This one simple trick will improve education in America…

Pay teachers more.  That’s it, that’s the trick.  All the ideas about incentives and merit pay and whatever else, just pay them more.  This is what I have been preaching for years.  One major effect of paying teachers more is that you will draw smarter people into the pool of potential teachers.  I was talking with my kids literally just earlier this week about how some of the best teachers they have had have been the smartest teachers they have had.  Nothing against some of the fine teachers my kids have had that went to East Carolina, but, the best teacher they all had in Elementary went to UNC– and I don’t think that’s an accident.

And, yet, I was not actually aware of some fairly compelling research that pretty convincingly shows that smarter teachers leads to better student outcomes.  But, a couple of my students (perhaps inspired by my in-class rant) wrote their policy reform papers on increasing teacher pay and included this research:

International differences in teacher quality are commonly hypothesized to be a key determinant of the large international student performance gaps, but lack of consistent quality measures has precluded testing this. We construct country-level measures of teacher cognitive skills using unique assessment data for 31 countries. We find substantial differences in teacher cognitive skills across countries that are strongly related to student performance. Results are supported by fixed-effects estimation exploiting within-country between-subject variation in teacher skills. A series of robustness and placebo tests indicate a systematic influence of teacher skills as distinct from overall differences among countries in the level of cognitive skills. Moreover, observed country variations in teacher cognitive skills are significantly related to differences in women’s access to high-skill occupations outside teaching and to salary premiums for teachers.

And here’s a great article summarizing the key findings:

When teachers have higher cognitive skills, their students perform better academically, according to a new study that compared data from 31 countries.

And teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely across the world, with teachers in the United States performing worse than the average teacher in numeracy and slightly better than the average in literacy. Similarly, U.S. students perform below the average score in math and about average in reading.

Notably, teachers have stronger cognitive skills—and their students perform better in math and reading—in countries that pay teachers more, like in Ireland, Canada, and Finland. Teachers’ cognitive skills were measured by an international survey of adults’ information-processing skills, like literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving.

“This is the first time I’ve got conventional wisdom on my side,” joked Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and one of the study’s authors. “We all think that having smarter teachers will in fact lead to better performance. … What we show, I think, is that countries that have smarter teachers … make an active choice to hire teachers from higher up in the distribution of college graduates.”…

The researchers also found the impact of teachers’ cognitive skills is somewhat larger for low-income students than their more-affluent peers, particularly in reading.

“Schools are just inherently more important for low-income kids,” Hanushek said. “[In wealthy households], you have the ability to make up for less-good instruction, whereas lower-income families, on average, are not as prepared or ready to make up for what goes on in schools.”

How Can We Create a Smarter Teacher Workforce?

Teachers perform better than the median college graduate in countries like Finland, Singapore, Ireland, and Chile, the study found. Finland and Singapore in particular have been praised by education scholars for their work on building a high-quality teaching force. For example, Finnish teacher-preparation programs only select about 10 percent of applicants—which the Finnish minister of education told Education Week is because “teachers are so respected in our society.”

To match the cognitive skills of Finnish teachers, the United States would need to recruit its median math teacher from the 74th percentile of the college distribution instead of the current 47th percentile, and its median reading teacher from the 71st percentile instead of the 51st, the study found…

“I think the U.S. has chosen a really bad equilibrium in that we really do underpay our teachers,” Hanushek said, adding that U.S. teachers are paid 22 percent less than comparably experienced and skilled college graduates doing other jobs. “Then we get people who are not very high up in the distribution of college graduates.”

The study found clear evidence that higher teacher pay is associated with an increase in teachers’ cognitive skills—which, in turn, is associated with better student performance.

And there you go.  

Also, but, man, that last line in the original summary:

Moreover, observed country variations in teacher cognitive skills are significantly related to differences in women’s access to high-skill occupations outside teaching and to salary premiums for teachers.

I put the whole long article into Claude (before I found that nice summary article) and it did a great job on the takeways.  But then I asked it this, “What are the implications of the gender findings for countries that believe in gender equality?” and it gave me a damn good answer.  Not perfect, but not bad at all and this stuff was not in the article as far as I can tell.  It really is artificial intelligence in a meaningful way:

The finding that alternative job opportunities for skilled women affect the cognitive skills of a country’s teaching workforce poses an interesting trade-off for countries that value gender equality. On the one hand, increasing career opportunities for women outside of teaching and allowing them to pursue jobs matching their skills aligns with principles of gender equality and economic efficiency. On the other hand, this may have the unintended consequence of reducing the overall talent level of the teaching profession, which could negatively impact student outcomes.

Some implications and options for countries wanting to balance these objectives include:

• Providing incentives to attract high-achieving women to teaching through measures like competitive pay, loan forgiveness programs, leadership opportunities, and flexibility. This could help offset impacts from broader labor market trends.
• Investing in teacher professional development and ongoing training. This could upgrade the skills of the existing teaching workforce regardless of outside job market changes.
• Working on making the teaching profession more appealing and prestigious through public campaigns. This could influence social attitudes over time and help attract talent.
• Considering policy supports like high-quality affordable childcare to make balancing work and family easier for skilled women considering teaching.
• Monitoring trends in teacher skills and student outcomes carefully and being prepared to respond with policy if impacts emerge.

Overall, countries committed to gender equality may need to get creative in finding ways to make the teaching profession appealing, stimulating, and high in social status for skilled women in order to attract and retain talent over the long run.

Anyway, forget all the other stuff.  Just start paying teachers a lot more and everything else will fall into place.  

Quick hits (part II)

https://www.one-tab.com/page/wd2_eUIMSJCFCwjKJBvReQ

Clearing out some somewhat older links today that I haven’t gotten around to (though, some new ones, too)

1) This is fantastic from Rogé Karma, “Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History: Was the country’s turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes.”

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.

What happened?

One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S…

McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.

2) This was one of those piece that felt necessary, but awful, to read. Gift link, Years into a climate disaster, these people are eating the unthinkable”

CHOTYIEL, South Sudan — It was 1 p.m., her children still hadn’t eaten, and every item on Nyaguey Dak Kieth’s “long to-do list” pertained to surviving another day. So Nyaguey grabbed a plastic bucket and an empty sack and set off from her village surrounded by floodwater. Those waters had upended her life, but also provided a food option — not a desirable one, but one of the few left.

Water lilies. They’d been keeping her family alive for two years.

They were bitter. Hard to digest. They required hours of manual labor — cutting, pounding, drying, sifting — just to be made edible. Nyaguey could still remember her initial shock at eating them, figuring they’d be a short-term measure. And now, with the floodwaters holding their ground, she could trace a two-year arc of distress in what the lilies had become: sustenance so vital that people were slogging farther and farther into the waters to find them, before someone else did.

“I can see some lilies here,” another woman told Nyaguey after a group of four had walked 20 minutes out of town, reaching the edge of the waters.

“Not enough,” Nyaguey said, and the group kept moving. “It looks like somebody already collected most of these.”…

In South Sudan, parts of the country have been underwater now for four years. Other areas, two or three. Some 15 percent of the country is submerged year-round, as opposed to 5 percent several years ago.

One extreme season has followed another, with major rainfalls flowing in from countries upstream, such as Uganda and Ethiopia. Over time, the soil below has turned sticky, sealing the waters in place. Subsistence farmers are bracing for the possibility that their land has changed for good — giving way to a new water mass the size of Lake Michigan, with 1 million people displaced because of flooding, their crops destroyed, their cattle now scattered bones.

South Sudan illustrates how even robust investments in relief aid are no match for the cataclysms that climate change, war and corruption have unleashed on many countries. This landlocked nation — which only gained independence from Sudan in 2011 — benefits from more Western funding than its neighbors, withmuch of it from the United States.

That moneyallows for day-to-day triage — upholding mud dikes, maintaining city-sized displacement camps, and providing food aid to some but not all who are hungry. But it isn’t enough to help people recover.

3) Last month I was explaining to my Public Policy class, the absurdity of the very existence of the drug Nexium and what we spend on it.  I came across this great article from Jon Cohn from 2016:

The story is about Nexium, a popular treatment for acid reflux—and how much Medicare Part D, the program that covers prescriptions for seniors, is spending on it. In 2014, according to federal data, Nexium accounted for $2.66 billion in total Medicare spending. That was the second‐highest total for any drug. The federal government picked up most of that cost, with individual Medicare beneficiaries responsible for the rest as out‐of‐pocket costs. That $2.66 billion figure represents a significant number in the context of the federal budget. It’d be more than enough to put 200,000 additional kids in Head Start, for example.

Sometimes the benefits of a drug justify the enormous sums government, insurers, and individuals spend on them. They treat or cure a disease that would be debilitating and require ongoing, expensive treatments, or they relieve symptoms without the usual side effects, making them clearly superior to their predecessors.

Is Nexium one of those cases? Here it helps to know the drug’s backstory, which books like Merrill Goozner’s The $800 Million Pill lay out.1 Acid indigestion and heartburn are occasional and short‐lived problems for most Americans. But they are chronic problems for some and can lead to painful, dangerous conditions like ulcers, acid reflux, erosion of the esophagus, and even esophageal cancer. In the 1970s, the drug industry started developing breakthrough drugs that could reduce the stomach’s secretion of hydrochloric acid, rather than merely neutralize it, with a new agent that blocks the histamine receptors in the gastric glands. In 1989 a Swedish‐based manufacturer won approval to sell a new drug called Prilosec in the United States. The company, which later became AstraZeneca, promoted the “purple pill” heavily, and by the late 1990s it had become the world’s best‐selling medication.

But by then AstraZeneca was already thinking about the future—specifically, 2001, when its patent on Prilosec was set to expire. Once that happened, generic manufacturers would produce their own versions, forcing down the price and cutting significantly into AstraZeneca’s revenue stream. As Gardiner Harris, then a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, later recounted, AstraZeneca’s executives convened a working group to find ways of replacing the lost revenue. They named the project “Shark Fin” because a graph of the income from the drug would look like a shark fin—sales sharply increasing, and then decreasing with the loss of the patent—if AstraZeneca didn’t do something.2

AstraZeneca’s solution was Nexium—the “new purple pill,” as the company called it. But AstraZeneca hadn’t really invented a new drug. Instead, it had taken advantage of the fact that Prilosec, like many drugs, is actually composed of 2 “isomers”—roughly speaking, 2 molecules that are mirror images of one another. AstraZeneca cleaved the isomers from each other and marketed one as Nexium.

It’s a common strategy in drug development, and sometimes it actually yields a better drug because one isomer turns out to produce substantially better results than the other. But after the company commissioned 4 studies of Nexium’s effectiveness relative to Prilosec, only one comparing Prilosec and Nexium at comparable dosages showed improved results for Nexium. It was for one particular condition, erosive esophagitis, which affects only a fraction of patients who have acid reflux disease. And the difference was marginal…

Spending on Nexium won’t be such an issue in the future, since its own patent just expired in 2015. But many public health experts believe it’s high time the federal government gave new drugs more scrutiny. One possibility would be to manage Medicare Part D formularies more aggressively—perhaps by assigning higher copayments to drugs with more ambiguous benefits, unless patients and physicians can demonstrate a medical rationale. This is essentially what happens at places like Group Health and Kaiser Permanente now. Another remedy would be to place new restrictions on the kinds of claims that drug companies can make with direct‐to‐consumer advertising. Or, of course, the government could simply take a more assertive and direct role in setting drug prices. That’s what the governments of most developed countries do.

Sadly, the more aggressive government interventions run into strong resistance from conservatives, who oppose government regulation on principle. And even steps like limiting government formularies to drugs with clear clinical value generate intense opposition from the powerful pharmaceutical lobby. As the drug companies tell it, such efforts would end up dampening innovation by making it harder for them to recoup the expense of developing drugs.

Many public health experts disagree, and they have a lot of data to back up their views. But it’s the drug companies’ claims that usually prevail. Employers, the government, and, eventually, individual Americans are left picking up the check.

4) Loved this from Brian Klaas, “Blood Diamonds and the Lottery of Earth: How an 18th century English inventor, an ancient inland sea, a Philadelphia-based marketing guru, and relentless geological forces combined to create dazzling, bloody conflict.”  You’ve just kind of got to read it:

Are our lives—and our histories—just the accidental playthings of geography and geology?

We’re about to embark on a journey around the globe, backward and forward across vast expanses of time, to understand how human history interacts with tectonic forces, to create absurdly peculiar outcomes—some triumphs, others tragedies.

In particular, I’m going to show you how an ancient inland sea, an 18th century English inventor, the shape of coastlines carved out over millions of years, a Philadelphia-based marketing guru, long-term erosion, and West African rebels descended from those freed from American slavery…combined to produce a violent, bloody conflict. And it was all fueled by cut, shimmering little minerals that suddenly and arbitrarily became valuable.

It’s a true story that will make you question how history works—and how much our lives are affected by unseen forces beyond our control.

5) I’m a sucker for music in a minor key. Kevin Drum:

Tyler Cowen points to a chart from Ted Gioia and Chris Dalla Riva that shows the share of popular songs written in a minor key:

6) This is true.  Some late-term abortions basically are elective, “Read this if you believe that later abortions only happen in case of severe medical conditions”  I would prefer these abortions not happen.  But, even more so, I would prefer that women who truly need late-term abortions for health reasons are able to get them.  It’s a necessary and worthy trade-off.

The best case abortion defenders can honestly make is this: Many post-20-week abortions happen because of severe health problems for mother or child, and we don’t know how many. What they cannot honestly claim is that late-term abortion is always in response to such dire health concerns or diagnoses.

Okay, not “always.”  Now, keep them legal anyways.

7) Giant African Land Snails are so disturbing! And a genuine invasive species threat in Florida.  And, a helluva plot point in Peacock’s “Killing It,” which is a great show.

Giant African land snails are back in Florida, spurring intensive efforts to destroy the invasive mollusks before they spread and wreak agricultural and environmental destruction.

After one of the large brown snails was spotted earlier this month north of Miami, the state has declared a quarantine and treatment area over a few square miles in the Broward County city of Miramar. The quarantine joins two others already underway in the state: one in Lee County, which is home to Fort Myers, and one in Pasco County, north of Tampa.

“The giant African land snail is one of the most damaging snails in the world, consuming at least 500 different types of plants,” the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services declared this week. “These snails could be devastating to Florida agriculture and natural areas as they cause extensive damage to tropical and subtropical environments.”

They’ve also been known to attach to houses and eat the stucco walls.

The Miramar quarantine means it’s illegal to move the snails and lots of other things — including plants, soil, debris and building materials — through or from the defined area without explicit permission.

Giant African land snails contain both male and female reproductive organs, and they don’t need a mate to reproduce. Reproduce they do, quickly and profusely – laying up to 500 eggs at a time, according to a factsheet from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA warns of serious health risks to humans: the snails can be carriers for rat lungworm, a parasite that can cause a rare type of meningitis in humans.

At full size, the snails grow up to 8 inches long and almost 5 inches in diameter, about the size of an adult fist. They have a brownish shell that covers about half their body.

8) The case for the 32 hour workweek

The autoworkers picketing factories across America aren’t just seeking higher pay. They are also, audaciously, demanding the end of the standard 40-hour workweek. They want a full week’s pay for working 32 hours across four days. And we’ll all benefit if they succeed.

Americans spend too much time on the job. A shorter workweek would be better for our health, better for our families and better for our employers, who would reap the benefits of a more motivated and better-rested work force. Other countries may seek an advantage in the global marketplace by wringing every drop of labor from their workers; American companies have to be more productive, and that means taking better care of their workers.

In 2015, the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, decided to reduce the workweek for 68 nurses at a city-owned elder-care facility. Instead of eight-hour days, the nurses worked for six hours, and the city hired 15 additional nurses to maintain the same level of staffing. As one might expect, the nurses were happier and healthier. The patients were happier and healthier, too.

A growing number of similar experiments by companies in other developed countries have yielded similar results. Working less improves the lives of workers — and it also benefits employers. Of the 61 British firms that participated in a six-month experiment with shorter workweeks last year, 56 decided to let employees continue to work less.

9) Good stuff from Sarah Zhang, “Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong: Start with this: You really have two noses.”

Nasal congestion, I’ve learned in all this, is far weirder than I ever thought. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is somehow connected to our armpits.

The argument that humans have two noses was first put to me by Ronald Eccles, a nose expert who ran the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, in Wales, until his retirement a few years ago. This sounds absurd, I know, but consider what your nose—or noses—looks like on the inside: Each nostril opens into its own nasal cavity, which does not connect with the other directly. They are two separate organs, as separate as your two eyes or your two ears.

And far from being a passive tube, the nose’s hidden inner anatomy is constantly changing. It’s lined with venous erectile tissue that has a “similar structure to the erectile tissue in the penis,” Eccles said, and can become engorged with blood. Infection or allergies amplify the swelling, so much so that the nasal passages become completely blocked. This swelling, not mucus, is the primary cause of a stuffy nose, which is why expelling snot never quite fixes congestion entirely. “You can blow your nose until the cows come home and you’re not blowing that swollen tissue out,” says Timothy Smith, an otolaryngologist at the Oregon Health & Science University’s Sinus Center. Gently blowing your nose works fine for any mucus that may be adding to the stuffiness, he told me. But decongestants such as Sudafed and Afrin work by causing blood vessels in the nose to shrink, opening the nasal passages for temporary relief.

In healthy noses, the swelling and unswelling of nasal tissue usually follows a predictable pattern called the nasal cycle. Every few hours, one side of the nose becomes partially congested while the other opens. Then they switch, going back and forth, back and forth. The exact pattern and duration vary from person to person, but we rarely notice these changes inside our noses. “When I tell people about the nasal cycle, most people are not aware of it at all,” says Guilherme Garcia, a biomedical engineer at the Medical College of Wisconsin. I certainly wasn’t, and I have been breathing through my nose only my entire life. But the idea made sense as soon as I consciously thought about it: When I’m sick, and extra swelling has turned partial congestion into complete congestion, I do tend to feel more blocked on one side than the other.

10) Yascha Mounk interviews Tim Urban— fantastic!  Now, if only Urban would make his book a physical product so that I would read it.

11) Good stuff from Jessica Grose on younger generations loss of faith (broadly speaking):

When I wrote my series on why Americans are moving away from organized religion, I didn’t focus specifically on those under 30, even though I knew they were the least religiously affiliated. I wanted to tell the full story that included different age groups because in recent decades, all age groups have seen a decline in religious participation. The sociological term for the unaffiliated is “nones,” a catchall for atheists, agnostics and those who say they have no religion in particular.

I also thought that for the youngest adults, the move away from traditional worship was just an extension of the overall trend: a combination of fewer of them being raised by religious parents, a greater social acceptance of not identifying as a person of faith and a cultural association between conservative political beliefs and Christianity that started years before the first Zoomer was born.

But after more reading, rumination and reporting, I think there’s something slightly new happening for Gen Z and the youngest millennials. So I turned again to Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who is a pastor and the author of “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going.” He told me: “The estimates vary on this, but it’s empirically defensible to say that at least 40 percent of Gen Z are nones now.”

He thinks the big story here is that so many younger nones categorize themselves as nothing in particular rather than as atheists or agnostics. If you’re an atheist or an agnostic, you have a defined worldview. Whereas with many young Americans, Burge said, “they look at all the religion options and say, ‘I really don’t want to pick a side.’ And that’s what nothing in particular is. It’s not religious, obviously, but it’s also not secular, either. It’s kind of, ‘No, thank you. I’ll pass on the question of religion.’”

And while some of their disaffiliation is driven by the same reasons we’ve seen for older millennials and Gen X, what distinguishes the under-30 set is a marked level of distrust in a variety of major institutions and leaders — not just religious ones. So it makes a certain kind of sense that they don’t want to associate too closely with any defined group.

A new report from the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute calls this “formative distrust,” noting that older Americans had “greater confidence in political leaders during their childhood years.” If you grew up, as I did, during the relatively stable Clinton years, for example, you probably have a very different view of political institutions than someone turning 25 today, whose political consciousness may have been formed during the Trump era.

I spoke to Daniel Cox, the director of the survey center, who said that for a long time most Americans generally respected society’s institutions and processes and expected that even if people had differing opinions, “the adults would kind of take care of things.” That’s changed. “For both millennials and Gen Z, I think that was not the world they were raised in, where you had people increasingly vociferously complaining, lobbing accusations around election integrity, and people cheating or not abiding by the rules or conventions of the past,” Cox said… Here’s one more interesting wrinkle: According to Burge, the “long-held trend” of women being more religious than men seems to be flipping for younger generations. His research has shown that “with those born in 2000 or later, women are clearly more likely to be nones than men.” The relationship between Christianity and conservative politics may be related here — as young women increasingly are more liberal than young men, they may be more inclined to move away from religion.

12) Good stuff from Jerusalem Demsas, “Why Americans Hate a Good Economy: Seven possible explanations for what’s going on”

Beyond the question of why Americans’ feelings about the economy may have diverged from the actual economy is another, perhaps equally important question: Why are policy makers and commentators so eager to explain it—or explain it away?

I attribute all of this energy to a mad dash to set the narrative following the pandemic recession. Some believe that the government’s robust response to the crisis proves that we could stabilize working- and middle-class family finances in perpetuity. Others believe that ensuing inflation was too high a price to pay for those social supports. Yet others wish that policy makers would focus more on how their ideas and victories are translated through a fragmented media ecosystem.

Narrowly, this debate is about whether voters think the economy is good or bad, and why; the bigger issue is what lesson future politicians will draw about how to respond to recessions. Will they cower at the potential inflationary effects of fiscal stimulus? Will they require that any new social supports remain permanent rather than risk voters’ wrath when they are removed? Policy makers tend to overlearn the lessons from the last war, and every side is fighting to say what, exactly, those lessons are.

13) Is the College Board pushing too many people to take AP tests? Maybe.

14) David Wallace-Wells interrogates Bethany McLean Joe Nocera’s on their new book “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.”  Honestly, they seem to have not thought through some things all that clearly.

In the beginning of the book you write, in what almost feels like a thesis statement for the book: “A central tenet of this book is that we could not have done better, and pretending differently is a dangerous fiction, one that prevents us from taking a much needed look in the mirror.”

This claim, that the U.S. could not have done any better, runs against your other claim, that what we observed was an American failure. It is also a pretty extreme claim, I think, and I wanted to press you on it in part because it is, in my view, undermined by quite a lot of the work you do in the book itself.

Would the U.S. not have done better if it had recognized earlier that the disease spread through the air rather than in droplets? Would it not have done better if it hadn’t bungled the rollout of a Covid test in the early months? You write at length about PPE shortages and the problems of coordinating care between hospitals in the early months — would the country not have done better if it had addressed those problems quickly, or not suffered from them to begin with? Disparities in health care access — is it a dangerous fiction to think we might address that? You guys are big champions of Operation Warp Speed — would it not have been better if those vaccines had been rolled out to the public in nine months, rather than 12, getting shots into the arms of the vulnerable elderly before the first big winter surge?

15) I recently had to complete sexual harassment training, which led me to learn this interesting feature of NC’s sexual assault law:

Sexual Battery
North Carolina law defines sexual battery as sexually touching another person’s intimate body
parts (clothed or unclothed) or placing semen, urine, or feces on another person who:
• cannot consent
• is forced and does not consent

Ummm, okay then.

16) Nate Silver argues that free speech is in trouble:

OK, with that throat-clearing out of the way, let me show you the numbers, broken down by students’ self-described political orientation. The figures in the table reflect the percentage of students who would allow the speaker.

If you want to critique the examples FIRE chose, I’m sympathetic up to a point — the conservative statements seem slightly spicier than the liberal ones, although maybe that reflects my personal biases. I figured that the students would have a strong dislike for speakers C1 (“transgender people have a mental disorder”) or C3 (“Black Lives Matter is a hate group”) because they could be seen as promoting hate speech or misinformation. I don’t personally think “hate speech” and “misinformation” are terribly coherent categories, but leave that aside for now. This is a survey of college students, including some as young as 18. So I was just hoping to find general, directional support for free speech — even if not necessarily in every instance from first principles.

But I was much more surprised by responses to speaker C2 (“abortion should be completely illegal”). People obviously have strong feelings about abortion, and a complete abortion ban is unpopular. Still, this is a commonly-articulated, garden-variety unpopular political opinion that doesn’t make any sort of factual claim and can’t reasonably be construed as hateful. You’d think even students with a tentative, half-baked belief in free speech principles would tolerate it. And yet, 57 percent of students — including 68 percent of liberals — thought a speaker expressing this anti-abortion viewpoint shouldn’t be allowed on campus. That number kind of shocked me.

For that matter, tolerance for some of the liberal viewpoints isn’t all that high either. Only 57 precent of students think L2 — the speaker who says religious liberty is used as an excuse to discriminate against gays and lesbians — should be allowed, even though that sort of claim has been common in American political discourse for decades now

Still, to be clear, there’s a big gap between the liberal students and the conservative students. The conservatives are actually quite consistent, with roughly 60 percent support for both liberal and conservative speakers. The liberal students have a relatively high tolerance for liberal speakers, but little tolerance for conservative ones.

16) This is excellent (link goes to a paywall free archive version), “Youth gender medicine has become a hall of mirrors
Kids in distress deserve ethical, evidence-based care. But what should be a medical issue has turned into a political battle.”

17) Jessica Grose asks, “Why Have We Allowed Money to Ruin Youth Sports?”  Because too many parents are unhappy with good old-fashioned Rec leagues, which are seemingly thriving here in all sorts of sports where I live.

My daughters love to swim, and we’d exhausted the lessons at our local Y, so I thought I’d try to find them a swim team. They’re only 6 and 9, so what I was looking for was a local rec situation that offered a bit of low-stakes camaraderie and regular exercise. They’re strong swimmers but probably not future Olympians, and besides, I want a life: I have zero interest in shuttling them up and down the Eastern Seaboard every weekend to compete, as the parents whose children are on travel teams seem to do.

The kind of chill athletic experience I wanted for my kids barely seems to exist anymore. There wasn’t anything like the delightfully bumbling soccer league of my youth. All I could find were intense teams that had practices several times a week. The only other regular swimming option for my children is lessons, which are expensive, and you need to sign up on the first day of registration or you’re out of luck.

I thought it might be just a New York City thing — often there are wait lists for all kinds of kid activities because there is so much demand and not enough supply. But it seems to be a cross-country problem: When I tweeted in frustration, lots of folks replied describing similar experiences — including a woman who wryly suggested that one might have to sacrifice a baby goat to get kids into swimming lessons in Portland, Ore.

18) A nice Q&A with deBoer, “How Elites Ruined the American Left”

19) Well, okay then, “Attacked by Amazon’s largest venomous snake, man survives days in jungle”

20) Encouraging, “The Long Quest for a Universal Flu Vaccine Finally Takes Its First Steps: The search for a shot that could protect us against many strains—and maybe a pandemic—is notching achievements at last. But the flu’s endless mutation and our own biology stand in the way.”

This variability speaks to the biggest challenge of fighting the flu: its restless, endless mutation. Every year, vaccine makers in each hemisphere build a new formula based on whatever is circulating. But they can never be confident that the strain they pick in a lab as that year’s target will look the same after six more months in the wild—or whether something entirely new will pull ahead of the pack.

So every summer, as the northern hemisphere’s flu season approaches, public health people fretfully anticipate the data. Will manufacturers deliver the shot in time? Will enough people take it? How effective will it be? And every year, as they watch the numbers settle, at least some of them long for something that could short-circuit the waiting: a vaccine that works no matter how the virus changes and that could be produced far enough in advance to prevent a fall vaccination crunch.

That goal is known as a universal influenza vaccine. For immunologists, it has been an end-of-the-rainbow phantasm for more than a decade, a deeply desired treasure that manages to stay just out of reach. Recently, though, the pursuit of a better flu shot has notched promising achievements. A vaccine candidate developed by the National Institutes of Health has entered its second Phase 1 clinical trial (which tests whether a compound is safe for humans). Other candidates developed by Moderna, based on the mRNA technology that allowed rapid development of Covid vaccines, are in Phase 1/2 and also Phase 3 trials (which test for efficacy). And novel constructs developed by teams at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania have delivered promising results in mice. They are all feats of engineering and imagination, deploying the latest virological tools against an ancient foe…

Here’s the central challenge of making a better vaccine. The portion of the virus that our immune systems react to, a protein on the surface called hemagglutinin (HA for short), is also the part that drifts genetically from season to season. When we develop an infection, antibodies that we produce bind and block that HA. “The first viral exposure you have shapes how you respond in the future,” says Jenna Guthmiller, an immunologist and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine and a collaborator with Palese’s lab. “In a few years, you see a drifted version of this, something that’s mutated just ever so slightly. That antibody may still be able to recognize it, but the strength of that binding is now reduced.”

To solve the twin problems of mutations always racing ahead and our response lagging behind, teams have pursued two concepts. One simultaneously presents the immune system with multiple HAs, a scenario that never occurs naturally. The other executes a maneuver that slides a different part of the flu virus into contact with the immune system first.

The second path is the strategy that Palese and his group have followed. Traditional flu vaccines deliver portions of the flu virus, or entire killed or weakened viruses, to prompt the immune system to respond. As a first step, the Mount Sinai research tinkers with the internals of the virus by tailoring its HA, disassembling the lollipop-shaped antigen into its component parts. By removing the head—the much-mutating part that engages with our cells—they allow the supporting stalk, which changes less, to come to the fore. Because the HA needs a head to invoke an immune response, the team creates a chimera, swapping in HA heads from flu varieties that don’t infect humans. Palese calls them “funny hats.”

21) This is really something else and well worth your time.  Gift link. “A home birth midwife faces scrutiny after a baby dies.
It’s not the first time.”

(Return of) Quick hits (part I)

1) Good stuff from Garrett Graff on what the government knows about UFO’s

However, I believe the UFO cover-up is about more than state secrets. The government routinely hides information important and meaningless on all manner of subjects, regardless of whether legitimate national-security concerns are involved. Its default position is to stonewall, especially to conceal embarrassing revelations. After reading thousands of pages of government reports, I believe that the government’s uneasiness over its sheer ignorance drives its secrecy. It just doesn’t know very much.

Officials are, at the end of the day, clueless about what a certain portion of UFOs and UAPs actually are, and they don’t like to say so. After all, “I don’t know” is a terribly uncomfortable response for a bureaucracy that spends more than $900 billion a year on homeland security and national defense.

Decades of declassified memos, internal reports, and study projects create the sense that the government doesn’t have satisfying answers for the most perplexing sightings. In internal documents written before the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966, officials, who had no sense that ordinary civilians would read their work, admit that they simply lacked credible explanations. In a then-classified 1947 letter that led to the Air Force’s original effort to study these “flying saucer” reports, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining seemed as baffled as anyone, writing that some of the reported craft “lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically, or remotely.” Project Sign, as the effort became known, looked at 273 sightings. After a year, it issued a secret report. Although many UFO sightings were either “errors of the human mind and senses” or “conventional aerial objects,” it said, it couldn’t explain all of them. Some sightings were just too weird to rule on one way or another. “Proof of non-existence is equally impossible to obtain unless a reasonable and convincing explanation is determined for each incident,” the Project Sign team wrote.

2) Good stuff on the alleged racial bias in the tests that teachers need to pass to be teachers in New York.  Lots of issues to dig into in here.  Among them… are the tests actually biased in any way?  Why exactly do racial minorities perform so much worse on average than white teachers?  What does it mean for a test to be racially biased? Are schools of education doing a good enough job on educating new teachers? Are these tests actually measuring at all what teachers should know?

3) My Thanksgiving plans this week were canceled due to one child, my wife, and me all getting a stomach bug this week.  It was mercifully short, but it still sucks.  National Geographic on the evolutionary marvel that is norovirus:

Noroviruses are one of virology’s great open secrets. In a recent issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Aron Hall of the Centers for Disease Control declared, “Noroviruses are perhaps the perfect human pathogen.”

Here’s what inspires awe in scientists like Hall.

Each norovirus carries just nine protein-coding genes (you have about 20,000). Even with that skimpy genetic toolkit, noroviruses can break the locks on our cells, slip in, and hack our own DNA to make new noroviruses. The details of this invasion are sketchy, alas, because scientists haven’t figured out a good way to rear noroviruses in human cells in their labs. It’s not even clear exactly which type of cell they invade once they reach the gut. Regardless of the type, they clearly know how to exploit their hosts. Noroviruses come roaring out of the infected cells in vast numbers. And then they come roaring out of the body. Within a day of infection, noroviruses have rewired our digestive system so that stuff comes flying out from both ends.

To trigger diarrhea, the viruses alter the intestinal lining, causing cells to dump out their fluids, which then gets washed out of the body–along with many, many, many noroviruses. Each gram of feces contains around five billion noroviruses. (Yes, billion.)

Noroviruses also make us puke. And if you can gather enough strength to think clearly about this, virus-driven vomit is a pretty remarkable manipulation of a host. Vomiting occurs when our nerves send signals that swiftly contract the muscles lining the stomach. Vomiting does us a lot of good when we’re hurling out some noxious substance that would do us harm. But repeated projectile vomiting of the sort that noroviruses cause serve another function: they let the viruses to find a new host.

To get us to throw up so violently, noroviruses must tap into our nervous systems, but it’s not clear how they do so. Here’s one particularly creepy hint: some studies indicate that during a norovirus infection, our stomachs slow down the passage of food into the intestines. In other words, they seem to load up the stomach in preparation for vomiting. Every particle of that stored food is a potential vehicle for noroviruses when it comes flying out of the mouth.

Once the norovirus emerges from its miserable host, it has to survive in the environment. Noroviruses have no trouble doing so, it seems. Fine droplets released from sick people can float through the air and settle on food, on countertops, in swimming pools. They can survive freezing and heating and cleaning with many chemical disinfectants. In 2010, scientists surveyed a hospital for noroviruses and found 21 different types sitting on a single countertop. It takes fewer than twenty noroviruses slipping into a person’s mouth to start a new infection.

4) My kids (okay, me, too) love the insane-sized Bucee’s convenience stores.  Nice article on the newest and biggest ever in the Washington Post.

5) Frustratingly, large-scale interventions to help teen mental health don’t seem to work, “These Teens Got Therapy. Then They Got Worse.: The kids are not all right, and frustratingly, we don’t really know how to help them.”

You have to admit, it seemed like a great way to help anxious and depressed teens.

Researchers in Australia assigned more than 1,000 young teenagers to one of two classes: either a typical middle-school health class or one that taught a version of a mental-health treatment called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. After eight weeks, the researchers planned to measure whether the DBT teens’ mental health had improved.

The therapy was based on strong science: DBT incorporates some classic techniques from therapy, such as cognitive reappraisal, or reframing negative events in a more positive way, and it also includes more avant-garde techniques such as mindfulness, the practice of being in the present moment. Both techniques have been proven to alleviate psychological struggles.

This special DBT-for-teens program also covered a range of both mental-health coping strategies and life skills—which are, again, correlated with health and happiness. One week, students were instructed to pay attention to things they wouldn’t typically notice, such as a sunset. Another, they were told to sleep more, eat right, and exercise. They were taught to accept unpleasant things they couldn’t change, and also how to distract themselves from negative emotions and ask for things they need. “We really tried to put the focus on, how can you apply some of this stuff to things that are happening in your everyday lives already?” Lauren Harvey, a psychologist at the University of Sydney and the lead author of the study, told me.

But what happened was not what Harvey and her co-authors predicted. The therapy seemed to make the kids worse. Immediately after the intervention, the therapy group had worse relationships with their parents and increases in depression and anxiety. They were also less emotionally regulated and had less awareness of their emotions, and they reported a lower quality of life, compared with the control group.

Most of these negative effects dissipated after a few months, but six months later, the therapy group was still reporting poorer relationships with their parents.

These results are, well, depressing. Therapy is supposed to relieve depression, not exacerbate it. (And, in case it’s not clear, although it’s disappointing that the therapy program didn’t work, it’s commendable that Harvey and her colleagues analyzed it objectively and published the negative results.)

But for people who study teen-mental-health treatments, these findings are part of a familiar pattern. All sorts of so-called universal interventions, in which a big group of teens are subjected to “healthy” messaging from adults, have failed. Last year, a study of thousands of British kids who were put through a mindfulness program found that, in the end, they had the same depression and well-being outcomes as the control group. A cognitive-behavioral-therapy program for teens had similarly disappointing results—it proved no better than regular classwork.

6) NYT guest essay on the issue:

Why were these programs counterproductive? The WISE Teens researchers suggest, convincingly, that the teenagers weren’t engaged enough in the program and might have felt overwhelmed by having too many tools and skills presented to them without enough time to master them. (The study found that WISE Teens participants who spent more time practicing the skills at home showed some slight mental health benefits — though most of the participants did not engage in home practice.)

But I would venture three additional explanations for the backfiring, all of which dovetail with what other research tells us about youth mental health.

First, by focusing teenagers’ attention on mental health issues, these interventions may have unwittingly exacerbated their problems. Lucy Foulkes, an Oxford psychologist, calls this phenomenon “prevalence inflation” — when greater awareness of mental illness leads people to talk of normal life struggles in terms of “symptoms” and “diagnoses.” These sorts of labels begin to dictate how people view themselves, in ways that can become self-fulfilling.

Teenagers, who are still developing their identities, are especially prone to take psychological labels to heart. Instead of “I am nervous about X,” a teenager might say, “I can’t do X because I have anxiety” — a reframing that research shows undermines resilience by encouraging people to view everyday challenges as insurmountable.

It’s generally a sign of progress when diagnoses that were once whispered in shameful secrecy enter our everyday vocabulary and shed their stigma. But especially online, where therapy “influencers” flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders, greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions — what Dr. Foulkes calls “problems of living.” When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop.

A second possible explanation for why these programs backfired is that they were provided in the wrong place and to the wrong people. The structure of school, which emphasizes evaluation and achievement, may clash with practicing “slow” contemplative skills like mindfulness. And many of the skills taught in these programs were developed for people coping with severe mental illness, not everyday stresses. These tools might not feel applicable to teenagers who aren’t deeply struggling — and on the flip side, their wide-scale adoption might make them seem too generic and watered-down to teenagers who are truly ill.

A third possible explanation is that these interventions offered enough information to highlight a problem, but not enough to fix it. As research has repeatedly shown, the most effective therapies involve not just learning skills but also developing meaningful relationships. Even the most structured cognitive behavioral approaches recognize the value of a strong working therapeutic alliance between therapist and client. Effective therapies often require clients to do hard things: Exposure therapies for anxiety, for example, ask clients to confront fears they’d prefer to avoid. Such interventions work best with steady, consistent, hands-on support from a dedicated therapist.

7) Love this from Yglesias.  Among all the stuff, we should also talk about how amazing bad Trump is on the issues, “Trump would make inflation worse: It’s better to make things better”

The press still largely covers Trump as an amusing sideshow, as if the world were stuck in a perpetual 2015, and the loudest critiques of this I hear call for more alarmist coverage of his authoritarian leanings. But I think the single most under covered story in American politics is about what you might call the “boring” stakes of the 2024 election. If the country elects Trump and a Republican congress and they implement their ideas on tax policy, trade, and immigration, what’s going to happen to the big economic variables that everyone cares about?

Because it seems to me that either they will make inflation and interest rates a lot higher, or else they’re going to be forced into the kind of draconian Social Security and Medicare cuts they claim not to want.

8) And Brian Beutler, “The 2024 Election Is About Real Things: It’s early still, but public perception of the candidates has lost touch with reality”

A year out from the election, my sense is that the public is horribly underinformed about the election, even having lived through a one-term Trump presidency and almost three years of the Biden administration. And as I see it, the stakes this time around are broadly comparable directionally to the stakes of the 2016 election, but somewhat higher overall. 

In 2016 the judiciary was up for grabs, but by now it’s already lost to the GOP. Trump would obviously make the bench even more corrupt and right-wing in a second term, but much of that damage has already been done. 

And as a result of that damage, Republican victory in 2024 could easily result in a national ban on abortion. If Biden’s re-elected, by contrast, the status quo will hold; if his party reconsolidates control of Congress, Democrats could even codify the protections of Roe v. Wade across the country.

Unlike in 2016, Republicans probably won’t be running on a defining policy grievance. Biden doesn’t have a signature structural reform under his belt that significantly expands the social safety net or regulatory state. There’s no “Bidencare” for Republicans to say they want to “repeal and replace.”

But there’s a bunch of smaller-bore stuff that’s nevertheless incredibly important, and Republicans are gunning for much of it.

Republicans say they want to repeal an Inflation Reduction Act initiative that’s already making prescription drugs cheaper for seniors, and they’d almost certainly rescind the legislation’s IRS enforcement funds. Cronies would take over regulatory agencies again. Junk fees would be so back. 

Just this week, a Trump-appointed appellate judge wrote a lawless opinion, which, if upheld by the Supreme Court, would essentially give the president sole jurisdiction to decide whether anyone has a valid claim of discrimination under the Voting Rights Act, making it a dead letter under Trump. Despite failing to repeal the ACA, Trump managed to temporarily reverse the decrease in the uninsured rate, effectively pushing millions of Americans off of their health plans. He’d do that again.

Matthew Yglesias has been at pains to convey a simple idea: Whatever voters say about whom they trust more to improve “the economy,” the empirical fact is that both candidates have economic agendas, and Trump’s agenda of tariffs and large, regressive tax cuts would cause inflation—now low and falling—to rise again. But for now at least political reporters seem much more interested in what economic-approval polls say than in providing voters the information they need to better align public opinion with reality.  

We can’t possibly know what the state of the war between Israel and Hamas will be a year from now, or if there will even be one, but we do know that Trump is more solicitous of the Israeli right wing than Biden (who’s still plenty solicitous), totally indifferent to the plight of Palestine, and embroiled in a corrupt relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu. And the Saudi royal family. And…

In a second Trump administration, the U.S. would probably abandon Ukraine and NATO, and Trump would rampage through the U.S. bureaucracy, driving expertise out of government, purging enemies, encouraging or ordering violence and judicial retribution against them, and generally laying waste to the rule of law. 

Some of this stuff would only be possible if one party or another manages to consolidate control of Congress and the White House. But plenty of it is within the discretion of the president alone. And thanks to some of the most undemocratic aspects of our political system, Trump is more likely to enjoy a governing trifecta if he wins than Biden is. 

9) Edsall talks to a bunch of experts on Trump’s profoundly warped and dangerous psychology:

I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”

Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration.” He added, “This behavior is also consistent with psychopathy, which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”

Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.

“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”

In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”

The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.” …

A recent editorial in The Economist carried the headline “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concluded:

would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.

Klaas of University College London concluded that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that should dominate all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:

The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.

10) This is pretty fascinating.  Ethically thorny as hell, but consider me in favor, “When Does Life Stop? A New Way of Harvesting Organs Divides Doctors. The technique restarts circulation after an organ donor is declared dead. But first surgeons cut off blood flow to the brain. One surgeon called it “creepy.” “

A new method for retrieving hearts from organ donors has ignited a debate over the surprisingly blurry line between life and death in a hospital — and whether there is any possibility that donors might still experience some trace of consciousness or pain as their organs are harvested.

The new method has divided major hospitals in New York City and beyond. It has been championed by NYU Langone Health in Manhattan, which says it became the first hospital in the United States in 2020 to try the new method. But NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, which has the city’s largest organ transplant program, has rejected the technique after an ethics committee there examined the issue.

If adopted more widely, the method will significantly increase the number of hearts available for transplantation, saving lives.

The reason is that most heart donors currently come from a small category of deaths: donors who have been declared brain dead, often after a traumatic incident like a car accident. But they remain on life support — their heart beats, and their blood circulates, bringing oxygen to their organs — until a transplant team recovers their organs.

The new technique, transplant surgeons say, significantly expands the potential pool to patients who are comatose but not brain dead, and whose families have withdrawn life support because there is little chance of recovery. After these patients’ hearts stop, they are declared dead. But hearts are almost never recovered from these donors because they are often damaged by oxygen depletion during the dying process.

Surgeons have discovered that returning blood flow to the heart, after the donor has been declared dead, will restore it to a remarkable degree, making it suitable for transplant.

But two aspects of the procedure have left some surgeons and bioethicists uncomfortable.

The first problem, some ethicists and surgeons say, stems from the way death has traditionally been defined: The heart has stopped and circulation of blood has irreversibly ceased. Because the new procedure involves restarting blood flow, critics say it essentially invalidates the earlier declaration of death.

But that may be a minor problem compared to an additional step surgeons take: They use metal clamps to cut blood flow from the revived heart to the donor’s head, to limit blood flow to the brain to prevent the possibility that any brain activity is restored. Some physicians and ethicists say that is a tacit admission that the donor might not be legally dead.

11) Safe to say more than one person really screwed up here, “Animals Meant for Adoption May Have Been Turned Into Reptile Food: The fate of more than 250 rabbits, guinea pigs and rats remains unknown more than three months after they were sent to a humane society in Arizona.”

12) Loved reading Noah Smith on how Ireland got so rich.  I’ve never had a particular interest in development economics, but, Smith’s explanations are always so fascinating. 

13) People hate inflation because it never comes back to where it was, it just slows down.  I’m never paying $3.75 for generic rising crust pizzas again (yes, that is an item I personally track).  What people seem to want is deflation, but that’s bad. 

14) It’s definitely frustrating that so many people still die of Tuberculosis. 

Tuberculosis, which is preventable and curable, has reclaimed the title of the world’s leading infectious disease killer, after being supplanted from its long reign by Covid-19. But worldwide, 40 percent of people who are living with TB are untreated and undiagnosed, according to the World Health Organization. The disease killed 1.36 million people in 2022, according to a new W.H.O. report released on Tuesday.

The numbers are all the more troubling because this is a moment of great hope in the fight against TB: Significant innovations in diagnosing and treating it have started to reach developing countries, and clinical trial results show promise for a new vaccine. Infectious disease experts who have battled TB for decades express a new conviction that, with enough money and a commitment to bring those tools to neglected communities, TB could be nearly vanquished…

Those diagnosed with drug-resistant TB receive medication to take for six months — a far shorter time than previously required. For decades, the standard treatment for drug-resistant TB was to take drugs daily for a year and a half, sometimes two years. Inevitably, many patients stopped taking the medicines before they were cured and ended up with more severe disease. The new drugs have far fewer onerous side effects than older medications, which could cause permanent deafness and psychiatric disorders. Such improvements help more people to continue taking the drugs, which is good for patients, and eases the strain on a fragile health system.

In Ghana and most other countries with a high prevalence of TB, the drugs are paid for by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, an international partnership that raises money to help countries fight the diseases. The sustainability of those programs depends on donor largess. Currently, the treatment for adults recommended by the W.H.O. costs at least $150 per patient in low- and middle-income countries.

“If our patients had to pay, we would not have one single person taking treatment,” Ms. Yahaya said.

Still, there has been progress in recent months in making the medicines more affordable, and prices may soon drop further. Johnson & Johnson has lowered the price of a key TB drug in some developing countries. The company had faced pressure from patient advocacy groups, the United Nations and even the novelist John Green, who devoted his widely followed TikTok account to TB test and treatment prices. The company also agreed in September not to enforce a patent, which means generic drug companies in India and elsewhere will be able to make a significantly cheaper version of the medication.

15) This is pretty cool, “A Giant Leap for the Leap Second. Is Humankind Ready? A top scientist has proposed a new way to reconcile the two different ways that our clocks keep time. Meet — wait for it — the leap minute.”

Later this month, delegations from around the world will head to a conference in Dubai to discuss international treaties involving radio frequencies, satellite coordination and other tricky technical issues. These include the nagging problem of the clocks.

For 50 years, the international community has carefully and precariously balanced two different ways of keeping time. One method, based on Earth’s rotation, is as old as human timekeeping itself, an ancient and common-sense reliance on the position of the sun and stars. The other, more precise method coaxes a steady, reliable frequency from the changing state of cesium atoms and provides essential regularity for the digital devices that dominate our lives.

The trouble is that the times on these clocks diverge. The astronomical time, called Universal Time, or UT1, has tended to fall a few clicks behind the atomic one, called International Atomic Time, or TAI. So every few years since 1972, the two times have been synced by the insertion of leap seconds — pausing the atomic clocks briefly to let the astronomic one catch up. This creates UTC, Coordinated Universal Time.

But it’s hard to forecast precisely when the leap second will be required, and this has created an intensifying headache for technology companies, countries and the world’s timekeepers.

“Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy,” said Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, in Boulder, Colo., where he is a leading thinker on coordinating the world’s clocks. He is constantly badgered for updates and better solutions, he said: “I get a bazillion emails.”

On the eve of the next international discussion, Dr. Levine has written a paper that proposes a new solution: the leap minute. The idea is to sync the clocks less frequently, perhaps every half-century, essentially letting atomic time diverge from cosmos-based time for 60 seconds or even a tad longer, and basically forgetting about it in the meantime.

“We all need to relax a little bit,” Dr. Levine said.

16) I enjoyed Yglesias‘ “Grand theory of the left” earlier this month:

As progressive ideas have grown in prominence and influence, it’s become much harder to ignore the more extreme versions of progressive ideas.

My general view, though, is that most political tendencies come in both sound and unsound forms. In college, I learned a lot from Robert Nozick, who introduced me to some important libertarian ideas, and over the years I’ve learned a lot about different policy issues from friends and acquaintances at libertarian institutions like Cato and Mercatus. Given the populist climate of Trump-era politics, I think libertarianism is kind of underrated and deserves more influence. That being said, precisely because libertarian ideas have such a clear grounding in a small number of principles, I think they tend to morph with alarming speed into wildly unsound versions of themselves.

 

This country could benefit from a lot of supply-side health care policy reforms that are mostly deregulatory and market-oriented in nature. But overly lax opioid prescribing policies have been disastrous, and aversion to paternalistic public health measures has contributed heavily to America’s anomalously poor life expectancy outcomes. We also really do not need a true market-based approach to health care financing where anyone poor who gets sick just dies in the street without treatment.

By the same token, though, most bad trends on the left are recognizable versions of perfectly reasonable ideas. It is true that burning fossil fuels has negative externalities and that public policy should do more to curb those externalities. There is real evidence of racial bias in traffic stops and a problematic tendency for conservatives to endorse or justify racially biased policies in terms of statistical aggregates. The government of Israel really has been trying to steal the West Bank, in parallel with its more legitimate security policies, and right-wing politicians in both Israel and the United States express troubling and borderline genocidal attitudes toward Palestinian civilians. Left Covid maximalism went off the rails, but the basic idea that “Donald Trump should take the pandemic more seriously” was completely correct — countless lives could have been saved if he’d urged his fans to skip holiday travel in November-January 2020 and just wait for the vaccine rollout. Basically anything can be taken too far, and in a big world, someone is going to try…

The leftward shift means that the balance of power between unsound right-wing ideas and unsound left-wing ideas is in closer equilibrium today than it was in 1998. That’s change for the better, all things considered. But it does mean that paying attention to and pushing back on unsound left-wing ideas is more important than it used to be, because the odds that such ideas will have meaningful policy influence are higher. The important thing, though, isn’t to deconstruct some big picture construct, it’s to plug away on the specifics, day-in and day-out. The strong and slow boring of hard boards, so to speak.

17) Thanks to BB for this, “Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud”

The observation of individuals attaining remarkable ages, and their concentration into geographic sub-regions or ‘blue zones’, has generated considerable scientific interest. Proposed drivers of remarkable longevity include high vegetable intake, strong social connections, and genetic markers. Here, we reveal new predictors of remarkable longevity and ‘supercentenarian’ status. In the United States supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. In the UK, Italy, Japan, and France remarkable longevity is instead predicted by regional poverty, old-age poverty, material deprivation, low incomes, high crime rates, a remote region of birth, worse health, and fewer 90+ year old people. In addition, supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five: patterns indicative of widespread fraud and error. As such, relative poverty and missing vital documents constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.

18) I love that medical science is always learning new things, even low tech, that can save lives, 

Shortly after a baby is born, doctors clamp the umbilical cord linking the infant to the placenta, which is still inside the mother’s uterus, and then cut it. New research shows that if doctors wait at least two minutes after the birth to clamp the cord, they significantly improve in-hospital survival rates for premature infants.

Delayed cord clamping — an intervention that can be introduced at relatively little cost — is believed to help because it allows umbilical cord blood, which is rich in iron, stem cells and antibodies, to flow back to the baby. Some experts say that it’s not entirely clear why the strategy seems to help, but that the data is convincing.

19) America is unusual in our reliance on 30-year mortgages. And it’s not great:

Buying a home was hard before the pandemic. Somehow, it keeps getting harder.

Prices, already sky-high, have gotten even higher, up nearly 40 percent over the past three years. Available homes have gotten scarcer: Listings are down nearly 20 percent over the same period. And now interest rates have soared to a 20-year high, eroding buying power without — in defiance of normal economic logic — doing much to dent prices.

None of which, of course, is a problem for people who already own homes. They have been insulated from rising interest rates and, to a degree, from rising consumer prices. Their homes are worth more than ever. Their monthly housing costs are, for the most part, locked in place.

The reason for that divide — a big part of it, anyway — is a unique, ubiquitous feature of the U.S. housing market: the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.

That mortgage has been so common for so long that it can be easy to forget how strange it is. Because the interest rate is fixed, homeowners get to freeze their monthly loan payments for as much as three decades, even if inflation picks up or interest rates rise. But because most U.S. mortgages can be paid off early with no penalty, homeowners can simply refinance if rates go down. Buyers get all of the benefits of a fixed rate, with none of the risks.

“It’s a one-sided bet,” said John Y. Campbell, a Harvard economist who has argued that the 30-year mortgage contributes to inequality. “If inflation goes way up, the lenders lose and the borrowers win. Whereas if inflation goes down, the borrower just refinances.”

This isn’t how things work elsewhere in the world. In Britain and Canada, among other places, interest rates are generally fixed for only a few years. That means the pain of higher rates is spread more evenly between buyers and existing owners.

In other countries, such as Germany, fixed-rate mortgages are common but borrowers can’t easily refinance. That means new buyers are dealing with higher borrowing costs, but so are longtime owners who bought when rates were higher. (Denmark has a system comparable to the United States’, but down payments are generally larger and lending standards stricter.)

Only the United States has such an extreme system of winners and losers, in which new buyers face borrowing costs of 7.5 percent or more while two-thirds of existing mortgage holders pay less than 4 percent. On a $400,000 home, that’s a difference of $1,000 in monthly housing costs.

“It’s a bifurcated market,” said Selma Hepp, chief economist at the real estate site CoreLogic. “It’s a market of haves and have-nots.”

20) And an excellent piece from Brian Klaas to finish things off, “The Biggest Hidden Bias in Politics”

Happy almost Thanksgiving to all you American readers! May it be restful and relaxing, full of good food and good cheer, with plenty of toasts for everything to be thankful for this year.

However, many of you will be dreading a difficult aspect of Thanksgiving in modern America: how do you get through the meal when one (or more) of your crazy relatives believes the moon landing was faked, that the Denver airport is the secret headquarters of the Illuminati, and that the only reason you’re not clever enough to recognize these hidden truths is because of the brainwave interference you’re crippled with forever due to the 5G chip that came as a Trojan Horse inside the covid “vaccines.”

Such difficult family dynamics function as an alarming mirror for American society, which, to a greater extent than other rich democracies, is plagued by delusional, conspiratorial politics. That poses a serious, urgent puzzle: why is the United States such an outlier for unhinged political extremism that’s utterly detached from reality?

To answer that question, let’s start with a seemingly unrelated pop quiz: how many of you can correctly identify who is pictured in the photograph below?

 

The correct answer is Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, leader of a country that is home to nearly 1 out of every 5 people on the planet. He’s one of the most important people in the world—and, by appearance and dress, one of the most recognizable. So, when Americans were asked to identify an array of photographs of prominent figures from politics, business, celebrities, you name it, what percentage of Americans could identify Modi correctly?

The answer: 3 percent. Three percent.

Let’s put that into perspective. Sixteen percent of Americans could recognize the face of PewDiePie, the Swedish YouTuber, which was pretty close to the proportion of Americans who correctly identified the face of Xi Jinping, the President of China (20 percent).

There is a clear trend in the data: most Americans can’t identify prominent world leaders, including some of their own—but have no trouble with celebrities. Take a look at the percentage of Americans who correctly identified the following people in this 2019 New York Times quiz:

• Narendra Modi (3 percent)

• Xi Jinping (20 percent)

• Boris Johnson (20 percent)

• Mitch McConnell (35 percent)

• Vladimir Putin (60 percent)

• Justin Bieber (67 percent)

• The Rock (85 percent)

• Oprah (86 percent)

These figures are reflective of the biggest hidden bias in politics—what I call Ignorance Bias.1

We focus so much energy on how the news is reported that we don’t pause to consider how few people actually consume it, or how little of it on the airwaves is about governance rather than political gossip and horserace-style fanfare.

Even Fox & Friends, which usually has the biggest share of the cable TV morning show market, averages around 1.2 million viewers. That’s 0.36 percent of the US population. One out of every 275 Americans is watching. (Even if you don’t include children in these figures, it’s still a tiny slice of the adult population).

It’s a bit like if the Titanic lookouts got consumed in a debate over whether the tip of the iceberg slanted to the left or the right, all while they slammed into the enormous, but much more dangerous bit lurking below the surface. The disconcerting truth is this: The biggest bias in (mis)understanding politics is the bias that political elites assume most other people think about politics often and have a basic working knowledge of it that is rooted in facts and reality.

That’s not a safe assumption.

One recent survey found that 52 percent of Americans can’t name a single US Supreme Court Justice. In 2011, a poll found that twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on American Idol than could correctly identify the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. And in 2006, three years after the war in Iraq began—the most important element of US foreign policy at the time—six in ten Americans couldn’t identify Iraq on a map of the Middle East. (A little over half could point to New York state on a map).

Here’s a map, from the New York Times, of thousands of Americans trying to put a dot on North Korea. It’s a pretty random spread.

 

Most discussions of these astonishing revelations lead only to condemnation and calls for education. And while I agree that educational investments form the long-term cornerstone of democratic success, it’s worth more carefully exploring the more immediate political implications of the fact that vast swaths of the voting public don’t have basic information about the political world or how our governments operate.

And, while I’m at it, a little more AI today

Logic is tough for LLM’s.  

My question:

A nearby beach has high tide at 15:10 on Monday, 15:20 on Wednesday, and 15:30 on Friday. What time will high tide be on Saturday?

Claude:

• The beach has high tides at:
• Monday – 15:10
• Wednesday – 15:20
• Friday – 15:30
• The tide times seem to be increasing by 10 minutes each day.
• So if the pattern continues, on Saturday the high tide should be at 15:40.

Therefore, the time for high tide on Saturday should be 15:40.

Me: Actually, it appears to be increasing 10 minutes every two days, not every day.

Claude:

You’re right, my previous logic was flawed. Let me re-analyze this:

• Monday – high tide at 15:10
• Wednesday (2 days later) – high tide at 15:20, so a 10 minute increase
• Friday (2 days after Wednesday) – high tide at 15:30, so another 10 minute increase

So it is increasing by 10 minutes every 2 days.

• Saturday would be 2 days after Friday.
• Since Friday was at 15:30, and it increases by 10 minutes every 2 days, the high tide on Saturday should be at 15:40.

Thank you for catching my mistake! With the clarification that it increases every 2 days, I now conclude the high tide time on Saturday should be 15:40.

A little more feedback from me and it finally go there.

But, BingGPT is just nuts: (the scientific notation is not coming through correctly, but you don’t need all this to figure out 5 minutes a day!)

This is a tricky question, because the tide prediction depends on many factors, such as the location of the beach, the lunar and solar cycles, and the local topography. However, based on the information given, we can make a rough estimate using a simple formula¹:

h=Ho​+A∑​fA​HA​cos[aA​t+(Vo​+uA​)−KA​]

where $h$ is the height of the tide at any time $t$, Ho​ is the mean height of water level above datum, fA​ is a factor for reducing the mean amplitude HA​ of any constituent $A$ to the year of prediction, aA​ is the speed of constituent $A$, (Vo​+uA​) is the value of the equilibrium argument of constituent $A$ when $t=0$, and KA​ is the epoch of constituent $A$.

The most important constituents for tide prediction are the M2 and S2 constituents, which are related to the direct gravitational effects of the Moon and the Sun, respectively¹. The M2 constituent has a period of 12.42 hours, and the S2 constituent has a period of 12 hours. The difference between these two periods causes the high tide times to shift by about 50 minutes each day.

If we assume that the M2 and S2 constituents are the dominant ones, and that their amplitudes and phases are constant, we can simplify the formula to:

h=Ho​+HM​cos(aM​t−KM​)+HS​cos(aS​t−KS​)

where HM​ and HS​ are the amplitudes of the M2 and S2 constituents, aM​ and aS​ are their speeds, and KM​ and KS​ are their epochs.

To estimate the high tide time on Saturday, we need to find the value of $t$ that makes the derivative of $h$ with respect to $t$ equal to zero, i.e.

dtdh​=−aM​HM​sin(aM​t−KM​)−aS​HS​sin(aS​t−KS​)=0

We can use the data given to solve for the unknown parameters. For example, if the high tide on Monday was at 15:10, then we can plug in $t=15.17$ hours (the decimal equivalent of 15 hours and 10 minutes) and h=Ho​+HM​+HS​ (the maximum height of the tide) into the formula and get two equations:

Ho​+HM​cos(aM​15.17−KM​)+HS​cos(aS​15.17−KS​)=Ho​+HM​+HS​

−aM​HM​sin(aM​15.17−KM​)−aS​HS​sin(aS​15.17−KS​)=0

Similarly, we can use the data for Wednesday and Friday to get four more equations. Then we can solve this system of six equations for the six unknowns, using a numerical method such as Newton’s method or a matrix solver.

Once we have the values of the parameters, we can use them to predict the high tide time on Saturday by finding the root of the equation:

dtdh​=−aM​HM​sin(aM​t−KM​)−aS​HS​sin(aS​t−KS​)=0

for $t$ between 15.30 and 27.72 hours (the range of possible high tide times on Saturday).

This is a very approximate method, and it does not account for many factors that affect the actual tide, such as the elliptical orbits of the Moon and the Earth, the tilt of the Earth’s axis, the declination of the Moon and the Sun, the atmospheric pressure, the wind, and the shape of the coastline. For more accurate tide predictions, it is better to use a tide-predicting machine or a software that incorporates the harmonic analysis of the tidal data for a specific location²³.

I hope this helps you understand how to estimate the high tide time on Saturday. If you want to learn more about the theory and practice of tide analysis and prediction, you can check out these resources⁴⁵. Have a nice day! 😊

A little AI knowledge is a dangerous thing

The second paper assignment for my Intro to American Government was due recently and I went over a sample of about 10 of the papers with my TA’s today.  I specifically crafted this writing assignment because I didn’t think ChatGPT, etc., would be particularly good at it and… I was right.

Here’s the assignment:

Misunderstanding American politics. Based on what you have learned in PS 201 this semester, what would  you say is the most important concept for better understanding how government/politics works that is, in fact, widely misunderstood by the American public. Explain the reality of this concept versus how it is commonly misused/misunderstood.  You will need to cite research to make your case.  How might American democracy work better if more people actually properly understood this concept?  Lastly, consider what you might have gotten wrong in your argument. You are responsible for the complete details of the assignment at: http://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/shgreene/PS201/AboutPaper2.htm.  Due November 17. 5 pages maximum.

And my AI policy:

AI Policy

• AI (ChatGPT, etc.) is a useful tool for generating ideas and for improving your writing. I will not penalize you simply for using AI-generated text.  That said, you, as the human, are fully responsible for what you end up submitting.  If you overly-rely on AI and include fake/hallucinated references, AI-generated false statements, etc., your grade will be substantially penalized. 
• Furthermore, the capacity for AI to write really nice sentences about American Government means my grading will place great emphasis on the things which AI cannot do well and reflect your engagement in this course.  AI is very poor at backing up claims with actual, relevant references, so I will be paying particular attention to that.  Furthermore, while AI can write coherently on all sorts of aspects of American government and political science, it has quite clearly not been a student in this class and I will therefore be placing great emphasis on your ability to demonstrate you have learned concepts particular to/emphasized within this particular class. 
• If you do use AI assistance in the writing of your assignment, I would like you to indicate so, the tool, and the nature of the assistance within you references.  E.g., “ChatGPT: I used ChatGPT to read over my paper and improve the overall writing style.  I asked it to help me create a basic organization structure for this assignment.” 

Two of the papers clearly just fed some variation of this prompt into ChatGPT and the results were… awful.  Honestly, so much worse than a person just trying to whip up some nonsense in an hour or two.  One was truly one of the worst papers I have ever seen.  Just word-salad jumbles about various aspects of American government.  Another one exactly quoted my example references statement, but based on my extensive use recently, I’m very confident it was mostly written originally by ChatGPT, rather than just improving existing writing.  If you’ve already got something there, I don’t think ChatGPT comes up with phrases like “the intricate dance of government” but damn does it love to come up with stuff like this with lazy prompting.  

Other papers were clearly mostly human, but then had aspects which seemed grossly over-written in a way that is very much indicative of AI (I suspect this happens much less so if you pony up the $20/month for ChatGPT 4).  Overall, there was still a lot of really poor writing.  I had honestly hoped that my policy would lead to students using their own ideas, but then improving their writing with AI.  That did seem to happen, I think, in a few cases, but at this point, it is also clearly harming students who are taking a powerful tool and using it in a lazy, slipshod manner. 

I’ll be grading upper-level papers on policy reform over the next couple of weeks and I will be very curious to see what the impact looks like here. 

Accountability for parents in gun crimes– but not like this

I was pleased to see this headline, “Mother of 6-Year-Old Who Shot Teacher in Virginia Is Sentenced to 21 Months”  About damn time we hold parents criminally negligent for the crimes their children commit with guns.  Owning a gun is a serious responsibility and if you don’t take that responsibility seriously, you need to be punished when others misuse your weapon because of your negligence.  I would hope even the gun lovers could get on-board with this, as much as they preach “responsible” gun ownership.  

Anyway, the actual details left me disappointed, as the mother was actually punished for drug law violations, rather than laws that truly require responsible gun ownership:

The mother of a 6-year-old who shot his first-grade teacher in a Virginia classroom was sentenced on Wednesday to one year and nine months in prison after pleading guilty in June to using marijuana while owning a firearm and making false statements about drug use.

The sentencing of the 26-year-old mother, Deja Taylor, was the latest development in a shooting that shocked the country in January when the authorities detailed how a child had retrieved a gun from his home, put it in his backpack and brought it to Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va.

There, the authorities said, the boy pulled out the gun in a classroom, aimed it at his teacher, Abigail Zwerner, and fired. The bullet passed through her hand and struck her chest, causing serious injuries.

Although recreational marijuana is allowed in Virginia, federal laws prohibit addicted or “unlawful” drug users from owning a gun.

Federal prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Eastern Virginia argued that Ms. Taylor was a “marijuana abuser whose chronic, persistent and, indeed, life-affecting abuse” extended the case beyond any sort of recreational use.

The problem is not that she had a harmful marijuana dependency (okay, that is a problem), but there should simply be prosecution for being negligent with your firearm and then it’s used to hurt someone.  That’s it.  Drugs simply shouldn’t have to be part of the equation to hold someone accountable in a situation like this.  

GPT Quick hits

Took most of my kids to Atlanta for the long weekend so I decided I would try once again to have ChatGPT write my quick hits.  I asked for excerpts, but it gave me summaries, but, that’s not so bad.  I finally got it to give me proper html code for the links.  It also only let me do 5 at a time.  The first set it numbered, but then after that, it wouldn’t anymore.  ChatGPT is weird.  That said, better to have decidedly sub-optimal article summaries than nothing.  I think.  Also, I have gone in and annotated a little.

1) The challenge of fentanyl, meth, and other synthetic drugs. Manhattan Institute

The rise of synthetic drugs has upended the drug market and poses new challenges for policymakers and law enforcement. Unlike plant-based drugs such as cocaine and heroin, synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamine can be produced in labs with cheap and readily available chemicals. This makes them more potent, more addictive, and more difficult to detect and regulate. Synthetic drugs are also more deadly: fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more powerful than heroin, is the leading cause of drug overdose deaths in the U.S., killing more than 36,000 people in 2020.

2) How to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict. Uncharted Territories (This is lengthy, but fantastic.  Covers so much useful ground for understanding the situation)

The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the most complex and intractable conflicts in the world. It has been going on for more than a century, and has claimed thousands of lives, displaced millions of people, and fueled regional and global instability. The conflict is rooted in competing claims to land, identity, and sovereignty, as well as historical grievances, religious beliefs, and security concerns. Despite numerous attempts at peace negotiations, the conflict remains unresolved, and the prospects for a two-state solution seem increasingly dim.

3) MrBeast’s money machine: How the YouTube star is reinventing philanthropy and his hometown. The Washington Post (unusual choice for a gift link, but I needed to share this with my son)

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is one of the most popular and influential YouTube stars in the world. He is known for his extravagant stunts and giveaways, such as giving away millions of dollars, cars, houses, and even an island. He has also launched several successful businesses, such as a burger chain, a mobile game, and a creator fund. MrBeast is not only a master of viral marketing, but also a visionary philanthropist who is using his platform and wealth to make a positive impact on the world. He is especially passionate about helping his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, where he has donated to schools, hospitals, and local businesses.

4) Golden Gate Bridge suicide nets delayed again. The New York Times

The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most iconic landmarks in the world, but also one of the most notorious suicide spots. Since the bridge opened in 1937, more than 1,700 people have jumped to their deaths from its span, making it the deadliest bridge in the world. In 2014, after decades of debate and controversy, the bridge’s board of directors approved a plan to install steel nets under the bridge to deter and prevent suicides. The project was supposed to be completed by 2021, but it has been delayed several times due to technical, financial, and environmental challenges. The latest estimate is that the nets will be installed by 2024, at a cost of $211 million.

And continuing on with new formatting, a bold higlight (I didn’t ask for it, but I like it), and no numbers.

• New Low Say Death Penalty Fairly Applied: A Gallup poll shows that only 40% of Americans think the death penalty is applied fairly, down from 49% in 2020 and 60% in 2000. The poll also reveals a sharp partisan divide, with 63% of Republicans but only 23% of Democrats saying the death penalty is fair. This is a troubling sign for the legitimacy of capital punishment in the US, especially as more states are abolishing or suspending it.
• Hollywood’s Dual Strike Is Over—and the Studios Lost: After months of negotiations and threats of a strike, the unions representing Hollywood workers have reached a tentative agreement with the studios on a new contract. The deal includes significant gains for the workers, such as higher pay, better working conditions, and more residuals from streaming platforms. This is a rare victory for labor in an industry that has been dominated by corporate power for decades. 
• The Best Nonfiction Books of 2022: The Atlantic staff and contributors share their recommendations for the best nonfiction books they read this year. The list covers a wide range of topics, from history and science to politics and culture. If you are looking for some insightful and engaging reads, you might want to check out these books.
• 160 Million Americans Are Eligible for a Booster Shot. Only 30 Million Have Gotten One.: Nate Silver analyzes the data on COVID-19 booster shots in the US and finds that the uptake is surprisingly low, despite the availability and effectiveness of the shots. He argues that the main reasons for this are the lack of clear and consistent messaging from the authorities, the confusion and fatigue among the public, and the complacency and optimism bias of the vaccinated. He warns that this could have serious consequences for the pandemic, especially as the winter approaches and new variants emerge.
• I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup: Scott Alexander, the author of the popular blog Slate Star Codex, writes a provocative and insightful essay on the psychology of tribalism and tolerance. He argues that most people are not really tolerant of different opinions or groups, but rather of their own ingroup’s enemies. He illustrates this with examples from politics, religion, and culture, and suggests some ways to overcome this bias and foster genuine tolerance. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of polarization and conflict in our society.
• The 2024 election is closer than you think — and Trump is winning: A Los Angeles Times op-ed argues that the 2024 presidential election is already underway, and that former President Donald Trump has a clear advantage over President Joe Biden, based on the latest polls and the historical trends. The op-ed cites several factors that favor Trump, such as the midterm backlash, the enthusiasm gap, the rural-urban divide, and the media attention. It warns that Democrats should not underestimate Trump’s chances of making a comeback, and that they need to offer a compelling alternative to his populist appeal.
• The Man Who Would Be Speaker: A New York Times op-ed profiles Mike Johnson, a Republican congressman from Louisiana who is a leading contender to become the next speaker of the House if his party wins the majority in 2024. The op-ed describes Johnson as a devout Christian, a loyal Trump supporter, and a skilled lawyer and legislator. It also raises some concerns about his extreme views on social issues, his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and his potential influence on the future of American democracy. (Actually, this piece is mostly a devastating takedown of Johnson’s completely false Christianity).
• A new human coronavirus associated with endemic respiratory infection: A preprint paper reports the discovery of a new human coronavirus, named HCoV-EMC/2023, that causes endemic respiratory infections in several countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. The paper describes the genomic and epidemiological features of the virus, and suggests that it may have originated from bats or camels. The paper also warns that the virus has a high potential for zoonotic spillover and human-to-human transmission, and that it poses a serious threat to global public health.
• The War That Never Ends: A New York Times op-ed reflects on the recent escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas, and argues that the conflict is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, due to the lack of political will, diplomatic engagement, and public support on both sides. The op-ed criticizes the cycle of provocation, retaliation, and ceasefire that has characterized the war for decades, and calls for a more realistic and pragmatic approach to achieve a lasting peace. It suggests that the US should play a more active and balanced role in mediating the conflict, and that the international community should pressure both parties to respect human rights and international law.
• The economy is booming. So why does it feel so bad?: A Vox article explains the paradox of the US economy, which is growing at a fast pace, creating millions of jobs, and raising wages, but also facing high inflation, supply chain disruptions, and labor shortages. The article argues that these problems are mostly temporary and caused by the pandemic, and that they will eventually subside as the economy adjusts to the new normal. It also suggests that the government can help ease the pain by passing the infrastructure and social spending bills, which would boost productivity, reduce inequality, and address climate change.
• Google’s New AI Is Writing the Internet: An Atlantic article reports on Google’s latest innovation in artificial intelligence, called Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which can create original and coherent texts on any topic, based on a few words or sentences. The article reveals that Google has been using GPT-3 to generate some of its featured snippets, the boxes that appear at the top of the search results and provide quick answers to queries. The article raises some ethical and epistemological questions about the use of GPT-3, such as its accuracy, reliability, bias, and accountability.
• What’s the Problem With Disability?: Freddie deBoer, a writer and educator, writes a personal and provocative essay on the issue of disability, both as a social construct and as a lived experience. He challenges some of the assumptions and narratives that surround disability, such as the idea that it is always a tragedy, a burden, or a source of inspiration. He also shares his own struggles and insights as a person with bipolar disorder and ADHD. He argues that disability is a complex and diverse phenomenon, and that we need to respect and accommodate the needs and preferences of people with disabilities, without pitying or patronizing them.
• You Can’t Just Say “Oh, That Doesn’t Count”: Freddie deBoer, in another essay, criticizes the tendency of some progressives to dismiss or ignore the opinions and preferences of the majority of Americans, especially on cultural and social issues. He cites several examples of polls and surveys that show that most Americans hold conservative or moderate views on topics such as abortion, immigration, transgender rights, and critical race theory. He warns that this attitude is not only arrogant and elitist, but also politically suicidal, as it alienates and antagonizes potential allies and voters.
• How Ireland Got So Rich: Noah Smith, an economist and writer, tells the story of how Ireland transformed itself from a poor and backward country to one of the richest and most advanced nations in the world. He traces the origins and evolution of Ireland’s economic miracle, which involved a combination of factors, such as joining the European Union, attracting foreign investment, developing a skilled workforce, promoting innovation, and maintaining social cohesion. He also discusses the challenges and opportunities that Ireland faces in the future, such as Brexit, climate change, and immigration.

I don’t think ChatGPT is ready to replace me, but, all these links are worth checking out.

Abortion matters, but it is not the Democratic savior in 2024

As you know, I’m generally a fan of Brian Beutler’s strategic advice to Democrats.  But, in this case, I think he (and many others) are way over-optimistic on the impact of abortion, based largely on Ohio’s Tuesday referendum. To wit:

1. Abortion has not faded as an issue, notwithstanding clumsy Republicans attempts to muddy and lie about it (cf. Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio).

2. Abortion may not remain an issue if voters don’t know in their marrow that nothing is settled until Roe is restored. Republicans will try to ban abortion nationally if they win a governing trifecta in 2024; failing that, they will try to ban abortion or tighten restrictions in every state where they gain power. Republican victories could easily lead to bans even in states where reproductive rights have been wrested back since Dobbs.

3. Joe Biden should revive the line I seeded after the Dobbs oral argument in December 2021. Back then it was: Give us two more senators and the House, and I’ll sign a bill to codify Roe in January 2023. Now it can be: Send me back to Washington with one more senator and the House, and I’ll sign a bill to codify Roe in January 2025. And he should say it more frequently and confidently this time. 

4. If I’m a state-level Democratic mover and shaker, I’m doing as much as I can to make sure everyone in free states, no matter how blue, knows that their reproductive rights rest on a knife edge. It would be an incredible political failure if, post Dobbs, people in states like Ohio and Virginia returned to the complacency they felt when Roe was still good law. 

Democrats have tried this already and it is only modestly effective.  If you have any doubt, just look at the Republicans that Ohio elected in 2022, after Dobbs.  Or very pro-life Ted Budd defeating Cherie Beasley for NC Senate in 2022.  

If voters get to vote just on abortion, the outcome is very clear.  But voters care about a lot of different stuff, and abortion is just one of many factors.  So, yeah, why they may not like JD Vance’s very pro-life stance, they still chose him over a Democrat.

Today’s David Leonhardt newsletter makes all these points more thoroughly than I was ever going to:

All the evidence

Many Democrats have come to believe that abortion access is the solution to their political problems. This week’s election results — with Ohio guaranteeing abortion access in a landslide and Democrats winning in both Virginia and Kentucky — support this notion.

But I continue to think that recent elections offer a more complex picture, and I want to use today’s newsletter to explain. I know that some readers are skeptical.

Widespread abortion access is clearly popular, even in many red states. When Americans have voted directly on the issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, abortion rights have gone seven for seven. What’s less clear is how much abortion politics affect general elections between a Democrat and a Republican. Is the effect large — or usually only enough to tip very close races?

Ohio, the center of the abortion fight in this year’s election, offers a useful case study.

‘It is the issue’

A year ago, the Democratic Party set out to turn Ohio blue by emphasizing the Republican Party’s opposition to abortion.

Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate nominee, protested outside the Supreme Court the day it eliminated the constitutional right to abortion access. “J.D. Vance wants a national abortion ban,” Ryan said about his Republican opponent later in the campaign. “I think we go back to Roe v. Wade.”

In the Ohio governor’s race, Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee, went further than Ryan and organized her campaign around the topic, as Jessie Balmert of The Columbus Dispatch reported. “It is the only thing we’re really talking about,” Whaley said three weeks before Election Day. “We think it is the issue.”

None of this worked. Ryan lost to Vance by six percentage points. Whaley lost to Gov. Mike DeWine, the Republican incumbent who had signed abortion restrictions, by 25 points. [emphases mine]

These failures were part of a pattern. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke focused on abortion in his campaign for governor last year. So did Stacey Abrams in Georgia, as well as the Democrats trying to defeat Gov. Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio in Florida. All these Democrats lost, some of them by double digits.

Nationwide, not a single Republican governor or senator has lost re-election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

That pattern might seem to conflict with this week’s election results, but I don’t think it does. Most Americans support widespread abortion access and will vote for ballot initiatives that protect or establish abortion rights. Yet in an election between two candidates, only a tiny slice of people is likely to vote differently because of any one issue, including abortion.

That slice can still decide some elections. In Virginia this week, Democrats won several swing districts in the state legislature (although not as many as they had hoped, the political analyst J. Miles Coleman says), partly by emphasizing abortion rights. Similarly, two of the few Republican House incumbents who lost last year — one in Ohio, another in New Mexico — struggled to defend their abortion opposition.

But many other examples that Democrats cite as proof of abortion’s political potency are weaker. Yes, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky emphasized abortion during his successful re-election campaign this year, much as Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan did last year. Here’s the thing, though: Almost every incumbent governor, from both parties, who ran for re-election this year or last year won. The only exception was Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Nevada Democrat.

To argue that abortion has become a dominant factor in U.S. politics requires ignoring the results in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere.

Spinning oneself

Perhaps the most common mistake in politics is to believe that one’s own views are more popular than they in fact are. This mistake leads parties and candidates to focus too little on persuading undecided voters and to lose winnable elections.

The Republican Party has certainly damaged itself with its unpopular opposition to abortion, and Democrats can help themselves by highlighting the issue. Many other high-profile issues today — like inflation, immigration and crime — are much less favorable to Democrats, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, told me. If the Supreme Court hadn’t overturned Roe v. Wade, maybe Republicans would be enjoying a winning streak right now.

Nonetheless, Democrats have not been able to use the popularity of abortion to defeat many Republicans since 2022. And Nate’s latest article offers reason to think that the issue’s effect on the 2024 elections may be even more modest. The electorate next year — for a presidential campaign — is likely to be larger, less liberal and less engaged in politics than this year’s electorate, he explains. It will include more people who vote as much on gut instinct as on policy positions.

To put it another way, if Democrats want to expand abortion access in the U.S., they almost certainly need to win more elections than they have in recent years. And to win more elections, they will probably have to campaign on a popular agenda that includes abortion yet is much broader.

Clearly the politics of abortion have changed in ways that advantage Democrats.  I’m pretty fascinated that even the “compromise” 12-week (NC) and 15-week (VA) ban positions have alienated so many for being “bans” even though legal abortion after the first trimester is quite unpopular in polling.  We’re definitely on a very changed ground here.  But Democrats cannot think they can win in 2024 based on abortion.  

Do you matter?

I really loved this NYT piece from a little bit ago, “Want to Believe in Yourself? ‘Mattering’ Is Key.: This overlooked concept has been linked to better relationships — with oneself and others.”

Dr. Flett, now a professor at York University and the author of “The Psychology of Mattering,” is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject. He and other experts agree that a sense of mattering is necessary for human flourishing, and while some factors are out of our control, there are steps, both big and small, that everyone can take to enhance it…

Mattering is “a core, universal human need,” a necessary component for well-being, Dr. Flett said. But it’s tricky to define, he added, because people sometimes confuse it with belonging, self-esteem and social connection.

Mattering involves “more than feeling like you belong in a group,” he explained; it’s also being “missed by people in that group if you weren’t there.” When it comes to self-esteem, you can like yourself and feel capable, Dr. Flett said, but “you still won’t be a happy person if no one notices you when you enter a room.”

To matter, people must feel valued — heard, appreciated and cared for — and they must feel like they add value in ways that make them feel capable, important and trusted, said Isaac Prilleltensky, a professor at the University of Miami and a co-author of “How People Matter.” It’s a two-part definition: feeling valued and adding value.

Research suggests that people who feel like they matter experience more self-compassion, relationship satisfaction, and greater belief in their capacity to achieve their goals, while lack of mattering is associated with burnout, self-criticism, anxiety, depression, aggression and increased risk of suicide.

How do you know where you fall on the scale? Start, Dr. Prilleltensky said, by asking yourself a few questions: Do you feel valued in your relationships? At work (both paid and unpaid)? In your community? Do you matter to yourself, possessing a sense that you’re worthy regardless of what you accomplish or how you look?

Then ask whether you add value in each of those four areas. Do you feel like a good partner or friend? Do you feel competent at work? Do those outside your immediate circle rely on you for anything? Is self-care a reality or a pipe dream?

The key, Dr. Prilleltensky said, is to aim for a sense of balance across both parts of the definition and all areas of your life. (Think, for instance, of the workaholic who is indispensable at the office but doesn’t invest enough time at home to feel valuable there.) These questions can help you notice where you need to make changes.

I know I’ve written before about what a great job, psychologically, being a college professor is.  I know I add value to my students and, yeah, I’m pretty sure that a good number of them value me.  And you’ve got to be really messing up as a parent to not being adding value to your kids’ lives.  

Anyway, I know I’ve mentioned that I attribute my general happiness to a high genetic setpoint that I don’t really have a lot to do with (thanks, Mom!), but, as for the rest of it, I feel like I matter and that’s obviously a damn good thing. 

 

When all you have is a hammer, systems of oppression edition

This is fantastic from Josh Barro, “Identity Politics Meets College Politics With Predictably Stupid, Immoral Results”

On Saturday, before the football game between USC and UC Berkeley, fifteen protesters rushed the field at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley and refused to leave until they were arrested, delaying the start of the game. Some people mistakenly assumed the protest was a demand for a ceasefire in Gaza. The truth was much odder: The protesters, most of them students at UC Berkeley, were demanding the reinstatement of a suspended Berkeley professor. Ivonne del Valle, an associate professor of colonial studies in the Spanish and Portuguese department, is on leave and faces potential termination because multiple investigations have determined that she stalked and harassed Prof. Joshua Clover, a communist poet in the English department at UC Davis…

Del Valle has become a cause célèbre despite having admitted to key aspects of the charges that led to her suspension, including that she keyed Clover’s car; sat outside his apartment and slid threatening notes under the door including “If you make me leave, it’ll be worse. I’ll keep doing this you can be sure of that”; spray painted “here lives a pervert” in the hallway outside his apartment; and dumped chunks of fermented pineapple on his mother’s doorstep. Extensive reports by KQED and the Chronicle of Higher Education, based on Berkeley’s Title IX investigation reports and interviews with del Valle herself, make clear that she was (and is) convinced that Clover, whom she barely knew before these incidents began, had hacked her electronic devices and was using the information he gleaned about her thoughts and actions in order to post coded messages about her on Twitter.1 Frustrated that police and Berkeley administrators did not take her delusional hacking claims seriously, she pursued a direct harassment campaign against her UC colleague, which she continued in violation of orders to stop contacting him. Again, del Valle admits these facts.

So why, in the view of del Valle and her supporters, is her suspension unjust? Well, it starts with the fact that she is a Latina and Clover is a white man…

This story itself — about a far-left-wing humanities professor with obvious mental illness behaving badly toward another far-left-wing humanities professor and receiving a ludicrous, histrionic, and identity-based defense of both her actions and her mental state from some of her students and colleagues3 — is not terribly important. But the manner in which del Valle’s supporters have convinced themselves to stand with her — by looking away from all the facts that conflict with their pristine moral worldview about who’s oppressed and who’s the oppressor — bears resemblance to a much more consequential form of left-wing moral idiocy that we’ve seen on college campuses in recent weeks: the willingness of many students and faculty to excuse (or even in some cases celebrate) Hamas’ terror attack that killed over 1,400 people.

Obsession with structural factors has led people on the identity-obsessed left to discard the idea that people are individual moral actors with responsibility for their actions. Instead, they rely on a moral framework that looks solely at a person’s or group’s position within a hierarchy of oppression, awarding culpability in any conflict to the person who ranks as less oppressed, regardless of actually existing evidence about who did what and why…

In both the globally important case of Hamas and the trivial case of del Valle, left-wing students and faculty have shown an inability to analyze a conflict through any frame other than “systems of oppression.” That is, Hamas is less powerful than Israel, and therefore it cannot be morally culpable for murdering, raping and beheading Israeli civilians (or must not have done so at all); and del Valle is a minority woman, so if she spray painted a white, male professor’s door with a message that he is a “sex addict,” it must be because she didn’t receive adequate support from her employer that a white employee would have…

It is reasonable for people to recoil from a moral framework that purports to judge culpability based on identity rather than actions — even when they suspect the people promoting the framework will lack the power to enact and enforce it, or doubt whether they sincerely believe in it.6 And one of the salutary aspects of the last month’s politics is that a lot of liberals who treated these ideas as a harmless academic diversion are now seeing the perverse moral places they can lead to.

It is perfectly reasonable for policymakers to look to rein in this insanity at universities, which rely extensively on taxpayer largesse and are supposed to serve the public interest but instead often produce a combination of radical politics and useless scholarship, egged on by a non-tenured, easily-firable DEI bureaucracy that seeks to perpetuate exactly this kind of “academic” “study.” Meanwhile, the rest of us need to deal with the fact that this insanity has escaped campuses and embedded itself as an identity-political bureaucracy within all kinds of organizations, while broadly animating the left.

Myth and reality on diet and nutrition

Super-busy day yesterday being a marching band dad, so no quick hits part II, today.  But while waiting between bands, I read this fantastic piece on nutrition/health myths and realities that JCP sent me, “If this isn’t Steve Greene quick hits material then I don’t know what is!”  Damn straight.  In fact, since I was too busy for part II and it’s Sunday, this piece gets its own post (and a gift link, of course).  It’s from Tamar Haspel who’s already inspired several posts on diet soda, “10 things I know are true about food – that people don’t want to believe”  Here’s my favorite parts:

1 Gene editing can be used for good.

My very first column was about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and I’m happy to say it feels dated now. Back then, the argument was primarily about herbicide-resistant corn and soy (which have undoubtedly given rise to herbicide-resistant weeds). But genetic engineering has been used to create disease-resistant cassava, blight-resistant American chestnut trees, camelina with the long-chain omega-3 fats that are otherwise found almost exclusively in marine sources, disease- and flood-tolerant rice, chickens that produce only female eggs (so 7 billion male chicks don’t have to be put through a grinder every year), a more nutritious purple tomato, blight-resistant potatoes and many more.

Technology is a tool. If I have a hammer, I can fix my neighbor’s roof or I can break his window. It’s the purpose, not the tool, that we need to focus on.

2 Diet soda is fine.

Here’s an example of a use of technology that might actually help people. If you like sweet things, but not the calories that come with them, there’s a host of artificial versions that can deliver. Unfortunately, the nutrition community hates them and has been telling you, with virtually one voice, not to use them.

Yet, despite decades of trying, critics can’t really find a problem with them. So you get studies that show, to take a recent example, that sucralose (used in Splenda) is genotoxic. Scary! But dig in, as epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz did, and you find that the sucralose dosage was the equivalent of 50,000 cans of diet soda.

So, yeah, don’t drink 50,000 cans of diet soda, and ask yourself why researchers would design a study using amounts that are orders of magnitude over what a human would consume. One possible reason: They want to show harm.

3 Subsidies didn’t create our terrible diets.

Yes, most farm subsidies go to corn and soy, two building blocks of cheap junk food. But economists I’ve spoken with believe that, at most, subsidies decreased prices of those by about 10 percent. And actual food is only about 15 percent of the cost of junk foods like, say, Twinkies. So we’re talking about a 1 to 2 percent price difference, which would be imperceptible to the consumer.

Vegetables are expensive because they’re way more expensive to grow than row crops such as corn, soy, oats, chickpeas and barley. A broccoli serving costs 10 times what a corn serving costs to grow. Ten times. Subsidies are a rounding error.

Speaking of vegetables …

4 Vegetables are a luxury product.

They’re expensive to grow and incredibly resource-intensive. They get the highest level of fertilizer and pesticide applications, and they deliver nutrients without many calories. In an overweight society, that’s a plus, but if you widen the lens to the whole world, where we have to feed 8-plus billion, ideally without expanding agriculture’s footprint, crops that deliver nutrition and calories are ideal.

Whole grains, legumes, tubers, tree fruits, nuts. Those are the backbone of a diet good for both people and planet.

Great stuff.  Again, worth reading the rest at the gift link, I shared.  And, yeah, that last sentence about diet soda says so much:

So, yeah, don’t drink 50,000 cans of diet soda, and ask yourself why researchers would design a study using amounts that are orders of magnitude over what a human would consume. One possible reason: They want to show harm.

Quick hits (part I)

1) This New Yorker article on the horror that is the Chinese fishing industry-– especially the absolutely brutal exploitation of workers– is a depressing must-read (and it’s a super-cool interactive online feature). 

2) Annie Duke with a great interview of Jay van Bavel, “Why Tribe Divides Us: Q&A with Jay Van Bavel, NYU psychologist, author, and leading research scientist on the effects of group identities, values, and beliefs, especially in politics”

Belonging, distinctiveness, and status

Annie: What do we get out of being part of a tribe? Whether it’s the Adidas tribe or the Puma tribe or tribalism in general, what are the human needs that are being satisfied by being in a tribe?

Jay Van Bavel: The three that we talk about in our book are belonging, distinctiveness, and status.

The first one is belonging.

It turns out that belonging, or a sense of connection with other people, is one of the most basic and fundamental social needs that people have. Among people who are lonely or lack that connection, mortality skyrockets and psychological wellbeing plummets. Belonging is one of the things that makes us happy and healthy. Connection with others come from being part of be a small group, a group of friends who get together and play poker, or people in an organization where they value each other and working together, or all kinds of groups, religious groups, communities.

The second need, which seems to oppose belonging, is a need for distinctiveness.

People often want to have a sense of distinctiveness, that they’re not identical to other people. The groups that tend to be stickiest are ones that give you a sense of belonging but also are distinctive from other groups. You can think of this with college. The U.S. News rankings of universities in the United States just got updated and sent out last week. People fight over it, and universities advertise it on the front page of their website. One of the things universities love to brag about is how hard they are to get into, how exclusive. If you get admitted there, you get access to an identity that’s very exclusive, where you both belong to the group of people who got into the school but are also distinct from all those who didn’t. Companies have that as well. Getting into a nightclub with a velvet rope and a long line outside confers the feeling that you are part of a distinctive group.

Finally, the third big factor that scratches the itch for most humans is status.

People have a fundamental need to have a sense of status. This can be connected to distinctiveness. Like I was saying with universities, getting a high ranking on U.S. News doesn’t just mean you’re especially a hard to get into, but also gives you status over other universities. People put these stickers on their cars to signal what university or college they went to signal the status of it. There are all kinds of ways that we get status, either being a high-ranking member in a group, like a president or a manager or a star on a sports team or being part of a group that’s high in status.

3) I found this NYT interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger to be delightful.

4) Chait is not wrong, “Bob Knight Was a Misogynistic Bully I grew up hating the Indiana coach, and I was right.”

5) Dan Bishop is an idiot and this is just stupid, but I really am so tired of those on the left calling every damn thing “racist.”  The government of China is awful and if you are implicitly criticizing it, that’s not racist.

One of the most important races on the ballot in North Carolina next year, which is just beginning to take shape, is already getting heated.

On Thursday, Rep. Jeff Jackson, a Charlotte Democrat, announced his campaign for attorney general, becoming the second member of Congress to join the race, after Rep. Dan Bishop, a Republican who lives in Waxhaw, launched his campaign in August.

The race between Jackson and Bishop, both prominent figures in North Carolina politics, was already expected to be one of the toughest-fought contests next year, and kicked off in earnest this week with Bishop welcoming Jackson to the race by attacking him for his embrace of TikTok to reach constituents.

Calling the Democrat a “Chinese Social Media Star,” Bishop released a mock statement made to look like it was from Jackson’s campaign. It was written in Chinese, and included a translation that said Jackson was a “Tiktok star who wants to make North Carolina soft on crime” and was “helping China spy on North Carolina.” At the top, it included the logo for Jackson’s campaign.

Posting the mock statement on X, formerly Twitter, Bishop wrote that it was “for our unamerican friends.”

Democrats were quick to condemn the post as “racist,” with N.C. Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton saying that Bishop was “resorting to using dog-whistle statements against the AAPI community instead of actually discussing what he wants to do for the people of North Carolina as Attorney General.”

Just, no, already!

6) Some pretty interesting research on gender bias in academia:

We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people’s opinions about sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as an omnipresent factor limiting women’s progress in the tenure-track academy. Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science. Given the substantial resources directed toward reducing gender bias in academic science, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of when and where such efforts are justified and of how resources can best be directed to mitigate sexism when and where it exists.

7) Democracy experts on the Trump enablers in the GOP:

Unfortunately, today’s Republican Party more closely resembles the French right of the 1930s than the Spanish right of the early 1980s. Since the 2020 election, Republican leaders have enabled authoritarianism at four decisive moments. First, rather than adhere to the cardinal rule of accepting election results after Joe Biden won that November, many Republican leaders questioned the results or remained silent, refusing to publicly recognize Mr. Biden’s victory. Vice President Mike Pence did not congratulate his successor, Kamala Harris, until the middle of January 2021. The Republican Accountability Project, a Republican pro-democracy watchdog group, evaluated the public statements of 261 Republican members of the 117th Congress after the election. They found that 221 of them had publicly expressed doubt about its legitimacy or did not publicly recognize that Mr. Biden won. That’s 85 percent. And in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, nearly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against certification of the results. Had Republican leaders not encouraged election denialism, the “stop the steal” movement might have stalled, and thousands of Trump supporters might not have violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election.

Second, after Mr. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted to acquit him, even though many conceded that, in Senator Mitch McConnell’s words, the president was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack. The acquittal allowed Mr. Trump to continue his political career despite his having tried to block the peaceful transfer of power. Had he been convicted in the Senate, he would have been legally barred from running again for president. In other words, Republican senators had a clear opportunity to ensure that an openly antidemocratic figure would never again occupy the White House — and 43 of them, including Mr. McConnell, declined to take it.

Third, Republican leaders could have worked with Democrats to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 uprising. Had both parties joined forces to seek accountability for the insurrection, the day’s events would have gone down in U.S. history (and would likely have been accepted by a larger majority of Americans) as a criminal assault on our democracy that should never again be allowed to occur, much like Spain’s 1981 coup attempt. Republican leaders’ refusal to support an independent investigation shattered any possible consensus around Jan. 6, making it far less likely that Americans will develop a shared belief that such events are beyond the pale.

Finally, with remarkably few exceptions, Republican leaders say they will stillsupport Mr. Trump even if he is convicted of plotting to overturn an election. Alternatives exist. The Republican National Committee could declare that the party will not nominate an individual who poses a threat to democracy or has been indicted on serious criminal charges. Or Republican leaders could jointly declare that for the sake of democracy, they will endorse Mr. Biden if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee. Such a move would, of course, destroy the party’s chances in 2024. But by keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House, it would help protect our democracy.

If Republican leaders continue to endorse Mr. Trump, they will normalize him yet again, telling Americans that he is, at the end of the day, an acceptable choice. The 2024 race will become another ordinary red versus blue election, much like 2016. And as in 2016, Mr. Trump could win.

Republican leaders’ acquiescence to Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor unavoidable. It is a choice.

8) And some good social science showing that the believers of Trump’s big lie actually believe it:

Do surveys measure sincere belief in Donald Trump’s “big lie” that fraud decided the 2020 election? We apply a comprehensive approach to detecting expressive responding: three honesty encouragements, a list experiment, two opportunities to express related sentiments, and two opportunities to bet on related predictions about the future. We find that nearly all respondents who endorse the big lie appear to genuinely believe it. These “believers” are evenly split between those who confidently accept the big lie and those who find it plausible but are not deeply convinced. Similarly, those who predicted that evidence of fraud would enable Trump to retain power in January 2021 or be reinstated in August 2021 were overwhelmingly sincere. Our findings indicate that Trump’s big lie is unique in terms of the size and veracity of belief differences between Democrats and Republicans. We discuss implications for democratic stability.

9) And some cool social science exploring evidence for a “general factor of personality” (cool, I had not heard of this) and the Big Five. 

In hereditarian circles, there’s a lot of talk about the general factor of personality (GFP). Briefly, the data shows that if you take typical Big Five (OCEAN) tests, they tend to be weakly correlated, even if they are supposed to be orthogonal by design. Because of these correlations, you will get a more general factor which has positive loadings on extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and a negative loading on neuroticism (thus, it is sometimes called emotional stability (ES) and reversed). It sure sounds like there is a weak tendency for everything good to go together, even if we are usually told that personality dimensions do not measure something better or worse. Of course more neuroticism is bad. However, it is also true that personality dimensions of OCEAN have nonlinear valence. It is better to be low on neuroticism, but perhaps not being in the bottom 1st centile, as this means you are basically unable to have any worries, even when you should have them. The same for extroversion. Being very introverted is bad for your social skills, networking etc., but being top 1st centile probably means you spend all of your time hanging out with others, and no time doing some critical things that need to be done alone (filing taxes, reading), not to mention the drug abuse association. A review of these nonlinear findings of OCEAN traits is found in Five into one doesn’t go: A critique of the general factor of personality (2011).

But let’s get more numerical. It turns out that if you score people on the GFP and also on the general psychopathology factor of psychiatry, then these turn out to be much the same thing. Another way of saying this is that people with psychiatric diagnoses are usually highly neurotic, introverted, lazy and disorganized (low conscientiousness). This meta-analysis (Linking “big” personality traits to anxiety, depressive, and substance use disorders: A meta-analysis., 2010) shows many of these features…

Conclusions

We could keep going with more difficult-to-integrate findings, but:

• Most psychology aggregates personality data to 5 dimensions, the familiar OCEAN. This is based on Galton’s initial ideas about taking every adjective in a dictionary and analyzing them (lexical hypothesis).

• Model fit statistics on large datasets of items don’t really support this 5 factor solution, nor do they support any other number in particular. Unsatisfying.

• In fact, modeling of personality data in general do not suggest they are hierarchical to a strong extent.

• Predictive modeling shows that using items — the most possible dimensions — is best for prediction by a wide margin.

• But data also shows that one can sort of extract a general factor of personality — the least possible number of dimensions — and this has fantastically strong correlations with psychiatric problems and the general factor of these in particular, thus enabling one to talk about a general “good personality” and a bad one.

• Do we have to accept the unsatisfactory conclusion that there isn’t any particularly globally optimal structure of personality, but that this depends on what you want to do with the data (predict vs. understand vs. psychiatry)?

• Major caveat: most data analyzed here are based on self-report, which could induce systematic distortions. A few are based on peer-report data, which mostly produced congruent results. One can use word embedding as a kinda weird alternative, and for that, see the Vectors of Mind blog.

• I don’t really know what to make of this in general. It’s a big mess.

10) Did you hear about the former NHL player who died because of an in-game cut to his neck via a skate?  Awful, awful, awful.  Apparently, though, there already exists Kevlar turtlenecks to prevent injuries like these– its just a matter of players choosing to wear them. 

11) Yes, it’s inexact, but of course rapid Covid tests can tell you something about just how much virus you are putting out into the world.  Those lines really vary in darkness and, yes, that means something. 

At-home rapid COVID-19 tests can reveal more about viral load than a simple positive/negative result, according to experts.

“By definition, the basic technology suggests that you somehow have to go from a negative ‘zero’ line to a dark line, and within that window — that 0 to 100% — there’s obviously a gradient,” Michael Mina, MD, PhD, chief science officer for eMed and a well-known public health expert who shares his expertise and views on the social media site known as Xopens in a new tab or window and in numerous publicationsopens in a new tab or window, told MedPage Today.

Mina recently shared a schematicopens in a new tab or window of rapid COVID test results and the potential implications of their variability. Mina has been a vocal proponentopens in a new tab or window of this testing technology, so people can better understand their own infection, and he has not been alone in highlighting these ideas. Researchers have shown that variations in COVID test results can reveal different aspects about an individual’s infection and, critically, how contagious they are at a given moment…

Mina said the first thing to consider about the rapid antigen tests is that they are built like virus traps. To show whether a person has enough virus to be considered contagious, the tests are designed to catch all the virus available in a test sample, which then appears on the test line.

Another important fact about the tests, he added, is that they do not include an amplifying step, which means the virus captured on the test line is a true representation of an individual’s viral load.

“It’s very intuitive when you start thinking about it,” he said. “If you see a line right away, I think a lot of people just intuit for themselves: ‘Wow, I have a lot of virus in my nose.’ If it takes 15 minutes for you to start to see a line … then it makes you realize you probably don’t have a lot of virus, and everything in between is that gradient.”

This means that people can interpret their test results in two simple ways: time to test line appearance and test line darkness after 15 minutes, he explained.

The basics of these variations come down to showing how much viral load a person has at one point in time. A darker test line or a faster test line mean a higher viral load. Mina noted that a person with a dark line that appears quickly has a very high viral load, and he or she is likely near the peak of their infectiousness. Conversely, a lighter line that appears closer to the 10- to 15-minute mark means viral load is low, he added.

In addition to measuring viral load at one specific time, Mina said that a series of tests could be used over a few days to determine where a person is in their infection. For example, if someone has a lighter test line on day 1 and a darker test line on day 3, then they are entering into their most contagious phase of their infection.

If a person used this information correctly, they could understand their infection better than just monitoring their symptoms, which are not necessarily correlated with their viral load, Mina explained. This would help an asymptomatic person know how long to isolate, and it could also help someone who continues to see a dark test line to understand that they need more medical attention to address their infection.

12) Yeah, there’s been about a million Op-Eds/essays like this, but it’s an important point in contemporary American politics, “The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test: The attack refutes the flawed assumption that all social-justice causes fit neatly together.”

he terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?

In corners of academia and social-justice activism where the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed are never in doubt, many people failed that test. In response to a fellow progressive who argued that targeting civilians is always wrong, the Yale professor Zareena Grewal replied: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” (She has since locked her X account.) Chicago’s Black Lives Matter chapter posted a picture of a paraglider, referencing the gunmen who descended on civilians at a music festival near the Gaza border from the air. (The chapter said in a statement that “we aren’t proud” of the post, which was later deleted.) Harvard student groups posted a letter stating that its signatories “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” …

I will go to my grave defending the original conception of intersectionality, a legal doctrine advanced by the American critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. She made the useful observation that civil-rights legislation has usually treated protected characteristics such as sex and race as discrete, when in fact they are often interlinked. One of her examples was a St. Louis car plant that, for many years, hired white women and Black men but never Black women. Even after management stopped discriminating, Black women always ranked low on the seniority list and therefore were especially vulnerable to layoffs. Yet how could they sue when they were not subject to racism or sexism per se, but an intersection of the two?

However, Crenshaw herself has expressed surprise at how the meaning of intersectionality has changed through its invocation in pop culture. “This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content,” she told Vox in 2019. In escaping from the academy into the mainstream, intersectionality morphed into both a crude tallying of oppression points and an assumption that social-justice struggles fit neatly together—with all of the marginalized people on one side and the powerful on the other.

That’s how you end up with Queers for Palestine when being queer in Palestine is difficult and dangerous. (In 2016, a Hamas commander was executed after being accused of theft and gay sex.) It’s also how you end up with candidates for Labour Party leadership signing a pledge that insists there “is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights,” even when—as in the eligibility rules for women’s sports—some wins for one group plainly come at the expense of the other. The pop version of intersectionality cannot deal with the complexity of real human life, where we can all be, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase, “half-victims, half-accomplices, like everyone else.” In fact, you can support the Palestinian cause without excusing acts of terrorism committed by Hamas. You can question Israel’s military response without excusing acts of terrorism committed by Hamas. In fact, maintaining the principle that targeting civilians is wrong gives you the moral authority to criticize any Israeli response that creates a humanitarian crisis…

The leftist belief in the righteousness of “punching up,” a derivation of standpoint theory, is also important here. Again, this idea has mutated from the reasonable observation that different groups have different knowledge based on their experience—I have never experienced being pulled over by a traffic cop as a Black man, and that limits my understanding of the police—to the idea that different rules apply to you depending on your social position. When an oppressed group uses violence against the oppressor, that is justified “resistance.” Many of us accept a mild version of this proposition: The British suffragettes turned to window smashing and bombing after deciding that letter writing and marches were useless, and history now remembers them as heroines. But somehow, in the case of the incursion from Gaza into Israel, the idea of “punching up” was extended to the murder of children. I simply cannot comprehend how any self-proclaimed feminist can watch footage of armed militants manhandling a woman whose pants are soaked with what looks like blood and decide that she has the power in that situation—and deserves her fate.

13) Pretty amazing piece from a Finnish psychiatrist, “‘Gender-Affirming Care Is Dangerous. I Know Because I Helped Pioneer It.’: My country, and others, found there is no solid evidence supporting the medical transitioning of young people. Why aren’t American clinicians paying attention?”

We are a country of 5.5 million with a nationalized healthcare system, and because we required a second opinion to change identity documents and proceed to gender surgery, I have personally met and evaluated the majority of young patients at both clinics considering transition: to date, more than 500 young people. Approval for transition was not automatic. In early years, our psychiatric department agreed to transition for about half of those referred. In recent years, this has dropped to about twenty percent.

As the service got underway starting in 2011, there were many surprises. Not only did the patients come, they came in droves. Around the Western world the numbers of gender-dysphoric children were skyrocketing. 

But the ones who came were nothing like what was described by the Dutch. We expected a small number of boys who had persistently declared they were girls. Instead, 90 percent of our patients were girls, mainly 15 to 17 years old, and instead of being high-functioning, the vast majority presented with severe psychiatric conditions.

Some came from families with multiple psychosocial problems. Most of them had challenging early childhoods marked by developmental difficulties, such as extreme temper tantrums and social isolation. Many had academic troubles. It was common for them to have been bullied—but generally not regarding their gender presentation. In adolescence they were lonely and withdrawn. Some were no longer in school, instead spending all their time alone in their room. They had depression and anxiety, some had eating disorders, many engaged in self-harm, a few had experienced psychotic episodes. Many—many—were on the autism spectrum.

Remarkably, few had expressed any gender dysphoria until their sudden announcement of it in adolescence. Now they were coming to us because their parents, usually just mothers, had been told by someone in an LGBT organization that gender identity was their child’s real problem, or the child had seen something online about the benefits of transition. 

Even during the first few years of the clinic, gender medicine was becoming rapidly politicized. Few were raising questions about what the activists—who included medical professionals—were saying. And they were saying remarkable things. They asserted that not only would the feelings of gender distress immediately disappear if young people start to medically transition, but also that all their mental health problems would be alleviated by these interventions. Of course, there is no mechanism by which high doses of hormones resolve autism or any other underlying mental health condition.

Because what the Dutch had described differed so dramatically from what I was seeing in our clinic, I thought maybe there was something unusual about our patient population. So I started talking about our observations with a network of professionals in Europe. I found out that everybody was dealing with a similar caseload of girls with multiple psychiatric problems. Colleagues from different countries were confused by this, too. Many said it was a relief to hear their experience was not unique. 

But, hey, I guess it makes me a transphobe for sharing that.

14) Great stuff from deBoer, “Everyone Can’t Do Everything”

This piece in The New York Times details how Halloween and other holiday celebrations have been canceled at some public schools, under extremely vague equality terms. The best the article can muster is that this action has been taken in the spirit of “building equity, fostering inclusion, and building a sense of belonging throughout our schools.” It seems that because some kids come from families that don’t do Halloween – Jehovah’s Witnesses? I don’t know, the piece is bizarrely silent on the question – nobody should be able to do Halloween stuff at school. As New Jersey’s (Democrat) governor says, this sounds pretty fucking stupid! The small minority of kids who don’t do Halloween are watching Halloween stuff on YouTube and TikTok and Disney+, they’re seeing Halloween decorations in front of house after house, they’re aware of the Halloween displays in stores, they’re listening to their peers talk about their costumes and parties and trick or treating. They know about Halloween. They’re gonna be sad about not participating whether their 2nd grade class cancels their party or not. You have the right not to do Halloween in your family, but the resulting sadness for your kid is on you. Why deprive other kids?

I would really love to hear someone more fully articulate the point about equity and inclusion because as it stands it really seems completely senseless. Are Hanukkah celebrations out? The vast majority of kids don’t celebrate. Should we shut down any dreidel playing in public schools, under the identical logic that most kids will feel excluded? How about Eid? Barely more than 1% of Americans are Muslim, after all. Doesn’t that mean that recognition of Eid in the classroom is a matter of introducing a holiday that not every student celebrates? Or Indigenous People’s Day, given their percentage of the overall population? Ah, but of course the whole DEI thing only really applies to majority imposition on minority rights – the fact that Halloween is a secular holiday enjoyed by the vast majority of children perversely makes it more of a target for exclusion, not less. I suspect that this sort of thing is really a matter of fretful liberal bureaucrats who feel like they need to Do Something and found this Thing To Do. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of the places that implement these policies quietly roll them back in the future. Who are you really serving, here?

Either way, the bigger issue remains: not everyone can do everything, and not everything is for everyone. The existence of the religious and cultural and national traditions that inspire holiday celebrations inevitably mean that those celebrations won’t be for everyone. Yet we’ve created this inescapable ideology that anything that’s for any child must be something for every child, and the related (and equally misguided) notion that any child can be or do anything. Canceling holidays is a different animal than specific children learning about their inevitable human limits, but the stated moral logic of these administrative actions stem from the same bad impulse – the thinking that says that if any kids can’t do something, this is an emotional setback they can’t overcome, rather than a simple reality of life. The basic human experience of not partaking in something other people enjoy becomes instead an error that has to be corrected. In our culture, if any individual kid can’t do something that other kids can do, that’s treated as injustice. That’s a check we can’t possibly cash.

15) Noah Smith with an interesting take on the decline of Humanities’ enrollments:

A bunch of people got upset when it was reported that the University of North Carolina system will now give out distinguished professorships only to scholars in STEM fields, and not to professors in the humanities. Some took it as a sign of the “dismantling of public higher ed in the USA”. I’m not so sure it means that much, but I do think it’s very likely that the shift away from an emphasis on the humanities will continue. The reason is that undergrads just don’t want to major in these subjects anymore:

 

Source: Ben Schmidt

The hard, cold fact is that while professors tend to see themselves as scholars first and educators second, from a university’s perspective, they are primarily instructors; if there aren’t as many students to instruct, fewer profs are needed.

Why are humanities majors (except for philosophy) in a state of collapse? My typical go-to explanation for this is economic — these degrees are less useful for getting a high-paying job, which is why we see students majoring in computer science, health, business, and other practical stuff more. And the timing lines up with the Great Recession, which strongly implies that once economic constraints started to bite, America’s youth became less eager to take a four-year voyage of intellectual pleasure and more focused on grabbing the brass ring.

But Bates College prof Tyler Austin Harper believes that the humanities have shot themselves in the foot by being “nakedly ideological”. He writes:

[W]e’ve created the conditions for what’s going on at UNC. How did anyone think we could get away with being nakedly ideological for years without any chickens coming home to roost?..Universities have always been tacitly left-leaning and faculty have always been openly so, but institutions have never been this transparently, officially political. Almost every single job ad in my field/related fields this year has some kind of brazenly politicized language…

An example. Here’s language from a current lit job ad: “We see this position as building on recent hiring in the English department in decolonial and anti-racist pedagogies and practices as well as a recent cluster hire in research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”…Imagine if a public university job ad instead read: “We see this position as building on recent hiring in the English department in traditionalist pedagogies and practices as well as a recent cluster hire in research related to pro-life ethics, nationalism, and family values.”

…This is about universities shamelessly embracing, as their official institutional posture, an openly ideological framework/stance.

Color me skeptical. While I do think that conservatives and red-state politicians are very mad at this ideological shift in humanities academia — and I agree with Harper that they have a right to be upset — I doubt that this is driving kids’ desire to avoid these majors. Young people are the ones who choose what to major in, not Republican politicians, and the young generation has a lot of lefties. I doubt very much that faculty job descriptions with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in their names are what’s making kids avoid history and English majors like the plague.

Instead, my guess is that the ideological shift in humanities academia is more an effect of the sector’s shrinkage than the cause of it. As all the money and opportunity in humanities academia dries up, people who care about living a decent life and having a well-paying job drift away from the profession. Who does that leave in humanities departments? People who obsessively love their research, of course, but also committed ideologues. So those ideologues will have proportionately more and more sway over hiring and over the culture of the field as a whole.

Of course, humanities departments that become more ideological may be more likely to provoke conservative officials to cut their budgets more. But I think the collapse in humanities majors has to be regarded as the likeliest culprit for the shift here. So although I’d personally like to see humanities departments be less ideological, I doubt this will save them from decline. The only thing that will save them, I predict, is if the U.S. economy returns to a state in which young people are confident that they can get a good job no matter what they major in.

So basically, humanities profs who want to save their fields should be strong proponents of a pro-growth economic agenda.

16) At current prices, obesity drugs don’t survive a rigorous cost-benefit analysis:

ICER’s model looks at the expense of obesity complications, including the most costly, cardiovascular disease. The group estimates that people on semaglutide will have a 20 percent chance of adverse cardiovascular outcomes by age 65, less than the 28 percent for people managing obesity through lifestyle changes alone.

But the savings accrued from averting cardiovascular risks must be weighed against the cost of taking the drug for decades. And given that semaglutide currently costs more than $13,000 for a year’s worth of treatment, there’s no guarantee the drug comes out ahead.

“Losing weight reduces your risk significantly, but it isn’t a cure,” Pearson said. “It’s the classic population health effect of getting good health outcomes and having some cost offsets, but not enough to offset the cost of treating the entire population of people with obesity.”

Another issue is that even after weight loss with semaglutide, many patients will still have a high enough body mass index to have obesity. It’s unknown how reducing one’s weight to a lower level of obesity would affect their risk of cardiovascular disease, but it’s clear that the drug alone will not be able to bring patients to the same baseline as someone who is not overweight or has obesity.

As a result, ICER concludes that the price of semaglutide should be between $7,500 and $9,800 a year to be cost-effective for treating obesity. This requires a discount of 44 to 57 percent off the current annual price. Put another way, for patients who don’t also have diabetes, the long-term savings from using semaglutide as a weight loss drug do not justify its current cost.

17) It really does suck how college football has ruined college basketball:

Imagine if the fate of a Major League Baseball team was directly connected to an NFL team that played in the same city. In this scenario, if the New York Giants decided to move to Connecticut, the Yankees would have to as well. The arrangement would also affect which channel you watched Yankees games on, as well as the team’s budget and potentially even its slate of opponents. (Better hope the Patriots move to the same conference as the Giants, or … no more games against the Red Sox!) Does that sound like a good position for the Yankees, or Major League Baseball, moving forward? Does that sound like a league well-positioned to succeed long term, or one that has any real control over its future?

This is what it has felt like to love college basketball lately. In an age of constant realignment and dramatically shifting priorities for universities and television networks, the sport, whose new season begins on Monday, seems to be fading more in relevance by the year. Some of its wounds are self-inflicted; for instance, a massive amount of roster turnover makes it somewhat inhospitable to fans. But the most existential problem is the chaos going on in college football, which has scrambled the entire college-sports landscape, and not in a good way.

As NCAA executives and TV executives (it’s difficult to tell the two apart anymore) were shaking college football until every nickel fell out, it was telling how little regard they paid to anything else. Men’s and women’s basketball are generally the second- and third-highest revenue-producing college sports, but they’re so far behind football that they’re all but irrelevant in the eyes of executives. Of the top 50 revenue-producing college sports teams last year, only one — Duke men’s basketball, No. 48 — wasn’t a football team. (University of Illinois football, which this alum will tell you has been consistently both awful and unwatchable for nearly 40 years, brought in more revenue last year than every college basketball team in the country.) The executives made every decision with only one sport in mind. And that approach has left college basketball largely in tatters, trying to figure out how to put itself back together.

18) Excellent post from Yglesias, “Israel’s two wars: One is bloody but justified, the other is lower-key and wrong”

One problem, I think, is that while Israel is waging a just war in Gaza, they are in parallel waging an unjust war in the West Bank. This second war is much less spectacular, much more of a slow burn, and at the moment, is causing much less death and destruction to innocent civilians. That these two wars — one just but spectacularly deadly, one unjust but lower-key — are playing out in tandem is contributing to a confused and polarized debate over a set of issues that were already quite fraught. It also, in my view, greatly complicates the question of the right policy response for the United States of America. As a matter of pure-position taking, I think it’s easy to say that the right stance is “Hamas is bad, it is correct to make war on them, but the ongoing colonization of the West Bank is also bad and Israel ought to halt and partially reverse it.” But I don’t know that foreign countries can actually craft a policy that makes that outcome any more likely…

In essence, the Hamid Plan is that Hamas should surrender to Israel in the Gaza War and Israel should surrender to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank War. And I agree entirely that is the thing that should happen. That’s why in my joke plan, the critical third step is for both Israelis and Palestinians to develop different preferences from the ones they actually have:

 

Obviously that’s not a real solution to anything. But I think a lot of these other proposed solutions are just ways of talking around it.

19) Yglesias makes this point in the above piece, but here’s Noah Smith with a whole post on it, “Asia is much more important to U.S. interests than the Middle East”

There’s nothing inherent in the genetics or the culture of the Middle East that make it destined to be more warlike and chaotic than Asia; indeed, up through World War 2 that relationship was largely reversed. Why the Middle East has become a land of war is a complex story. The meddling of outside powers like the U.S. and Russia certainly exacerbated things. The curse of oil, which gave some Middle Eastern countries money to fight with without being forced to develop strong institutions, has a lot to do with it. And of course religion is a factor.

But the point is that the Middle East has been trapped in a bad equilibrium for many years now, where rulers live in the lap of luxury while the impoverished masses focus on sectarian conflict and vengeance. Except for Israel and Turkey, the economies of the region are generally stagnant.

 

In other words, unlike in Asia, the Middle East doesn’t really have much of a status quo worth protecting. This is a region that deeply needs reform, on pretty much every level of society — economic, political, religious, and cultural. That reform cannot be accomplished by application of U.S. power. The Iraq War, which was the most prominent and failed attempt to do so, ended up poisoning local attitudes toward America for a generation.

In other words, Middle Easterners, unlike Asians, do not want American power in their region. Nor is there much that American power can accomplish.

20) If you got pre-teens and teenagers, they are probably fans of Mr Beast, just like my kids.  Interesting story on how he’s transformed his hometown of Greenville, NC. 

21) I so hate the language creep of liberals, especially, using the most extreme language for everything they disagree with. And when everything is a genocide, nothing is a genocide.  To be fair, in the current conflict, both sides are constantly claiming to be victims of genocide or wannabe genocide.  Jeff Maurer, “A Waiter Double-Charged Me For My Entrée. Is That Genocide?”

At then I realized: Maybe I don’t know what “genocide” means. Does anybody? Can anybody these days, when people throw around the word “genocide” like a DJ tossing beads off a Mardi Gras float? Every action by either side in the Israel/Hamas war is denounced as “genocide” by a chorus of Twitter idiots. Activists of an especially nutty piquant have stretched the term to cover basically any bad thing. “Genocide” is now literally the most overused word in the world, surpassing the word “literally”, a word that literally nobody knows how to use.

But “genocide” actually has a meaning. It doesn’t mean “any bad thing done by someone I don’t like.” People have worked to define the term. In 1948, the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which speaks of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” That’s not the whole definition, and people debate the word’s parameters, but most people agree on two components: 1) An intent to exterminate a group, and 2) Large-scale action to realize that intent.

Sometimes, the word “genocide” has legal weight. The International Criminal Court can prosecute people for genocide, and once in a blue moon, they actually do. Many countries have made genocide part of domestic law. In the US, some policy makers feel that a finding of genocide requires the government to take certain actions. This belief has influenced American thinking on events like the The Rwandan Kerfuffle, The Armenian Brouhaha, and The Great Cambodian Whoopsie.

But not all bad things are genocide. Crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing are all very bad, but they’re conceptually distinct from genocide. The Nazis who were prosecuted after World War II were not tried for genocide; they were tried for crimes against humanity. Of course, the absence of a genocide charge didn’t do much to preserve their reputations. They’re still Nazis convicted of crimes against humanity; in most social circles, that’s a major smudge on your reputation. If you knew someone who was a Nazi convicted of crimes against humanity, you probably wouldn’t think “yeah but not genocide” and then set them up with one of your single friends.

Some people are clearly determined to call everything genocide. This may stem from the habit of some left-wing activists to act as though a clear and robust regime of international law exists, even though it doesn’t. Or maybe it’s just maximalism: If you’re trying to win an argument, you might as well accuse your opponent of the worst crime you can think of. This tactic is tempting because if you accuse someone of something, and they deny it, then many people will assume that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. So, if you baselessly call your enemy a rapist, the charge might not stick, but a lot of people will assume that he must be some sort of medium-grade pervert. When it comes to accusations, there’s an incentive to go big.