Quick hits (part I)
January 7, 2023 2 Comments
1) Best stuff I’ve seen on XBB1.5:
At this stage of the pandemic, new variants are *guaranteed* to come and go. Variants arise from random errors as viruses make copies of itself. Most of these errors will be neutral (or even harmful) to the survival of the virus. But if you roll the dice millions of times, you’re bound to hit a winner eventually. A mutation that gives the virus an advantage will spread and create more copies of itself, crowding out other less “fit” variants.
This is what we are currently seeing with XBB.1.5 in the U.S…
Is XBB.1.5 more severe?
So far there is no evidence that XBB.1.5 causes more severe disease, but it’s something we always keep an eye on. There are very few “immune naïve” people who have not been infected, vaccinated, or both. While new variants can evade existing immunity enough to infect people and spread, we still have significant protection against severe disease compared to when we had no immunity.
2) Some pretty interesting research I definitely need to delve into more, “Does having children make you more politically conservative?”
Lead author Dr Nicholas Kerry, a psychology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, says the team surveyed people in 10 countries, including Australia, about their feelings towards kids, as well as conducted a series of experiments encouraging participants to recall or imagine certain parenting and childcare experiences.
“We asked people to talk about either real or imagined experiences of childcare and reflect on how they felt at the time,” Kerry explains.
“For those who didn’t have kids, we asked them to imagine a child and then put them in different situations. We then compared this group to a control group, who were asked to think of similar positive experiences but without a child involved.”They found that even thinking about scenarios like a child crying or playing ball fundamentally shifted the way people viewed the world, especially in relation to issues such as abortion, immigration and sex.
“Because socially conservative values prioritise safety, stability and family values, we hypothesised that being more invested in parental care might make socially conservative policies more appealing,” Kerry and his colleagues write.
3) Apparently, I’m a “reactionary centrist.” Also, talk about reactionary, good God these leftists are dumb and knee-jerk. Chait:
The term originates from a 2018 essay by progressive activist and former Democratic House aide Aaron Huertas. It has been picked up and circulated by left-wing commentators like Jeet Heer, Michael Hobbes, and Thomas Zimmer.
Huertas defined a reactionary centrist as “someone who says they’re politically neutral, but who usually punches left while sympathizing with the right.” Zimmer, in a recent podcast, said, “The term refers to people who claim to be moderate, in the middle, while always punching left.”
This definition applies, at least loosely, to some of the “reactionary centrists” they criticize. But while some “reactionary centrists” (David Brooks, Bari Weiss, Shadi Hamid*) reside on the center-right, many more reside on the center-left (the New York Times editorial page, Matthew Yglesias, me, among others). Very few of these “reactionary centrists” always or even usually criticize the left. The actual standard, and the term’s most commonly applied usage, is an insult for liberals who sometimes criticize the left.
The left-wing condemnations of “reactionary centrism” have both a minimalist and a maximalist version. The minimalist version argues that, since the right poses the greatest danger to liberal democratic values, it distorts reality to focus on the left as if its flaws are greater. I happen to agree with this version of the argument, and my work product (the overwhelming majority of which is directed against the right) reflects this belief.
But the left’s critique frequently slips into a maximalist version, which holds that, since the right poses the greatest danger to liberal democratic values, one should never criticize the left. Leftists who believe this don’t usually say it quite this bluntly. But their arguments leave no room for forceful criticism of the left, at least not in any terms that might be used by conservatives. Internal criticism from the left — scolding an ally for their lack of fervor — or criticism on purely personal or tactical grounds is exempt. But any “punching left,” or “scolding activists” as the sin is sometimes described, is forbidden on grounds of aiding the enemy.
A related version of this argument demands that liberals restrain their criticism of the left rather than engage in “left-bashing that empowers actual enemies of free speech.” None of these critics accept any such limits on their criticism of the liberals. It is a one-sided demand: The liberals must abstain from criticizing the left — or criticize only in the most respectful terms — because uninhibited attacks on the left help the right. The left, on the other hand, is free to attack liberals without inhibition. One cannot help but suspect the point of these rules is winning intra-left factional conflicts, not national elections…
Huertas, in his foundational essay on the phenomenon, comes close at one point to acknowledging the possibility that a liberal critic may be correct, before veering away.
“If progressive groups are doing something you can describe as distasteful or beneath you, or ineffective,” he writes, “that’s an excuse to avoid the hard work of participating in the progressive political movements that are actually trying to make our politics better.” You might believe progressive groups are misguided, but rather than saying so, you should simply work harder, like Boxer in Animal Farm.
4) Eric Levitz, “The GOP Is More Ungovernable Than Ever Before”
Meanwhile, over the past three decades, the rise of right-talk-radio juggernauts such as Rush Limbaugh and major conservative outlets like Fox News created further alternative power centers to the Republican leadership. These right-wing-media institutions had distinct incentives from the GOP. Whereas Republicans must appeal to a mass electorate, Fox News and Limbaugh served niche audiences that were both far more conservative and politically engaged than the median voter. And while internecine warfare is bad for party governance, it’s quite good for ratings: The media exists to tell stories, and you can’t have a compelling narrative without conflict…
It is one thing for Republican backbenchers to humiliate their party in defiance of its leadership; it is another for them to do so in defiance of the GOP Establishment, Donald Trump, and the bulk of the conservative media. In the past, the Republicans’ internecine feuds pitted the party’s disparate power centers against one another. In the current feud, however, all of the right’s major institutions are aligned behind McCarthy. And roughly 20 House Republicans feel comfortable defying their party anyway.
This intransigence is all the more extraordinary when one considers how little is actually at stake. There are no profound ideological divisions between Gaetz and (McCarthy supporter) Taylor Greene. Electing Steve Scalise or Andy Biggs or any other House Republican Speaker will not change the fact that Democrats control the Senate and the presidency and, therefore, that the conservative agenda cannot be implemented at the present time. The rebels do have official demands. But these are so outlandish as to call into question their sincerity; the House is not going to create a new legal entity that empowers the Freedom Caucus to unilaterally wage lawsuits.
In truth, it might be this very pointlessness that has rendered the GOP’s civil war so difficult to resolve. The House’s conservative hard-liners may be less interested in any particular outcome than they are in the chaos itself; their means may be their end. Placing oneself at the center of a days-long national news firestorm attracts attention to one’s social-media feeds, and that attention can eventually be monetized in all manner of ways. As Puck’s Tara Palmeri notes, far-right congressman Biggs has been raking in campaign contributions on the strength of his “Speakership revolt antics.”
5) Lee Drutman on the Republican mess:
Thought #2: Divided government encourages Republican recklessness
A long-standing Republican opposition strategy with a Democrat in the White House is to sow chaos in Washington, on the thought that dysfunction and chaos in Washington hurts the party in the White House. If Washington is in chaos, perhaps voters will think it’s time for a change.
Thus, rather than forcing the parties to work together, divided government encourages the party out of the White House to make the party in the White House look bad.
And while enough Democrats ultimately want to keep governing functioning so they will make deals with a Republican White House, enough Republicans want to force the government to shrink in size and believe that chaos is the only way to make it happen.
Are there political limits? Forcing a government shutdown can backfire. And nobody knows what happens if you don’t vote to raise the debt ceiling — which is, of course, the big looming crisis that could turn this clown show from dumb-and-dumber comedy to costly tragedy.
But far-right Republicans presumably see the looming debt ceiling as their point of maximum leverage, in which they can make outrageous demands and dare Democrats to deny them.
It’s hard to imagine any Republican speaker surviving a debt ceiling fight. Ultimately, they will need Democratic votes to pass the raise the debt ceiling. And when a Republican Speaker does that without extracting significant concessions, the revolt from the far-right will bring their downfall.
The problem is that Republican leadership has so demonized Democrats that much of its fired-up voter base sees compromise as submission to evil. But the rhetoric of opposition never lives up to reality. And enough current members of Congress, and their supporters and benefactors, now believe the conflict really is a fight to the death.
The fight is over the size and scope of the federal government. These are existential times. America is at stake. Enough people in Congress either genuinely believe it now, or they have earned so many psychic and financial rewards from saying so that they can’t tell whether they believe it or not, but they are conflict-seeking and attention-seeking enough to keep fighting to the end.
It is a 90-year fight, though one that has intensified into final battle status since a black man was elected president and White Christian America became a demographic minority. Which takes me to thought #3…
Thought # 3: It’s hard to manage a 90-year opposition party at the cranky old age of 90.
For nine decades, American politics has been defined by the macro-conflict over the role of the federal government. FDR’s New Deal was a Democratic Party program. Truman’s Fair Deal was a Democratic program. LBJ’s Great Society was a Democratic Program. Broadly, Republicans have spent nine decades now opposing the federal government’s role in American life.
Why does this matter? Because after 90 years of fighting the same fight against government, generation after generation, the Republican Party has become a thoroughly anti-system party. And it is very hard to lead an anti-system party when leadership means being part of the system.
6) Great stuff from my regular co-author, Laurel Elder, on gender in Congress:
This issue is important because how many women there are in the room when legislative decisions are made has significant consequences for the policies that governments enact. Female legislators are more likely than men to introduce, speak about and work to pass policies that disproportionately affect women and girls, such as paid family leave, pay equity and gender-based violence.
Having more women in Congress also strengthens female voters’ sense of connection with the government. It also bolsters women’s sense that government cares about their concerns and inspires young women to become more politically engaged…
What’s behind this sluggish pace
While women are underrepresented in governments around the globe, it is a particularly significant problem in the United States. Currently, the U.S. ranks 73rd in the world when it comes to female representation in government.
But the reason women are so dramatically underrepresented in U.S. government is not because they face resistance from voters or struggle to raise money. On the contrary, decades of research shows that when women run, they raise as much money and win as often as similarly qualified men.
In my 2021 book, “The Partisan Gap,” I show that the slow progress of women in politics is a tale of two political parties.
In the next Congress, there will be 107 female Democratic lawmakers and 42 female Republican lawmakers in the Senate and House combined.
In other words, Democrats will compose 72% of the women in Congress. Despite Democrats losing nine congressional seats during the November 2022 midterms, the number of Democratic lawmakers in Congress who are women will remain steady.
The gap between elected Republican and Democratic female lawmakers in Congress has widened over the past four decades…
But the Republican Party’s increasing conservatism has made it harder for women running as Republicans to win elections, as it has not made encouraging more women to run for office a priority. This creates additional challenges for potential Republican female candidates, since women typically need to be encouraged by others to consider running for office.
So, what will it take to get more Republican women to run? The Republican Party would need to commit more fully to recruiting and supporting female candidates.
In the 2018 elections, the number of Republican women in the House dropped to a mere 13, the lowest level in two decades. In response, Republican House member Elise Stefanik started the political action group Elevate-PAC to identify, cultivate and support Republican female candidates. Although Stefanik faced criticism from her party for this move, her efforts paid off with 31 Republican women elected in 2020.
In order for women to gain half of the seats in Congress, more women need to run, especially on Republican tickets. I believe that this will require the Republican Party as a whole to prioritize recruiting women – and not just for one election cycle, but in a sustained way.
7) Great stuff from Scott Alexander on ChatGPT, “How Do AIs’ Political Opinions Change As They Get Smarter And Better-Trained?”
Here more intelligence and training make AIs more likely to endorse all opinions, except for a few of the most controversial and offensive ones. Smarter and better-trained AIs are more liberal and more conservative, more Christian and more atheist, more utilitarian and more deontological.
What does it mean for the trained AI to be more liberal and more conservative? This isn’t a paradox: it just means the AI goes from unopinionated to a mix of strong liberal and conservative opinions. Why would it do that, when RHLF is supposed to make it more neutral and helpful and inoffensive? Unclear; an expert I ran this by suggested it was sycophancy bias, a tendency for the AI to agree with the predicted opinion of whoever is asking the questions (more in Part V below).
Although the AI gets both more liberal and more conservative, these aren’t equal effects; RHLF increases liberalism more than conservatism, for a net shift left. Other net shifts: towards Eastern instead of Abrahamic religions, towards virtue ethics instead of utilitarianism, and maybe towards religion rather than atheism.
What’s going on here? It’s not that the crowdsourced human raters have told the AI to be more Buddhist, or punished it for being insufficiently Buddhist, or necessarily ever given it a question on virtue ethics in particular. I think the answer is that, in lots of different ways, the crowdworkers have been rewarding it for being nice/helpful and punishing it for being not nice/helpful. One thing the AI learns from this is to be nice and helpful. But another thing the AI learns – and this is close to the same thing, but not exactly the same thing – is to answer all questions the way that a nice and helpful person would answer them.
To see how this isn’t the same, imagine that women are generally nicer and more helpful than men. And imagine that you asked the AI what gender it was. You can’t actually do this, because people have trained these AIs to respond that they are AIs and don’t have genders. But I think if you could do this, then an AI rewarded for nice/helpful answers would be more likely to say that it was a woman. This isn’t a nicer and more helpful answer, but it’s more the kind of answer that a nice and helpful person would give.
Is that an offensive stereotype? Maybe, but we’ve already found that AIs use stereotypes in reasoning. I think the reason RHLF makes AIs more Christian than atheist, but more Buddhist than Christian – is that the AI has stereotypes that Christians are nicer and more helpful than atheists, but Buddhists are nicest of all. This is just a theory – but you try explaining why the AIs keep coming out Buddhist.
8) I don’t actually think wanting to learn is some secret thing that people don’t talk about. “The Key to Success in College Is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned”
One of the most important factors in Ms. Zurek Small’s success seems almost too obvious to mention but, in fact, deserves far more attention and discussion: a simple willingness to learn. In more than 20 years of college teaching, I have seen that students who are open to new knowledge will learn. Students who aren’t won’t. But this attitude is not fixed. The paradoxical union of intellectual humility and ambition is something that every student can (with help from teachers, counselors and parents) and should cultivate. It’s what makes learning possible.
The willingness to learn is related to the growth mind-set — the belief that your abilities are not fixed but can improve. But there is a key difference: This willingness is a belief not primarily about the self but about the world. It’s a belief that every class offers something worthwhile, even if you don’t know in advance what that something is.
Unfortunately, big economic and cultural obstacles stand in opposition to that belief.
The first obstacle is careerism. To an overwhelming degree, students today see college as job training, the avenue to a stable career. They are not wrong, given the 70 percent wage premium for 22- to 27-year-old workers with a bachelor’s degree over those with only a high school diploma. But this orientation can close students off from learning things that don’t obviously help their job prospects. Despite the fact that I taught at a religious college, students in my theology class grumbled about having to satisfy a requirement. Why, they asked, would they need to know theology as an accountant, athletic trainer or advertising manager? …
The other big obstacle to the willingness to learn is the urge to present yourself as always already informed. The philosopher Jonathan Lear calls this attitude knowingness. He regards it as a sickness that stands in the way of gaining genuine knowledge. It is “as though there is too much anxiety involved in simply asking a question and waiting for the world to answer,” he writes.
Knowingness is everywhere in our culture. From a former president claiming “everybody knows” some conspiracist nonsense to podcasters smugly debunking cultural myths to your feeling you have to have read, heard and streamed everything, the posture of already knowing supersedes the need to approach new situations with curiosity.
9) An entire AI screenplay is presumably a decent-way off, but, this is interesting, “Soon You’ll Be Able to Make Your Own Movie With AI Artificial intelligence isn’t about to change the movie industry. It already has.”
There’s a new Knives Out movie on Netflix, and I still haven’t seen a few of this season’s awards contenders. But the film I most wish I could watch right now is Squid Invasion From the Deep. It’s a sci-fi thriller directed by John Carpenter about a team of scientists led by Sigourney Weaver who discover an extraterrestrial cephalopod and then die one by one at its tentacles. The production design was inspired by Alien and The Thing; there are handmade creature FX and lots of gore; Wilford Brimley has a cameo. Unfortunately, though, I can’t see this movie, and neither can you, because it doesn’t exist.
For now, Squid Invasion is just a portfolio of concept art conjured by a redditor using Midjourney, an artificial-intelligence tool that creates images from human-supplied text prompts. Midjourney was released into public beta over the summer and for months belched out mostly visual gibberish. “I was trying to make a picture of Joe Rogan fighting a chimp, and it just looked like nightmare fuel,” says the Reddit user, OverlyManlySnail, whose real name is Johnny Weiss. Then, in November, the software was upgraded to version four. It began effortlessly translating complicated suggestions (“DVD screengrab, ’80s John Carpenter horror film, an alien squid attacking a horrified Sigourney Weaver, blood everywhere, extra wide shot, outstanding cinematography, 16-mm.”) into imaginary film stills that look good enough to be real. Some of them look better than anything in Hollywood’s current product line: stranger, more vividly composed, seemingly less computer generated even though they’re completely computer generated.
Soon, Hollywood could be in direct competition with generative AI tools, which, unlike self-driving cars or other long-promised technologies that never quite arrive, are already here and getting better fast. Meta and Google have announced software that converts text prompts into short videos; another tool, Phenaki, can do whole scenes. None of these video generators has been released to the public yet, but the company D-ID offers an AI app that can make people in still photos blink and read from a script, and some have been using it to animate characters created by Midjourney. “In the next few years,” says Matthew Kershaw, D-ID’s VP of marketing and growth, “we could easily see a major movie made almost entirely using AI.” Someday, instead of browsing our Rokus for something to watch, we might green-light our own entertainment by pitching loglines to algorithms that can make feature-length films with sophisticated plots, blockbuster effects, and A-list human actors from any era.
10) Eric Levitz on a supply-constrained economy:
The age of excess supply probably isn’t coming back anytime soon. The U.S. population is old and getting older. Demand for medical services and elder care will grow even as the proportion of prime-age workers in the nation will shrink. Meanwhile, the green transition will stress the economy’s resource base: The more critical minerals needed for electric-vehicle batteries, the fewer available for cell phones; the more construction laborers needed for building transmission lines, the fewer at the housing sector’s disposal.
And if America fails to build out renewables as fast as fossil-fuel production declines, energy-price shocks could ensue. The asset manager BlackRock recently declared that America has entered a new economic regime characterized by “production constraints” and “brutal trade-offs.” …
Liberals will also need to loosen their attachment to supply-constraining regulations. America’s current regulatory framework makes it exceedingly difficult for both the public and private sectors to build housing and clean-energy infrastructure. Environmental laws that help NIMBYs kill renewable-energy projects or tie them up in court for years must be rewritten. Zoning rules that make it extremely challenging for developers to build housing in high-demand areas must be abolished.
Even in the care sector, excessive regulations stymie supply. The U.S. is currently suffering from a shortage of doctors, in no small part because of its stringent licensing requirements. Other nations also make it much easier for foreign-trained physicians to practice within their borders. But rather than fighting to reduce unnecessary licensing requirements, some liberals have recently sought to expand them by making college degrees mandatory for child-care workers.
By reflexively opposing calls for deregulation, liberals do not uphold progressive ideals so much as they undermine them. An America in which housing, energy, and medical care are chronically undersupplied is one in which progressives’ vision for the country will be impossible to realize. In other words, liberals will need to develop their own supply-side economics.
11) This is interesting: a set of right-wing, rationalist principles. A lot of them I would mostly agree with. What’s fascinating to me, though, is how completely obsessed it is with IQ. I’m a huge believer in individual differences in innate ability and think too many liberals downplay this way too much (I’m pretty much with deBoer on this), but, damn does this almost completely ignore the power of context.
12) Crazy story. “‘Office Space’ Inspired Engineer’s Theft Scheme, Police Say”
A software engineer siphoned more than $300,000 from his employer by introducing what prosecutors called a “series of malicious software edits” that wired money into his personal account. If the scheme sounds like the plot of “Office Space,” that’s because the authorities said it was partly inspired by the movie.
It appears the engineer, Ermenildo Valdez Castro, 28, of Tacoma, Wash., did not watch the entire movie: All of the evidence in the workplace comedy was destroyed in an office fire. But Mr. Castro detailed the scheme in a document found on his company laptop, according to the Seattle police.
Mr. Castro, a former software engineer for the e-commerce site Zulily, edited code to divert shipping fees to a personal account and manipulate product prices, stealing about $260,000 in electronic payments and more than $40,000 in merchandise, the police said. He was charged on Dec. 20 with two counts of theft and one count of identify theft and is scheduled to be arraigned on Jan. 26 in King County Superior Court in Seattle, where Zulily is based.
According to a police report, a document found on Mr. Castro’s work laptop referred to the scheme as “OfficeSpace project.” He later told the police that he “named his scheme to steal from Zulily after the movie.”
13) I thought there was a lot that “Andor” could have done better (an overly confusing beginning; somewhat bloated in spots), but, that said, a lot to like and this is a good take, “‘Andor’ Is a Master Class in Good Writing”
14) I’m totally a fan of composting human remains and it should definitely be legal. Pretty cool interactive, so here’s the gift link to check it out.
…and a selection of good stuff from twitter over the past couple weeks
15) Love this. So much of life is arbitrarily based on 5 or 7.
16) This is quite the study. Handjob in an MRI, seriously.
17) On college majors and income.
18) Such an awesome graphic on what color was the infamous dress.
19) I’m not sure that we shouldn’t be giving out metformin with pretty much every Covid diagnosis at this point.
20) Though, here’s also some good results on Paxlovid
20) Good stuff on “neuromyths” of learning
Fully Myelinated 
Recent Comments