Astral Codex Ten

Asians

5 min read

Asians

Article

Asians is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 16, 2021 and September 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “the increased risk of hospitalization and death in Asians”; “Asians (Korea, Japan, etc) are having the most fertility issues”. It most often appears alongside Israel, @halomancer1, ACX.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: February 16, 2021
  • Last seen: September 12, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Vitamin D: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
February 16, 2021 · Original source
In the US, more blacks than whites have gotten coronavirus. But this could be because of Vitamin D, or because of wealth/education disparities. One easy way to check this is to look at Asians. Despite their superficially lighter skin, they have Vitamin D deficiencies almost as bad as blacks. But on average they're better-off and better-educated than whites. If blacks' problem was Vitamin D, we would expect Asians to do worse than whites; if it was wealth and education, we'd expect them to do better. In fact, it's a mix. They get coronavirus only about half as often as whites, but they do worse once they get it. This suggests that maybe blacks are are getting the virus more because of wealth/education disparities, but doing worse once they get it because of something that might be Vitamin D? So maybe Vitamin D is involved in severity, but not overall infection risk? We'll come back to this.
Inline links: have Vitamin D deficiencies, it's a mix
The loose ends that bother me the most are the seasonal pattern, the latitude data, plus the increased risk of hospitalization and death in Asians. I don't have a great explanation for those. One possibility is that sunlight does help prevent coronavirus, it just isn't Vitamin D mediated. I suspect that the "anything involving sunlight is Vitamin D" assumption a lot of epidemiologists have isn't going to hold up very well - this seems especially true for cancer, where sunlight matters a lot but study after study has shown Vitamin D doesn't help at all. It may also be true for schizophrenia, although I'm going off one really pathetic study there and it could very well turn out to be Vitamin D after all. Some people are doing a little bit of work to clear up what the sunlight-related-Vitamin-D-independent pathways might be; I think nitric oxide has come up a few times.
Inline links: nitric oxide
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
6: …and I found the above a good appetizer before reading It’s Embarrassing To Be A Stay At Home Mom, which argues (I think correctly) that the root cause of declining fertility is what society finds honorable vs. low-status. Attempts to shore up fertility through economic means and free childcare have mostly failed. Attempts to shore it up with status (giving mothers of X children some kind of national award presented by a beloved figure) have . . . well, they’re at least correlated with success, although this post doesn’t prove causation as well as I’d like. In this model, Asians (Korea, Japan, etc) are having the most fertility issues because their societies are most collectivist, ie people more closely follow the gradient of what is vs. isn’t considered socially acceptable/high-status. I’m impressed by this post’s thoroughness, but also by arguments from the stay-at-home moms I know: they say people are constantly giving them grief about it, and often look for some part-time make-work job they can take just so people will stop looking down on them for being a stay-at-home mother (a friend suggests this is responsible for most of the popularity of multi-level marketing - and this same friend argues that Korea could solve its fertility crisis by mandating that all K-pop idols have at least two children).
Inline links: It’s Embarrassing To Be A Stay At Home Mom