This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I blame Fauci.
Its hard to come out of Covid without some sense that "the science lies to us". I generally like to trust experts, but now it constantly feels like a slight level of uncertainty has crept into all my interactions with experts. The idea of an entire group of academics capture by a single interest group and willing to lie to our faces ... no longer seems very far fetched. At most you'll get a couple of the experts that defect and say all of their colleagues are wrong.
What it often requires me to do is to go look at the data the experts have, rather than what they say about their own data. At which point I get frustrated about even having experts in the first place. I usually have to rely on other smart people that I actually trust to go and check the data.
Things where I am suspicious about what the experts say:
Since Fauci isn't really being punished for any lies, I can assume most experts picked up on the hint: say what we want you to say and you'll be protected.
I still tend to have a lot of trust for economists, but that is maybe because I have found economists I actually trust, and I don't read the economists that would ruin my trust.
I can believe that we are in a great economic period right now. Nothing in my life suggests anything is great or terrible economically, so its not hard to think that either scenario is possible. There are multiple measures of employment, and I really wish news orgs would just report the full table of employment measures, U1-U7 (if I remember correctly). I feel like any one of them is potentially misleading individually, but altogether they give a great picture.
I have a very hard time trusting economists related to currency. The topic has always seemed like black magic to me. There is a joke among the academics I work with that monetary economists are always a bit on the weird side. I personally feel that its because monetary economics is a bit like studying cthulu. Simply witnessing it and understanding it drives you a little crazy. Also if there is any place where apparatus of government control has an incentive to get economists to lie, then that place is gonna be monetary economics. You simply cannot have modern sized governments without currency manipulation and money printing. I don't think they tend to lie too often about inflation numbers, or I at least believe that the numbers they give are consistently measured. Its more of a big giant lie that I worry about, rather than tiny lies to benefit one specific administration.
I share your gut-level distrust of economics and general suspicion of experts, but at the same time I must admit that I have not given a serious attempt at learning economics and if I did, I might realize that at least parts of it are trustworthy.
With regard to such issues in general, I often use the "would many separated groups, even enemies, mostly agree about it?" heuristic. Obviously there is no reason to trust the intelligence community by this heuristic, since different countries' intelligence communities will, for obvious reasons, often completely disagree with each other in public.
On the other hand, most scientific communities and governments in the developed world, even ones in countries that are each others' enemies, support widespread COVID vaccination and treat climate change as a somewhat serious threat. I find it unlikely that the US academic community and the Chinese academic community, and the two countries' respective bureaucracies, are both controlled by one overarching global cabal of consenus-makers. Which leads me to increase my estimate of how likely it is that the so-called scientific consensus about COVID and climate change are accurate.
The response to the great Barrington declaration suggested to me that this consensus was manufactured. I also think the US government hands out a majority of infectious disease research money. So the impression of an independent international scientific community is misleading. Wuhan lab reviewed funding multiple times from the US.
I don't believe they treat it as a serious threat at all. I think they treat as an excuse for economic control. If they treated it seriously there are sub trillion dollar solutions that they could implement: sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere, or a large sun shade in outer space.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can't say I disagree but for the majority, I'd go so far as to say that instead of being merely suspicious, I'm in flagrant opposition.
On the matter of COVID death rates, it depends on whether you are considering the initial claims of CFR in the first few months, or the more reasonable values that emerged later down the line. A 0.1-0.5% CFR seems reasonable enough to me, at least until the vaccines came out.
As for economics, shrugs, I'll care to be better informed when I'm in a position to dictate fiscal policy for any organization larger than my household. I'm content in crossing the very low bar of being better than average.
Wait. Aren't you an economist or trained in the field? It deeply concerns me that you too are forced to believe the last claim, but then again you economists are a contentious lot, each content to claim the other is ruining a noble field.
On the other hand, I'm hardly as uncertain when it comes to claims that are tangentially related to medicine, doctors do tend to agree on most things that matter, for noble or ignoble reasons I guess!
We already had reasonable values by late Feburary 2020 due to the diamond princess outbreak. They just weren't widely advertised.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the lack of testing available combined with us not knowing how to treat it led to artificially inflated death rates. And then for a while afterwards many hospitals and medical orgs were given money for COVID cases and deaths, so they of course started reporting it more heavily.
Undergrad economics degree. Mostly gave me a sense that there are weird academic holdouts on obscure topics that aren't corrupted by politics. But anything that politics touches becomes corrupted.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They were the first class of experts to lose my trust, after 2008. Hmm, actually, maybe the second after Iraq and the GWOT. Of course I never believed the "gender" and "psychology" experts in the first place, so there is that too.
I studied economics between 2009-2013. It was a contentious time for economics. I don't trust an expert just because they have a PhD in economics, but I think some basics of the field have held up really well. And I think the field in general has robust data gathering and adversarial checking of data.
Out of curiosity, how much stock do you put in the polls of economists that IGM Chicago puts out? Presumably such polls dilute out individual cranks and their idiosyncrasies all come out in the wash, but it would still be of limited use if there's systematic biases and blind spots.
Low to no usefulness.
To be a useful survey question of economists, a question needs to:
Given those limitations not all the survey questions are useful.
Many of them have a huge scope like asking "would regulation of x industry be [good]". That becomes basically a vibes questions about how you feel about regulation in general. Even the staunchest libertarian leaning economist can acknowledge regulation is sometimes helpful. And even the staunchest statist pro-regulator out there can acknowledge that some regulations are harmful. So the question really becomes 'what quality of regulation do you think is likely'.
If the economists don't clearly come down on one side of the question, then you are back to a foundational problem of "how do you know which experts to trust if the experts disagree with each other?" This seems useful for someone that wants to organize a panel discussion between economists that disagree with each other, but less useful if you are just a pleb trying to figure out what the experts say on a topic.
Sometimes there are questions about price movements, or supply and demand movements. You can predict what economists will say by understanding a basic econ 101 textbook. You'll typically see fewer "uncertain" answers for these questions. It is maybe useful to have a professional economist interpret a current political problem and translate the econ 101 rules for everyone. But I do believe that people can do this for themselves. And typically when they fail to make this translation it is because they willfully don't want it to be true, and no amount of expert consensus will get through to them.
https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/women-and-the-labor-market/
I'll go through this survey on their website to demonstrate.
Question A: (rephrased basic econ question) If you take someone out of the labor force for a few years will they be paid more or less than someone that continued to work during that time? Obviously they will be paid less. Ok, what would be the effect of them not leaving the labor force at all. They would be paid the same.
Question B: (not limited in scope, agreement slightly unclear) It is comparing two treatment effects and asking which one is bigger. This can be very misleading: Treatment A might be huge, while treatment B might only be large. Or Treatment A is small, while treatment B is non-existent. In both cases the economist would answer the same. In this specific question you can go to the comments and find that while they think Treatment A is bigger, many seem to think Treatment B matters too.
Question C: (Agreements slightly unclear, This may be a useful one) I do think the economists didn't read the question very closely, or else there is an interpretation of "substantially" that I don't understand. This type of regulation would only address one of the things that cause a difference in pay for mothers vs not-mothers. And quite a few economists said in the previous example, that educational and occupational choices still matter. What this question is implying through the answer and the other survey responses: There is a gender pay gap. This gender pay gap has at least two major causes (educational and occupational choices vs parenthood and social norms around men's and women’s roles in childrearing). A partial solution for only one of the more major causes will substantially cause the gender pay gap to close. Removing the word "substantially" from the question would remove my objection, but it would also render the question much closer to a basic econ question.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Micro or macro? If macro, can you explain what it means that M1 and M2 money supply has been FALLING? Most of the pundits seem to be saying "nothing to see here", whereas the stopped clocks are saying it's a harbinger of recession.
That just means V is up. During COVID the Fed flooded the market with liquidity but my guess is a lot of that was semi trapped in interest on excess reserves.
By the same token during COVID you would have expected far more inflation based off of base money growth.
More options
Context Copy link
I preferred Micro. If I had any specialty it would have been public choice.
Macro is dark wizardy
If you like public choice, then you like would’ve enjoyed law and economics.
They had some overlap for sure. The law and econ stuff sometimes got too close to straight philosophy for my taste. Public choice was ultimately grounded in making predictions about politicians and political outcomes.
Perhaps but L&E ended up rather accurately “backing into” common law rules that evolved over time. It definetly made me think “this framework is prettt strong”
It's hard to tell if they backed into those rules, or they created a path to get to those rules. It's kind of like evolutionary psychology, where you can tell a just so story to fit what you observe. There isn't much new psychology evolving so it's hard to know how much predictive ability it has. Likewise there isn't much common law arising these days.
Public choice has at least one area where it can be repeatedly tested: elections.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Good god, it's been a while since I've cracked open my econ degree.
TLDR, M1 and M2 are basically how much free-flow, readily available cash is in the hands of the public(as opposed to Banks, the federal deposit, and other entities.)
Or, put another way, how much money do civilians and John Q Public have available at quick notice.
If it's been falling, well... that means they have less cash on-hand. Why that is could be due to... well, a long list of reasons.
Also, that redefinition of m1 annoys me to a horrendous degree for some odd reason.
The M1 redefinition makes estimating models annoying too, although M3 is a good enough measure nowadays given how liquid even savings accounts and GICs are.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'll add nutrition "experts" to the pile as one of the groups that I started losing trust in. I still can't believe I fell for the idea that sodium is "bad for you" above the recommended 2300mg/day recommendation. Preventing muscle cramps by cranking up my sodium intake and following up on the empirical evidence for low-sodium diets was one of my first indications that the public health professionals are either ignorant or lying.
Nutrition is protoscience, barely better than psychology.
at least psychology has IQ going for it, which is useful.
More options
Context Copy link
Really? So what can I know about the food I eat?
Specific about given food - fine. How to avoid scurvy and similar - fine.
That we should avoid extremely processed food, overeating, sugary drinks and similar traps - many clear cases that should be avoided are known.
But science based guide for optimal diet? Hahaha. No.
More options
Context Copy link
Eat more calories to gain weight and less to lose weight is pretty solid.
That's physics, not nutrition, to be fair.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Quite a lot actually. We know that lack of Vitamin C will cause scurvy, lack of Vitamin D will cause rickets, and lack of Iodine will cause goiter. The last two were extremely common prior to the 20th century.
Unfortunately, nutrition science didn't build on these successes but started to make conclusions which weren't supported by evidence.
The other problem is that the job got a lot harder. We have basically invented entire new classes of food since then, and more importantly there's been a lot of population mixing. Given that the optimal diet for one group (not even race, much narrower genetic groups than that) can be completely opposite that of another, it's a damn hard nut to crack now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can't say I disagree, as an aspiring psychiatrist who currently has to occasionally write diet charts.
Well, at least the drugs work, regardless of the theoretical grounding of more hand-wavey stuff like therapy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link