Between family, work, and other stuff, I’ve been remiss in posting “open threads.” Life changes. I remember back in 2010 I was posting daily roundups of links and what not. No time for that.
Finished The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao. Recommended. One thing that most of you likely know is that the surveys which indicate low levels of religiosity in China are partly an artifact of translation. Chinese who have no affiliation to a confessional religion may still have supernatural beliefs.
Reading Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.
This piece in Wired is getting some attention, ‘Expert Twitter’ Only Goes So Far. Bring Back Blogs. I’ve been trying to nudge people back to blogging for the last 5 years or so, to no avail. The “activation energy” for Twitter is lower, and the exposure and feedback is so immediate. How can you compete with that? My argument is blogs have the “long tail”…but the “long tail” is also very 2000s!
With this talk of blogs, I’ve been bringing up Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World up a lot. The reason is that it outlines with structured text is so important for dialogue. This is most evident in the form of a scientific paper, which has a precise structure that others adhere to, and engage with. Here is part of the summary:
Warriors of the Cloisters tells how key cultural innovations from Central Asia revolutionized medieval Europe and gave rise to the culture of science in the West. Medieval scholars rarely performed scientific experiments, but instead contested issues in natural science, philosophy, and theology using the recursive argument method. This highly distinctive and unusual method of disputation was a core feature of medieval science, the predecessor of modern science…
You can imagine the recursive argument method working in structured debate podcasts and YouTube live streams, but I think the latency and time for thought allowed for text makes it superior in that form in terms of depth. It’s almost impossible to pull off on Twitter.
Zoom’s Biggest Rivals Are Coming for It. Zoom might be like Netscape.
The genetic variation of lactase persistence alleles in northeast Africa. I will probably blog this shortly.
Population genomics insights into the recent evolution of SARS-CoV-2.
The Post-Pandemic Paradigm and Why China Has Won. I hope this is wrong.
Evolutionary history of modern Samoans.
Synonymous mutations and the molecular evolution of SARS-Cov-2 origins.
A Timescale for the Radiation of Photosynthetic Eukaryotes.
‘Turn Around, Go Back’: Summer Islands Don’t Want Coronavirus, or You – The New York Times.
As Africa Groans Under Debt, It Casts Wary Eye at China. While Western academics were prattling on about post-colonialism, Africa was being recolonized by China through debt.
Powered by Fear, Indians Embrace Coronavirus Lockdown. Fear. Indians have firsthand recent experience with the literal plague. The best predictor of how societies have reacted to SARS-CoV-2 is whether they’ve been hit by infectious epidemics recently.
It’s Time To Build. I think for the West the question is can we do it. We can. It’s do we have the will? Not sure.
I interviewed the author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are for the podcast. I “blurbed” the book, so I obviously liked it. It’s not a monograph, there’s a pretty compelling throughline of a familial narrative, but buttressed by a thorough exploration of a lot of scientific details.
Isn’t this just as true of e.g. Americans? I thought it was common to have no affiliation but nevertheless maintain supernatural beliefs. I thought this state of affairs showed up on American surveys as something like “spiritual”. If such a survey is translated, they must not just omit the “spiritual” option… right?
Hey Razib, what do you think of this?
https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
@Razib
Amazing to see a reference to Warriors of the Cloisters… interested to know what you think of the argument… Beckwith is a kind of brilliant that creates new categories with incredible disparate primary sources, often in dead languages, but it struck me as the kind of argument so alien to the incremental genericism of academia that it shows that there could be new ways of mapping argument, logic, and dialectic. I’ve often wondered how one could overlay a computational method of analyzing texts to prove or disprove his argument. But definitely interested in your thoughts.
I’m part way through “Warriors of the Cloisters” and I have already disavowed science because it is appropriated from Muslim culture (who appropriated it from Indians.) Who knew Trump was more woke than anyone on the Left? He hates science.
Re; Warriors of the Cloister, I guess the key here would be to demonstrate that in writing, Christian figures in late Antiquity well before this were not already doing this (“recursive argument method”). It’s probably not enough to be like “Well, I read of Central Asians doing this, because that is my specialism, and then I see parallels between Western European works I’m also aware of, somewhat later”.
Re; “It’s time to build!”, I dunno. A lot of this seems to be driven by people who feel like they’re better educated than their parents, so they should have a bigger house or a cheaper flat than they do. They “deserve” it. At least in the UK. So want they want the government to build it for them.
Deregulate planning permission to prevent capture by those who to constrain supply and use it to inflate their house prices? Sure. But engage in mass programs of publicly subsidized building (housing, hospitals, transport), financed by governments bonds, so a bunch of white collar professionals can live in big metropolises at lower prices? Not sold.
If we believe interest rates are so low that governments should be taking on debt because it’s “so cheap it’s practically free”, then use that to fund working class tax cuts and R & D, both of which have more clear benefits to the average person that won’t just be captured by the urbane upper middle class.
My view here is pretty cynical; Turchinian “elite overproduction” has occurred, and failed aspirant elites beginning to hit middle-age want more elite stuff to be built, so that they can enjoy affluent, urbane middle class lifestyles. It seems all very much wanting a life among the glittering skyscrapers, but apartments are too expensive and small to raise a family, so build more skyscrapers and apartments. Or they want a Harvard education for their kids, but Harvard has limited places, so build more Harvards. About expanding elite goods to match and overproduced wannabee elite. But a better “medicine” would be to let the overproduced elites sit in dissatisfaction, and aim any extra government fiscal capacity at improving the lot for the middle and lower in society. Countering “Coming Apart”, not leaning in to an ever expanding upper middle class.
“The Post-Pandemic Paradigm and Why China Has Won. I hope this is wrong.”
I think, it is fair to assume he is. The author sounds like one of those people who worked or studied at one of the Chinese elite universities in a first-tier city & then believe this is China.
Example: “China designates English a “required school subject from third grade through college and graduate school” and has hundreds of millions of citizens capable of reading a philosophy book in English”
They may be able to read it, but almost all of them wouldn’t understand it. After high school, they are barely able to understand a simple modern novel.
I taught in China at all kinds of universities. In most cases, even English majors understand an English text only just enough to answer multiple choice questions. Any deeper analysis is impossible.
Having said that, even with only a small minority of universities teaching English at a higher level, that’s still some 20 universities in China. So, there should be more than enough Chinese with a proper understanding of English to read more complex texts.
Understanding “Western” culture is a very different problem, though. & you don’t get diplomatic posts because of your research credentials, but because you’re a good commie & belong to the right faction. In some cases (maybe the ambassador to the US is an example) that works, in others (ambassador to South Africa) not so much.
Who knew Trump was more woke than anyone on the Left? He hates science.
You are absolutely right. He is the worstest, worstest, worstest person in the whole world! He is a POOPIE-HEAD!!!!
Here’s an article by Beckwith on Europe developing scientific method.
https://www.berfrois.com/2013/02/how-western-europe-developed-scientific-method-christopher-beckwith/
Tim
Razib, do you think that coronavirus-related GWAS studies (genetic links to susceptibility to infection, severity of disease once infected, etc.) will be clinically useful in the short-medium term (months)?
“Between family, work, and other stuff, I’ve been remiss in posting “open threads.” ”
Razib. Whoever sets up the open threads at your other blog BrownPundits.com does a lot less work to start them than you do. Usually the open thread just says something like: “Have at it.” or “Do your own thing”.
“It’s Time To Build. I think for the West the question is can we do it. We can. It’s do we have the will? Not sure.”
I will just link my comment from last week:
“My conclusion is that I am not worried about China, I am worried about an American system that seems pretty close to death by paralytic incompetence.”
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/04/05/open-thread-04-05-2020/#comment-18411
The theme of “It’s Time to Build” is something that many Trump supporters will understand. (Not sure about the Donald, don’t think he has the analytical chops).
But, putting the Democrats back in the executive branch would be a hard 180 in the other direction. Their obsessions with social justice and plastic straws, are precisely the wrong things to worry about.
The social justice warriors want to redo Medical School so that the students will be chosen for their political commitments and trained to fight racism and gender oppression. see: https://quillette.com/2020/04/11/declining-med-school-standards-in-a-time-of-pandemic/
The plastic straw set seems to be impervious to reality. Disposable plastic bags are the sanitary choice.
Cracks are appearing among the cranks:
Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans Directed by Jeff Gibbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
“Have we environmentalists fallen for illusions, “green” illusions, that are anything but green, because we’re scared that this is the end—and we’ve pinned all our hopes on biomass, wind turbines, and electric cars? No amount of batteries are going to save us, warns director Jeff Gibbs (lifelong environmentalist and co-producer of “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine”).”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/22/earthday-epic-michael-moores-new-film-trashes-planet-saving-renewable-energy-full-movie-here/
His bottom line: Get rid of industry and technology to “save the planet” is going to be a hard sell, when what we need most is technology and industry to produce it.
Some of the faithful are resisting the siren call:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/26/climate-activists-want-michael-moores-doc-panning-green-energy-banned-say-its-chock-full-of-misinformation/
Indian here. Ate you talking about the Surat plague scare of 1995?
That was a panic merely and apart from that I can’t think of any literal plague here in my 50 years.
New paper – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15907-4
Pottery residue analysis shows Early European farmers (before steppe ancestry and ritual beakers) really liked their milk, in the cool North Atlantic to Western Baltic region. Much less so in the south. Only pottery of people in Baltic show much fish oil (where we know of pottery using hunter-fishers continuing quite late possibly until after CW era to admix at high proportion into populations of BA cultures).
Heavy dairy in Ireland; higher proportions of ruminant body fat in the south (Spain/Portugal, France).
So same pattern repeated itself long before Bronze Age and rise of lactase persistence allele. Butter:oil divide already existed?
Makes me wonder if there are some other raw dairy consumption adaptations which were beginning in the Neolithic and we just haven’t detected in modern dna? Other than the known sweeping European LP allele.
More on the SJWs and Medical School:
“Med School Needs an Overhaul: Doctors should learn to fight pandemics, not injustice.” By Stanley Goldfarb, M.D. on April 13, 2020
https://www.wsj.com/articles/med-school-needs-an-overhaul-11586818394
I dunno if you guys saw, but Ezra Klein at Vox posted his own response to “It’s time to build.” His answer is basically that in the public sector all incentives are to delay/cripple/destroy projects rather than actually implement new ones, and that in the private sector investor focus on short-term returns basically penalizes any actor who wants to “go long.” In both cases, he thinks we need to reform institutions and norms before we can actually commit to building anything – because in our sick system any attempt to not only think, but act big will be defeated by some faction or another.
I think this take is basically correct (nothing worth doing can be done in the U.S. by either party unless the legislative filibuster is eliminated), though as is usually the case with Klein, he says a lot while committing to startlingly little, making slightly warmed-over centrist liberalism seem like something more radical than it really is.
@suryavansha
Razib has actually mentioned the book a number of times here before:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/?s=%22warriors+of+the+cloisters%22
@Karl, kind of a hot take response but:
Klein’s approach seems pretty US specific. There is value in that, but he’s placing a lot of work on checks and balances and distribution of power in the US system.
But if it’s OECD wide and democracies without a division of power between a separately electorally appointed Upper House, Lower House, and Executive end up with the same “problems” with building new stuff, I wonder if it’s really that. In the UK it doesn’t seem like we have projects that come in particular more close to budget and on-time really, but perhaps I’m underestimating the difference.
Similarly he talks about lack of spare capacity in health and chalks it up to profit and system incentives that force companies to be averse to long term investments. Well, OK, but from my perspective the NHS didn’t have any more spare capacity. (And that makes sense because a publicly funded system did not want a load of wasteful unused spare capacity swallowing its fixed costs.)
How much of this is just really aversion to public debt and high costs for demographic structural reasons that don’t have much to do with specific features of the US system?
@Karl, @Matt,
The Vox article picked up on some of the same responses I had when reading Andreesen’s piece — “it’s time to build” sounds strange coming from the pen of someone whose strategy is “software uber alles”. Do we really need to build more Facebooks, Lyfts, etc.?
Much of what Klein writes about the US is indeed specific to that system of government, but there are universals as well. In Canada, we have the same NIMBYism and the same short-term, election- or quarterly report-driven thinking, despite having what is effectively a unicameral system of government, tight integration of the executive and legislative branches of government, and a much slower-moving investment climate.
Inability to build in Canada is often chalked up to aversion to new taxation (as in the USA) but also to squabbling between federal, provincial, and municipal governments over how to split the bill. I didn’t use to see that as much in the US, though perhaps some latent tensions there are now boiling over.
Klein points out the role of American political polarization in preventing things from getting done, but my outsider’s perspective, regionalism, the divide between highly urban and highly rural states, and the “federal government by the states” approach seem to be just as big.
@TGGP
Thank you!
@Razib
Apologies for asking something easily referencible
Re whether China’s won: no, they lost when they abandoned government-by-committee and went with government-by-Xi, for life. He may seem okay now but no one will be able to tell him when he’s wrong, he’ll get erratic, he’ll get old and then things fall apart.
Government-by-committee probably wasn’t stable though, so maybe it was inevitable that someone would be the new Mao. Authoritarian systems aren’t good at self-correction and are terrible at transitions. China will pay the price. Hopefully they’ll get their Gorbachev and a better outcome than Russia.
Regarding whether tropical nations are really significantly spared the same horrors (via significant to vast increases in excess deaths in given month) northern nations went through, I think recent evidence from places as varied as Ecuador (bodies piling up in Guayaquil), Brazil(bodies piling up in Manaus of Amazon), Indonesia(40% increase in all deaths in Jakarta), and even Somalia has most likely refuted that hopeful notion:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/02/somali-medics-report-rapid-rise-in-deaths-as-covid-19-fears-grow
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-indonesia-coffins/jakarta-coffin-maker-faces-gruelling-days-as-coronavirus-death-toll-climbs-idUSKBN21Q14W
New preprint: Large-scale Inference of Population Structure in Presence of Missingness using PCA.
Appears to outperform PLINK on missing data scenarios in their test data, but uses much more memory. (“We further note that EMU outperformed PLINK in every scenario regarding inference of principal components.”)
However, may be relevant in adna, where numbers of individuals still relatively low (thousands). Missingness a bit problem in adna. Also include memory efficient variant though performance of this does not seem to be established in paper.
re: building. a lot of evidence about the privatization of gov’t work too. now, everyone has “consultants” who just happen to make 3x as much a gov’t workers. just like military private contractors. that’s the plan for conservatives: hamper gov’t programs so their buddies can enrich themselves. Even Eisenhower thought criticizing The New Deal was insane. Now, right wingers only endorse The New Steal.
finished “The Power Worshipers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.” like it.
Somehow, I think that most of those consultants are Democrats. And I am fairly sure very few of them are right wingers.
They are good college graduates getting the good jobs they were promised if they went through 17 years of school.
@Riordan – Comparisons between countries are difficult; lots of possible confounds. Compare Guayaquil at sea level with Quito at 9,350 feet. Or listen to the latest podcast between Spencer and Razib – highly recommended.
Summer has arrived in Hong Kong with a bang. Temperatures are way above climatic means, and with enough solar radiation to roast a goat (to steal a phrase from Gregory Cochran). I had hoped to be able to make some anecdotal observations about what higher temps, humidity and UV do to coronavirus transmission, but I can’t – we have had zero locally transmitted infections surfacing for the past 14 days straight. I suppose I could observe that the local infections have been coming down as the weather has been getting warmer and more humid, and with a lot more solar radiation, but it could be purely coincidental, and I can conclude nothing. I had expected an uptick in local transmission when everyone hit the beach for the Easter long weekend, but no, nothing at all. At no time have we had anything close to a total lockdown. I can’t go to the gym because they are all shut, but that’s all. Voluntary mask wearing in public is at 100% and has been right from when we got the first couple of cases. So yeah, Jacinda Ardern is a goddess, she really is, but we’re even better – eradication in a population 1.5 times the size, and with no lockdown, and contiguous with Mainland China.
We are still getting a trickle of imported cases. HK has 2,000 permanent residents stuck in Pakistan and 3,000 in India who got stranded there when all of the air travel shut down, and the government is now chartering flights to fly them back to HK. Gotta get our brownz back safe, we need ’em; strength in diversity. The first flight back from Pakistan had two infected people, but they couldn’t know they were because they were asymptomatic and only got tested on landing in HK. The imported cases are not a problem because everyone is tested on arrival, those infected go straight into isolation in hospital (everyone, including the mildly ill and asymptomatic), and the remainder go into 14 days quarantine.
So far here, 1040 total cases, and 4 fatalities. All of the fatalities occurred very early on, and included one 39 year old guy with chronic heart disease who died from sudden heart failure. The other three were 70, 79 and 80, all with co-morbidities, but they haven’t said what.
Since then, the doctors in the public hospitals haven’t lost anyone, and plenty of the patients have been elderly – that seems to me like a pretty stellar performance. They have settled on treating severe patients with a cocktail of Kaletra, Ribavirin, Remdesivir and interferon (whatever that is – I don’t know what it is). It seems to be working, even for the very elderly. No one seems to be commenting on how successful they have been in preventing deaths of severe patients. I hope the doctors are communicating what they are doing to their colleagues in other countries/jurisdictions; they should be. Maybe it’s what everyone is doing, I dunno.
I don’t mean this to sound triumphal or anything; that’s certainly not what I’m feeling. I’m watching the rest of the world aghast and empathizing; and it could all suddenly turn very nasty very quickly here if we don’t all stay very vigilant. Plus we have the usual cast of violent extremists making bombs, and just lurking in the wings waiting for a chance to start causing chaos again – they haven’t gone anywhere. June 4 is a date to watch – anniversary of Tienanmen Square, and a big mob scene could kick off a disastrous, massive outbreak. And then the next big one will be July 1. No doubt the public hospital staff are eyeing those dates as watchfully as I am.
Meant to add – hospitals here have already obtained plasma (serum in American English?) from multiple recovered patients and plan to use it for severe cases if they need to – not trials, but active cases. I don’t know what other countries/jurisdictions are doing in this regard.