Astral Codex Ten

Philippe Lemoine

11 min read

Philippe Lemoine

Article

Philippe Lemoine is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between July 07, 2021 and February 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “especially good critiques coming from blogger Philippe Lemoine”; “Philippe Lemoine finds there was no overall correlation”; “Philippe Lemoine is extremely against this conclusion”. It most often appears alongside US, ACX Grants, Brazil.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: July 07, 2021
  • Last seen: February 10, 2022

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.

Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
July 07, 2021 · Original source
This study has been heavily criticized, I think fairly, with especially good critiques coming from blogger Philippe Lemoine, a Swedish team published in Nature, and a German team in Frontiers In Medicine. They converge on a few points. First, a bug in the model attributes almost all of the transmission reduction in a country to whatever the last intervention was that the country tried. Since most countries started with weaker interventions and then moved on to full lockdown, the model concluded that full lockdown was responsible for almost all the transmission reduction. In the one country that didn't institute lockdown during the period studied, Sweden, there's about the same amount of transmission reduction, but the model attributes all of it to the last thing Sweden tried - a ban on public gatherings - even though in every other country it says such bans had no effect.
Inline links: blogger Philippe Lemoine, a Swedish team published in, a German team in
Why did Scandinavia as a whole do so well? An easy guess would be low population density, but Philippe Lemoine finds there was no overall correlation in Europe between population-weighted population density and COVID death rate:
Inline links: Philippe Lemoine finds
Philippe Lemoine is extremely against this conclusion. He first argues that since we don’t know why Finland+Iceland+Norway+Denmark did so well, we can’t assume it’s a “Scandinavia effect” and so we can’t assume Sweden would share it. Therefore, we should be judging it against the European average rather than the (better) Scandinavian average. I would counter that, although we can’t prove that just because X is true of Finland+Iceland+Norway+Denmark and not other European countries, that it should also be true of Sweden, but we should have a pretty high prior on it, in the same way that eg if we know that X was true in every American state except Arkansas (whose value was unknown), and not in any non-American polities, we should have a high prior that X is true in Arkansas. Anyway, even if we don’t compare Sweden the rest of Scandinavia, we would compare it to Europe, which it did twice as bad as.
Inline links: extremely against this conclusion
Links For November
November 25, 2021 · Original source
Boris Johnson (left) is 5’9, so the guy in the middle must be gigantic. Who is he? Looks like it’s Milo Djukanovic, President of Montenegro, who’s 6’6 (198 cm). Is he the tallest world leader? It seems like he’s tied with his colleague across the border, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic. Why are Balkan leaders so tall? As usual, the answer is “genetics”. This article says: It has been noted that men from Herzegovina are taller on average than men in other places—the average male height is just over six feet...Putting all the data together, researchers concluded that the most likely cause of larger-than-average height of Herzegovinian men is lifestyle during the Paleolithic—men hunted large animals such as mammoth for survival—such a diet, heavy in protein, combined with small population densities, would have provided ideal conditions for height selection, resulting in increasingly taller men who passed the trait down through their I-M170 chromosome to future generations. Some sources note that they manage to beat the Dutch despite the latter country’s much higher human development index. The Dutch are probably tall through a combination of nature and nurture; Balkan people are tall through nature alone. 7: Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t need more ego boosts, but an idea he had a couple of years ago - using strings of bright lights to provide a better and brighter experience for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers than regular light boxes - spread from him to the rationalist community to the wider world, and has finally gotten tested in a formal study (see Acknowledgments section). Results seem vaguely positive: "SAD symptoms of both groups improved similarly and considerably...exploratory analyses indicate that a higher illuminance is associated with a larger symptom improvement in the BROAD light therapy group" 8: Percent of people who choose woke options on polls very tentatively and preliminarily seems to be going down post-Trump (h/t Richard Hanania). 9: Twitter conspiracy theories 10: Did you know: all those reconstructions of “how classical art would have looked with the original paint” are probably inaccurate. There is no reason to think the Greeks and Romans used garish technicolor hues on their statues; what evidence we have suggest they were good at shading, and the statues were probably colored very tastefully. 11: Complaints about how Karl Friston uses the term “Markov blanket” 12: Trevor Klee on the claim that cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia. Apparently there was a big study where basically nobody on the immunosuppressant cyclosporine ever got dementia, and there are some theoretical reasons why cyclosporine might prevent neurodegeneration. But another study found people on cyclosporine got dementia at the usual rate. I think in a situation like this you should have a really high prior on “the people who got the crazy result bungled their study somehow”, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think. 13: Also from Trevor: a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID. 14: To tide you over until the next book review contest, here is awanderingmind’s review of The Conquest Of Bread. 15: Claims: cnbc.com/2021/11/05/sam…\nft.com/content/dcb75a… (better article, but paywalled)","username":"moskov","name":"Dustin Moskovitz","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Nov 05 15:49:46 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":184,"like_count":1188,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.ft.com/content/dcb75a56-ca23-439c-96db-56483979bf34","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80a58c96-c72f-4301-b571-aa9384f132bd_2400x1350.jpeg","title":"Subscribe to read | Financial Times","description":"News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication","domain":"ft.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 16: Big trial on Vitamin D for depression finds null result. Peter Attia tries to tear it apart here, but I am unconvinced, especially in the context of Vitamin D never working for any of the things people say it does besides the most boring aspects of bone health. 17: “California is actively considering the adoption of flawed and inequitable guidance on math curricula based on misleading data and inaccurate success metrics reported by San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)...Based on our review of the data, we found misleading, unsupported, and cherry-picked assertions of success for the new math program. We noted that overall test scores are down and enrollments in UC-approved advanced math classes have dropped as well.” It looks like San Francisco is trying the good old “lower standards, then when more kids meet the standards, claim your school reform plan worked” trick again. 18: A new study claims that self-reported “Long COVID” symptoms are more associated with believing you’ve had COVID than with actually having it (as measured by serologic testing), which sounds like pretty strong evidence that it’s psychsomatic. Expert reactions are mixed-to-negative, although the only one of these that doesn’t sound like excuse-making is Dr. Rossman’s about the unreliability of the tests. I haven’t confirmed test reliability stats but Philippe Lemoine also thinks this is a plausible confounder. 19: Noahpinion: What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? I appreciated this for making me think, and for underlining the extent of the difference between the Deng/Jiang/Hu era and what Xi’s doing. I especially appreciated this line, which I’d never thought about before: Xi presided over the end of China’s hypergrowth. To some extent this is not his fault. No country can grow at 10% forever, and there were many structural forces pushing downward on China’s numbers — the end of the demographic dividend, the exhaustion of rural surplus labor (the Lewis Turning Point), the saturation of export markets, and so on. But China is also slowing down earlier than South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan did in their day. China’s per capita GDP (at PPP) is still only about 1/3 that of a developed country, so if they stop catching up at about half of developed-country levels, that will not be a great showing. A big lesson of the past twenty years has been “actually liberal democracy isn’t necessary to reach developed-country status”, so it would be quite the twist if it turned out you needed liberal democracy to reach developed-country status. This gets pretty close to the great mystery of why some less-developed countries “catch up” and others don’t; whatever happens in China is going to be a really useful data point. 20: Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion. 21: You’ve probably heard about the University of Austin, the new project by a bunch of wokeness-critical academics to start a new university that won’t cancel people or force conformity (New York Post article, Politico article - these were the two least “you need to be super-outraged about this right now” articles I could find). Tyler Cowen and Larry Summers are involved; Steven Pinker was supposed to be but left for unclear reasons. My thoughts, in no particular order: Even forgetting the political aspect, attempts to start new universities are always welcome.
Inline links: Milo Djukanovic, Aleksandar Vucic, This article, in a formal study, Richard Hanania, Twitter conspiracy theories, There is no reason to think, Complaints about, cyclosporine patients don’t get dementia, a history of fluvoxamine treatment for COVID, The Conquest Of Bread, Vitamin D for depression, here, is trying, A new study, Expert reactions, Philippe Lemoine also thinks, What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent?, Lewis Turning Point, slowing down earlier, per capita GDP (at PPP), the great mystery, Variations on the fable of The Frog And The Scorpion, New York Post article, Politico article
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
8: Philippe Lemoine: Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission
Inline links: Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission
Against That Poverty And Infant EEGs Study
January 26, 2022 · Original source
I was going to try to fact-check this, but a bunch of other people (see eg Philippe Lemoine, Stuart Ritchie) have beaten me to it. Still, right now all the fact-checking is scattered across a bunch of Twitter accounts, so I'll content myself with being the first person to summarize it all in a Substack post, and beg you to believe I would have come up with the same objections eventually.
Inline links: Philippe Lemoine, Stuart Ritchie
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
#76: Richard Hanania’s Think Tank I’m Richard Hanania, and I’m seeking funding for my think tank, The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). We believe that scientific stagnation, identity politics, and widespread risk aversion didn’t come out of nowhere. They’re the result of bad policies and practices – bureaucratization, politicization, and credentialism – that have infected our institutions and spilled over into the larger culture. CSPI is bringing these dynamics to the attention of scientists, intellectuals, and politicians, emboldening them to take steps to reform, deregulate, or defund stagnant institutions. Over the last year, our researchers have had a large impact on the discourse surrounding several important issues. Philippe Lemoine helped discredit the public health consensus surrounding COVID and showed lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions to not be worth the costs. Eric Kaufmann documented political intolerance in academia and worked with the British government to secure enhanced free speech rights for academics. My own work has demonstrated that wokeness is largely the product of civil rights law and the HR bureaucracy that enforces it. We’re seeking additional funding so that we can hire more research fellows and distribute more grants, expanding our influence in the policy space to fight back against failing institutions. If you’re interested in helping, email me at contact@cspicenter.org. To learn more, visit our website at https://cspicenter.org.