She took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine

March 6th, 2020

A woman contracted Lyme disease in her early 20s. It damaged her feet and ankles and left her in significant pain, which she treated with morphine — until, decades later, she tried another pharmaceutical:

In September 2015, she took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine but was actually “pure LSD in powder form.”

The authors defined a normal recreational dose as 100 micrograms — equal to 0.1 milligrams.

The woman blacked out and vomited frequently for the next 12 hours but reported feeling “pleasantly high” for the 12 hours after that — still vomiting, but less often.

According to her roommate, she sat mostly still in a chair, either with her eyes open or rolled back, occasionally speaking random words. Ten hours later she was able to hold a conversation and “seemed coherent.”

Her foot pain was gone the next day and she stopped using morphine for five days. While the pain returned, she was able to control it with a lower dose of morphine and a microdose of LCD every three days. After more than two years, in January 2018, she stopped using both morphine and LSD and reported no withdrawal symptoms, although the case report said she did experience an increase in anxiety, depression and social withdrawal.

The case studies were compiled by Mark Haden, executive director of Canada’s Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and an adjunct professor at the University of British Colombia School of Population and Public Health, and Birgitta Woods, a psychiatrist in Vancouver..

They noted that in CB’s case “ingestion of 550 times the normal recreational dosage of LSD was not fatal and had positive effects on pain levels and subsequent morphine withdrawal.”

The authors note in the study that no lethal doses of LSD have been documented, although they said scientists have estimated that a lethal dose in humans would be 14,000 mcg.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

All human behavioral traits are heritable

March 5th, 2020

Human Diversity by Charles MurrayBehavior geneticist Eric Turkheimer set out three laws of behavior genetics, Charles Murray reminds us (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class):

First law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
Second law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
Third law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

Murray adds some related findings:

Whether the topic was a Big Five characteristic such as extraversion or neuroticism or more specific characteristics such as tolerance, sense of well-being, or alienation, twin studies of heritability kept coming up with correlations for MZ twins that were more than twice the correlations for DZ twins, leaving no role for the shared environment.

[...]

The literature on shared environment, nonshared environment, and heritability tells us that a family’s SES (income, parental education and occupation) is unimportant in explaining the cognitive abilities and personality traits that parents try hardest to promote.

[...]

The bulk of the variance in success in life is unexplained by either nature or nurture. Researchers are lucky if they explain half of the variance in educational attainment with measures of abilities and socioeconomic background. They’re lucky if they can explain even a quarter of the variance in earned income with such measures. The takeaway for thinking about our futures as individuals is that we do not live in a deterministic world ruled by either genes or social background, let alone by race or gender.

Posted in Policy, Science | 6 Comments »

Salamanders and other amphibians glow green when bathed in blue light

March 5th, 2020

Salamanders and other amphibians glow green when bathed in blue light:

Amphibians fluoresce green to yellow in response to blue (440–460?nm) (Figs. 1 and 2) and ultra-violet excitation light (360–380?nm) (Supplementary Fig. 2), but the biofluorescent light emitted under blue excitation is more intense than when excited by ultra-violet light (Supplementary Fig. 2). Fluorescent green coloration in response to blue excitation light is strikingly widespread across the amphibian radiation (Figs. 1 and 2) and is the focus of this survey. Every amphibian species and life stage we examined, including aquatic larvae, is biofluorescent (Supplementary Table 1). Peak fluorescent emissions coming from these amphibians (Fig. 2) fall within the spectrum of green light (ca. 520–560?nm). The intensities of fluorescent light we recorded were variable among taxa (Figs. 1 and 2) and weakest for those that lacked bright or reflective pigments (i.e., yellows, oranges, whites).

Salamanders and other amphibians are aglow with biofluorescence 1

Posted in Animals, Science | 1 Comment »

In the real world, assortative mating is routine

March 4th, 2020

The third part of Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, the part about class, naturally addresses assortative mating:

In the real world, assortative mating is routine. At least when it comes to marriage, people tend to marry others who are similar on a wide variety of traits. The empirical reality of that statement has been established for a long time, beginning with Steven Vandenberg’s review of the early literature in 1972.

Since then, extensive additional research has documented assortative mating for education, intelligence, political affiliation, mental illness, substance abuse, aggressive behavior, and criminal behavior. Often these correlations are substantial, in the region of +.4 to +.5.

Posted in Science | 12 Comments »

Getting there six days early helps

March 4th, 2020

Endure by Alex HutchinsonThere are no shortcuts to feeling good at altitude, Alex Hutchinson (Endure) finds, as he summarizes a recent study:

One of the most pressing questions for people slotting mountain adventures into precious vacation is how much time they need to allot to acclimatization. Will arriving a day or two early make an appreciable difference to their performance and health? This is also, as it turns out, a crucial question for military personnel being deployed on mountain missions where they need to quite literally hit the ground running. Optimizing that calculation is the motivation for a new study from researchers led by Robert Kenefick at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, in Natick, Massachusetts, published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

The question the new study asks is: if you’re headed to 14,000 feet (4,300 meters) and need to perform well right away, is it worth trying to get there (or partway there) two days early? Specifically, the researchers had 66 volunteers complete a series of tests, including a 5-mile time trial on a treadmill set at 3 percent grade, at the altitude research lab on the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado. For the two days prior to the tests, the subjects were split into four groups who either camped in Pikes Peak National Forest at 8,200 feet, 9,800 feet, or 11,500 feet, or stayed at the research station at 14,000 feet. A previous study from the same group had found that spending six days at 7,200 feet did significantly improve performance after a rapid ascent to 14,000 feet, an approach known as staging. But who’s got six extra vacation days? The goal this time was to do it faster by going higher.

There was one other variable the researchers threw in. Exercising at altitude puts your oxygen-starved body in even greater stress, so adding some workouts during your acclimatization period might serve as an additional adaptive stimulus.

[...]

The result of all these machinations? A big fat nothing. All eight of the subgroups produced essentially identical results in the final testing at 14,000 feet.

[...]

But if we have to extract some general rules of thumb for mountain adventures from this body of research, I’d go with: getting there six days early helps; getting there two days early doesn’t; and, since we don’t yet know what happens between days two and six, you should err on the safe side and lobby for more vacation days.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Fear of the inchoate other was so great

March 3rd, 2020

At Prepper Camp, Lauren Groff found, “fear of the inchoate other was so great that the survivalists felt justified in being prepared to kill other humans to protect their material goods”:

But scientists and historians who study catastrophes for a living have long known that there is, in fact, very little antisocial behavior that takes place after disasters. Rebecca Solnit’s extraordinary book A Paradise Built in Hell describes in great detail the collective sense of “immersion in the moment and solidarity with others” that follows large-scale calamities. The common person rises to the situation to help other people, and there can be a profound experience of well-being, inventiveness, and flexibility. In fact, the worst effects in the aftermath of disasters come when institutions try to impose top-down organization, as the military might. The presumption of mass chaos, looting, murders, rapes — this comes from something disaster scientists call “elite panic,” when people in positions of power fear the loss of their power and so overreact in violent ways.

[...]

Elite panic on behalf of white conservatives led to a vast increase in prepping during Barack Obama’s presidency; there was a downtick in interest after Donald Trump entered the White House — ironic, given the comparative risks of a catastrophic event then and now. Trump has made the Environmental Protection Agency into an auctioneer of public lands, which has in turn rapidly undone commonsense regulation. Not to mention that with his deregulation and outright looting of the environment in the interest of privatizing public wealth, he has pushed the Doomsday Clock much closer to midnight. But survivalism, as it exists now in America, is not rational. It is emotional. It is the twisting of hypermasculine fear into a semblance of preparedness and rationality.

I lay in my hotel bed in Greenville, finally clean, and began to feel a strange and terrible sadness for the people I had left on the mountain. The majority of them had military backgrounds. I thought of how they had learned in the service to be powerful, effective, competent with weapons; I thought of their leaving the military and returning to a world where those virtues were far less valuable, even sometimes scorned. How strange it must be to go from the battlefield, always on high alert, capable of killing a fellow human, back to society, where people walked around nakedly vulnerable. Our support for veterans has never been strong, and it’s worsening rapidly. It must be alienating to feel devalued, to have to struggle to retain the kind of self-worth the military had built up in you, after you have given a great deal to your country. You start to believe that institutions have failed you. And so you begin to obsess over the end of society. You stock up on guns because you’ve been trained to believe that guns can protect you, and while you’re at it, you stock up on food and water and other things. You’ve become a prepper. You begin to imagine the end of society — which you see replicated so often in zombie films, television shows, disaster flicks, and dystopian literature that you can imagine it vividly — and perhaps you start to long for the apocalypse. It would solve so much of what makes you uncomfortable about the contemporary world.

Posted in Policy, War | 12 Comments »

A simple test to identify who can override an intuitive and wrong answer

March 2nd, 2020

Before Rationality gained a capital letter and a community, a psychologist developed a simple test to identify people who can override an intuitive and wrong answer with a reflective and correct one:

One of the questions is:

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

Exponential growth is hard for people to grasp. Most people answer ’24’ to the above question, or something random like ’35’. It’s counter-intuitive to people that the lily pads could be barely noticeable on day 44 and yet completely cover the lake on day 48.

Here’s another question, see if you can get it:

In an interconnected world, cases of a disease outside the country of origin are doubling every 5 days. The pace is slightly accelerating since it’s easier to contain a hundred sick people than it is to contain thousands. How much of a moron do you have to be as a journalist to quote statistics about the yearly toll of seasonal flu given a month of exponential global growth of a disease with 20 times the mortality rate?

Human intuition is bad at dealing with exponential growth but it’s very good at one thing: not looking weird in front of your peers. It’s so good at this, in fact, that the desire to not look weird will override most incentives.

Journalists would rather miss out on the biggest story of the decade than stick their neck out with an alarmist article. Traders would rather miss out on billions of dollars of profits. People would rather get sick than do something that isn’t socially sanctioned.

Even today (2/26/2020), most people I’ve spoken to refuse to do minimal prep for what could be the worst pandemic in a century. It costs $100 to stock up your house with a month’s worth of dry food and disinfectant wipes (respirators, however, are now sold out or going for 4x the price). People keep waiting for the government to do something, even though the government has proven its incompetence in this area several times over.

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

Perhaps this class was a way of hiding in plain sight

March 2nd, 2020

Lauren Groff’s last class of the day at Prepper Camp was “Psychological Warfare”:

The instructor was a super-fit black man named Hakim Isler, whose movie-star charisma made sense when I learned that he had been on Naked and Afraid and other survivalist television shows; he calls himself the Black MacGyver. He, too, was former military, from the SERE — or Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion — school, a combat veteran, and a fourth-degree black belt in To-Shin Do, which had led him to write a book called Ninja Survival.

Isler took us through the idea behind psychological operations, or psyops, which he learned when he was in MISO, or military information support operations. He spoke of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the five tenets of survival (there’s always an agenda, know what makes you tick, psyops is a two-way street, take notes, be flexible and open to change), and the four strategies of the field (fortify, align, divide, and overcome).

I began to think that perhaps Isler was himself here to engage in psyops — to discover what makes preppers tick, to track their psychology, to understand the needs and weaknesses of this community, with the ultimate aim of somehow using that knowledge. Perhaps this class was a way of hiding in plain sight, being so brazen about his presence that nobody would ever suspect him of having an agenda. I thrilled to the idea; I felt, for the first time since the disillusionment of the day before, that there might be someone in this place who wasn’t a libertarian. Perhaps I wasn’t as lonely in my politics as I had felt. Or perhaps I was losing my mind.

Posted in War | No Comments »

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple

March 1st, 2020

Steve Sailer noted Freeman Dyson’s recent passing and gave a tip of the hat to my recent post of Dyson’s “interesting ideas about all sorts of topics” — and a commenter shared one I hadn’t seen before, apparently from Infinite in All Directions, which I may now have to pick up:

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments »

Farmers would do better to plant crops the way crops want to grow

March 1st, 2020

Vegetarian-agnostic-feminist Lauren Groff was understandably more drawn to the hippie homesteading sessions at Prepper Camp than to the paranoid militaristic ones:

I couldn’t understand how tracking protests against police violence from a tent somewhere had anything to do with prepping. But I regained some sense of my enthusiasm by proceeding to classes on permaculture, which I believe in deeply. Industrial agriculture is poisoning the planet and our bodies; we’re all better off growing as much of our own food as possible. Our host, Rick Austin, sweating through his khaki shirt in a circle from shoulder to sternum, gave such a thrilling talk about “Secret Gardens and Greenhouses” that I bought his book, Secret Garden of Survival, at the prepper mall afterward. Austin had been a commercial farmer, growing apples in New Hampshire and oranges in Florida, when he realized that agriculture’s traditional rows of plants were not designed for the plants’ sake, but for the sake of the machinery that sows and harvests it; in a post-doomsday world without heavy machinery, and with smaller-scale, nonindustrial agriculture, farmers would do better to plant crops the way crops want to grow.

Austin showed pictures of the evolution of a garden on his mountainside homestead, first stripped to the topsoil, then planted in “guilds” of fruit or nut trees surrounded by symbiotic plantings of berries and vines and useful nitrogen fixers. The result within only a few years was a garden so lush and productive it now doesn’t look like a garden, doesn’t need weeding, watering, pesticides, or nutrients, and provides many pounds of food per square foot.

[...]

I ate in my tent, and with my hand-crank flashlight, I read Rick Austin’s book. It didn’t take more than twenty minutes; I finished pretty bummed out that I had spent $35 on the thing. Though it contains some good ideas, it suffers the lack of editorial attention typical of self-published works, offering only the vaguest recommendations, with eccentric punctuation and terrible photography, and it included the only instance of overt racism (putting aside the MAGA gear and Confederate flags) that I saw all weekend: a photo of the “zombie hordes” that Rick Austin believes will be swarming the land and stealing his food during the apocalypse, credited to the Associated Press, actually depicts desperate brown people wading with their children to dry land.

He has a website and YouTube channel:

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

Most people need social approval to prepare for a widely-reported pandemic

February 29th, 2020

COVID-19 could be pretty bad for you, Jacobian of LessWrong reminds us:

But the worst thing that could happen is that you’re seen doing something about the coronavirus before you’re given permission to.

I’ll defend this statement in a minute, but first of all: I am now giving you permission to do something about COVID-19. You have permission to read up on the symptoms of the disease and how it spreads. Educate yourself on the best ways to avoid it. Stock up on obvious essentials such as food, water, soap, and medicine, as well as less obvious things like oxygen saturation monitors so you know if you need emergency care once you’re sick. You should decide ahead of time what your triggers are for changing your routines or turtling up at home.

In fact, you should go do all those things before reading the rest of the post. I am not going to provide any more factual justifications for preparing. If you’ve been following the news and doing the research, you can decide for yourself. And if instead of factual justifications you’ve been following the cues of people around you to decide when it’s socially acceptable to prep for a pandemic, then all you need to know is that I’ve already put my reputation on the line as a coronaprepper.

Instead this post is about the strange fact that most people need social approval to prepare for a widely-reported pandemic.

As Eliezer reminded us, most people sitting alone in a room will quickly get out if it starts filling up with smoke. But if two other people in the room seem unperturbed, almost everyone will stay put. That is the result of a famous experiment from the 1960s and its replications — people will sit and nervously look around at their peers for 20 minutes even as thick smoke starts obscuring their vision.

The coronavirus was identified on January 7th and spread outside China by the 13th. American media ran some stories about how you should worry more about the seasonal flu. The markets didn’t budge. Rationalist Twitter started tweeting excitedly about R0 and supply chains.

Over the next two weeks, Chinese COVID cases kept climbing at 60%/day reaching 17,000 by February 2nd. Cases were confirmed in Europe and the US. The WHO declared a global emergency. The former FDA commissioner explained why a law technicality made it illegal for US hospitals to test people for coronavirus, implying that we would have no idea how many Americans have contracted the disease. Everyone mostly ignored him including all major media publications, and equity markets hit an all time high. By this point several Rationalists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere started seriously prepping for a pandemic and canceling large social gatherings.

On the 13th, Vox published a story mocking people in Silicon Valley for worrying about COVID-19. The article contained multiple factual mistakes about the virus and the opinions of public health experts.

On February 17th, Eliezer asked how markets should react to an obvious looming pandemic. Most people agreed that the markets should freak out and aren’t. Most people decided to trust the markets over their own judgment. As an avowed efficient marketeer who hasn’t made an active stock trade in a decade, I started at that Tweet for a long time. I stared at it some more. Then I went ahead and sold 10% of the stocks I owned and started buying respirators and beans.

By the 21st, the pandemic and its concomitant shortages hit everywhere from Iran to Italy while in the US thousands of people were asked to self-quarantine. Most elected officials in the US seemed utterly unaware that anything was happening. CNN ran a front page story about the real enemies being racism and the seasonal flu.

Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

How useful in this particular crisis is decelerationism?

February 29th, 2020

Donald G. McNeil Jr. of the New York Times recommends “going medieval” on coronavirus:

There are two ways to fight epidemics: the medieval and the modern.

The modern way is to surrender to the power of the pathogens: Acknowledge that they are unstoppable and to try to soften the blow with 20th-century inventions, including new vaccines, antibiotics, hospital ventilators and thermal cameras searching for people with fevers.

The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders, quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities.

For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove.

At least for a while, it worked, and it might still serve a purpose.

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, was able to seal off the city of Wuhan, where the Covid-19 outbreak began, because China is a place where a leader can ask himself, “What would Mao do?” and just do it. The bureaucracy will comply, right down to the neighborhood committees that bar anyone returning from Wuhan from entering their own homes, even if it means sleeping in the streets.

The White House, in defiance of recent American history, also opted to go medieval by aggressive measures like barring entry to non-Americans who were recently in China and advising Americans not to go to China or South Korea.

[...]

This has led to much consternation among other public health experts, who argue that travel restrictions can cause more panic, misery and death than they prevent. Crowds may besiege hospitals, supercharging the infection rate. Closed borders can cut off vital medications like insulin. Factory and shop closings mean lost wages, hardships and possibly recession.

Also, quarantines feed racism and stigma.

Officially, the World Health Organization opposes travel and trade restrictions. It reiterated that even as it declared the epidemic a global emergency on Jan. 30.

But it now admits that they helped.

He tells a similar story of AIDS in New York City versus Cuba:

Meanwhile, the United States took a pro-legal-rights approach. Even offering an H.I.V. test was made illegal without a separate counseling session, which scared many away from testing. Although gay bathhouses were epicenters of transmission, there were long divisive fights over closing them.

After triple therapy was developed in the mid-1990s, most Cuban camps closed.

But the difference in lives saved by choosing brutality over freedom was stark: Cuba’s H.I.V. infection rate was for decades about one-sixth that of the American one. New York City and Cuba have roughly the same population. In the epidemic’s first 30 years, fewer than 2,500 Cubans died of AIDS. Over 78,000 New Yorkers — mostly gay men — did.

Steve Sailer asks, how useful in this particular crisis is decelerationism?

The respectable opinion has mostly been that it is inevitable that the infection gets into the United States so we should just keep the globalization pedal to the metal, because in the long run we’re all dead so whaddaya whaddaya?

My natural instinct, in contrast, is to try to decelerate, to spread the bad effects out longer. For example, we’ve got about a million hospital beds in this country, with a large fraction already in use every day. If the hospitals overflow, then things get very bad.

There are also reasons to be optimistic about next year or the year after for getting a vaccine.

But how much good can decelerationism do? I don’t really know, but we ought to be discussing the question of accelerationism vs. decelerationism.

Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

It was already too late to blend in, though

February 29th, 2020

Lauren Groff of Harper’s decided to attend Prepper Camp — and didn’t fit in:

They were mostly male, between their late fifties and early seventies, with such an abundance of paunch that the only possible reaction was to marvel. These men were straight-up gravid. They seemed proudly working-class and most were former military, a fact made clear by the patches and medals they wore like over-the-hill Eagle Scouts. Nearly everyone was white. Over the weekend, I would count exactly nine visibly non-white preppers, three of whom were presenters.

[...]

As the day came on around me, I listened to the human parking cone cheerfully directing traffic. “You handicap?” he shouted toward a giant pickup.

From the truck there was a hemming. At last, one of the men inside shouted, “He’s too proud to tell you he’s a wounded veteran.”

“Aren’t we all!” said Parking Cone.

A river of grim and portly old men flowed by, and I felt shy in my civilian womanhood and comparative youth. I waited until I saw a pair of women in hiking boots and flak vests, and gathered my courage to follow them out into the cluster of tents optimistically called the Prepper Camp Shopping Mall.

[...]

Prevalent iconography included eagles, crosses both Celtic and Latin, the Don’t Tread on Me snake flag (aka the Gadsden flag), and the Confederate Stars and Bars. There were MAGA hats galore, so many that by Sunday I would lose the thrill of fury at seeing one. There were T-shirts bearing such phrases as: we are the virus they want to destroy; pro-god, pro-gun; live free or die hard; the calm before the storm. The right shoulder sleeves of many shirts featured backward flags, which I took to have sinister intent until I discovered that this was a convention of military uniforms, meant to show the banner flying as though in a breeze. My favorite tee depicted Ronald Reagan unbuttoning his dress shirt to reveal a chest made out of the American flag.

[...]

It was already too late to blend in, though. I hadn’t known before I arrived that at Prepper Camp camo and olive drab were the markers of belonging. Even very old ladies who certainly had never seen active duty wore camouflage sun hats and plastic clogs. I watched the people around me with a creeping sense of dismay. With a jolt, I saw that I was also being watched in return. I understood then that being a woman alone in this place was already unusual; far worse, I was wearing East Coast liberal-arts-college clothes, a Patagonia fleece, and a North Face backpack. I looked like a good bourgeoise, the kind of woman who drinks kombucha and does yoga and reads Harper’s before bed.

[...]

Perhaps I should have expected to feel wildly out of place at Prepper Camp. I am a vegetarian agnostic feminist in a creative field who sits to the left of most American socialists: I want immediate and radical action to halt climate change; Medicare and free public higher education for all; abortion pills offered for pennies in pharmacies and gas stations; the eradication of billionaires; the destruction of capitalism; and the rocketing of all the planet’s firearms into the sun.

And yet I am also, in the darkest corners of my heart, a doomsday prepper myself.

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

Freeman Dyson appeared for more esoteric topics

February 28th, 2020

Freeman Dyson just passed away at the age of 96. He was known for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering — but he appeared here for more esoteric topics, like the Serbian crisis of 1914, Littlewood’s Law of Miracles, religion and public education, global warming, his time in the Operational Research Section (ORS) of the British Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, firestorms, ripping out gun turrets, drums that talk, the other telegraph, heat death, Project Orion, the illusion of validity, building the H Bomb, the most wanted man in China, starship research, aircraft survivability, the origin of Blue Origin, and Gwern’s proposal for an archive revisiter.

Posted in Science, Technology, War | No Comments »

Plunder the bookshelves

February 28th, 2020

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph TainterLaura Spinney reviews a number of books about societal collapse for Nature:

The newest is Before the Collapse. In it, energy specialist Ugo Bardi urges us not to resist collapse, which is how the Universe tries “to get rid of the old to make space for the new”.

Similarly, Diamond’s 2019 book Upheaval suggested that a collapse is an opportunity for self-appraisal, after which a society can use its ingenuity to find solutions.

[...]

Questioning Collapse, a 2009 collection of essays edited by archaeologists Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, took Diamond to task for cherry-picking to spin a good yarn, for example in blaming such iconic societal failures as the population crash of Easter Island on its people’s destruction of their own environment.

[...]

In his influential 1988 The Collapse of Complex Societies, archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues that collapse — in the sense of the complete obliteration of a political system and its associated culture — is rare. Even the worst cases are usually better described as rapid loss of complexity, with remnants of the old society living on in what rises from the ashes. After the ‘fall’ of Rome in the fifth century, for example, successor states took more than 1,000 years to achieve comparable economic and technological sophistication, but were always recognizably the empire’s offspring.

[...]

In his thoughtful Understanding Collapse (2017), archaeologist Guy Middleton surveys more than 40 theories of collapse — including Diamond’s — and concludes that the cause is almost always identified as external to the society. Perennial favourites include climate change and barbarian invasions — or, in the Hollywood version, alien lizards. The theories say more about the theorists and their times, Middleton argues, than about the true causes of collapse.

The pressing question, Tainter told a workshop on collapse at Princeton University in New Jersey last April, is why can a society withstand repeated external blows — until one day it cannot? For him, a society fails when it is no longer able to adapt to diminishing returns on innovation: when it can’t afford the bureaucracy required to run it, say. In Why the West Rules — For Now (2010), historian Ian Morris proposes a twist on this, namely that the key to a society’s success lies in its ability to capture energy — by extracting it from the ground, for example, or from nuclear fission once fossil fuels have run out. By contrast, Peter Turchin, author of the 2006 War and Peace and War, suggests that collapse is what happens when a society stops being able to deal with the strains caused by population growth, leading to inequality and strife.

[...]

Goldstone rigorously dissected upheaval in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in his 1991 book Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. This convinced him that revolution is an inappropriate response to societal tensions, usually leading to tyranny. Solutions have come instead from deep, meaningful reform. Yet the idea that revolution removes obstacles to progress has “deluded literally billions of people”, he argues.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

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