This long Twitter thread from a researcher is partly about the object-level question of mask effectiveness, but more interesting to me as a look at the meta-level question of how to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention that’s poorly suited to randomized controlled trials.
https://twitter.com/trishgreenhalgh/status/1414294003479089154
Traumatic insemination, also known as hypodermic insemination, is the mating practice in some species of invertebrates in which the male pierces the female’s abdomen with his aedeagus and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity (hemocoel). The sperm diffuse through the female’s hemolymph, reaching the ovaries and resulting in fertilization.
The process is detrimental to the female’s health. It creates an open wound which impairs the female until it heals, and is susceptible to infection. The injection of sperm and ejaculatory fluids into the hemocoel can also trigger an immune reaction in the female.
Sam Altman has one of the best-thought-out plans I’ve seen for keeping our society viable over the next decades in the face of technological change from AI. Recommended. Very interested to hear other people’s thoughts.
My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.
We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world–companies and land–in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth. Doing so can make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains.
This is a really interesting argument:
The media has panned Donald Trump’s First Amendment lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube: “sure to fail,” “as stupid as you’d think,” “ridiculous.” Mr. Trump’s complaint omits important precedents, facts and claims for relief, but there’s a strong case to be made that social-media censorship violates the Constitution. If his lawyers do better in court than in their initial filing, Mr. Trump can win.
It’s true that the First Amendment ordinarily applies to the government rather than private companies. But the central claim in Mr. Trump’s class-action lawsuit—that the defendants should be treated as state actors and are bound by the First Amendment when they engage in selective political censorship—has precedent to back it up. Their censorship constitutes state action because the government granted them immunity from legal liability, threatened to punish them if they allow disfavored speech, and colluded with them in choosing targets for censorship.
The Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973) that the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” As Jed Rubenfeld and I argued in these pages in January, that’s what Congress did by passing Section 230(c)(2) of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech and immunizes them from state liability if they do so.
The high court has repeatedly held that federal immunity pre-empting state law can transform a private party’s conduct into state action subject to constitutional scrutiny. In Railway Employees’ Department v. Hanson (1956), the justices found state action in union-employer agreements because Congress had passed a statute immunizing such agreements from liability under state law. In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association (1989), the court again found state action in a private company’s conduct because federal laws immunized companies from liability if they tested employees for drugs.
Prominent congressional Democrats have also issued severe, explicit and repeated threats to retaliate against social-media giants if they fail to remove “hate speech” and “misinformation” that the government can’t directly censor under the Constitution. These threats have worked.
A thoughtful essay from Freddie deBoer.
The obsession with microaggressions is a perfect example of the desperate need for materialism in racial politics. Yes, it’s unfortunate if people say or do things that subtly indicate racial superiority or otherwise embody imperfect racial attitudes, such as making oblique references to stereotypes. But human beings have profoundly limited control over their minute social interactions. (Among other things, we literally do not choose the things we say.) Policy cannot effectively stop microaggressions, even if we implemented heavy-handed laws to attempt to do so, and I certainly hope we won’t. Meanwhile a mile or two from me a bunch of Black children live in Brownsville in environmentally unhealthy housing, go hungry every night, and are regularly exposed to violence and crime. The notion that we should spend so much time talking about microaggressions and so little talking how to improve the conditions of those children can only happen when the racial discourse has been hijacked by a bunch of cossetted affluent college-educated journalists and academics who are as far removed from Brownsville as they are from Mars, whatever their race. And this is another key element of materialist approaches to race: recognizing that we in fact have limited political and social and argumentative resources, that we must prioritize, that we will never achieve a perfect racial environment and that our efforts to do so are counterproductive. We have to decide what comes first, and what should come first is making sure people are safe, fed, housed, clothed, educated, and cared for. After that we can worry more about being nice to each other.
[…]
The current “racial awakening” illustrates the contrast very well. If your antiracism is concerned with symbols, feelings, words, ideas, then you can celebrate. We’ve had an absolute revolution in race relations. If on the other hand you care about the material dimensions of race and the concrete reality of the average Black life, then the whole thing is a joke. How has the past year of yelling about race materially changed the life of a Black family struggling to keep the lights on in their impoverished community in the Mississippi river delta? What for them has changed?
Cult-style brainwashing? Not really a thing. As a matter of fact, cults are barely able to keep anyone around — nearly all members leave within two years. In retrospect, the whole cult hysteria of the 60s and 70s — including support from courts of kidnapping voluntary, adult cult members for “deprogramming” — seems to have been more or less a moral panic. Yet another reminder that moral panics are very dangerous and hard to resist (I can think of at least one going on currently, and another in the past few years).
Research from Gwern, who I completely trust to present the research thoroughly and dispassionately.
Psychologists searched in vain for a prevalence of “authoritarian personalities,” neurotic fears, repressed anger, high anxiety, religious obsession, personality disorders, deviant needs, and other mental pathologies. They likewise failed to find alienation, strained relationships, and poor social skills. In nearly all respects – economically, socially, psychologically – the typical cult converts tested out normal. Moreover, nearly all those who left cults after weeks, months, or even years of membership showed no sign of physical, mental, or social harm. Normal background and circumstances, normal personalities and relationships, and a normal subsequent life – this was the “profile” of the typical cultist.
…Numerous studies of cult recruitment, conversion, and retention found no evidence of “brainwashing.” The Moonies and other new religious movements did indeed devote tremendous energy to outreach and persuasion, but they employed conventional methods and enjoyed very limited success. In the most comprehensive study to date, Eileen Barker (1984) could find no evidence that Moonie recruits were ever kidnapped, confined, or coerced (though it was true that some anti-cult “deprogrammers” kidnapped and restrained converts so as to “rescue” them from the movement). Seminar participants were not deprived of sleep; the food was “no worse than that in most college residences;” the lectures were “no more trance-inducing than those given everyday” at many colleges; and there was very little chanting, no drugs or alcohol, and little that could be termed “frenzy” or “ecstatic” experience (Barker 1984). People were free to leave, and leave they did – in droves.
Barker’s comprehensive enumeration showed that among the relatively modest number of recruits who went so far as to attend two-day retreats (claimed to be Moonies’ most effective means of “brainwashing”), fewer than 25% joined the group for more than a week, and only 5% remained full-time members 1 year later. Among the larger numbers who visited a Moonie centre, not 1 in 200 remained in the movement 2 years later. With failure rates exceeding 99.5%, it comes as no surprise that full-time Moonie membership in the U.S. never exceeded a few thousand. And this was one of the most successful cults of the era! Once researchers began checking, rather than simply repeating the numbers claimed by the groups, defectors, or journalists, they discovered dismal retention rates in nearly all groups. [For more on the prevalence and process of cult defection, see Wight (1987) and Bromley (1988).] By the mid-1980s, researchers had so thoroughly discredited “brainwashing” theories that both the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the American Sociological Association agreed to add their names to an amicus brief denouncing the theory in court (Richardson 1985).
(quoted section is from Iannaccone 2003, “The Market for Martyrs”)
Thought-provoking essay on the limitations and weaknesses of current attempts to reimagine American history.
Whatever birthday it chooses to commemorate, origins-obsessed history faces a debilitating intellectual problem: it cannot explain historical change. A triumphant celebration of 1776 as the basis of American freedom stumbles right out of the gate—it cannot describe how this splendid new republic quickly became the largest slave society in the Western Hemisphere. A history that draws a straight line forward from 1619, meanwhile, cannot explain how that same American slave society was shattered at the peak of its wealth and power—a process of emancipation whose rapidity, violence, and radicalism have been rivaled only by the Haitian Revolution. This approach to the past, as the scholar Steven Hahn has written, risks becoming a “history without history,” deaf to shifts in power both loud and quiet. Thus it offers no way to understand either the fall of Richmond in 1865 or its symbolic echo in 2020, when an antiracist coalition emerged whose cultural and institutional strength reflects undeniable changes in American society. The 1619 Project may help explain the “forces that led to the election of Donald Trump,” as the Times executive editor Dean Baquet described its mission, but it cannot fathom the forces that led to Trump’s defeat—let alone its own Pulitzer Prize.
The political limits of origins-centered history are just as striking. The theorist Wendy Brown once observed that at the end of the twentieth century liberals and Marxists alike had begun to lose faith in the future. Collectively, she wrote, left-leaning intellectuals had come to reject “a historiography bound to a notion of progress,” but had “coined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going.” This predicament, Brown argued, could only be understood as a kind of trauma, an “ungrievable loss.” On the liberal left, it expressed itself in a new “moralizing discourse” that surrendered the promise of universal emancipation, while replacing a fight for the future with an intense focus on the past. The defining feature of this line of thought, she wrote, was an effort to hold “history responsible, even morally culpable, at the same time as it evinces a disbelief in history as a teleological force.”
…
An older tradition of left-wing American politics had much less trouble with this kind of historical thinking. Frederick Douglass plays little part in the 1619 Project, but he knew better than most that historical narratives matter in political struggles: they shape our sense of the terrain under our feet and the horizon in front of us; they frame our vision of what is possible. Douglass’s famous speech about the Fourth of July came at a low ebb of the abolitionist movement, just after the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, appeared to remove the question of slavery from national politics for good. That made it all the more important for him to build an argument from history, drawing on the experience of the Revolution to insist that the United States belonged not to “the timid and the prudent,” but to insurgents who “preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage.” Douglass’s fight against antebellum timidity took courage and purpose from an understanding of history in which radical change was possible.
Moreover, Douglass questioned the wisdom of any historical politics that undermined the prospects for present-day change. This did not imply a purely instrumental contempt for the past, in the manner of the Trumpian right, but rather reflected a clear-eyed determination to treat history not as scripture or DNA, but as a site of struggle. “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future,” Douglass declared. “To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time.”
Solomonoff induction is a principled formalization of Occam’s razor, inductive reasoning, the scientific method, prior-free Bayesian reasoning, and other deep parts of thinking and computing. I found it absolutely fascinating and quite readable. Geared toward an audience that has at least a vague idea of what Turing Machines and the halting problem are.
An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction – LessWrong
That…sounds like some seriously sci fi medicine. I’m a bit skeptical that the AP has this quite right; I want to look more into the actual mechanisms here.
Doctors are reporting improved survival in men with advanced prostate cancer from an experimental drug that delivers radiation directly to tumor cells.
Few such drugs are approved now, but the approach may become a new way to treat patients with other hard-to-reach or inoperable cancers.
The study tested an emerging class of medicine called radiopharmaceuticals, drugs that deliver radiation directly to cancer cells. The drug in this case is a molecule that contains two parts: a tracker and a cancer-killing payload.
Trillions of these molecules hunt down cancer cells, latching onto protein receptors on the cell membrane. The payload emits radiation, which hits the tumor cells within its range.
“You can treat tumors that you cannot see. Anywhere the drug can go, the drug can reach tumor cells,” said Dr. Frank Lin, who had no role in the study but heads a division at the National Cancer Institute that helps develop such medicine.
Foucault’s thinking had an enormous impact on me in the 1990s when I was getting a degree in philosophy, and shaped a lot of my later thinking about performance as Bacchanalia and the creation of ruptured spaces through chaos. I’ve felt a bit disillusioned with him in recent years because of how his work has been used in critical theory. It’s very good to be reminded that Foucault can’t actually be pinned down as a mascot for any particular political agenda. “I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard . . . : as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, etc.”
How We Forgot Foucault – American Affairs Journal
via Ross Douthat’s interesting “How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right“
