK, maybe sometimes they do.  But it is sort of hard to tell.)

I still say that the best extended documentary series about an exotic prison, and how it is run, is Happy Jail, about the (formerly) all singing and dancing prison in Cebu.   I strongly recommended it here at the time, and have told people about it in person, but have yet to meet someone else who has actually watched it. My powers of persuasion are obviously low.

A seasonal produce observation

The white nectarines this year are exceptionally sweet and cheap.

I read someone somewhere saying that all stone fruit was better this year because the farmers had to pick later, and riper, fruit due to labour shortages.  I wonder if that's true.

The insightful rabbit man

For a young guy with an obsession with rabbits, that Noah Smith sure writes well and insightfully on a variety of topics.   Here's the latest example:  The End of the War on Islam. 

An extract:

Some of America’s 16-year panic over Islam was due to terror attacks, but some was due to the fact that the American Right simply panics about stuff. It is what they do. Communism, crime, rap lyrics, the War on Christmas, Dungeons and Dragons, video games — always just one thing after another. Some of the panics are much more justifiable than others, but the supply of panic is roughly fixed.

Readers on the Right are not going to like hearing this, but some portion of the panic over Islam was not really about terror attacks, but a displaced fear of the demographic and cultural changes that were taking place in America in the 2000s and early 2010s. The conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a Muslim was obviously just a stand-in for the fact that he was part African. The fear of Sharia Law probably had something to do with the decline of Christianity in the U.S. The years of 2001-2016 were years of high immigration and rapid demographic change, and many people on the Right were afraid of that, and it was easy to associate those things with a “foreign”-feeling religion like Islam, especially given the backdrop of the War on Terror.

But the Trump Era changed this in two ways. First of all, it gave people on the Right permission to express explicit worries about one of the things they were really scared of — immigration. Instead of using the foreign-seeming-ness of Islam as a proxy, conservatives were free to point the finger at actual foreigners. Second, the Trump Era saw the reignition of America’s biggest and most fundamental and most divisive social conflict — the Black-White Conflict. Given a choice to fight about the Black-White Conflict vs. anything else, Americans will choose the former. With Antifa and BLM to worry about, who needs ISIS?

This change will be durable, I think. The GOP has decisively shifted away from the party of Bush to the party of Trump, and Trumpism has decisively shifted away from attacking Islam to attacking BLM, wokeness, Antifa, anarchism, rioters, etc. etc.

He doesn't actually mention it, but surely much of the Right's panic supply has moved onto China generically as its target.  (Which is not to say that China is not a cause for concern in many respects, of course.)  

 

Phrenology noted

I don't even know the details of the "Quillette supports phrenology" controversy, but I still found this funny:

 

Timbo in love

Martian origins

There's a paper at arXiv talking about how there is reason to suspect Mars may have actually been more hospitable to the creation of life than Earth.  (I assumed that life originating on Mars was more of a long shot theory.)   The abstract:

An origin of Earth life on Mars would resolve significant inconsistencies between the inferred history of life and Earth's geologic history. Life as we know it utilizes amino acids, nucleic acids, and lipids for the metabolic, informational, and compartment-forming subsystems of a cell. Such building blocks may have formed simultaneously from cyanosulfidic chemical precursors in a planetary surface scenario involving ultraviolet light, wet-dry cycling, and volcanism. However, early Earth was a water world, and the timing of the rise of oxygen on Earth is inconsistent with final fixation of the genetic code in response to oxidative stress. A cyanosulfidic origin of life could have taken place on Mars via photoredox chemistry, facilitated by orders of magnitude more sub-aerial crust than early Earth, and an earlier transition to oxidative conditions. Meteoritic bombardment may have generated transient habitable environments and ejected and transferred life to Earth. The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover offers an unprecedented opportunity to confirm or refute evidence consistent with a cyanosulfidic origin of life on Mars, search for evidence of ancient life, and constrain the evolution of Mars' oxidation state over time. We should seek to prove or refute a Martian origin for life on Earth alongside other possibilities.

You can download the paper from here.

Only joking

The conservative Rights sympathy for Putin continues its merry way, no matter how many of his enemies end up poisoned or in jail.

Trump supporters in denial

On the one hand, this article by William Saletan at Slate gives cause for some optimism about the majority of the American population not being nuts:

Donald Trump might be in denial about who won the 2020 election, but his pollsters aren’t. Two of them have performed autopsies on his defeat, and those autopsies are now public. One of his pollsters, John McLaughlin, published an analysis in Newsmax in November. Another report, written by consultant Tony Fabrizio, was posted on Monday by Politico. Neither pollster blames the former president, but their numbers tell the story: Trump destroyed himself.

The autopsies identified two reasons why Trump should have won. First, based on self-identification, the 2020 electorate was significantly more Republican than the 2016 electorate. Second, public satisfaction with the economy favored the incumbent. Both pollsters found that people who voted in 2020 thought Trump would handle the economy better than Joe Biden would. McLaughlin’s analysis, based on his post-election survey of people who voted in 2020, noted that 61 percent of these voters said they were better off than they had been four years earlier. Despite this, Trump managed to lose one-third of the 61 percent. “Fully 20% of all voters thought they were better off today than four years ago and did not vote for President Trump,” McLaughlin wrote.

Fabrizio analyzed exit polls from 10 battleground states Trump had won in 2016. Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas stayed with Trump in 2020; Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin flipped to Biden. Collectively, in the 10 states, Fabrizio computed a “massive swing” against Trump among independents (by 17 to 19 percentage points) and a similar shift among college-educated white voters (by 14 to 18 points). Likewise, in his national sample, McLaughlin found that Biden won moderates, 62 percent to 36 percent.

Trump repelled these voters, even those who were happy with the economy. In McLaughlin’s national sample, Biden was viewed more favorably than Trump. Among voters who disliked both candidates, the pollster noted, “dislike of Trump was more dominant.” Three-quarters of Biden voters cited character or personality traits as reasons for their voting decisions, and the reasons they gave were “mostly anti-Trump,” McLaughlin wrote. Seven percent of respondents said they had voted mostly “against Biden,” but 19 percent said they had voted mostly “against Trump.”

Fabrizio found similar results. In the battleground states, voters said by a four-point margin that Biden wasn’t “honest and trustworthy.” Trump’s deficit on the same question was much bigger: 14 to 18 points. The exit polls also indicated that Trump inspired millions of new voters to turn out, either in person or by mail, to get rid of him. Fabrizio noted that collectively, in the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump outpolled Biden among people who had voted in 2016. What killed Trump were the new voters. Biden won them by 14 points in the five decisive states.

On the other hand - it's depressing to know that the Trump cultist base is still in complete denial that their cult leader is unpopular and that this alone accounts for his loss.

I would guess that this is not going to be cured until top GOP figures bite the bullet and start telling the base, that they fear, some home truths.

The extent of the GOP takeover by the cultists in denial is discussed in this article from Daily Kos, which starts:

It’s becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as the reality that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection. If the Republicans dare admit any of it is real, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.

That’s become especially self-evident among Republicans at the state and local levels throughout the country in the weeks since the Jan. 6 riot. As Hunter recently explained, the GOP at the ground level not only has fully embraced the conspiracist rot that Trump promoted after he lost, but it also has become even more openly extreme than it was before the election. Liz Cheney is now finding that out.

It ends with the point that (sorry) I keep coming back to, but it is so obviously true:

This is what Barack Obama adroitly describes as America’s “epistemological crisis.” It will not stop happening as long as there are news organs that traffic in falsehoods as a profit model, and who devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week of broadcast time to using those lies to coach half of the nation on how and why to hate the other half—and politicians gleefully profiting from it as well.

New York steam explained

So Google made me watch an interesting video about the steam heating system in New York and other American cities: 

I would never have guessed that such systems had been around for so long, and were so extensive.   I wonder what other international cities have something similar?  

But yeah, that asbestos aspect is a very unattractive feature....

Another in the series - late movie reviews

This time:  American Hustle, from 2013.

I knew it had good reviews at the time, but yeah - it's a terrifically made, very enjoyable, film.   

My son thought it covered a lot of similar ground to Martin Scorsese, but I said no, it's better than Scorsese because the women aren't just background characters.  (True, the wife in Casino was important, but most Scorsese films are exceptionally man-centric.  You could say that's just because of the gangster/mafia material he is interested in, but I recently re-watched his early black comedy After Hours for the first time since I had viewed it in the 1980's, and what struck me was how all of the women were nuts.  The entire theme of he movie seemed to be a warning to men to not trust any women, no matter how nice they might seem initially - most are actually nuts and can get you into diabolical trouble.)

Anyway, back to Hustle.  My God, isn't Amy Adams versatile?   Of course, Christian Bale is too, but Amy Adams just seems to have chosen a wider range of roles than him.   And Louis CK - a competent actor who I now can't see without thinking "weirdo chronic masturbater".  (Or is that spelt with "..or"?)

It's really hard to fault the movie - although, of course, it could have been written with a little less swearing.  But I forgive it.

 

Friday philosophy - hedonism

So, I learned from this article in Philosophy Now that the there was a group in ancient India who considered hedonism as a legitimate life philosophy, just as there was in Greece:

By the time of the Cārvākas, around the time of the Buddha (6th-5th C. BCE), the six orthodox schools of Hinduism had already considered valid means of knowledge and the good life extensively. One of a number of heterodox schools of Indian philosophy, the Cārvākas rejected almost all of the standard Hindu means of knowledge, were staunch materialists, and considered pleasure as the goal of a good life, denying the pursuit of the kind of liberation from desire advocated by Hindus and Buddhists alike. For many schools of Indian philosophy, the self or soul persists through many lifetimes, and how subsequent lives manifest is contingent on one’s actions (this is karma), and liberation from this cycle of rebirth is attained through enlightenment, which frequently involves the denial of one’s desires. The Cārvākas, however, don’t seem preoccupied with breaking the cycle of rebirth: they are very much rooted in the present, and in the sensations of the here and now.

While there is only fragmentary records of this school, they were real party boys (and pretty irresponsible sounding ones at that):

... according to the Sarvasiddhantasamgraha, the Cārvākas maintained that “the enjoyment of heaven lies in eating delicious food, keeping company of young women, using fine clothes, perfumes, garlands, [and] sandal paste.” And the Cārvākas didn’t let anything stop them from enjoying life, as illustrated by an earlier claim in the Sarvadarsanasamgraha that “while life remains let a man live happily, let him feed on ghee even though he runs into debt.” They also vehemently decried the abstinence typical of Hindu ascetics, arguing that “chastity and other such ordinances are laid down by clever weaklings”, instead preferring to argue for the sensual indulgences mentioned. This dedication to indulgence was not to be hampered by the social conventions of mainstream Hindu society, such as debt or devotion or belief in karma, and it is also consistent with their views on knowledge. If the only means of experiencing the world is through sense perception, and the highest good is pleasure, then it makes sense that the Cārvākas would consider pleasure a phenomenon of the senses.

The article then goes on to contrast with the more refined Epicurean view of hedonism, which is much more reasonable sounding:

For the Epicureans, the height of pleasure was the absence of pain. Some may find it strange to say that out of all pleasures, the greatest isn’t an indulgence in or an achievement of something, but rather an absence of something. Even among hedonists, such a view is a radical one. But the Epicureans leave little room for ambiguity in their view. As Epicurus himself argues in the Letter :

“It is not drinking bouts and continuous partying and enjoying boys and women, or consuming fish and the other dainties of an extravagant table, which produce the pleasant life, but sober calculation which searches out the reasons for every choice and avoidance and drives out the opinions which are the source of the greatest turmoil for men’s souls.”

Despite such a refined view of pleasure Epicurus was able to develop a theory based on it. Epicurus’ prescription for the good life outlined in the Letter famously includes the maxim that ‘the limit of good things is easy to achieve completely, and easy to provide’. The hedonist who views pleasure as constant indulgence in partying and other sensual objects, an Epicurean would argue, is setting himself up for disappointment when these things are no longer within his means. However, the hedonist who understands that the greatest pleasure is freedom from pain seeks contentment in a frugal and simple life, and will always be ready to cope with life’s struggles. Indeed, it seems clear that the Epicureans would certainly be proponents of attitudinal rather than sensory pleasures. They definitely don’t seem susceptible to the criticisms of hedonism we noted. Despite Cicero’s claim that the pursuit of pleasure is ‘totally unworthy of a human being’, it’s not entirely clear how the ‘sober calculation’ and ‘lack of pain in the body’ that the Epicureans strive for is any less worthy a pursuit than any of the virtues advocated by, say, the followers of Aristotle.

So, it all depends on how you define "pleasure" as to whether the pursuit of it sounds reasonable, or not. 

I have probably read about the Epicureans' modest form of hedonism before, but forgotten about it.

Getting to the bottom (ha ha)

This was an unexpected headline:

China rolls out anal swab coronavirus test, saying it’s more accurate than throat method 

Months-long lockdowns. Entire city populations herded through the streets for mandatory testing. The people of China could be forgiven for thinking they had seen it all during the coronavirus pandemic.

But now they face a new indignity: the addition of anal swabs — yes, you read that right — to the testing regimen for those in quarantine.

Chinese state media outlets introduced the new protocol in recent days, prompting widespread discussion and some outrage. Some Chinese doctors say the science is there. Recovering patients, they say, have continued to test positive through samples from the lower digestive tract days after nasal and throat swabs came back negative.

Yet for many, it seemed a step too far in government intrusions after a year and counting of a dignity-eroding pandemic.

“Everyone involved will be so embarrassed,” one user in Guang­dong province said Wednesday on ­Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. In a Weibo poll, 80 percent of respondents said they “could not accept” the invasive method.

It can't be that hard to get the patient to do the swab themselves, surely?  

And anyone who has had to insert cream for a haemorrhoid would know it's not going to kill you to have something thin inserted.   I mean, it's not going to be like a prostate digital exam, surely.

Are the Chinese particularly culturally sensitive to examination of their body?   I have wondered about this - the Japanese are so relaxed about public and family nudity in the right context (bathing, mainly), yet go across to China and my impression is they seem to have a cultural shyness about bodies.

Very unclear how this will progress

While this sounds very bad:

 there are several likely complicating factors yet to unfold:

*  more "Trump in private" disclosures to come (making no difference to Trumpists, but still influential on establishment Republicans who don't want to see a return of Trump influence?)  

*  Trump's personal legal problems coming to a head in the next year 

*  possible international tensions coming to a head, and (hopefully) being capably handled by Biden (perhaps a bit of Chinese or North Korean military sabre rattling?)

*  some key right wing media figures having their own problems removing them from influence.  Alex Jones is now facing several defamation law suits which may well harm his career;  Rush Limbaugh will die one day.   On the other hand, Fox News though is going harder right to try to get back audience from OANN and Newsmax.   

 I think it is impossible to overemphasis the damaging role of Fox News and the rest of the RW media universe in restoring "normal" politics again in the US.