Astral Codex Ten

Nobel prize

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Nobel prize

Article

Nobel prize is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between April 30, 2021 and November 01, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “For this, he wins the Nobel prize”; “Robot Elvis : (one Nobel prize,”; “one Nobel prize … my family had 3 siblings that were a Nobel prize winner”. It most often appears alongside United States, Germany, Darwin.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: November 01, 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.

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
Despite lack of experience, no knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of genetics (which were yet to be discovered), skepticism from his superiors, suspicion from the Mexican farmers, and even Vogt’s attempt to shut the program down, Borlaug perseveres. After years of painstakingly cross-breeding hundreds of wheat strains from all around the world by hand, he finally stumbles on his miracle wheat, which sextuples the yield of the previous wheat cultivars in Mexico and turns the country into a wheat exporter virtually overnight. With Borlaug’s "package" of new wheat (and later, rice), modern synthetic fertilizer, and state-of-the-art agricultural science, a global famine – threatening not just Mexico, but the billions of people worldwide experiencing the post-WWII population boom – is averted, and farmers around the world can now feed orders of magnitude more people with less effort. For this, he wins the Nobel prize and timeless love and admira– ...haha, just kidding. He does win a Nobel prize, but I think it’s safe to say that while some highly educated folks in some niche fields know what the Green Revolution is, outside of a few unassuming places in the Midwest, nobody is going to run into a statue of this guy in their town square.
Inline links: miracle wheat, a few unassuming places in the Midwest
Highlights From The Comments On Great Families
November 18, 2021 · Original source
Just thinking of Nobel prizes, there are two more relevant families to consider:
Jan Tinbergen won the first Nobel prize in Economics in 1969, and his brother Niko Tinbergen won the Nobel in medicine in 1973. (Both of them working on topics relevant to this blog, about individual and group behavior in economics and ecology.) Their brother Luuk Tinbergen committed suicide at a somewhat young age, but had two children that are both moderately prominent ecologists.
The only two Indian physicists to win a Nobel Prize (CV Raman and Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar) came from the same family (Raman was Chandrasekhar's paternal uncle)
Movie Review: Don't Look Up
January 04, 2022 · Original source
Now we are introduced to Tech CEO, the “third richest man on Earth” and the President’s biggest donor. Tech CEO says the comet’s full of the rare earth elements he needs to make cell phones, and demands the President call off the comet deflection mission. He wants to use his own unproven technology to surgically disassemble and retrieve the comet. Some “Nobel Prize winning scientists” who work for him agree it’ll go great. Rather than offend a campaign donor, the President cancels the comet deflection mission.
But the worst part is…well, basically every scientific institution ends up lying. Asian Scientist, the head of NASA, officially announces there’s nothing to worry about. Tech CEO parades a bunch of Nobel Prize winners who endorse his idiotic plan and say it’ll go great. Male Scientist, during his work-within-the-system phase, makes commercials reassuring people that the comet won’t hurt them. The media is complicit in all of this, systematically preventing the populace from hearing the truth. The only scientist telling it like it is, Female Scientist, has (by the end of the movie) been kicked out of grad school and ended up bagging groceries.
Your Book Review: Making Nature
May 20, 2022 · Original source
For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see this paper, which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family. Leaving aside Cell, a more specialized biology journal that seems to have gotten into the CNS acronym the same way Netflix got into the FAANG acronym, Nature and Science are very similar. They both publish articles in all scientific fields. They both date from the 19th century. They’re published weekly. They jointly won a fancy prize for services to humanity in 2007. And having your paper in either is one of the best things that can happen to a scientist’s career, thanks to their immense prestige. But how, exactly, did Nature and Science become so prestigious? This is the question I hoped Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal, a 2015 book by historian of science Melinda Baldwin, might answer. It focuses on Nature, but much of its lessons can likely be extrapolated to Science considering their similarity. I grew curious about this when I realized that most researchers treat journal prestige as a given. Everyone knows that Nature and Science matter enormously, yet few would be able to say why exactly. But this is important! Prestigious institutions, from universities to media companies to major sports competitions, have a huge impact on the world. It’s useful to understand how they came to be, beyond “being famous for being famous.” One reason this is more difficult than it sounds is that we often settle for superficial answers. Selectivity, for instance, is a common explanation: prestige simply comes from obtaining what is hard to obtain, such as a Harvard degree, an Olympic medal or a Nobel Prize. Nature is indeed highly selective, accepting less than 10% of submitted articles (and the vast majority of papers are not even deemed worthy of a submission to Nature by their authors). Yet harsh selectivity alone cannot explain prestige, or it would be trivial to launch a prestigious journal or university just by setting an artificially low acceptance rate. Another facile explanation is longevity. It’s true that prestigious institutions are often old, and indeed Nature has been around for more than 150 years since its birth in 1869. Science is only slightly younger, having been founded in 1880. But there are many older scientific journals: the oldest one, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was created two hundred years before Nature, in 1665. Then there are more recent publications that are prestigious: Cell, for instance, was founded in 1974. The correlation between prestige and longevity is real, but imperfect. It also says nothing of causation: does longevity cause prestige, or does prestige cause longevity? What matters is not the span of time per se, but the specific events that happened — in other words, the history. Making Nature, while not specifically about prestige, gives us exactly that. We’ll first examine the origins of Nature and how it disrupted the publishing landscape of its time (Part I). Then we’ll study the factors that allowed it to build a reputation during its first century of existence (Part II). We’ll end with a focus on the 1970s, when selectivity and prestige suddenly became important to Nature and scientific publishing in general (Part III). I. On the Origins of Nature The story begins with Nature’s founder and first editor, Norman Lockyer. Lockyer had a cushy job as a civil servant in the British government, but dabbled in astronomy in his spare time. In the 19th century, dabbling in astronomy in your spare time could be an intellectually productive hobby: the line between professional and amateur science was blurrier then, and it wasn’t hard to contribute original research even without formal training. During the 1860s, Lockyer published several papers on astronomical observations, the most consequential of which might be the co-discovery and naming of the element helium, from his studies of the sun. His reputation grew among the “men of science” (as scientists called themselves then) of Victorian Britain, and he was soon elected to the Royal Society. But astronomy was an expense, not a source of income. Lockyer routinely supplemented his government job by writing nonspecialist scientific articles and books for a lay audience. Then, one day, he had an idea for a new kind of publication. It would be a weekly periodical to disseminate scientific knowledge to the broader public — but unlike the other periodicals that existed at the time, it would be written by the prominent men of science themselves. It would have a simple, evocative name: Nature. Lockyer summarized the two aims of Nature like this: FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery, and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life; And, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time. In other words (and getting rid of the old-fashioned capitalization of random adjectives and nouns), Nature was meant to do two things: communication from scientists to the public, and communication among scientists. It was an interesting idea. It was also a new one; until then the two aims had been separate. Recall that scientific journals have existed since 1665. During their first two hundred years, they primarily served to record the meetings of learned societies. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society were originally just that: summaries of whatever “philosophical” questions were discussed at the Royal Society. Aside from journals, specialized books were common and were in fact the higher-status way to communicate science in Victorian Britain. Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, published in 1859, is the most famous example. Informal correspondence between scientists was also a major, but private, channel: Darwin wrote more than 15,000 letters in his lifetime, enough to fill 30 volumes. With the exception of some books, none of the above were intended for laypeople. Educated non-scientists (professionals, clergymen, statesmen, etc.) instead got their science news from generalist or literary periodicals such as the Athenaeum magazine. The articles in those publications were not written by specialists, but by journalists and dilettantes. Lockyer’s view, shared with his close supporter Thomas Huxley — a biologist known for defending Darwinian evolution — was that they were riddled with errors and theological overtones. It would be better, they thought, if scientists did the work of communicating their research themselves. It was bold of Lockyer and Huxley to assume that scientists would be interested in doing this communication work. They weren’t. Almost immediately after Nature was founded, its contributors ignored the popularization part (“not a high-status undertaking,” Baldwin’s book says) and focused on the intra-science communication part. They did write summaries and abstracts of their own research, as Lockyer had intended, but they expected that their readers would be other men of science. Within three years, the educated laypeople who were Lockyer’s target audience were complaining that they could no longer understand the contents. Thus the first of Nature’s two aims was met mostly with failure. Fortunately, this was balanced out by unexpected success at the second aim. Scientists did actually enjoy writing for Lockyer’s magazine, in large part because it was published weekly. They found that writing a summary of their own research in Nature was an excellent way to share their results quickly and gain attention from other scientists. Books were slow; Darwin took many years to write and publish On the Origin of Species, for instance. The journals of scientific societies were slow; you had to wait for a meeting to take place and then for the meeting’s “transactions” to be published. Private correspondence was fast, but it wasn’t public. Through publication speed, as well as other factors as we’ll see below, Nature filled a niche in the ecosystem. It was the Twitter of 19th-century British science. Soon enough, this model would be copied, most notably by the journal Science in 1880. According to its first editor, Science was explicitly meant to, “in the United States, take the position which ‘Nature’ so ably occupies in England.” In just a few years, Nature had disrupted scientific publishing and established itself as a useful and unique institution of science, recognized by specialists both in the UK and abroad. First page of the first edition of Nature, 4 November 1869 II. One Hundred Years of Building a Reputation Despite its popularity, Nature didn’t become prestigious overnight. Far from it, in fact. Making Nature often reminds us that the journal spent most of its history as a low-grade publication where anything could be printed quickly, as long as it was factually correct. (This was ensured by basic checks from the editorial team; Nature articles were not consistently peer-reviewed until the 1970s.) As late as the 1960s, a researcher publishing a preliminary report in Nature was expected to follow up with a longer paper “in a more serious journal.” In other words, Nature delivered quick and cheap distribution, not luxury brand approval. This changed about fifty years ago, as we’ll see in Part III. But to understand what happened then, we first need to examine the characteristics of the journal in the roughly 100-year period from its early days until prestige took over, starting with a deeper look into publication speed. Publication Speed John Maddox, editor of Nature in the late 20th century, said that “one of Nature’s greatest early assets was the speed of the Royal Mail.” You could write to Nature, be published within a week, and read the replies to your communication within two weeks. This was state-of-the-art communication tech! Consider how many times publication speed is mentioned throughout the first half of the book (emphasis mine): What made Nature unique was, in large part, its ability to act as a venue for . . . discussions via its correspondence columns and its weekly publication schedule. (p. 8) Many British men of science found that one of the fastest ways to bring a scientific issue or idea to their fellow researchers’ attention was to send a communication to Nature. (p. 39) Unlike the literary periodicals, there was almost no delay between the submission of a piece and its appearance in the journal. (p. 63) A second reason Nature’s speed of publication would have been compelling to men of science is that getting one’s work into print quickly had become an increasingly essential part of establishing priority for a scientific finding or theory. (p. 65) Scientific weeklies [such as Nature] played a unique role in researchers’ publishing strategies at the end of the nineteenth century by offering researchers a forum where short articles could be printed quickly. (p. 105) Both the Proceedings [of the Royal Society of London] and the Philosophical Magazine had significant lag times between submission and publication . . ., which made Nature and its weekly turnaround uniquely valuable for the priority-conscious Rutherford. (p. 109) [Rutherford] sent his most interesting experimental results [to Nature] immediately, both as a way of keeping his colleagues updated on his work and as insurance against being scooped as he had in 1899. (p. 112) These quotes highlight two distinct reasons why speed was important. The first, as I hinted at earlier, was Nature’s role as the аcademic social media of its time. It was simply the best way to have discussions about scientific topics — or science itself — that could, unlike private correspondence, reach a large audience. More on this in the next section. The second reason, as shown by the mentions of physicist Ernest Rutherford, was establishing priority. Today we take for granted that being the first to publish new ideas or results is important, but in the 19th century this was less clear. To bring up Darwin as an example again, he kept his thoughts on evolution private for many years, because he wanted to make sure his argument was sound before he submitted it to the public (although he did eventually sense the urgency of publishing the theory before Alfred Russel Wallace did). But as science became professionalized, “not being scooped” became more and more crucial, and the weekly Nature was a good tool to avoid that. All this talk of speed may surprise anyone who has recently submitted a paper to Nature. In 2016, an analysis revealed that the median time for Nature to review a paper was 150 days, i.e. 5 months, up from 85 days a decade earlier. Nature itself reports, for the year 2020, a median time of 226 days between submission and acceptance. We’re a long way from “less than a week.” Why was there a decrease in publication speed? As we might expect, the reason was Nature’s growing popularity, especially among the international scientific community. At least, that’s what happened the first time there was a slowdown, in the mid-20th century. Early on, Nature was a journal for and by British scientists. But in the first half of the 20th century, science in general and Nature in particular began to involve much more collaboration between researchers across borders. It was a big deal, for instance, when a foreign government banned Nature, as Nazi Germany did in 1938; German researchers had been using it as an important source of scientific news. The ban was furthermore covered in non-British media, such as The New York Times, indicating that the journal was internationally newsworthy. Such an increase in international readership meant more letters and articles sent to the editors, and by the 1950s, there was such a backlog that submissions needed to be held for six months or more. In the 1960s, the new editor John Maddox recognized this as a problem. He began his editorship by clearing the backlog, and even printed the date of submission along with each scientific paper to show everyone how quick Nature was at reviewing articles (“often within a month,” Baldwin’s book says). Clearly, Maddox thought that restoring the speedy reputation of the journal was important. He seems to have succeeded, for a time. As late as 1989, during a controversy around cold fusion, a Wall Street Journal article said that Nature was still fast: it was able to print papers “in as little as three weeks instead of the more usual lead time of six to twelve months for other scientific publications.” Thus, despite a dip in the middle of the century due to its popularity and international reach, speedy publication was still an important characteristic of Nature in the 1970s. A second — and so far permanent — decrease occurred more recently, perhaps as a result of prestige and the competition of near-instantaneous online platforms, but that’s another story. Network Effects As of 2022, scientists argue in public on Twitter, blogs, and other online platforms, like ResearchHub. In the 19th century, Twitter and ResearchHub hadn’t been invented [citation needed]. Fortunately, Nature was there. A network effect occurs when the value of a product comes primarily from the people who use it. If there are two competing telephone systems, the most valuable one is whichever has the most users (or at least the users you want to talk to). If you create an improved Twitter clone, then all its amazing features won’t do much if you don’t somehow manage to capture Twitter’s network of several million people. Likewise, Nature became an interesting journal to read and contribute to because it gained the attention of Britain’s scientific elite as the place to discuss big science questions. This role as a forum was a constant in Nature’s history, as Making Nature shows with several detailed accounts of debates that took place within the journal’s pages. Some examples: Controversies over the age of the Earth in the 1880s.
Inline links: this paper, a fancy prize for services to humanity, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo20298849.html, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oY23!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F99a28e6f-d976-477a-8d14-f47510a23908_200x300.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!glJ9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F873e6e2d-15a6-4b31-954b-f24fcd5e0e23_794x1024.jpeg, more than 15,000 letters, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Athenaeum_(British_magazine), took many years, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GYj8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa4f03221-7d79-42f6-bf6c-35d90fe3f7e5_1142x1600.jpeg, revealed, reports, ResearchHub
“At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. . . . [Cell] was edited by a young biologist named Ben Lewin, who approached his work with an intense, almost literary bent. Lewin prized long, rigorous papers that answered big questions – often representing years of research that would have yielded multiple papers in other venues – and, breaking with the idea that journals were passive instruments to communicate science, he rejected far more papers than he published.
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
I leave out Kellogg and Briand, who read as largely opportunists seeking to use these ideas for their own benefit. Kellogg in the end received the Nobel Prize. As an aside, I often think a history of all the times a Nobel went to the wrong person, or someone else could have reasonably contested it, would be a fascinating and very long book.
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Adraste sticks to moral arguments against eugenics and never tries to claim it wouldn’t work; I don’t think arguments that it wouldn’t work are defensible. Nobody doubts that breeding programs can successfully enhance or remove traits from farm animals or dogs; nobody serious doubts anymore that most human traits are at least partly genetic. And Beroe specifically mentions sperm banks - I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that which sperm donor you choose affects your future child’s traits a lot, and the child of a Nobel Prize winner is about 100,000x more likely to win a prize themselves than the average person. Even if you doubt the existence of genes, eugenics should work on whatever alternative explanation you have for the clustering of traits within families. For example, if the reason poorer people have poorer children is educational access / culture / cycles of poverty, you should still expect that increasing the proportion of rich people to poor people having children would increase the proportion of rich people to poor people in the next generation. This doesn’t mean that a given proposal to change the gene pool might not need much more selection pressure / take much longer than expected (see footnote 2 above), but now that we understand genetics we can calculate this. Also, common sense goes a long way here - most people have a good idea how much more children resemble their parents than the average adult.
Beroe: Let’s say - financial incentives for the most talented people to have lots of children. Something like the old Nobel Sperm Bank, where people with great socially-valuable gifts are encouraged to deposit gametes, and couples who can’t conceive naturally - maybe infertile people, maybe lesbians - are encouraged to make use of them. And making voluntary contraception free and easily available, since by far the most common reason for the less-genetically-blessed part of the population having children is that they want contraceptives but can’t access them.
Coria: That’s fine. You have every right to oppose eugenics, but you must exercise that right in your capacity as a citizen of a democratic polity, not as some sort of impersonal arbiter of morality who gets to decide prima facie what actions are always and forever off limits. Paul Ehrlich estimated that what was best for the world was to pursue a sterilization campaign, and he lobbied the government for it. If you estimate that what’s best for the world is to never do sterilization campaigns, you should also lobby the government for that. I will believe both of you are good people trying to do the right thing as you understand it. Only one of you can be right, of course, but that reflects on your intelligence, not your morality. We can’t all be geniuses. At least not until Beroe gets her Nobel Sperm Bank!
In The Long Run, We're All Dad
December 22, 2023 · Original source
America has about 200 living Nobel Prize winners. 735 billionaires. 1,000,000 doctors, 5,000,000 nurses. 100,000 pilots, 700,000 cops. Also 700,000 drug dealers, 100,000 murderers, and 1,700 NYT journalists.
The nurse called my name, I handed her the cup, and she took it away to pour into some lab apparatus. Good bye, 200 Nobelists. Good bye, 32,000 pilots. Good bye, son who would have destroyed the world. Good bye, daughter who would have saved it. I waited to see if God would smite me. He did not. A few weeks later the clinic called and said there was nothing wrong with my sperm. My fertility problems were just bad luck. I should just keep trying.
Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head
August 02, 2024 · Original source
(Source) A diagram of the human spine next to a diagram of the human body, indicating which parts of the body are innervated by which vertebrae in the spinal column. The cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral regions of the spine are highlighted in different colors, with the corresponding body regions highlighted in the same colors. Starting at the top, the cervical (neck) vertebrae control the head, neck, arms, and fingers. The thoracic (torso) vertebrae control the entire torso and abdomen. The lumbar (lower back) vertebrae control the hips and front muscles of the legs. The sacral (tailbone) vertebrae control the back muscles of the legs and the groin area. The very last vertebra, S5, innervates the anus and genitals. Clayton is injured quite high up on the torso at the T5 vertebra. Let's consider the ramifications of having everything below the nipples be completely numb and limp. To start off, that means that he has no use of the muscles that hold him upright. Nothing keeps me sitting up—no hip flexors, erector spinae, hamstrings, or abdominal muscles. I am arms-and-a-head on a column of Jell-O. He can't put both arms out in front of him, lest he fall over. He has to continuously prop himself up with one arm while doing anything at arm's length. After only 1.5 years of being paralyzed, this has already caused significant repetitive strain injuries in his elbows, shoulders, and ulnar nerves. Clayton still has to deal with all the logistics of life, despite two-thirds of his body being a hunk of corpse-flesh. He dedicates huge swaths of the text to all the little time-wasting tasks he now has to do. How much of his life is ticking away with every delay, every piece of effort, every task that is trivial for an able-bodied person but monstrously difficult for him. Something as simple as getting out of a car is an entire production—let alone running errands, cleaning, doing laundry, cooking. Since the lower two-thirds of his body no longer sends pain signals to his brain, he must proactively tend to all of its physical needs. Complications include pressure sores, infections, and a high chance of blood clots. Aside from suicide, the leading causes of death among paraplegics are all related to poor circulation. In addition to the loss of conscious sensation and muscle control, problems with the autonomic nervous system—heart rate, orthostatic blood pressure, temperature regulation—are common. This is even more pronounced in cervical spine (neck) injuries. Some quadriplegics black out or the blood rushes to their head when being moved from lying down into reclining in a wheelchair. A spinal cord injury wreaks havoc on the body's functioning. Go back to that diagram. The groin area is innervated by the very end of the spinal cord, at the S5 vertebra. We tend to think of our legs as being “below” the crotch, but the nerves that control bowel movements and urination are downstream of the ones for the legs. To keep the party rolling I will tell you about piss and shit. [...] To urinate I have to slide a catheter down my urethra. [...] To defecate I finger myself up the ass and root around and around until the shit comes out. Nuggets, smooshy, whatever it is I’m digging in it. He describes the disgusting, nauseating process at length. For the sake of your lunch, I will refrain from quoting it all. In addition to being unable to open and close his sphincters on command, he also receives no signals of needing to go. If he eats the wrong thing and gets a bout of diarrhea, he will have no warning—no abdominal discomfort and no final urge to rush to the bathroom. One afternoon he "has an accident" while lounging on his couch. In trying to move from the couch to the toilet, he subsequently smears feces all over the couch, the carpet, his wheelchair, the toilet seat, and the shower. After he digs the poop out of his anus and washes himself off, he then has to clean all of that up by himself. From a wheelchair. Bending down, stretching, trying not to fall over, trying to reach the floor to scrub feces off the carpet. From a wheelchair. This episode was hardly the first time. He would routinely wake up in the morning to find that he had soiled himself overnight. Imagine struggling to rip dirty sheets off the bed, stuff them in the laundry, and put a clean sheet on the mattress—from a wheelchair. I don't know about you, but I can barely get a fitted sheet on my own mattress, and I get to do it while standing up. And unless I want to piss or shit myself, there can be no rest from this drudgery, ever, for the rest of my life. No relieving stretch of time without piss-dowsing and fingering myself up the asshole. Nobody told Kid Me that Professor X has to dig turds out of his anus every day. The groin dysfunction doesn't stop there. To be redundant once more, I can’t feel my penis. [...] Men, think how losing your penis would make you feel. Ladies, think of having your clit amputated and never having sex again. [...] True, the unfeeling penis attached to the living corpse I drag around can become erect but what has that to do with me? The one time he tries to have intercourse after his injury, it goes about as well as you'd expect: Watching a woman bob up and down on the penis attached to the corpse that used to be my body struck me as macabre and disturbing. It was like necrophilia. It’s like watching a woman get off by rubbing my amputated foot on herself. The disturbing facts just keep on rolling. One final note about the physical symptoms: spinal cord injuries hurt. Everything below the damage is numb, but the injury itself is a massive tear in the central nerve that controls the body. The pain is insistent, nagging, and so sharp it seems to crackle. [...] It’s just as sharp and intense every time, over and over, like it’s mocking you. Sometimes it happens when I’m lying in bed and it’s like trying to fall asleep with someone sticking a needle between my ribs or the bones of my big toe. But, surely, the only real problem is the physical limitations? Clayton is still the same person he'd always been, right? He has the same brain, same personality he did before the accident. Even if he can't walk anymore, he still has his memories. Not so fast. Yes, Even Worse Than That What kind of mental and emotional toll does all of this take on Clayton? The feeling I experience is a frantic, frenzied, desperate distress. [...] I need to move. I need to move. [...] Not only is two-thirds of my body paralyzed, but so is a huge part of my innermost self. It wants more than anything to feel and experience life. To exist. But it exists now only in a place between reality and nothingness with no hope of ever coming back. [...] All it can do is degenerate in the solitary place it has been forever exiled to. A popular heuristic in neuroscience is "use it or lose it." This is usually in the context of memorization, but it also applies to sensory organs and limbs. When Clayton is injured, his brain's connection to everything below his nipples is severed. Lacking any more sensory input from down there, the brain simply overwrites and repurposes the unused neurons. His injury is not limited to his present and future, but also reaches back into his past: Certain of my memories seem to be disappearing. For example, when I try to remember doing things that involved running, jumping, and sex, the memories seem less real or vivid than they used to. [...] If I imagine taking another person’s hand in mine, or kissing someone’s face, or someone touching my face, I feel something similar to sensation in those parts of my body when I imagine it. [...] But my lower body is now just a void, and its death started the creation of a void in my brain. Not only can I not feel it, but my ability to imagine feeling it is disappearing, as is my capacity to remember feeling it, and doing things with it. He likens himself to a Cartesian brain, a part of the world but outside of it, forever locked away, unable to exert his will on the outside world. Not only has he lost his legs; he is beginning to lose the memory of those legs, too. Everything he ever was, any skills that he ever learned related to being able-bodied, are destined to die over the coming years. His mind is doomed to slowly decay as its neurons do what neurons do: rewrite themselves until none of the person he used to be is left. Toxic Positivity Can Clayton actually talk about any of these things with his peers? Not really. He has a small circle of other recently paralyzed friends who understand, but outside of that, no. American culture has an entire social ecosystem that reinforces the idea that disabled people should be upbeat and optimistic about their life prospects. Almost any interview with a paraplegic ends on some upbeat note about how their disability "doesn't stop them from doing all the things they want to do" and that "they can do anything” an able-bodied person can. In fact, Two Arms and a Head opens with one such quote from Stephen Hawking: “I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many.” —Stephen Hawking This is patently absurd. Why do they say these things? Do they actually mean it, or are they just being hyperbolic for rhetorical effect? Surely they all know, secretly, that they’re lying to themselves? Clayton argues that no, they mean it, and they’re not lying to themselves. Remember how disability affects the brain? How all those unused neurons get repurposed, and any concepts of using those paralyzed limbs gets overwritten (if they ever existed in the first place)? They [lifelong paraplegics] tend to only see life in terms of the possibilities that exist for them [...] Their view becomes somewhat tautological. “What I can do is all that is possible, therefore I can do all that is possible.” Just as able-bodied people cannot comprehend what it’s like to be a paraplegic, lifelong paraplegics and quadriplegics simply cannot grasp what it is to be able-bodied. I’m not saying that lightly. The difference is biological. They have different brains. [...] They do not understand the experience of being able-bodied—neither the subtleties or much of what, to observers, is overt and glaring. They can try to imagine it, but they don’t even come close to comprehending the potential that exists there. Hence the common refrain that there are “not many” things that they can’t do. Adding to this dynamic is that it is considered impolite in our culture to call them out on it: If I were still able-bodied and a paraplegic told me he could do everything I could, I would just think “Looks like being crippled fucked up his mind too, because that’s insane.” I’m not sure what I’d actually say to him, but I know it wouldn’t be that. [...] So the disabled are basically allowed to go around saying whatever on Earth they want. They acquire a kind of de facto moral infallibility because nobody is going to argue with them. On top of this, humans have a basic need to belong, stay positive, and avoid people who are negative and miserable. If paraplegics were honest about all the body horror and misery, they would quickly find themselves devoid of friends. So what is a newly paraplegic person to do in order to maintain connections during a time in their life when they desperately need comfort and support? Brainwash themselves, of course! Clayton was staring down the prospect of what he would have to do to his mind in order to survive in our current society as a paraplegic. It was bad enough to be mutilated physically; he didn't also want to be mutilated mentally. What happened to my body is frightful, but no less than what happens to the minds of many disabled people. We have to have some kind of integrity to our views of the world and reality, and the more the better. [...] So my unwillingness to adopt certain “attitudes” or whatever people call them is something like a desperate struggle to evade the clutches of madness. It gets worse. This does not just affect their social lives and beliefs. These dynamics ripple out into the medical community’s attitudes about paraplegia. If every interviewee swears that paralysis doesn’t hold them back in life, then why pour resources into finding a cure? I’ve heard people say that spinal cord injury is not a priority for medical research like cancer because “people can live like that”. No, we can’t live like this. This is not “life”. Which raises the question—have there been any breakthroughs since 2008? The State of the Cure Let’s take a short break from the existential horror to look at the science of spinal cord injuries. Clayton killed himself in 2008 because there was no cure at the time. Have there been any new developments in the ~15 years since? The short and upsetting answer is "not yet"—though there are some glimmers of hope. Why are Spinal Cord Injuries So Hard to Fix? The spinal cord consists of multiple concentric layers of nerve fibers, not unlike an electrical cable. Wherever the spinal cord has trauma, the nerve cells die off and form lesions of scar tissue that block all nerve signals from traveling downstream of whichever thread was damaged. Some patients are lucky in that only parts of the spinal cord are damaged, resulting in paralysis on only one side of the body. Nerve cells in the spinal cord do not regenerate themselves. Once damaged and scarred, there’s nothing anyone can do. The good news is that emergency medicine has come a long way in arresting the formation of scar tissue at the moment of injury. Patients coming into the ER today have a much better prognosis than they did a few decades ago. The interventions are straightforward treatments like stabilizing the spine, surgery to release pressure on the pinched nerves, and shots of corticosteroids to reduce swelling and inflammation. But beyond that, there is no clinically-proven, FDA-approved treatment for an existing injury. Clayton describes the challenge of rebuilding his injury as something similar to “reconstructing a crushed strawberry.” No amount of stabilization would have put his smeared spinal cord back together. The Latest Research Treatments fall into two camps: bridging the injury, and encouraging the injured scar tissue nerves to regenerate. Implanted Nerve Cells In 2012, Prof. Geoffrey Raisman's team at University College London successfully treated a paralyzed man in Poland. The treatment involved removing one of the olfactory bulbs in his brain in order to culture olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs), which are the only nerve cells in the human body that continuously regenerate. The surgeons removed a section of nerve from the patient's ankle, then implanted both the ankle nerve and the OECs into his spine at the injury site. The grafted tissue bridged the gap between his brain and the healthy spinal cord just below the injury. After years of rehab and physical therapy, in 2014 the researchers announced their success to impressive fanfare. As of 2016, the patient could walk, ride a tricycle, and had regained bladder, bowel, and sexual function. He was far from his pre-injury self, but his quality of life had improved immensely compared to before the treatment. The call went out to recruit two more volunteers for another study. And then... crickets. This follow-up study has yet to be performed. It could have been delayed for a number of reasons. Perhaps they never found suitable volunteers whose profiles satisfied the demands of European regulators. Perhaps Brexit threw a bureaucratic wrench in the collaboration between UCL and the research center in Poland. Perhaps they ran out of funding. To make matters worse, Prof. Raisman passed away in 2017. In the years since, the team has been making progress in fits and starts. As of 2022, the current focus at UCL has been on figuring out how to culture OECs from the nasal mucosa instead of needing to crack open the skull to get at the olfactory bulbs directly. They’ve also made improvements in the technique for applying these cells to the injury site. Things are certainly happening, albeit at a glacial pace. This treatment strategy may become widespread in the future, but at the moment, it remains experimental. NervGen's "Wiggling Molecules" In 2021, NervGen Pharma announced a drug that encourages damaged spinal tissue to heal without scarring. A bioengineered molecule, NVG-291, is injected into the spinal cord and acts as a scaffold for the nerve cells to attach to as they regrow. The molecules of this scaffold naturally "wiggle” and stimulate nearby nerve cell receptors, promoting healing. Animal models were extremely promising. NVG-291 is currently in Phase 1b/2a clinical trials, which are scheduled to start in August of 2024. I’m cautiously optimistic. The main impediments to finding a cure are the same ones that plague any other field of medical research: lack of funding and unreasonable requirements from regulators. The main problems at this point in time appear to be bureaucratic rather than strictly biological. Will any of this research pan out within the next 5, 10, or even 20 years? Maybe. Only time will tell. (Someone should start a prediction market about this!) Alas, this is all coming too late to have saved Clayton. The Decision to Die I am absolutely and heartbreakingly in love with life. But this is not life. [...] For those who like to say this one: “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” I reply that suicide in my case is a permanent solution to a permanent problem. [...] I have only one serious problem in life and it’s being paralyzed. Clayton does not come to this decision lightly. He considers it exhaustively and systematically. When deciding whether to keep living, he starts from the premise that there is some amount of suffering past which life stops being worth it. He evaluates where that dividing line is by examining the sources of meaning in his life. He starts by asserting that there is nothing wrong with his mental health or his reasoning abilities: I am not depressed, I am tortured, and there is a difference. [...] If they came up with the cure today and I got better instantly, I could win myself a Nobel Prize in medicine for proving that depression was caused not by anything in the brain as previously thought, but by damage to a few cubic centimeters of nervous tissue in the spinal cord. Because I guarantee I’d pop up and be feeling as merry as a lark in about one second. [...] My problem is not depression. [...] There is no problem with my reasoning powers. [...] So if I say, “Paraplegia prevents me running. A life without running is not worth living. Therefore, my life is not worth living.” you might not agree with one of my premises, but there is no question of whether I’m being reasonable. This is similar to Frankl’s argument in Man’s Search for Meaning, and in fact Clayton spends an entire section talking about Frankl. He has a few disagreements with the book, but he has no gripe with the core message. Clayton decides to die because he had meaning in his life—and then the accident took it all away: Probably the life of a deaf man would be good enough for me, or that of a mute or a man missing a leg or an arm. But not the life of a paraplegic. There is not enough left for me. [...] The life I dreamed of and loved with all my heart is gone forever and there is nothing I can do about it. And it’s not just slightly changed, but utterly devastated. [...] My skills as a carpenter, roofer, plumber, gardener, all devastated. My ability to conduct my everyday life with wonderful efficiency, devastated. The wonderful way I was able to relate to other people, devastated. My sex life, devastated. My social life, devastated. [...] I am who I am, I love what I love, and given what I need from life, existence is no longer tenable for me. Some readers may look at that list and call him shallow. Even if that were so, that doesn't change his argument. Maybe most people don't place having sex, controlling one's bowels, and running through the woods as the quintessence of life-affirming values, but I'd be willing to bet that they're still important. Reading this book should prompt a moment of introspection. If you disagree with Clayton’s list above, then reflect on what does give your life meaning. No, seriously, make a list: family, friends, partners, children, hobbies, skills, etc. Write them down. Cross out one entry at random. How would you feel if you lost that entry? Would you still have enough left over to carry on? Probably. Now cross out a few more. Lose your partner. Lose your children. Lose your parents. Your siblings. Your best friend. Your favorite hobby. How do you feel? Still worth it? Add in some physical negatives: chronic pain. Constant nausea every time you eat. Losing feeling and control of your bowels, your legs, your genitals, your diaphragm, your non-dominant hand, your dominant hand, both arms. What about loss of sight? Hearing? Speaking? Communicating at all? What about ending up like the title character in Johnny Got His Gun, where he is left with no legs, no arms, and is rendered blind, deaf, and mute? What would life be like as a disconnected brain in almost complete sensory deprivation? How much would you have to lose before your life stops being worth living? That list—and the dividing line between "worth it" and "not"—is different for everyone. The decision to end one's life is deeply personal. Clayton happened to draw the line at a particular point. Others may agree or disagree, but Clayton’s judgment was his own. Decision in hand, next comes the hard part. The Roadblocks I did not want much from the world in dying. To be able to put my affairs in order without fear of being taken prisoner and treated like I was insane. To say goodbye to those I loved without the same fear. To die a painless death without worrying about leaving behind something gruesome. And to be comforted as I died. When a person has absolutely nothing left and is facing annihilation, all he wants is not to be alone. For Clayton, killing himself is not a simple matter. At the time only one US state, Oregon, had any kind of “Death With Dignity” law on the books. However, this law only allowed assisted suicide for terminally ill patients with less than six months to live, while Clayton’s condition was stable. The slightest whisper of suicidal ideation would have gotten him locked up in the psych ward. He has to write his book in secret, he has to lay his thoughts out for the world in secret, and he has to die in secret. Becoming paralyzed destroys him on two fronts—the disability itself, and the fact that he is completely, utterly, devastatingly alone with his feelings. He writes Two Arms and a Head because he needs to show the world how agonizing it is to face death alone and how important it is for physical-assisted suicide to become—and stay—legal. How empty to exist in this universe and share your feelings and experience with nobody! But that is how you, the world, have left me to die, alone. But what you don’t realize is this: in turning your backs on me, you have turned your backs on yourselves. [...] Someday you will be on your deathbed and maybe you will remember me. What I say to the world is that if you don’t do something about the way death and assisted suicide are dealt with, you may someday find yourselves in an unimaginably horrible situation with no way out. [...] Beware! There could be a horrible fate waiting for you and if you don’t all get together, look each other in the eye, recognize the insanity, and change the laws, you could wake up tomorrow as a head on a corpse with no way out for the next thirty years. A lingering question you might be asking is: if he cared so much about it, then why didn’t he become an activist to get it legalized? The Overton Window was shifting. Washington state would pass a bill a few months after his death, and it would be legalized in Montana by a court case in 2009. Several more states would follow suit in the mid-2010s. He could have shared his experiences far and wide and joined the burgeoning movement that existed back then. He was a law student at Vanderbilt for crying out loud; surely he could have enlisted the help of at least a couple of his colleagues? No one but him could have answered that, though I suspect that the answer is because he didn’t want to. He found his existence to be so ghastly that he didn’t want to stay in it for a second longer than necessary. The only reason he lasted as long as he did was because he wanted to finish the book. He chose to leave Two Arms and a Head as his legacy for the world, and nothing more. We’ve gone over the state of the cure over the last ~15 years. Has there been any progress on amending the laws for physician-assisted suicide? The State of MAiD Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is currently legal in a patchwork of countries and US states. The exact rules, restrictions, and methods vary. In most places that have legalized it, the patient’s condition must be considered terminal (i.e. death is expected within six months) to be eligible for MAiD. The procedure itself is typically either an IV injection administered by a nurse, or a prescription cocktail of benzodiazepines, digoxin, and opioids which patients drink themselves. In Canada and the Netherlands, MAiD is also available to patients with a disability that does not present as immediately terminal. The Netherlands currently includes severe treatment-resistant mental illness as a qualifying condition, and Canada will follow suit in 2027. So it sounds like Clayton got his wish, at least in Canada and parts of Europe. Now, when a Canadian ends up in a terrible accident, they have a choice in the matter of whether they want to spend the next few decades as a quadriplegic head-on-a-corpse. Phew. However, it’s not all smooth sailing. It seems like every few months there’s another horror story in the press coming out of Canada or Europe. Two news stories came out in quick succession in late March/early April 2024—one from Canada, the other from the Netherlands. In Canada, a 27-year-old autistic woman with no disclosed physical symptoms was granted the right to proceed with MAiD by an Alberta court. The story broke after her father sued to try and stop her. In the Netherlands, a 28-year-old woman has decided to pursue MAiD due to her treatment-resistant clinical depression and borderline personality disorder. Her MAiD is scheduled for sometime in May 2024. At the time of this writing, she has yet to undergo it. These stories are nothing new. They certainly sound dreadful. Diving into every big story from the last ten years would be beyond the scope of this review, but let’s return to the one about the 27-year-old autistic Canadian woman who was granted MAiD. Both the Calgary Herald and CBC framed the story as a grieving father desperately trying to prevent his autistic daughter from being led astray by unethical doctors cherry-picked by the Alberta Health Service. The father insists that his adult daughter is physically healthy, albeit “vulnerable and not competent” to make medical decisions due to her autism and ADHD. Despite this, the judge has allowed MAiD to proceed anyway. Meanwhile, reading the actual court decision shows that the legal issue at hand is whether the woman is required to disclose the physical ailment(s) that led to two doctors approving MAiD. The judge ruled that the woman is competent to make her own medical decisions, and that she is not required to disclose her diagnosis to either her family or the court. The father has since filed an appeal. (July 2024 Update: the appeal hearing was subsequently scheduled for October 7, 2024 - six months in the future. Not willing to wait that long, the woman began a voluntary stoppage of eating and drinking (VSED) on May 28. The hearing was rescheduled for June 24. However, the woman continued to refuse food and water going into June. The father withdrew his appeal on June 11. It is unknown whether the woman has undergone MAiD at this time of this update.) She is not choosing MAiD because of autism or ADHD. We don’t know what her physical diagnosis is. We only have the father’s insistence that “her physical symptoms, to the extent that she has any, result from undiagnosed psychological conditions.” That’s the father’s words, not a physician’s, and not the patient’s. Neurodivergence does not bestow immunity against all the nasty ailments that can cut someone down in their twenties. I’m not accusing every news piece about MAiD of being similarly sensationalized, but I’m not not accusing every MAiD story of being similarly sensationalized. Despite so many of these stories not holding up to their headlines, many remain opposed to the expanded rules. There is a massive contingent of activists who want to keep MAiD illegal. Not Dead Yet Clayton had a particular amount of ire directed at one prominent anti-MAiD disability rights org: Not Dead Yet. Not Dead Yet (NDY) was founded in 1996 by the same people who lobbied to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed a few years prior. As the name implies, they reject the notion that death could ever be an acceptable response to living with a disability. Like any activist org worth their salt, they have a convenient Talking Points page where they lay out all the reasons why they’re opposed to MAiD. They argue that MAiD is deadly discrimination against disabled patients, with current programs having insufficient safeguards to prevent foul play. NDY argues against a medical field that has decided that death is preferable to disability. They insist that they are not against individual autonomy; patients will always be free to commit “un-assisted” suicide if they truly wish to die. The page opens by explaining that MAiD is necessarily a disability issue, even in places where MAiD is only available to the terminally ill. Although people with disabilities aren’t usually terminally ill, the terminally ill are almost always disabled. When terminally ill patients get polled on why they are choosing MAiD, it turns out that avoiding pain isn’t the primary motivation. In Oregon, where MAiD is only available for the terminally ill, every patient fills out a questionnaire when they apply for the program. Tallying up all the surveys from 1998–2023, to top reasons are: “Losing autonomy” (90%)
Inline links: Source, Prof. Geoffrey Raisman's, As of 2016, As of 2022, NervGen Pharma, Phase 1b/2a clinical trials, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), late March, early April, These stories, are nothing new, CBC, court decision, filed an appeal, May 28, withdrew his appeal on June 11, Not Dead Yet, Talking Points, In Oregon,
Links For November 2024
November 01, 2024 · Original source
…whose grantee David Baker recently won a Nobel Prize for his research on synthetic proteins. Potential applications include new drugs, vaccines, and materials. 25: Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent. Rich people who want to signal group membership to other rich people online can’t boast about how rich they are; that would be gauche. Instead, they’ve settled on the solution of making fun of rich people in hyperspecific language that proves familiarity with the culture. 26: Tap Water Sommelier: Vladimir Putin has two sons, ages 5 and 9. They are kept in luxurious but total isolation from the outside world and raised by flunkies who are too scared to punish/restrain them in any way. Also some discussion of an unexpected historical analogue. 27: Experiment from Colombia: replacing experienced teachers with less-experience but higher-scoring-on-tests teachers significantly decreased student performance. Got to admit I was expecting the opposite of this, I’d seen US data saying that experience didn’t matter and teacher intelligence did. Looking over this more, I find lots of studies on both sides and will go back to agnosticism on this question until someone I trust investigates further. 28: Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa). This study used a 100 word essay on why you supported your party (you can see if you can do better here), but past attempts with different structures (religion, vegetarianism, polyamory) have shown broadly the same results. The researchers try to put this in the context of various studies showing that people do misunderstand their opponents (eg think they’re more extreme, underestimate the level of common ground), but it seems like intellectual Turing Tests aren’t a good way to measure or tease out this misunderstanding. 29: Congratulations to Substacker WoolyAI for doing the impossible and providing a genuinely novel and interesting (to me) take on pickup artistry: 30: Did you know: if you Google “cool websites”, our subreddit (r/slatestarcodex) is the first result. 31: Moshe Koppel, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, is writing a series of posts (presumably) based off of my Every Bay Area House Party, titled Jerusalem Area House Party (it’s multiple part, you have to go to the main Substack page to find the others). I won’t necessarily link everyone who riffs off one of my posts - but honestly I probably will if you also have a Wikipedia page that describes you as working on computational Talmudology. 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors. 33: Medications often decrease “secondary endpoints” (eg stroke, heart attack), but the holy grail of pharma studies is proving that a certain drug decreases all-cause mortality. This is much harder (not all heart attacks kill people, and people die from lots of other things), but is the strongest possible endorsement for the drug (without it, you might worry that it only prevented non-fatal heart attacks, or that it killed as many people through side effects as it saves through heart attack prevention). Even great medications that we’re confident in can’t always clear this bar. But a new JAMA article adds another member to this select club: Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, probably because it prevents drug addiction, car accidents, and impulsive actions. 34: Before the Gulf War got in the way, Saddam Hussein was building some crazy mosques: 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress. You might hope that, whatever the other disadvantages of anti-immigrant parties, at least they’re incentivized to let natives have children, but looks like they can’t even get that one right. Starting to wonder whether the trains even run on time. 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector. It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.
Inline links: won a Nobel Prize, Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent, Tap Water Sommelier, Experiment from Colombia, experience didn’t matter, teacher intelligence did, Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test, you can see if you can do better here, religion, vegetarianism, polyamory, WoolyAI, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4FRI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F558ad67a-bfca-469e-abd8-2edc7c8b888a_590x916.png, if you Google “cool websites”, r/slatestarcodex, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, Jerusalem Area House Party, says it’s a myth, Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, some crazy mosques, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2W0c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2be0549-aa2b-411d-b6a6-da50c34f7f86_1000x572.jpeg, Italy bans surrogacy, Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups?, Related, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T3h-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08b011b3-ef20-42e5-91b2-33946b8ca7b6_1761x1355.jpeg, @cremieuxrecuel, responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument, My post, is finally going for, Trust Assembly, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based, not infinitely based, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fY_K!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b3b61c8-6c48-4eb7-9608-426b738ab9c8_592x111.png, which can use your computer, Claim, Ems Dispatch, The first use of artificial insemination in humans, administers several personality tests to the same people, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!epEc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47c474c6-d68a-41e4-954e-d24cd00ec040_740x388.webp, Whither Tartaria, a well-researched article showing, in a new article he demolishes a different theory, When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal, Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals?, more, Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here, Naomi Kanakia, No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, Howe 2022, a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete, goes into more depth about one of those ways, The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence, discussion, previously argued, the pioneering analysis of this technology, Gwern retracted his objections, says, polygenic selection, banned journalist Ken Klippenstein, you can read Klippenstein’s side here., appears to be unbanned now