Quotulatiousness

May 29, 2023

The high-water mark of the Vegan cult?

Filed under: Food, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Patrick West celebrates the passing of peak food puritanism:

“Welcome to Las Vegans and Vegetarian, Whole Foods fake meat section, Las Vegas, NV, USA” by gruntzooki is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Over the past few years, there has been an explosion of vegan processed food appearing in supermarkets. A growing number of the population also claims to be vegan. But there are signs this trend could be going into reverse. Demand for animal-free food and drink products has collapsed over the past year. One casualty is Swedish oat-milk firm Oatly, which has recently withdrawn its dairy-free ice cream in the UK. Another is the Yorkshire sausage-making company, Heck, which has scaled-down its vegan-friendly range from 10 products to two. Smoothie-maker Innocent discontinued its dairy-free range earlier this year. Supermarket sales of meat-free products fell by £37.3million between September 2021 and September 2022, according to the consumer intelligence firm NielsenIQ.

There seems to be two main reasons. Rising inflation has been cited as one cause, as consumers have scaled back on branded and luxury eatables. Plant-based processed foods are generally more costly than the meat and dairy products they purport to replace. Another explanation is that producers of vegan food may have overestimated the size of the market for veganism, and now they are having to readjust to reality.

Whatever the reasons, we should welcome the retreat of the cult of veganism. And I use the word cult deliberately, because veganism greatly resembles not so much a lifestyle choice, but a way of life itself. It’s a faith that resonates with today’s puritanical and conformist mood.

And I should know, as someone who became a vegetarian in 1996 and has not eaten meat since. Sure, my decision aroused some mockery and derision back then, but vegetarianism had mostly stopped being regarded as weird by the mid-1990s. Ever since then, most of the opprobrium and scolding we vegetarians face comes from vegans, largely because we continue to eat eggs, cheese and milk.

For vegans, nothing must be consumed or worn that derives from animals or insects – even if there is no killing or discernible harm involved. Anything else is a feeble cop-out. Their way of thinking is absolute. In this respect, the best exemplars of the vegan movement are the animal-rights fundamentalists, PETA, whose members are well-known for their shrill, exhibitionist narcissism. Their message is simple: they are better people than you.

It’s no surprise that veganism was turbo-charged in the mid-2010s, when wokery captured the minds of so many – when absolutist, extreme thinking, and the competition to be purer than the next man or woman, took over. The trans movement echoes this rush to extremes. It demands the transformation of your entire body. Indeed, bodily self-mutilation and mortification of the flesh have long been practised by religious fundamentalists.

May 12, 2023

The crusade against (insert scare quotes here) Ultra-Processed Food

Filed under: Europe, Food, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Christopher Snowden traces the orthorexist journey from warning about the dangers of saturated fat, to protesting against sugar content in foods, through an anti-carbohydrate phase to today’s crusade against “Ultra-Processed Food”:

It is barely ten years since Denmark repealed its infamous “fat tax”. It was supposed to be a world-leading intervention to tackle obesity but it proved to be hugely unpopular and lasted just 15 months.

It seems almost strange now that it targeted saturated fat. In hindsight, it was the last gasp of the crusade against fat before all eyes turned to sugar. The anti-sugar crusade seemed to come out of nowhere in 2014 with the emergence of the tiny but phenomenally successful pressure group Action on Sugar. Within three years, the British government had announced a tax on sugary drinks, but by then the anti-sugar movement was morphing into a campaign against carbohydrates. That began to run out of steam a couple of years ago when many of the leading anti-carb personalities found that they could get more attention — and, dare I say, money — from being “sceptical” about COVID-19 vaccines.

They come and go, these food fads, but they all rely on the belief that there is something in the food supply that is uniquely dangerous, something hitherto unknown that only independent free thinkers can see is the cause of all our problems.

The new dietary villain is “ultra-processed food” (UPF), a concept that didn’t even exist until a few years ago but is now everywhere. There have been two books about UPF published in recent weeks and a third — Henry Dimbleby’s Ravenous — dedicated a lot of space to it.

The simple definition of ultra-processed food as used by those who are concerned about them (I am not making this up to make them sound silly) is anything that is “wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient you wouldn’t find in a home kitchen”. Since you probably don’t have emulsifiers, preservatives and artificial sweeteners in your kitchen, this rules out a lot of products.

The argument is that these products make you fat and should be avoided. The evidence for this comes from a study published in 2019. In a randomised controlled trial, ten people were given an ultra-processed diet and ten other people were given an unprocessed diet. Both diets were similar in their overall sugar, fat, protein and salt content, although the meals themselves were very different.

The participants were given all the food for free and they could eat as much as wanted. The people on the ultra-processed diet ended up eating 500 calories per day more than the other group and, after two weeks, had put on nearly a kilogram of weight. By contrast, the people on the unprocessed diet lost weight.

If you look at the food that was offered to the two groups, the explanation is obvious. The meals and snacks available to the UPF group were delicious whereas the food given to the other group was rather Spartan and was unlikely to make anybody ask for a second helping. If you give people tasty food for free, they will tend to eat more of it.

May 5, 2023

JunkScientific American

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Stephen Knight calls out the woke editors of once-proud publication Scientific American for their anti-scientific support of the gender warriors:

A dangerous strain of utopian thinking has taken hold of the “progressive” left. Many now share the delusion that if we pretend certain falsehoods are true, then various forms of oppression and bigotry will magically disappear. Worse still, the proponents of these falsehoods demand their unequivocal affirmation from the rest of us.

Today’s leftists rightly insist on the importance of scientific truth when it comes to questions like climate change, vaccine safety and evolution. But they will discard scientific facts the moment they become inconvenient to their own worldview. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more pronounced than on the issue of gender, where transgender ideology has almost entirely supplanted scientific truth among the left. More alarming still is the fact that many scientists and scientific institutions, which really should know better, are colluding in this deception.

The latest scientific institution to promote gender pseudoscience is the once-venerable Scientific American magazine, which this week published an article headlined “Here’s why human sex is not binary”.

Make no mistake, sex in human beings really is binary and immutable. There are few things more emphatically true in our scientific understanding of the world than the human sex binary. Human beings cannot change their sex – we are either male or female, as determined by which type of gametes our biology is organised to produce (sperm or eggs). These are observable, testable scientific facts. And this objective truth matters in very real and consequential ways – to our society, to law, to healthcare and to the safety of women and children.

Trans ideologues claim that the categories of male and female are on a “spectrum”, or that they represent nothing more than a subjective feeling. These ideas have already had disastrous consequences for society. It is thanks to these ideas that male rapists have been placed in women’s prisons in the UK. It is why, just this weekend, a biological man won an elite women’s cycling race in America – finishing 89 seconds ahead of the closest female competitor and netting $35,350 in prize money. We would simply recognise this as “cheating” were it not for the hold that gender ideology has over our institutions – and for the opprobrium that is visited on anyone who dissents.

After some silly and irrelevant trivia about the biology of lizards and fish (humans are neither fish nor lizards), the Scientific American article concludes by claiming that anyone who upholds the human sex binary is “trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society”. This single claim inadvertently reveals a great deal about what is wrong with the trans movement. Unable to refute the truth of the human sex binary, gender ideologues resort to demonising those who notice it as having ulterior, sinister motives.

This isn’t the first time Scientific American has lent its (now waning) credibility to gender nonsense. Back in 2018, it published an article titled “Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is overly simplistic”. To this day, this piece is gleefully shared around by gender activists, emboldened by this apparent vindication of their ideology from a credible, scientific publication. However, the author of the piece has since clarified that reality actually is as simplistic as humans having only “two sexes”.

March 18, 2023

QotD: Experts outside their field of expertise

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… just because someone is really smart and successful at A does not necessarily mean their opinion on B is worth squat. As always, as a consumer of opinions, caveat emptor should always be the watchwords.

The first time I really encountered this phenomenon (outside of obvious examples such as the political and economic opinions of Hollywood celebrities) was related to climate change. I don’t see them as often today, but for a while it used to be very common for letters to circulate in support of climate change science signed by hundreds or thousands of scientists.

The list of signatures was always impressive, but when you looked into it, there was a problem: few if any of the folks who signed had spent any time really looking at the details of climate science — they were busy happily studying subatomic particles or looking for dark energy in space. It turned out most of them had fallen for the climate alarmist marketing ploy that opposition to catastrophic man-made global warming theory was by people who were anti-science. And thus by signing the letter they weren’t saying they had looked into it all and confirmed the science looked good to them, they were merely saying they supported science.

When some of them looked into the details of climate science later, they were appalled. Many have reached the same general conclusions that I have, that CO2 is certainly causing some warming but the magnitude of that warming or in particular the magnitude and direction of its knock on effects like floods or droughts or tornadoes, is far from settled science.

So it is often the case that people who show strong support for ideas or people outside of their domain do so for reasons other than having made use of their expertise and experience to take a deep dive into the issues. Theranos is a great example from the business world. Elizabeth Holmes convinced a bunch of men (and they were mostly all men — women seemed to have more immunity to her BS) who were extraordinarily successful in their own domains (George Schultz, the Murdochs, Henry Kissinger, Larry Ellison) to become passionate believers in her vision. Which is fine, it was a lovely vision. But they spent zero time testing whether she could really do it, and worse, refused to countenance any reality checks about problems Theranos was facing because Holmes convinced them that critics were just bad-intentioned people representing nefarious interests who wanted her vision to fail.

Warren Meyer, “People Who Express Opinions Outside of their Domain Seldom Have Really Looked into it Much”, Coyote Blog, 2019-05-28.

March 17, 2023

Ukrainian, Yugoslav and Baltic Nazis? – ϟϟ Foreign Fighters Part 2

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 16 Mar 2023

Across Europe, non-Germans are filling the ranks of Heinrich Himmler’s forces. These foreign fighters certainly don’t meet the racial standards of the SS but times are tough and the Reichsführer-SS needs warm bodies. So, does that mean Himmler’s given up on the idea of a Germanic master race? Not at all. And he uses all sorts of twisted esoteric logic to justify his latest moves.
(more…)

March 5, 2023

The clear drawbacks of depending too much on oral history

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson explains why you need to exercise caution when dealing with oral traditions:

Lac La Croix Indian Pony stallion – Mooke (Ojibway for – he comes forth), October 2008.
Photo by Llcips09 via Wikimedia Commons.

A BBC travel feature published several weeks ago had the hallmarks of a classic progressive narrative. It was the tale of the “endangered Ojibwe spirit horse; the breed, also known as the Lac La Croix Indian pony, is the only known indigenous horse breed in Canada.”

The spirit horse was reduced to near extinction by European settlers who treat these magical creatures, deemed “guides and teachers”, as a mere nuisance to be culled and eliminated in favour of more profitable animals like cattle, or so the telling goes. A native breed of a beloved animal struggling to survive in the face of voracious colonial settlers.

Someone call James Cameron.

Unless you know a little evolutionary history, that is. In which case, you will already be aware that this story is pure pseudoscientific hokum.

Look, no one likes to be disrespectful about sensitive matters where the legitimately oppressed and aggrieved claims of First Nations peoples are concerned. This is a nation that is struggling to come to terms with its own horrific colonial past. This process is taking on many forms: witness the applause granted to singer Jully Black, who recently amended the national anthem “our home on native land”. Or, perhaps, the calls by one NDP MP to combat residential school denialism by passing new laws on hate speech — which would make questioning certain narratives not only an act of heresy, but also a literal crime.

Listening to stories, and respecting lived experiences and oral histories Indigenous people at the core of Canadian history and identity has given a new credibility to the traditional knowledge of First Nations people in academia, media, and in society at large.

But the story of the Ojibwe spirit horse is a clear example of the limits of oral history.

The horses now roaming the plains of North America are not a native species. The horse did evolve on this continent before migrating to Asia and Europe. However, the North American breed is believed to have been extirpated about 10,000 years ago (or thereabouts) during a mass extinction event that wiped out almost all large land mammals.

There is some evidence that isolated pockets of a native horse breed may have survived in North America much later than this, but the horses roaming about today are descended from those that were brought from Europe after the 15th century.

Of course, science is always evolving, but the overwhelming bulk of genetic and archeological evidence to date supports this theory. The native North American horse is long, long gone. The bands of horses freely wandering the backcountry are not wild, but feral; they’re the product of escaped or abandoned horse stock of distant European origin.

February 12, 2023

JunkScientific American

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The editors of Scientific American have been steadily injecting more political and progressive content into their traditional coverage of hard scientific topics:

Scientific American magazine has been around since 1845, evolving into a reader-friendly purveyor of hard science, a respected, slightly intimidating denizen of supermarket checkout lines. But judging by the recent ridiculous trend of stories and editorials, it’s been wholly captured by the woke blob.

On the surface the monthly still does what it says on the label in providing long articles, short reviews, and cool photographs for an intelligent audience, with almost-comprehensible stories on the physics of black holes for science buffs, and stunning photos of deep-sea creatures for the rest of us.

But then there’s the ludicrously left-wing ideology that seeps into every issue. A NewsBusters perusal of the contents of each 2022 regular-release monthly issue revealed 34 stories grounded in liberal assumptions and beliefs, nearly three per issue. That’s even after skipping stories with liberal themes that were nonetheless science-based — for example, a cover story on melting glaciers in Antarctica wasn’t included.

Of course, the COVID pandemic in particular tugged the magazine toward government interventionism and the smug rule of health “experts”.

Some of the most bizarrely “woke” material is online-only, with a wider potential reach. The most notorious recent example is a January 6, 2023 opinion piece, cynically seizing on the on-field collapse of a Buffalo Bills player to label the NFL racist: “Damar Hamlin’s Collapse Highlights the Violence Black Men Experience in Football — The “terrifyingly ordinary” nature of football’s violence disproportionately affects Black men“. It’s written by Tracie Canada, who is, no surprise, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology.

So what’s the solution? Surely Canada wouldn’t recommend banning blacks from the National Football League for their own protection?

But plenty of bizarre pieces fill the print edition. Here’s a headline from the July 2020 issue of this purported science magazine: “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity“. Yet a June 2019 SA article argued that the nation’s “biggest health problem” was obesity. So is Scientific American, for being concerned about obesity, by its own bizarre standard racist as well?

QotD: The heyday of Victorian newspapers

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A few years ago, I did some research on three early Victorian murders that caused me to read several provincial newspapers of the time. I discovered incidentally to my research that the owners or editors of about half of the British provincial newspapers also sold patent medicines; and this made perfect sense, for by far the greatest advertisers in provincial newspapers were the manufacturers of patent medicines. The owners or editors of the newspapers sold advertisements to the producers of patent medicines, then they sold the newspapers in which the advertisements appeared, and finally they sold the products themselves to the readers. It was an excellent example of rational commercial synergy. (About half of the medicines, by the way, were either to cure or to prevent syphilis — a disease, then, that was a great support to the press of the time.)

Now, the principal quality or characteristic of the sellers of patent medicine has always been effrontery, that is to say the blatant insinuation of the false. Thomas Holloway’s innovation was to insinuate such falsehood on a mass or industrial scale. There was hardly a newspaper in which he did not place a weekly advertisement; moreover, he pioneered the advertisement that masquerades as news story. He would ensure that reports of miracle cures in faraway places, supposedly wrought by his pills and ointment, and written as matter-of-factly as possible, were placed in every newspaper, reports whose veracity no one could possibly check for himself, of course.

As Napoleon once said, repetition is the only rhetorical technique that really works — besides which hope and fear render people susceptible to effrontery. In Thomas Holloway’s time, the fear of illness was often, and the hope of cure rarely, justified; at least Holloway’s preparations were unlikely to do much harm (they contained aloe, myrrh, and saffron), unlike the prescriptions of the orthodox doctors of the time. They allowed for the possibility of natural recovery, whereas orthodox medicine often hurried its consumers into their graves. Nevertheless, the claims Holloway made for his ointment and pills were preposterous, and something is not curative just because it fails to kill.

Holloway made an immense fortune by his effrontery and founded a women’s college in the University of London on the proceeds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Way of Che”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-10-28.

January 20, 2023

Christopher Snowden on our latest “Clown World” alcohol guidelines

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, Christopher Snowden pokes gigantic holes in the stated justification for the latest Canadian drink consumption recommendations (also mentioned in this post yesterday):

Canada is on the brink of making itself an international laughing stock by cutting its drinking guidelines from two drinks a day to two drinks a week. The previous guidelines were only set in 2011 so Canadian drinkers can be forgiven for being suspicious about this dramatic change. The evidence base has not significantly changed in the interim. The evidence for the health benefits of moderate drinking has continued to pile up.

The only thing that has really changed is that neo-temperance zealots like Tim Stockwell have tightened their grip on alcohol research. Stockwell and his “no safe level” pal Tim Naimi both live in Canada and are both authors of the report that has made the ludicrous new recommendations.

I have been saying for over a decade that the “public health” plan is to get the guidelines down to zero so they can start regulating alcohol like tobacco. The evidence does not support this fundamentally ideological campaign and so the evidence has been dropped in favour of fantasy modelling and cherry-picking.

[…]

A Canadian “standard drink” contains 13.45 grams of alcohol. Three standard drinks equals 40 grams. Four standard drinks equals 53 grams. The meta-analysis has no data on people who drink so little, so the claim that colon cancer risk increases at three or more standard drinks is not supported even by the authors’ own preferred source.

As for breast cancer, which can only affect half the population and is partly why most countries have different guidelines for men and women, the report cites this meta-analysis of 22 studies, 13 of which found no statistically significant association with drinking. It pooled the studies and reported a 10 per cent increase in risk for people drinking 10 grams of alcohol a day. As with the colon cancer study, this was the minimum quantity studied so it tells us nothing about Canadians who drink 3-5 standard drinks.

In terms of mortality, another meta-analysis found that light drinking was not positively associated with any form of cancer, including breast cancer, and was negatively associated with cancer in a couple of instances […]

As countless studies have shown, heart disease and stroke risk is substantially reduced among light and moderate drinkers. For example, a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies (which track people’s drinking habits and health status over a number of years and are the most reliable studies in observational epidemiology) found that drinkers were 25 per cent less likely to die from coronary heart disease than teetotallers. The evidence for strokes is similar.

This is main reason why life expectancy is longer for moderate drinkers and the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality is J-shaped.

The authors of the Canadian report essentially ignore all this evidence and instead focus on a cherry-picked meta-analysis written by Stockwell, Naimi and pals which massively adjusted the figures to arrive at their desired conclusion. This is inexcusable.

At The Line, Jen Gerson points out the utter absurdity of public health officials doing their best Carry Nation bar-smashing imitations while at the same time pushing for “harm reduction” policies for cocaine, heroin, and other illegal narcotics:

“Bayer Makes Heroin” by dog97209 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

“The guidance is based on the principle of autonomy in harm reduction and the fundamental idea behind it that people living in Canada have a right to know that all alcohol use comes with risk,” noted the CCSU and, hey, yeah!

I like to understand my risks so that I can make informed decisions.

But you know what else poses significant risk?

Lots of morphine and cocaine.

I think this is generally known. But God help you if you want to engage in a conversation about the risks society might be courting with safe supply or even harm-reduction strategies, and have fun being labelled a Conservative troglodyte who just wants suffering addicts to die in the street. You’re probably just a rich, callous asshole who opposes all of these evidence-based policies who blows second-hand smoke into the faces of your children while drinking your sixth beer of the night at the local pub. Just shut up and pick up those discarded needles in your yard, you monster.

I was picking on Health Canada previously, but they’re hardly the only ones who display a bizarre split-personality on these issues. Any story by or on the CBC on the matter of alcohol use now sounds like something straight out of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Yet just try to find critical reporting on safe consumption sites or safe supply policies. Almost all of it is uniformly glowing.

[…]

Obviously, I don’t think that our public-health officials are telling Canadians that heroin takes the edge off a hard day better than a glass of red or a pint of beer. But did we learn nothing over the course of the pandemic about the importance of consistent and clear public-health communications? The target audience for this is not those who have carefully studied harm reduction and substance use disorders. It’s people who just like to have a drink with dinner.

If our governments want to maintain any credibility, they can’t be uptight about how many glasses of pinot noir we drink, and then appear to be loosey goosey on heroin. It’s just impossible to take that kind of suck-and-blow at face value, but that’s exactly how this messaging will come across to people who aren’t closely engaged with this issue. “The government wants to give free hard drugs to junkies but thinks my cocktail is a problem?”

October 28, 2022

QotD: “Cliodynamics”, aka “megahistory”

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For this week’s musing, I want to discuss in a fairly brief way, my views of “megahistory” or “cliodynamics” – questions about which tend to come up a fair bit in the comments – and also Isaac Asimov, after a fashion. Fundamentally, the promise of these sorts of approaches is to apply the same kind of mathematical modeling in use in many of the STEM fields to history with the promise of uncovering clear rules or “laws” in the noise of history. It is no accident that the fellow who coined the term “cliodynamics”, Peter Turchin, has his training not in history or political science but in zoology; he is trying to apply the sort of population modeling methods he pioneered on Mexican Bean Beetles to human populations. One could also put Steven Pinker, trained as a psychologist, and his Better Angels in this category as well and long time readers will know how frequently I recommend that folks read Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization instead of The Better Angels of our Nature.1

Attentive readers will have already sensed that I have issues with these kinds of arguments; indeed, for all of my occasional frustrations with political science literature (much of which is perfectly fine, but it seems a frequent and honestly overall positive dynamic that historians tend to be highly critical of political scientists) I consider “cliodynamics” to generally take the worst parts of data-driven political science methodologies to apotheosis while discarding most of the virtues of data-driven poli-sci work.

As would any good historian, I have a host of nitpicks, but my objection to the idea of “cliodynamics” has to do with the way that it proposes to tear away the context of the historical data. I think it is worth noting at the outset the claim actually being made here because there is often a bit of motte-and-bailey that goes on, where these sorts of megahistories make extremely confident and very expansive claims and then when challenged is to retreat back to much more restricted claims but Turchin in particular is explicit in Secular Cycles (2009) that “a basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems” in the pursuit of discovering “general laws” of history.

Fundamentally, the approach is set on the premise that the solution to the fact that the details of society are both so complex (imagine charting out the daily schedules of every person one earth for even a single day) and typically so poorly attested is to aggregate all of that data to generate general rules which could cover any population over a long enough period. To my mind, there are two major problems here: predictability and evidence. Let’s start with predictability.

And that’s where we get to Isaac Asimov, because this is essentially also how the “psychohistory” of the Foundation series functions (or, for the Star Trek fans, how the predictions in the DS9 episode “Statistical Probabilities“, itself an homage to the Foundation series, function). The explicit analogy offered is that of the laws that govern gasses: while no particular molecule of a gas can modeled with precision, the entire body of gas can be modeled accurately. Statistical probability over a sufficiently large sample means that the individual behaviors of the individual gas molecules combine in the aggregate to form a predictable whole; the randomness of each molecule “comes out in the wash” when combined with the randomness of the rest.2

I should note that Turchin rejects comparisons to Asimov’s psychohistory (but also embraced the comparison back in 2013), but they are broadly embraced by his boosters. Moreover, Turchin’s claim at the end of that blog post that “prediction is overrated” is honestly a bit bizarre given how quick he is when talking with journalists to use his models to make predictions; Turchin has expressed some frustration with the tone of Graeme Wood’s piece on him, but “We are almost guaranteed” is a direct quote that hasn’t yet been removed and I can speak from experience: The Atlantic‘s fact-checking on such things is very vigorous. So I am going to assume those words escaped the barrier of his teeth and also I am going to suggest here that “We are almost guaranteed” is, in fact, a prediction and a fairly confident one at that.

The problem with applying something like the ideal gas law – or something like the population dynamics of beetles – to human societies is fundamentally interchangeability. Statistical models like these have to treat individual components (beetles, molecules) the way economists treat commodities: part of a larger group where the group has qualities, but the individuals merely function to increase the group size by 1. Raw metals are a classic example of a commodity used this way: add one ton of copper to five hundred tons of copper and you have 501 tons of copper; all of the copper is functionally interchangeable. But of course any economist worth their pencil-lead will be quick to remind you that not all goods are commodities. One unit of “car” is not the same as the next. We can go further, one unit of “Honda Civic” is not the same as the next. Heck, one unit of 2012 Silver Honda Civic LX with 83,513 miles driven on it is not the same as the next even if they are located in the same town and owned by the same person; they may well have wildly different maintenance and accident histories, for instance, which will impact performance and reliability.

Humans have this Honda Civic problem (that is, they are not commodities) but massively more so. Now of course these theories do not formally posit that all, say, human elites are the same, merely that the differences between humans of a given grouping (social status, ethnic group, what have you) “come out in the wash” at large scales with long time horizons. Except of course they don’t and it isn’t even terribly hard to think of good examples.

    1 Yes, I am aware that Gat was consulted for Better Angels and blurbed the book. This doesn’t change my opinion of the two books. my issue is fundamentally evidentiary: War is built on concrete, while Better Angels is built on sand when it comes to the data they propose to use. As we’ll see, that’s a frequent issue.

    2 Of course the predictions in the Foundation series are not quite flawlessly perfect. They fail in two cases I can think of: the emergence of a singular exceptional individual with psychic powers (the Mule) and situations in which the subjects of the predictions become aware of them. That said Seldon is able to predict things with preposterous accuracy, such that he is able to set up a series of obstacles for a society he knows they will overcome. The main problem is that these challenges frequently involve conflict or competition with other humans; Seldon is at leisure to assume such conflicts are predictable, which is to say they lack Clausewitzian (drink!) friction. But all conflicts have friction; competition between peers is always unpredictable.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: October 15, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-15.

August 12, 2022

Testing the old saying about those who believe in nothing will believe anything

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander considers the old saying — often mis-attributed to G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis:

There’s a popular saying among religious apologists:

    Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis, neither of whom actually said it. If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.

Still, it’s worth examining as a hypothesis. Are the irreligious really more likely to fall prey to woo and conspiracy theories?

This Economist article examined the question and concluded the opposite. See especially this graph:

“White evangelicals” are more likely to believe most measured conspiracy theories, and churchgoers were more likely to believe in QAnon in particular.

There’s an obvious confounder here: the authors are doing the usual trick where they cherry-pick right-wing examples of something bad, show that more right-wingers are in favor of them, then conclude that Science Has Proven Right-Wingers Are Bad. QAnon, illegal votes, and COVID microchips are inherently right wing conspiracy theories; vaccines/autism has probably become right-coded post-COVID. Only the moon landing seems politically neutral, and it’s hard to tell if there’s a real difference on that one. So this just tells us that white evangelical church-goers are further right than other people, which we already know.

These data still deflate some more extreme claims about religion being absolutely protective against conspiracy theories. But I was interested in seeing how people of different faiths related to politically neutral conspiracies.

July 17, 2022

Science by press release

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Snowden on a media-genic “study” from a few years ago that supported the priors of the anti-alcohol campaigners and thus was given full uncritical media coverage, despite obvious flaws in data selection and methodology:

In 2018, the Lancet published a study from the “Global Burden of Disease Alcohol Collaborators” which claimed that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption. This was widely reported and was naturally welcomed by anti-alcohol campaigners. The BBC reported it under the headline “No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms”. (Note the cheeky use of the word confirms, despite the finding going against fifty years of evidence.)

The study wasn’t based on any new epidemiology. Instead it took crude, aggregate data from almost every country in the world, mashed it together and attempted to come up with a global risk curve.

As I said at the time:

    The study contains no new evidence and uses an unusual modelling approach based on population-wide data from various online sources. If you look at this massive appendix you can see the kind of data they were using. The figures are extremely crude.

    The authors don’t dispute the benefits of moderate drinking for heart disease but they claim that the benefits are matched by risks from other diseases at low levels of consumption and are outweighed by the risks at higher levels of consumption. Some diseases which have been associated with benefits of drinking, such as dementia, are excluded from the analysis entirely. They also ignore overall mortality, which you might think was kind of important.

A typical risk curve for alcohol consumption and mortality is J-shaped. It looks like this …

But the GBD’s risk curve for “all attributable causes” looked like this…

You will notice that there appears to be no protective effect at moderate rates of consumption in the GBD’s curve. One important reason for this is that they associate alcohol consumption at any level with tuberculosis. Tuberculosis remains a serious health problem in much of the world, but not in Britain. So what relevance does a global risk curve have to us? None.

Moreover, TB is not really an alcohol-related disease and is only viewed as such in this study because (a) drinking might weaken the immune system and (b) people who go to bars and clubs are more likely to catch an infectious disease. I kid you not.

July 16, 2022

Declarations of faith in the Church of Scientism

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray points out the hard-to-miss similarities between traditional religious beliefs and the modern beliefs of the congregations of the Church of Scientism:

Christian churches tend the bust out the HE IS RISEN banner on Easter Sunday, and here’s a version of the central declaration of faith from another religion, the Church of Scientism:

“We stand by science, so we stand by the vaccine.” These hang from every lamppost on the sizeable campus of a major research hospital in Los Angeles, an identical recitation of faith that appears before the eyes of the medical pilgrim every thirty steps or so. You can chant it in a rhythm, if you’re so inclined, as ye performest thine Stations of the Vaccine. The true penitent will park on Robertson, to walk past the maximum number of signs, but mark ye the parking restrictions, for the ways of Los Angeles parking enforcement are cruel, and many are they who suffer the penalties.

If this isn’t a declaration of a faith, then what is it? The call and response, the this-therefore-this:

Priest: Because of science, we save lives every day.

Congregation: We stand by science, so we stand by the vaccines.

You can hear the chanting in your head, can’t you? The repetition, the delivery of a mantra in a form that allows you to perceive it, and perceive it, and perceive it, and perceive it yet again before ye makest thine turn onto San Vicente. When you say it often and identically, it wears grooves; it patterns the dailiness of life with the avenues of belief. It’s Benedictine Scientism.

Or, you know, not. My bet is that most people never notice these signs, or never notice them twice, but the choice to make them and to display them is compellingly bizarre and creepy. I wish I could have witnessed the meeting of medical administrators that led to that choice, because I’m fairly confident that it played like a Paddy Chayefsky movie IRL.

I’ve been reminded over and over this week how important Substack has become. This absolute must read post from el gato malo discusses the complete implosion of popular trust in the mRNA injections, from the sharp decline in booster uptake to the “that parrot is dead” numbers regarding mRNA uptake in children under the age of five. Flatly, people aren’t taking this shit anymore, and they’re for damn sure not having it injected into their children.

July 12, 2022

“Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking or outright lying … in support of the theory of imminent catastrophic global warming”

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Y’know, the folks at The Daily Sceptic really need to tell us what they think instead of cloaking their opinions in euphemisms:

Two top-level American atmospheric scientists have dismissed the peer review system of current climate science literature as “a joke”. According to Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen, “it is pal review, not peer review”. The two men have had long distinguished careers in physics and atmospheric science. “Climate science is awash with manipulated data, which provides no reliable scientific evidence,” they state.

No reliable scientific evidence can be provided either by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they say, which is “government-controlled and only issues government dictated findings”. The two academics draw attention to an IPCC rule that states all summaries for policymakers are approved by governments. In their opinion, these summaries are “merely government opinions”. They refer to the recent comments on climate models by the atmospheric science professor John Christy from the University of Alabama, who says that, in his view, recent climate model predictions “fail miserably to predict reality”, making them “inappropriate” to use in predicting future climate changes.

The “miserable failure” is graphically displayed below. Since the observations cut-off, global temperatures have again paused.

Particular scorn is poured on global surface temperature datasets. Happer and Lindzen draw attention to a 2017 paper by Dr. James Wallace and others that elaborated on how over the last several decades, “NASA and NOAA have been fabricating temperature data to argue that rising CO2 levels have led to the hottest year on record”. The false and manipulated data are said to be an “egregious violation of scientific method”. The Wallace authors also looked at the Met Office HadCRUT database and found all three surface datasets made large historical adjustments and removed cyclical temperature patterns. This was “totally inconsistent” with other temperature data, including satellites and meteorological balloons, they said. Readers will recall that the Daily Sceptic has reported extensively on these issues of late and has attracted a number of somewhat footling “fact checks”.

Happer and Lindzen summarise: “Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence marshalled in support of the theory of imminent catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and CO2.”

February 17, 2022

Andrew Doyle on our current age of hoaxes

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Last week in UnHerd, Andrew Doyle, the comedian behind the wonderful Twitter troll account “Titania McGrath”, explained why trolling today is so likely to succeed:

“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle

This technique is the precursor to what we now call “trolling”. The term is often misused as a synonym for malicious and bullying online behaviour but, as traditionally understood, trolling is the art of coaxing people into a reaction. Motivations vary from troll to troll. For some, it is simply a matter of revelling in the gullibility of strangers. For others, the intention is to expose the vices and shortcomings of those in power.

Jonathan Swift was an early exponent of this kind of trolling in the creation of his alter-ego Isaac Bickerstaff, who wrote pamphlets which predicted, and then announced, the death of the astrologer John Partridge. Swift resented Partridge because of his attacks on the church, and must have been immensely gratified that Bickerstaff’s announcement had been taken on trust by so many. It is said that Partridge was thereafter continually having to fend off queries about his uncanny resemblance to a dead man.

[…]

Many of those duped by [Chris] Morris [in the TV series Brass Eye, 1997] were seemingly happy to read aloud any hogwash from an autocue in return for television exposure and the impression that they were on the right side of history. Such hoaxes could potentially be even more effective in today’s climate, with so many soft-witted celebrities eager to endorse fashionable but illiberal notions they barely understand. All major political, educational, artistic and corporate bodies are seemingly in submission to a new identity-obsessed religion of “social justice” that couches its regressive ideas in progressive terminology.

But, unlike the days of Brass Eye, the jesters are now in lockstep with these establishment lines, and so the most pertinent sources for satire are generally left untapped. They are, as Morris recently put it, more interested in “doing some kind of exotic display for the court” than exposing the follies of the powerful.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that one of the most impressive hoaxes of recent years has come from outside the comedy industry. In October 2018, it was revealed that Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose had spent a year writing and submitting bogus academic papers to various journals in order to show how certain branches of the humanities were now routinely prioritising ideological goals over the pursuit of truth and knowledge. By the time the hoax was exposed, seven of their 20 articles had been accepted for publication, and a further seven were in the process of review.

As a work of satire, this project was an undoubted success. It provided evidence of what many had long suspected, that nonsensical ideas could thrive within the academy so long as they were camouflaged in vogueish jargon. One paper purported to be a study of the sexual activity of dogs in urban parks, and used this phoney data to draw conclusions about contemporary “rape culture”. Another argued that white male students ought to be chained to the floor during lessons as a form of reparation for slavery. Most audacious of all was the article based entirely on a chapter of Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of intersectional feminist theory.

That all of these articles were accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals should have alerted academics to a troubling strain of corruption and fraudulence in their field. They should have resolved to rectify the problem, but instead chose to demonise and smear the hoaxers who had exposed it. When satirists hit on uncomfortable truths, they are rarely thanked for their efforts.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress