felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Why go to all the trouble? The question reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about Islamic Terrorism. A comment noticing
But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike me as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the inefficient and hard things.
got the response
Every-one thinks that they are the good guy. That isn't just a quirk of psychology, it is also a constraint.
People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good guy in their own head.
They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.
Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.
I think that Reddit Admins are just as much constrained by the need to be the good guy in their own head as Islamic Terrorists or any-one else. They must have a reason. They can cope with ignoring that it is fake reason that they manufactured themselves (humans are good at that kind of cope); but they must have one.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The sociological interest lies in watching people fail to join the dots.
The airplane safety card has a section on depressurization and the oxygen masks dropping down. "Put your own mask on first."
The danger being guarded against is that the parent takes too long trying to fit the mask on their frightened child and the parent passes out themselves. But how could that happen? Surely the parent soon suffers respiratory distress that forces them to fit their own mask before resuming helping their child? No. Hypoxia doesn't work like that. It is the carbon dioxide that makes you want to breath and the parent is breathing that out just fine. You can pass out from hypoxia with very little warning. I think this is now widely know, mostly due to the warning on the airplane safety card. The warning retains its place on the terse card because they want every-one to know.
There are other routes to this knowledge. Starving My Brain of Oxygen…For Safety?!? is two minute video on pilot training
Without proper training, pilots may not recognize the symptoms of hypoxia
More on the hypoxia training story I was looking for a much older video, which I think was an upload of a historical film of hypoxia training for pilots, with the low oxygen environment being some kind of Nissen hut. Hypoxia training isn't new.
There is a classic industrial accident involving a storage tank. Workman climbs down inside to do maintenance after the tank has been drained. But the residual chemicals have reacted with the oxygen, so he climbs down into a nitrogen atmosphere and dies. His safety buddy sees that he has passed out and, forgetting his training, climbs inside to do a heroic rescue. He also dies. Do you prefer Deaths from Environmental Hypoxia and Raised Carbon Dioxide or Confined Spaces Deadly Spaces: Preventing Confined Space Accidents? The YouTube video has a cute animation with a plumber with a mustache (Mario?) testing the air in the sewer. This also happens down on the farm Incident Investigation: Worker Loses Consciousness in Manure Spreader Tank | WorkSafeBC.
News coverage pretends to know none of this
In his Guardian interview, Smith said he feared that if Alabama carried out his execution it would put the new killing method of nitrogen hypoxia on the map.
The news coverage makes it seem that you can blunder into a confined space with little oxygen, gasp and struggle, and face the horrifying prospect that if you cannot escape in twenty-two minutes, then the lack of oxygen will kill you. And that this is a new hazard. I would feel more comfortable with agit-prop headlines screaming: Capitalism has been killing workers with nitrogen hypoxia for decades.
I'm feeling a little lost. Was the execution deliberately botched by pro-death-penalty activists trying to persuade the impalers and the crucifiers that the method is sufficiently cruel? Were the difficulties invented by anti-death-penalty activists trying to persuade us that the method is excessively cruel? I can tell that I'm being lied to, but not why or by whom or which details are false.
I can also see that the lying isn't being called out, perhaps not even noticed. The lies contradict well known stories about how the world works and how to avoid being killed by it, and yet people don't seem to join the dots and complain about the contradictions. That troubles me.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
That is an important distinction and worth up holding. The underlying issue is that the economic logic of copyright leads to an awkward compromise. Copyright terms long enough to liberate the Artist from the tyranny of the day job, but not so long as subject the Artist to the tyranny of the copyright office. (Where there's a hit, there's a rip!). Meanwhile the economic logic of trademarks suggests that they should be eternal.
The culture war aspect is that copyright eternalists love the term "intellectual property" because it fudges the distinction. They hope to use the unlimited life of trademarks as an argument for eternal copyright because they are "the same kind of thing".
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?
This strikes me as a Socratic question. Socrates used to ask Greeks questions that were slightly off. Being polite, the Greeks would refrain from nit-picking the questions, and try to answer. Then Socrates, being an arse-hole, would nit pick the answers. He would entangle his victims with his verbal dexterity, and skillfully obscure that bad answers were down-stream from bad questions.
There are many stories to tell about gravity. Kepler discovered that the planets moved in ellipses. Newton invented a theory of mechanics and new mathematics. Then he was able to respond to speculation that the ellipses were due to an inverse square law of attraction by filling in the details of what that actually meant, and solving the mathematical problems to demonstrate it.
Newton went further, spotting that gravity was "universal". By "universal" Newton meant that the attraction was not a specific property of the Sun (which would leave gravity on the surface of the Earth as a separate mystery) but was about all matter attracting all matter. So a cannon ball fired by an artillery man follows an elliptical trajectory with one focus at the center of the Earth. Obviously an artillery man uses the parabolic approximation (until the Paris gun in 1918. But (unless my memory is playing tricks on me) Newton had the idea that a cannon fired horizontally with sufficient force would cause the cannon ball to orbit the Earth, just as the moon orbits the Earth.
"Universal" creates a loose end. Jupiter is attracting Saturn and Saturn is attracting Jupiter. The Sun is not the only player in the solar system. That loose thread went unpulled until it was noticed that Jupiter was spiraling in. Jupiter's orbit was decaying and it would in time destroy the Earth. Then a French mathematician (LaPlace?) got stuck into the details. Jupiter and Saturn are nearly in a five to two orbital resonance. The difference frequency is about 800 years. Four hundred years of Jupiter spiraling in and Saturn spiraling out get followed by four hundred years of Jupiter spiraling out and Saturn spiraling in. Theory and accurate astronomical observation agreed; panic over.
Other stories include Halley working out the orbital parameters of a comet and predicting its return. That was a big deal at the time, because comets were traditionally seen as bad omens. If they simply moved in obedience to Kepler's Laws, they stopped being frightening. The comet returned as predicted and is now called Halley's Comet.
After Hershel discovered Uranus, both John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier puzzled over anomalies in the orbit of Uranus. Could there be another planet. Verrier go Johann Galle and Heinrich D'Arrest to look, and there was Neptune, discovered in 1846 by mathematics and Newton's Law of Gravitation. Verrier tried to repeat his success with anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, and inferred the existence of the planet Vulcan. Which wasn't there, leading eventually, by a circuitous route to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
For me, this raises questions about the word believe. I'm comfortable with three interpersonal meanings. Do I believe a person's testimony: did the things he tells me actually happen? Do I believe a person's promises: will he keep them? Do I believe a person's predictions: will they actually happen? But how does one extend the word believe to cover scientific theories? The tale that I've told goes well beyond my personal experience. The largest telescope that I have looked through is a twelve inch reflector. Maybe the story about Neptune is made up; I've seen Saturn, but neither Uranus nor Neptune. Interpersonal belief is at issue. Yet when we talk of belief in Newton's Law of Gravity, we assume the honesty of astronomers and are talking about something else. I'm not clear what. Contemplating the long narrative that I have sketched is valuable because it gives a concrete example of what successful science looks like. Trying to abstract a high level concept of "belief"? That is the kind of unmotivated abstraction that confuses things.
I'm comfortable with two meanings of the word true. One is person testimony (again). Did that actually happen? The other is in my books on mathematical logic. When is (A and B) true? When A is true, but not just A, B must also true. Add in first order logic, sets, and model theory and there is lots to read about. But neither notion of truth fits well with generalisations arising from empirical investigations.
The most promising notion of truth, appropriate to empirical investigation, that I have encountered is Probably Approximately Correct learning theory and Vapnik-Chervonenkis Dimension. Those are crap links. To get the basic idea, image rolling a d6 six hundred times to estimate the probabilities of each face. You get numbers like 100, 118, 95, 88, 114, 85 or like 112, 103, 93, 104, 99, 89. Empirical work always has a certain about of random slop and your empirical estimate will never be true in the sense of being exact. But what about being approximately true? Fix an unambitious goal for accuracy and ponder the probability of being approximately correct. Things can still go horribly wrong; an unlucky sequence of rolls could give you 600, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and your empirical work is not even approximately correct. But something interesting happens when the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension is finite. Fix your desired level of approximation and keep rolling the d6. The probability of not meeting your approximation goal eventually starts to decline exponentially with the number of rolls. Exponentially! You are on the route to the practical man's version of certain knowledge. Well, that is nice, but God is it complicated.
Asking "Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?" is doing the 20000 foot overview thing. It can only lead to vague waffle. On the other hand, waffling vaguely is rather fun; what am I actually proposing as a rival ideal? I think that interesting gap is between social science and "hard" science. There is a gap between "hard" science and ideal certainty, but it seems unimportant compared to the gap between social science and "hard" science. Let me give a concrete example of how little we know in social science so that you can see how well Newton's Law of Gravity compares.
Think about Laffer Curve effects. Here are four theories.
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The Laffer Curve is bunk. If the government increases income tax from 40 pence in the pound to 83 pence in the pound, that will increase revenue. Revenue will probably double.
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Rich businessmen are trapped by their commitments. If their take home pay falls, they won't be willing to give up their yacht or their mistress. They will draw more salary from their business, to maintain their take home pay. Rather than pay themselves $1,600,000 to take home $1,000,000 they will pay themselves $5,882,353 to take home $1,000,000. Tax revenue will rise from $600,000 to $4,882,353 Eight fold, not two fold.
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Don't ask where we are on the Laffer Curve, ask when we are. The government is taxing fifty year old businessmen, expecting revenues to hold up indefinitely. But in thirty years time they will all have retired. Will today's twenty year olds replace them? No, once Boxer goes to the knacker's yard, no-one is taking his place.
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Laffer Curve effects are prompt. When taxes are low the rich businessman pays his mistress from after tax income. When tax rates soar, he cuts the money that he withdraws from his business as personal income, and preserves his lifestyle by having his company employ his mistress as a secretary. Tax revenue falls.
What would it be like to have a theory of taxation with the accuracy of Newton's Law of Gravity? The very idea is mind boggling. A good philosophy of science would help us construct a scientific theory of tax revenue. A good discussion of the philosophy of science would look at areas of science where we are doing badly and wonder how to do a little better. Perhaps a good discussion of the philosophy of science would also look at successes, such as Newton's Law of Gravity and try to extract lessons, about how to do science, that we could apply to where we are failing. That is very different from looking at Newton's Law of Gravity and worrying about miracles or something.
I've seen this argument before, that if people really believed, it would drastically modify their behavior.
I've made this argument myself. Now I'm worried that its wrong.
Think about type II diabetes and morbid obesity. Call it the fat nurse problem. Nurses know that they are heading for trouble because they have treated patients a little older than they are who have already run into trouble. It is as if you go on holiday to Rome and the Vatican is doing tours of Hell. You wonder what became of some-one who died recently and who lived a wicked life. You take the tour and spot him among the damned, suffering. Later you return to the USA determined to mend your own wicked ways, and like the fat nurse and her diet, you fail to do so.
Yes, we see people who fail to modify their behavior. In the context of religious belief, we feel tempted to draw an inference: they do not really believe. In the context of practical matters, they have often seen with their own eyes. Of course they believe! And yet they fail to modify their behavior. What then becomes of our logic? In the religious context, we lack clear guidance about whether people believe, so we attempt to infer belief from behavior. In the practical context we have a contingent gold standard for belief: sometimes folk have seen the truth with their own eyes so naturally they really believe. There is no need to attempt an inference.
On the other hand, there is an opportunity to check the validity of our inference. The inference that we draw from behavior ought to agree with belief that we infer on the basis of noticing that some people have direct experience and must therefore believe. Whoops! Disaster has struck. In the practical case we notice people who must really believe, failing at responding appropriately. So the inference we want to make in the religious case is invalid.
What then becomes of the observation that true belief drastically modifies the behavior of a sizable minority, but only a minority? My guess is that in times of universal belief in God, most people really believe. They have a sense that they are going to answer personally to God. They sin anyway. They repent. They sin some more. They face death with a combination of fear and cope, sometimes dreading punishment, sometimes hoping the God is love and will not judge them too harshly.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
I suspect that the view of science as disunified and pluralistic is an illusion caused by zooming in too close. Older, rival ways of knowing get neglected and forgotten. That should create the impression of a loss of intellectual diversity, but we actually zoom in until the limited, remaining intellectual diversity fills the field of view.
I first rediscovered older perspectives reading about the Spanish Armada of 1588. Garrett Mattingly wrote 421 pages for his book The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. He gives a largely materialist account in which the superior upwind performance of English ships allows them to stay up wind of the Spanish and pound the Spanish from long range with their superior canon. At 583 pages, Neil Hanson gets to include more on Spanish thinking in his book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, the true story of the Spanish Armada. And the thinking is religious and pious.
The Spanish did have some hard headed military men, but religion and piety also had a say in naval matters. If you had tried to warn a Spanish noble about English technical superiority and tactical advantage he might have replied with the authentic 1580's version of this
That is not how this works, that is not how any of it works. The wind blows at God's command. If we pray ardently, if we are right with God, he will grant us fair winds. Second to God's blessing come our own courage and faith. You make much of minor points such as the English being able to pull their muzzles back inside their hulls for reloading, but such matters trail a poor third behind God's will and man's courage and determination.
Second, I was discombobulated by reading that Hobbes was viewed with suspicion in his own time. I imagined that the throne-and-altar guys would love him. God had divinely appointed Kings and there was Hobbes justifying God's wisdom to doubters: of course we need a King. Without a King we will have a war of all against all and life will be nasty, brutish, and short. Yet his contemporaries found Hobbes' perspective mechanistic, materialist, in a word: atheistic. Not the right way to think about the world at all.
Third, in The Discarded Images, C. S. Lewis attempts to explain the Medieval world view to the modern mind. He selects some earlier work he regards as seminal, include the commentary on Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius. Macrobius divides dreams into five species, three veridicial, and two which have 'no divination' in them.
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Somnium: truths veiled in an allegorical form
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Visio: direct, literal prevision of the future
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Oraculum: the dreamers parents or other grave and venerable person openly declares the future
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Insomnium: daily cares intruding on sleep
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Visum: garbled trash, including nightmares
I cannot believe there was ever a time when every-one took Visio seriously. Dreams must so often fail to come true that many would notice their limitations as a way of knowledge. On the other hand, I assume that Macrobius took dreams seriously, and others followed his lead. What must it have been like to grow up in a world in which the reliability of dreams was accepted by the adults around you and that way of thinking was metaphorically "in the water supply"? It would be hard to see the point of science. Much better to have a good nights sleep and hope, in the morning, to interpret the allegory of Somnium.
There were so many better ways of knowing things than science. You could pray to God. You could study scripture. You could dream.
None of that actually works. It fails hard enough that it is hard in 2023 to imagine taking any of it seriously, yet I believe that people did so. If we zoom out far enough to include such ideas in our field of view, Science shrinks to a small and particular kind of epistemology. Does it have an essence? In the zoomed out view, internal details are too small to be seen and, yes, science has a nerdy essence.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Do you make the same commitment that you will .... absolutely accept the result of this election?
I've added emphasis to a question that I see as a disgusting example of linguistic trickery. I don't know the name for this trick, I'll provisionally call it Schrodinger's Context.
The question is being asked ahead of the election. How absolute is absolute? What if Dominion program their machines to ignore Republican votes and the Democrats win with 100% of the votes counted? Clearly there has to be some limit, at which one notices that the vote is rigged and one rejects the result. So absolute isn't to be interpreted in the most literal way possible; there is an implicit context and that context contains limits on the extent of electoral anomalies the the candidate is expected to tolerate.
The context is not spelled out. It is just understood that the election will be basically honest. But, if after the vote, some amount X of fraud gets discovered, that is like Schrodinger opening the box and discovering that the context was really about accepting the result if there is ≤ X amount of fraud.
I think the traditional context goes like this:
Politicians get to campaign hyperbolically. They can rile their base by saying that the Chinese are building car factories in Mexico and these cars will flood the American car market causing job loses among American auto-workers. Politicians are allowed to describe the these jobs loses as a bloodbath as if the Mexicans themselves will flood across the border, armed with machetes, and hack the American auto-workers to death in a literal bloodbath. No, it is just job loses, no actual blood spilled, but the hyperbolic rhetoric is allowed. "Every-one" knows not to take it literally.
"Every-one". There is a problem here. There is always some-one who gets over excited and attempts electoral fraud, thinking that they are the good guy, because they are averting a literal blood bath. Hyperbolic rhetoric is permitted, and the cost of this is that some people are not quite right in the head and break the rules on counting the votes because the hyperbole wound them up to the point of madness.
So the traditional context has two more parts. First, a few nutters attempting electoral fraud doesn't invalidate an election. It can be literally true that some Democrats cheated, and yet perfectly reasonable that Donald Trump concede the election. Second, there is a gentleman's agreement that rival politicians police their own side and try to prevent electoral fraud in their own cause. If a Democrat cheats, fellow Democrats call them out, and a Democrat Attorney General prosecutes. That is the quid pro quo for Trump conceding despite a small amount of fraud.
That is my understanding of the traditional context. I think current problems are due to the gentlemen's agreement breaking down. If a few nutters are committing electoral fraud, well, smirk Donald Trump should still concede, without asking "how much?" and without expecting Democrats to police their own side.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Think about this in terms of the external audit of a public company.
A public company has its own accountants. They may notice money going missing, track it down, and report the employee to the police for fraud.
As a public company it must also submit to and pay for an external audit. The external audit is not looking for fraud. The external audit is auditing the internal controls and the procedures. Are the internal controls sufficient (if the procedures are followed) to stop money going missing? Are the procedures being followed? It gets a little tricky because a big business is inevitably full of minor lapses and edge cases. The external auditors will not qualify the companies accounts unless the weaknesses of internal controls and breaches of procedure are material.
However, if there are material weaknesses, the external auditors will qualify the accounts, saying that they cannot be fully relied upon because blah blah. This is a big deal. Remember that the external auditors are not looking for fraud. Looking for fraud that is really there is often futile; the fraud only took place because lax procedures that were not even followed, provided an opportunity to get away with fraud. Once the accounts have been qualified the company takes measures (perhaps under a new board of directors) to remedy the problems.
The weaknesses of internal controls and the failures to follow procedures are treated as dispositive. It is presumed that there was fraud and action is taken to prevent it. It would be wrong to say that people don't care about the facts or whether fraud actually happened. If perchance fraud can be found there will be efforts to identify the perpetrators and prosecute them. But there is an acceptance that finding material weaknesses in procedures is as "we found fraud" as it gets.
Perhaps some-one will claim "Sure there are problems with the procedures that might in theory have allowed fraud to go undetected, but no fraud was proven, so I'm content that no fraud happened and no action is required." But where money is at stake, this is naive and silly.
The core of @Hlynka's claim is that votes are as valuable as money, so the same presumption of fraud applies.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
The line about living with the Amish misses the depth of the technology stack. Every-one, including the Amish, benefit from access to high carbon steels. All the chisels and saws that carpenters use in a low-tech wooden life-style depend on heat treated steels that retain their cutting edge. Making the chisels and saws depends on hardened high carbon steel being harder than normalised high carbon steel, sufficiently harder that you can use files and hacksaws to form the blanks for your chisels and saws before you harden them in their turn with more heat treatment. It is all very delicate, depending on chemistry and metallurgy to get quench hardening to work right ("Silver steel" has added chromium to improve through hardening. Metallurgists need microscopes to see what is happening with the grains in the steel). (Things have moved on. Now-a-days you heat treat steel parts before cutting them to shape using carbide tooling,...)
I wondered if the Amish use cement. Maybe just lime mortar. It is a tough question. Yes, and attention to price and efficiency seduces you, so that you end up tied to industrial cement making. No, and your building techniques are in some ways pre-Roman; who wants to go back that far?
We are mostly ignorant of the long history of our technology stack and use phrases such as "back to nature" in ways that do no withstand scrutiny
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm happy to join in disputing the "fact that the nazis were far right" but I would emphasize the worthlessness of the left/right spectrum.
Reactionaries, those throne and altar guys like the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, are right wing. Florian Geyer had "no crown, no cross" scratched on his sword, the sword that he used to fight for peasants during the Peasants Revolt; not right wing. Hitler thought Florian Geyer a hero and was happy to have an SS regiment named after him. I'm thinking that Hitler and Stalin had rival takes on how to stick it to the Kings and Priests, but both thought of themselves as acting on behalf of the workers and the common man.
If one really wants to have Hilter->right and Stalin->left, then one gets into trouble with reactionaries, monarchists, and integralists. All the classic right-wing positions have to be kicked off the spectrum to make room for Hitler. You even have to horse-shoe Florian Geyer and get him to the right to have Hitler think him a hero.
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
My expectations for bio-security for gain of function research go like this:
Use two small remote islands: Research Island and Quarantine Island. Researchers parachute into Research Island. At the end of their six month tour of duty they sail to Quarantine Island. After a month, a plane lands on Quarantine Island to collect them.
In reality Biosafety level four, the top level, is still situated in a building in a city. It seems odd that we site nuclear power stations in remote locations, or at least, outside cities, yet the much more dangerous, create-a-lethal-plague technology, is conveniently sited so that researchers can go to the theater or the food market after work. Is there a consensus among biological researchers about this?
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I think that you have got that backwards. If the police are scrupulous about treating crime and punishment as strictly individual, there will be no racism apparent as the cases are investigated and prosecuted one by one. But compile national statistics and racial differences jump out at you. If you believe in individual justice and judging people by their character, not the color of the their skin, you just have to shrug and say "races really are different."
The trouble starts if you insist that the national statistics need to be race balanced. To make the national statistics come out race balanced requires fiddling the individual cases, convicting innocent white men, acquitting guilty black men, and doing the racist thing of telling an individual "we aren't going to judge your case on the actual facts, but on skin color, because we've a quota to fill."
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
I only heard of the Polish-Ukrainian War two weeks ago, from this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DVZARacjKGI
The axe being ground in that video is a little complicated. Poland has a law making it a criminal offense to talk about "Polish concentration camps". I thought that I understood where the Poles were coming from. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact kicked off WWII with the Germans and the USSR dividing Poland between them. The Germans set up some concentration camps in the part of Poland that they occupied. Calling these "Polish concentration camps" blames the Poles for what the Germans got up to.
But the Polish law also bans talking about the Polish concentration camps that the Poles set up in the aftermath of the Polish-Ukrainian war. The law against blaming the Poles for what the Germans got up to, turns out to be a sneaky law against blaming the Poles for what the Poles got up to.
That leaves me rather against any law limiting freedom of speech; you never know what kind of sneaky cover up is being attempted.
You will sometimes see a medical study described as a "blinded randomized controlled trial" and other medical studies as an "open label randomized controlled trial". Whether a study is blinded or open-label is a separate issue from having a control group and separate again from having random assignment to treatment. The Wikipedia page on GRADE doesn't mention blinding. Checking the website of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) the reference to randomized controlled trials does not mention blinding.
A study on breast augmentation can qualify as a randomized controlled trial, generating top quality evidence, with the following design: recruit 200 subjects. Randomly assign 100 to have the operation. The others are the control group. Researchers must keep in touch with the all 200 to find out how things worked out for them.
Keeping in touch with all 200 might be tricky. Some of those in the trial group might be disappointed with the results of the surgery and feeling disillusioned with medical intervention may reject further contact with the trial. Some of those in the control group may interpret being rejected for surgery as being rejected from the trial and disappear. Such people are lost to follow up. How to analyse a trial with large loses to follow up is controversial. Do we blandly say "we don't know"? Should we interpret losses from the trial group as bad outcomes? One might vary the design. 100 breast augmentations. 50 get psychotherapy that aims to persuade them that they don't need breast augmentation. 50 get regular contact to keep in touch, but bland contact, merely reminding then that they also serve who only stand and wait.
Scott's deep dive into Alcoholics Anonymous is my goto article for the practical importance of having a control group. Or should that be the disappointing effect of control groups?
If a trial does not have randomization, it is vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox. One may find that a medical treatment is beneficial, but partitioning the data into two exhaustive and mutually exclusive subgroups, find that the treatment is harmful to one of the subgroups and also harmful to the other subgroup. Wut? The analysis may collapse into baffling incoherence. Actually it is worse than that. The laws of arithmetic are chaotic evil, and permit that a conclusion that has been reversed by one partition may yet be swapped back by a finer one (if the Chrome browser objects to a faulty certificate, using incognito mode will work.)
The two issues, of needing a control group, and of needing randomization, are widely understood; I would not expect Dr Hilary Cass to restate the arguments in her report.
Edited to fix link to Simpsons Paradox, spotted error way too late :-(
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Solving rape by teaching men not to rape has the same kind of energy as solving inflation by teaching men not to print money. You actually need to target rapists and central bankers.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
You are spot on and thinking about it I realise that I've seen TK's the lack of incrementalism before.
I was listening to radio broadcast about the Utopia Experiment. Dylan Evans sees total collapse coming and sets up his simple living experiment to try to get ahead of it. But quite early on, his attempts to make soap come unstuck because he has already given up the internet, so he cannot watch the "How to make soap" videos on You Tube. That is when I twigged that the story was going to turn into a mental health crisis. Going all in, rather than plotting a path and taking reasonable sized steps is usually a sign of mental illness. And so it was in Dylan Evans' case.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
The common thread is some people thinking that laws are self-acting. People deep inside the first world bubble look around and see a surface appearance that fits nicely with laws being self-acting. One can explain this away, but the explanation must never-the-less explain why it looks that way, even though it isn't. Here is my attempt, focusing on incentive compatibility and Magic Special People, the MSP's.
Utopia, version one. There is an excellent rule book. Its excellence lies in how nice the world would be if people followed the rules. Its downfall is the lack of enforcement mechanisms. People break the rules and the utopia fails.
Utopia version two. A mostly free-market system. Most rules are incentive compatible. People obey those rules because it is in their interests to do so. But most isn't enough. Some necessary rules get broken and the utopia fails.
Utopia version three. Further compromise with Moloch. All the rules are incentive compatible. People fleeing the society say "Those were not compromises, they were surrenders." Version three turns out to be Hobbes' war of all against all. Works as planned, but is a dystopia.
Utopia version four. Built on version two. Yes, some rules are not naturally incentive compatible, but there is a police force. Break the rule and your punishment is worse than your gain from breaking the rule. So the rules are artificially incentive compatible. I'll use police as a synecdoche for police, courts, prisons, etc. There not just a rule book for the ordinary citizen. There is a rule book for the police. Some of it is incentive compatible. Some of the policemen believe in the utopia and follow all of the rule book for the police, even though it is an uphill struggle. But there are not enough of them, and there is no police-police enforcing the rule book that the police are supposed to follow. Too many doughnuts are eaten. Too few laws are enforced. The utopia fails.
Utopia version five. An Ourobos built on version four. The police-inspectors supervise the police, making sure that the police follow the rules. The common people watch the police-inpsectors and can vote them out of office. This is the basic idea of representative democracy. The record is mixed. The USSR had a constitution very like the American one, but with much less success. There is an extra, unrecognised ingredient. Most version five utopias fail quickly. Some last as long as supplies of the missing ingredient hold up.
Utopia version six. Ourobos + Magic Special People. Turn aside from contemplating the Ourobos and recall that utopia version four didn't fail as quickly as expected. Some of the policemen believe in it and went against their incentives out of religious conviction. There really are Magic Special People like that, just not enough off them. Notice the hierarchical structure of version five. Ordinary folk, police, police-inspectors. All but the top level face artificial incentives. The pyramid narrows towards the top. If society has 2 or 3 % MSPs, they could occupy the top level and make it work. If we sprinkle some fairy dust on society to get the MSPs to the top we would have a viable utopia.
How long would utopia version six last? People get old and die. Where is the new crop of Magic Special People to come from?
Perhaps from cultural transmission. Some MSP are teachers, encouraging children to cultivate and grow their inner MSP. So long as this is respected there is hope for continuity. But if the culture asks "If you are so smart, how come you aren't rich?" and mocks the self-sacrifice required to make cultural transmission happen, the supply of new, young MSP's will dwindle and the utopia fall.
Perhaps there is a genetic element. Some women seems to have a rather paleo-lithic taste in men, preferring those who win fights and grab an unfair share of resources for their own children. MSP's with their obsessions with justice, rules, fairness, and self-sacrifice, are not sexy and Magic Specialness is slowly bred out of the population, causing a type six utopia to fail.
Perhaps I'm understating the issue with magic fairly dust. Maybe MSP's are elbowed aside by grifters, and the top of the social heirarchy gets filled will muggles, who follow their incentives and the utopia fails.
Before answering my question about why it looks like the law is self-acting, I want to fill in some of the details of what life in a type six utopia is like.
There are ladies and gentleman. Some people are capable of understanding how society works and the need for rules, and are able to make and keep gentlemen's agreements about following the necessary rules. They lack the ruthlessness and self-sacrifice to count as Magic Special People, but provided the MSPs maintain order in society as a whole, the gentle folk have no need of MSPs within their bubble. Within their bubble, law is effectively self-acting.
There are rough folk. They push boundaries and break rules. They are sometimes caught and punished. Too seldom and things escalate and utopia fails. Too much? Is there a too much? It is a more subtle issue of the expensive of policing, and the corruption that results if police are granted too much latitude. There is also an issue that the more laws society has, the more police society needs, and the more MSPs society needs to supervise the police. MSPs are a scare resource; expand the need until society runs out of them and watch the utopia fail.
In between gentle and rough are ordinary folk, by far the most numerous. They have aspirations to be genteel. They want to be ladies and gentlemen, but when it comes to keeping gentlemen's agreements they find themselves hard pressed by tempation. They want to be street smart, not a mug or a mark. Not the one still trying to be a gentleman when every-thing has gone to shit and it is time to play for rough, to play for keeps.
The ordinary folk have rich inner lives, filled with psychological drama, which leads to the key distinction between the ordinary folk and the rough folk. Managing the rough folk requires that the police are efficient enough to keep the expected value of criminal activity negative. Managing the ordinary folk only requires the police to do their job occasionally. There is an inner struggle. Will the aspiration to be genteel win? Will the aspiration to be street smart win? It is enough that the gentle side can point to one or two middle class criminals caught and shamed. The street smart side might start figuring the odds but the gentle side scolds that as shameful in its self.
In the good times, the ordinary folk are kind of, somewhat in the same bubble as the ladies and gentlemen who honour their agreements and can see law as self-acting. Come the bad times and ordinary folk will flip to being street smart and things will go down hill fast and hard.
And that is my story of how society works, and how it comes to appear to nice middle class people that the law is self-acting, even though it really isn't.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
The COVID lockdowns in the UK point to a darker problem with expertise. Life is short, people grow old and die; it takes about 70 years. Suppose that being locked down causes a 10% reduction in quality of life (I'd prefer to say 50%, but I'll err on too low because I want to focus on a different controversy). Government locks down 70 million people for a year, which costs 7 million Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). Actual deaths, if spread across the age range, cost 35 QALY's each. The lock down needs to be saving 200 thousand lives to break even. But deaths from COVID were concentrated among the frail elderly. Say 7 QALY's each. To break even the lock down needed to save the lives of one million frail old people. It is not remotely plausible that it did so.
The lockdowns were a national disaster on the scale of 200 thousand dead. Compare that to American loses in Vietnam at 50 thousand. The lockdowns were a huge national disaster.
But how did it happen? The experts were socialized into an "identified cause" model of morbidity. If something specific kills you, that counts. If something makes you a year older, that counts zero. Since zero times anything is still zero, it doesn't matter how many people are affected. Basically expertise here was so narrow in scope that the fact that people grow old and die lay outside of its scope and was neglected.
The darker problem is that growing old and dying is basic to the human condition. The experts let themselves be socialized into collective insanity. I don't see any way around this. Experts are dangerous in much the same way that fire is dangerous. Essential despite being dangerous. You have to be able to spot that experts have gone mad and flat out reject what they say.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
That is an interesting example of a slippery slope. Divorce has been legal in Christian countries for what? Around a hundred years? Longer in some places (America), a more recent development in others (Southern Ireland).
I think it came in on the basis that maybe 1% of marriages were wretchedly bad. Let them be dissolved and the sum of human happiness would rise, with no unexpected consequences to follow. But divorce became more common. Rich middle aged men took to trading in their middle aged wife that they had married when young, and starting a second family with a new, younger wife. That was understood as an abuse, and was tackled with alimony laws that were generous to the old wife. Those generous payments encouraged wives to divorce their boring middle-aged husbands, in the hope of a more exciting sex life, as an independently wealthy women. Divorce rates soared towards 50%. That in turn soured men on marriage. Men are reluctant to marry, and some countries (Canada?) have tackled this problem with marriages of adhesion (usually called common law marriages). Live too long with your girlfriend and bam, married.
Slipping further down the slippery slope, we are eradicating financial privacy to tackle the problem of men hiding their assets from ex-wives. Ponder how strange that would have seemed in the early days of divorce, when the idea was that the husband was perhaps an abusive drunk, probably unable to hold a job. Of course we want the woman to be able to escape and start a family with a hard working, good provider husband. Imagine if the early divorce law reforms had including the full range of legal changes. People who doubted that permitting divorce at all was wise, would have been confronted with the idea that the husband might be rich, and financial secrecy would have to go so that the ex-wife could be guaranteed her big share of the dosh. I think that people would never have started down the road of permitting divorce.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
34 is an allusion to the provision of the US constitution that requires the President to be at least 35 years old.
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
You might be right that it is a strawman, but intriguingly, it is not a baseless strawman. The book title "in confident hope of a miracle" is a quote from a Spaniard of the time. At least one Spaniard was indeed that superstitious. The difficulty is that, with no Gallup polling from back, then it is hard to know whether that level of superstition was common enough to matter.
There are also difficult issues around compartmentalization, both of society and within the minds of individuals. I think that there were sharp class distinctions between tradesmen and nobles. So tradesmen would be level headed and practical in regard to their trade. Shipwrights would build seaworthy ships based on trial and error and folk-naval-architecture, then the noble would swoop in to have the priest bless the ship to make it seaworthy. Within the head of the noble there would be two watertight compartments. One would commission ships, but only from shipwrights whose previous ships had made it back from America. The other would navigate the treacherous waters around heresy by ensuring that the importance of the priest was never doubted. The obvious point, that only the shipwrights track record mattered would be carefully ignored.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
This takes me back to 8th November 2002 and Security Council Resolution 1441
The remarkable bit is in section 5
...further decides that UNMOVIC and the IAEA may at their discretion conduct interviews inside or outside of Iraq, may facilitate the travel of those interviewed and family members outside of Iraq,...
Basically, UNMOVIC gets to whisk the Iraqis who know, out of Iraq, and their families too, so that they can spill the beans without having to worry about going back to Iraq or about how to get their families out.
I tried to guess what would happen next. Once Saddam's own experts were outside Iraq, and their families were outside Iraq, they would be able to speak freely. What would they say?
Perhaps they would say that Iraq did indeed have forbidden weapons and say where they were hidden.
Perhaps they would explain how weird and corrupt it all was. There was money allocated to the Mustard Gas budget, but it was "stolen" to build a palace. It is no use looking for Mustard Gas, there isn't any. The Mustard Gas budget is just there to fake out the Iranians. (The CIA believed it too!)
I admitted to myself that I just didn't know and went 50:50.
Notice that I managed to be 100% wrong. Saddam never complied with 1441. UNMOVIC never got to talk to Iraq's weapons experts outside of Iraq. And that refusal to obey 1441 was the legal basis of the war.
We all remember how it looked to hoi polloi. Weapons of Mass Destruction. We must invade before they can be used against us. Panic! War!
But insiders, steeped in the minutiae of UN Security Council Resolutions probably had a different take. What if the weapons are not found? What if the weapons were never there? Do they get into trouble for starting a war on lies? No.
Technically they were not actually claiming to know for sure. They were claiming the right to find out for sure. Saddam was playing a game of "I've handed over all the weapons. I've dragged my feet and obstructed the inspectors for so long that no-one feels really sure, but don't worry, that is only to frighten the Iranians. Honest!". And 1441 gives UNMOVIC the right to question the relevant Iraqi officials when they and their families are safely outside of Iraq. I wonder what would have happened if Saddam had let the officials and their families leave, and their testimony had been that the weapons were all gone.
I suspect that there was a double game being played. Saddam knew that the weapons were gone. If he could get the UN to accept that the weapons were gone and leave, then his experts could start manufacturing again, and he could recreate what he had lost. Perhaps not immediately, but if he got into another war with Iran and needed them again. But it all depended on retaining his experts. Once UNMOVIC had moved them and their families to the USA, Saddam wasn't getting them back. So maybe the point of 1441 was that the US knew he didn't actually have the weapons any more and the plan was to steal away his experts so that he couldn't recreate them in the future.
But why would insiders feel the need to fake weapons of mass destruction? They were following the legal technicalities and knew that the formal resolution was only that Saddam had to stop playing around and let them find out about the weapons for sure. And if Saddam continued to play around and got invaded, then the US would find out about the weapons for sure. All nice and legal, even if it turned out that there are no weapons any more.
Even at the time, most people following politics had no interest in the clever maneuvering of section 5 of 1441. But I'm guessing that it mattered to insiders. Legally, they were in the clear, even if no weapons were found. So faking it is double bad. First, they might get caught. Second, faking it admits that they are at fault if the weapons are not there; which is silly, because they have won the bureaucratic battle and it is technically Saddam at fault for not surrendering his experts.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
The classic formulation of your final paragraph is Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
"Rip his arm off and beat him to death with the soggy end" is part of the kayfabe of the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE after a legal dispute with the World Wildlife Fund over who is the real WWF). Your teacher's annoyance with you might well be genuine, but he is nevertheless issuing a comedy threat and inviting you to participate in an in-joke (perhaps forgetting that you are too young to get the reference)
I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early history, with brave men inventing wings, strapping them on, and jumping out of towers. Jumping to their deaths. Others were more cautious and built gadgets to help them understand wings and lift. Wind tunnels were invented late. Before wind tunnels they used the whirling arm apparatus.
A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.
The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.
The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.
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