…even when people seem to care about distant risks, it can feel like a half-hearted effort. During a Berkeley meeting of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller brought up the basic idea behind the hydrogen bomb. You would use a nuclear bomb to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction in some other substance, which would produce a bigger explosion than the nuke itself. The scientists got to work figuring out what substances could support such reactions, and found that they couldn’t rule out nitrogen-14. The air is 79% nitrogen-14. If a nuclear bomb produced nitrogen-14 fusion, it would ignite the atmosphere and turn the Earth into a miniature sun, killing everyone. They hurriedly convened a task force to work on the problem, and it reported back that neither nitrogen-14 nor a second candidate isotope, lithium-7, could support a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

They seem to have been moderately confident in these calculations. But there was enough uncertainty that, when the Trinity test produced a brighter fireball than expected, Manhattan Project administrator James Conant was “overcome with dread”, believing that atmospheric ignition had happened after all and the Earth had only seconds left. And later, the US detonated a bomb whose fuel was contaminated with lithium-7, the explosion was much bigger than expected, and some bystanders were killed. It turned out atomic bombs could initiate lithium-7 fusion after all! As Ord puts it, “of the two major thermonuclear calculations made that summer at Berkeley, they got one right and one wrong”. This doesn’t really seem like the kind of crazy anecdote you could tell in a civilization that was taking existential risk seriously enough.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/

…when dawn broke on Wednesday morning this week, and thousands of Democratic voices were crying out in anger that President Trump had not been more thoroughly repudiated by voters in the 2020 election, it felt a bit familiar. “This is the country we live in,” was the shocked refrain of the day.

And hey, I get it. It’s easy to look at Trump’s disastrous presidency — his indifference to the coronavirus pandemic, his abject racism, his disrespect for democracy and ostentatious flouting of the law — and see a disaster. It is frustrating that so many millions of Americans don’t see it the same way.

On the other hand, it’s really tiresome to see a lot of smart people appear shocked over and over by the same damn thing. It was one thing to be caught off-guard by Trump’s victory in 2016. It’s another thing entirely to be surprised again if he scores a near-miss four years later. There is a substantial, though not invincible, constituency for conservatism in this country. There was four years ago. There will be four years from now. This really is the country we live in.

[…]

Four years ago, after Trump won, there was a lot of talk in the press about “getting outside of our information bubbles.” Liberals hear one set of media voices, the thinking went, while conservatives hear another entirely. The smart thing to do was to make an effort to listen to voices you didn’t really want to hear.

I’m not sure many liberals actually did that. The New York Times’ occasional “Trump voters in this Ohio diner are still supporting Trump” stories may have become self-parodic through repetition, but they also represented a modest attempt to bring new perspectives to the paper’s readers. Those stories were routinely greeted with widespread derision and threats to cancel subscriptions from readers who, it seemed, believed they already understood the right-wing point-of-view well enough, thank you very much. An attempt by The New Yorker to do a live interview of Steve Bannon — yes, an odious figure — produced a near-revolt.

[…]Progressives who want to make genuine, positive change can probably be most effective by doing the hard and uncomfortable work of truly understanding the perspectives of people with differing views, rather than waving them off with stereotypes. We might even listen once in a while, instead of always trying to win the argument at Thanksgiving.

Otherwise, the shocks will probably keep coming every four years, no matter the election results. “This is the country we live in” shouldn’t be a statement of angry resignation — but the beginning of realistic discussion about how to make America better for everybody.

The liberal bubble never really popped

I think this is exactly right.

On the left, landslide predictions were everywhere — it’ll be a blowout for Biden, so many said. He’ll take Florida, maybe Texas! Then the Senate goes blue, too. Court-packing, here we come. On the right, a mirror image of this anticipation, incessantly encouraged by a president who goes well beyond the usual campaign spiel about confidence in the American people’s wisdom to assertions that any unfavorable report is a deliberate lie and the only explanation for his loss is the coordination of massive fraud by his enemies. “The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” a GOP county chair from North Carolina told Politico in June. “We’re thinking landslide.”

This pattern held in my personal acquaintance, too. Almost every Trump supporter I know thought their man would triumph by a comfortable margin, as did almost every Biden supporter. Map after map envisioned Electoral College totals north of 320, 330, 360! A friend of mine who works at a conservative consulting firm will likely win the office pool of election predictions because nearly all her Republican coworkers expected Trump to equal or improve upon his 2016 showing. The Democrats on my Twitter feed “just don’t even understand” how Trump got any votes. On a Republican Facebook friend’s profile, commenters are “stunned” Trump could lose (or convinced he’ll still pull off a victory somehow). And the QAnon folks … whew.

It’s as if American partisans have lost their political theory of mind. Their opponents’ interior life has become inaccessible, inexplicable. At the individual level, they might understand why their aunt voted Republican or their old roommate is a Democrat. But that exercise doesn’t seem to scale. Contemplating the nation, the politically mind-blind struggle to imagine how 70 million voters made a choice they find unfathomable.

https://theweek.com/articles/948405/americans-have-lost-political-theory-mind

This is a fascinating analysis of Trump’s success in reimagining America’s place in the world.

Blocked institutionally on so many fronts, Trump nonetheless scored his most extraordinary victory imaginatively—by inhabiting every crevice of his audience’s consciousness, pursuing them even in their nightmares, and eliciting from them their own share of norm-busting. The consequences were, in part, the obstacles and obstructions placed in the way of his haphazard and ineffectual policymaking. But it is hard to argue that every last bit of Trump’s occupation of the political imagination—an extraordinarily compliant act by those who feigned resistance to him—was required to incite the right response in the right amount. No president has ever combined so much institutional weakness with such imaginative romp.

In case after case, Trump’s mainstream opponents directed their ire more censoriously against policies in which Trump was simpler to forestall, while ignoring ones in which he was making substantial transformations. He controlled and owned them, luring them into drastic mistakes of principle and strategy, like their over-investment in the Mueller Report and the diversion of impeachment. But beyond any specific reaction, what was remarkable was how far Trump created a vast audience in the mainstream media and social media that made a life of hating him, while ignoring the causes of his reign in which they had participated, and the real alterations in American policy he was making, even as they were locked in embrace with him.

What has differed in real terms over four years is the shape of the debate about the American past and future. Closing the false “end of history” in 1989 and opening a new epoch, Trump oversaw a total renovation of our sense of where we stand and what Americans might do in response.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/11/09/how-trump-won/

Not yet peer-reviewed, but this is fantastic news if true. Present in 90% of all ocean samples!

Estimates of marine plastic stocks, a major threat to marine life (1), are far lower than expected from exponentially-increasing litter inputs, suggesting important loss factors (2, 3). These may involve microbial degradation, as the plastic-degrading polyethylene terephthalate enzyme (PETase) has been reported in marine microbial communities (4). An assessment of 416 metagenomes of planktonic communities across the global ocean identifies 68 oceanic PETase variants (oPETase) that evolved from ancestral enzymes degrading polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Twenty oPETases show predicted efficiencies comparable to those of laboratory-optimized PETases, suggesting strong selective pressures directing the evolution of these enzymes. We found oPETases in 90.1% of samples across all oceans and depths, particularly abundant at 1,000 m depth, with a strong dominance of Pseudomonadales containing putative highly-efficient oPETase variants in the dark ocean. Enzymatic degradation may be removing plastic from the marine environment while providing a carbon source for bathypelagic microbial communities.

Rapid Evolution of Plastic-degrading Enzymes Prevalent in the Global Ocean | bioRxiv

(via Gwern)

This highly thought-provoking essay by David Brooks asks some pretty tough questions about where we go from here in the wake of a precipitous decline in interpersonal (and institutional) trust.

Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution? I’m not so sure. If you think we’re going back to the America that used to be—with a single cohesive mainstream culture; with an agile, trusted central government; with a few mainstream media voices that police a coherent national conversation; with an interconnected, respected leadership class; with a set of dominant moral values based on mainline Protestantism or some other single ethic—then you’re not being realistic. I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things. We’re too beaten up for that. The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.

A model for that can be found in, of all places, Houston, Texas, one of the most diverse cities in America. At least 145 languages are spoken in the metro area. It has no real central downtown district, but, rather, a wide diversity of scattered downtowns and scattered economic and cultural hubs. As you drive across town you feel like you’re successively in Lagos, Hanoi, Mumbai, White Plains, Beverly Hills, Des Moines, and Mexico City. In each of these cultural zones, these islands of trust, there is a sense of vibrant activity and experimentation—and across the whole city there is an atmosphere of openness, and goodwill, and the American tendency to act and organize that Hofstadter discussed in The Age of Reform.

Not every place can or would want to be Houston—its cityscape is ugly, and I’m not a fan of its too-libertarian zoning policies—but in that rambling, scattershot city I see an image of how a hyper-diverse, and more trusting, American future might work.

America Is Having a Moral Convulsion

[This is honestly a pretty scary picture, and makes me give serious consideration to early-voting in person, which I really don’t want to do.]

“We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.”

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

The Election That Could Break America

I’ve been terrible about blogging. I place some of the blame on the WordPress app being broken on my tablet, and some on work getting extremely busy as we gear up for election season, but neither of those is a full excuse. Partly it’s because I’ve got too much stuff stacked up to be blogged, so I’m going to dump a bunch of it in one blog post and start fresh:

If you only read one, make it this one: plastic recycling is largely a scam created for good PR by the oil and plastic companies 🙁

If you only read two, this should probably be the second one: “Lawmakers briefed on U.S. intelligence have been practically begging the Trump administration to make public information about ongoing 2020 election meddling.”

Matt Taibi: the left is now the right.

Reddit: What is the most unique piece of art you’ve ever seen? Some truly amazing stuff in here.

Who can afford to have dyslexia?

How have climate models done over the years as we’ve gathered more real-world data? tl;dr — pretty damn well.

The heartbreak of orphaned implants

NYT: durational art and its relevance during the pandemic

There are plenty of older ones I never posted, but I’ll stop here for this post. Sorry, hope to be a bit better about posting in future (but I’ve said that before) 🙂

I think we need to discuss philosophy and learn different views, not refuse to talk to each other and perpetually believe we’re right. What happens when a field of engineers gets outcast from its ideas because it’s viewed as self-serving, or a religion changes its dogma to click bait? What happens when corporate mothers refuse to allow artists to express their own distinctive values? Scott Alexander is correct: if some features occur in naturally occurring systems all the time, then they are features of all desirable systems. It’s not a coincidence that a religion, an organism, a mob of lion fish, and a stock market all look alike; it’s just that as time goes on they all get more complicated and so they look more dissimilar. There are typically relatively featureless seed entities (an exploit, a convert, a founder) and then elaborations and permutations that go on according to the users who follow the ideas and put them to use. It’s not a coincidence that the big disasters of technology in the past couple centuries have been from relatively simple systems that someone can just launch some malicious exploit at and start getting new permutations to exploit without having to get new ideas first.

GPT-3 Creative Fiction · Gwern.net

Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming. A plurality (46%) of Americans believe that cancel culture “has gone too far.” About a quarter of Americans — many of whom are perhaps blissfully offline — said they didn’t know or had no opinion on the matter. When they are removed from the results, a clear majority — across almost every demographic category — says that cancel culture has gone too far.

Twenty-seven percent of voters said cancel culture had a somewhat positive or very positive impact on society, but almost half (49%) said it had a somewhat negative or very negative impact.

While online shaming may seem like a major preoccupation for the public if you spend a lot of time on Twitter, only 40% of voters say they have participated in cancel culture and only one in 10 say they participate “often.” It appears to be more of a liberal pursuit: Half of Democrats have shared their dislike of a public figure on social media after they did something objectionable, while only a third of Republicans say they have.

Age is one of the most reliable predictors of one’s views. Members of Generation Z are the most sympathetic to punishing people or institutions over offensive views, followed closely by Millennials, while GenXers and Baby Boomers have the strongest antipathy towards it. Cancel culture is driven by younger voters. A majority (55%) of voters 18-34 say they have taken part in cancel culture, while only about a third (32%) of voters over 65 say they have joined a social media pile-on. The age gap may partially explain why Ernest Owens, a millennial journalist, responded to Obama’s criticism with a New York Times op-ed that amounted to a column-length retort of “OK, boomer.”

Americans tune in to ‘cancel culture’ — and don’t like what they see – POLITICO