Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 2/18/2019

Peter Turchin’s Ages of Discord is now a free rental if you have Amazon Prime (otherwise you will be prompted for a Kindle Unlimited subscription). If you are interested in the kind of stuff I talk about, I highly recommend all of Peter Turchin’s work. For readers of this weblog Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall and War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations would be of most interest.

Speaking of Peter, check out his recent blog post, An Anarchist View of Human Social Evolution, which is basically a critique of the two of scholars and an essay, Are we city dwellers or hunter-gatherers? The interesting sociological aspect is that one of the scholars is a pretty unpleasant disputant with critics on social media…and that seems to redound to his fame and influence. Unfortunate incentives.

An Honest Living: What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition. The author is, to be frank, kind of a dick. But there are lots of people with unpleasant and intolerable personalities in academia.

President’s Day sale and DNAGEEKS. Put in the code “PREZ” and you are good to go.

Speaking of presidents, you probably know about The Age of Jackson. A more recent book, The Age of Lincoln is worth reading. And, if you want to get more contemporary views for and against Jacksonianism, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.

The post below, The End Of America As The World As We Know It, is gated. But the first two posts should be free. And since the gating is leaky if you want to deal with the hassle you should be able to figure out how to get access (I’m going to make them free after 30 days as well).

The biography of Maximinus Thrax is on sale as Kindle. A lot of the Roman history stuff that is discounted is kind of like a Wikipedia entry, but this biography comes from a serious scholar and has some reviews that are positive from legitimate people. Thrax is a bit of a turning point character, ushering in the period when the Roman Empire was under serious threat from without and within.

Jussie Smollett. I wish there were betting markets for this sort of stuff. Also, those guys were shredded.

More than 26 million people have taken an at-home ancestry test. A bit of an update on the piece David Mittelman and I worked on last year, Consumer genomics will change your life, whether you get tested or not.

What ancient DNA tells us about caste. David Reich was in India for a bit talking about his work. It seems that they’re ready to uncoil their work soon enough. I’ve been told that he said a draft of the paper was written, so it’s probably going through internal revisions with collaborators.

This Mediterranean diet study was hugely impactful. The science has fallen apart.

The Making of a DNA Detective CeCe Moore, an amateur genealogist turned professional, helps police crack decades-old cases.

If you are on Twitter, Thomas Chatterton Williams is worth following.

For those of you who have read this blog since the beginning, you know that Ramez Naam is a friend. How to decarbonize America — and the world.

Mitogenomic evidence of close relationships between New Zealand’s extinct giant raptors and small-sized Australian sister-taxa.

Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe.

A ‘Denisovan’ genetic history of recent human evolution.

A journalist is tweeting out old, and likely false, information, and another journalist is pointing out how you shouldn’t trust this result. Unfortunately, the original tweet-out is getting more RTs and likes than the refutation of the source and the credibility of the result.

I don’t normally read a book such as The Souls of Yellow Folk. First, it’s too much like a memoir, and I don’t care about other peoples’ memories. Second, I am on the same wavelength about most of these sorts of issues as Wes Yang, and I didn’t think I’d encounter anything novel or that pushed me to new views. But Yang is a good writer. Reading on the strong recommendation of a friend.

This week on the BrownCast I’ll be posting a conversation about Native Americans and nationalism with a lawyer.

Noah Smith says replace listening to podcasts with audiobooks. The problem I see with this is when it comes to books I have to give singular attention…so if I wanted to pay attention I’d just read the book. Podcasts are things that are less dense and contingent and I can sample in and out.

New York Did Us All a Favor by Standing Up to Amazon: Yes, Amazon’s departure will modestly hurt the city’s economy. But it’s also a victory against bad economic policy.

The Valentine’s Day episode of The Insight was fun. This was a conversation we could have had for three hours.

Speaking of academics who are irascible, Bob Trivers is burning up Twitter. Worth a follow.

10 thoughts on “Open Thread, 2/18/2019

  1. Have to agree with Noah re: podcasts. I think I listened to 3 or 4 books last week alone, on top of dozens of articles. Then again, my job requires no focus at all so that’s why i do it.

  2. I signed up just now for premium and $2/month. And….I had to hunt around for this open thread post to get any info whatsoever on what I’d get. It’s not on the register page.

    I realize the premium thing is an experiment, but a wee tiny bit of marketing wouldn’t hurt. 🙂

    I suppose you’re already planning to do something, and this is a soft rollout. But at a minimum I’d suggest: 1) a separate post explaining what your plans are for premium (it’s ok to explicitly say it’s an experiment, just be clear on what’s going on, and the odds that it’ll keep up), 2) add a short version of that info to the sign up page.

    I’ve been reading you for years, so am happy if on the margin a $2 a month makes it worthwhile for you to spend more time writing. But it’ll potentially annoy your possible best readers if you don’t put up some minimum info now that it’s live.

    All the best. Hope it works out!

  3. The situation with the Mediterranean diet study is weird. Most reaction I saw to the original retraction was not justified. The new article provides a little gossip to explain what people are really thinking. It’s still pretty stupid, but maybe it hints that people have better ideas that they are not willing to state publicly. But I’ll stick with the surface explanation: nonsense attacks by people who don’t understand statistics.

    The original attack used the phrase “fabricated data,” but attacked thousands of studies. If people believe that about this study, they’re afraid to say so openly. Maybe people are insinuating that they don’t believe the study because they believe that it was fabricated, so it doesn’t matter how much it is reanalyzed. But because people aren’t willing to say that, it’s hard tell what their conclusion is, let alone the reasoning. Maybe there is some secret back channel where competent people have settled on this conclusion. Hardly a paragon of open science. But it’s just as likely a back channel among incompetent people.

    The original attack says that the arms are too similar. Putting households in the same arm is perfectly fine and makes a small contribution to this effect. But cluster randomizing clinics is (1) bad and (2) should make the arms more different. So the new paper fails to explain away the original attack, which is very suspicious. There was some more complicated randomization procedure to equalize the sexes, which might explain away the effect. On a quick scan, I don’t see the paper even attempting to explain away the attack, other than by invoking “stratified randomization.”

    People are quoted as making diverse attacks on the paper. It seems to me that the attacks do not compound. For example, Janssens complains that the paper is poorly written. So fucking what. NICE complains that the “Mediterranean diet” is a poor abstraction. In fact, the control group moved towards the Mediterranean diet according to the official score. But telling people to change their diet doesn’t work, so it doesn’t matter what advice the study gives. This should instead be seen as a study of the concrete foods of olive oil and nuts and of the intervention of giving people food, rather than advice. The paper’s framing is wrong, but that doesn’t mean that NICE should reject the paper, just draw the right conclusions.

  4. From my vantage point as a free market-lover, I agree that the Amazon deal was bad economic policy. But is it at all possible for a city like New York to draw businesses to settle and invest without making such deals? I mean, NYC isn’t Dallas. It’s committed to high taxes, high rents, union control, and all that. Given its demographics, a low-tax regime with rules that encourage private enterprise (apart from the immigrant-owned restaurants and dry cleaners) is never going to be popular, I think. So the city “managers” have to attract the occasional big corporate, through crony capitalism if necessary.

    Or am I reading this wrong?

  5. “New York Did Us All a Favor by Standing Up to Amazon: Yes, Amazon’s departure will modestly hurt the city’s economy. But it’s also a victory against bad economic policy.”

    My theory is that it was mostly Amazon that woke up and said to itself: “My God. What have I done?”

    Amazon dodged a bullet on this one. The deal would have been a disaster for them. First, the location they picked is a transpiration black hole. moving 25,000 people in and out of their every day would have been chaos. Second, the people they thought they could hire for $150,000 a year are making $300,000 a year working for “banks” (hedge funds, PE funds, i-bankers). Amazon was lucky that the politicians gave them cover for backing out.

    Actually, the whole HQ2 thing was mis-specified and not well thought our. Amazon does need to spread out and lower its vulnerability to being held hostage by Seattle, (Boeing did that a few years back) and to regional group think.

    What they should be doing is putting units in as many places as they can. New York is a terrific location for hiring soft goods merchandisers, not number crunchers. How about putting web services in Pittsburgh, or Logistics in Detroit? The idea is that if you invest in 20 states instead of 2 or 3, you have that many more congresscritters and state governments who must be sensitive to your well being.

  6. I read War and Peace and War on Razib’s recommendation. Good book. Was hoping for more non-European examples, though.

    I approach podcasts differently from audiobooks. The former are much more like an on-demand radio serial that can be started and stopped at will. (This is why it’s a great idea for podcast hosts to “re-introduce” their guests and provide a “on next week’s episode” teaser at the end of each podcast — at least for “The Insight” it usually takes me two commutes’ worth of listening to finish one episode.) Audiobooks are just someone reading a text aloud — I can’t really make it work for anything but the lightest fare.

  7. “Ramez Naam is a friend. How to decarbonize America — and the world.”

    Meh. It is the same old stuff and does not grapple with the real problems. Wind mills and solar panels are shiny baubles that make the foolish and ignorant think we are doing something. Germany has committed very heavily to those technologies and its emissions have gone up almost as fast as the price of electricity. Cows are carbon neutral. They eat plants that suck CO2 out of the air. Their methane, BTW, is oxidized and disappears from the atmosphere within days.

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