Quotulatiousness

May 30, 2021

The Stanford Prison “Experiment”

Filed under: Books, Health, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In another of the anonymous book reviews at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, a look at the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment:

The second most famous psychology experiment in history is the Stanford Prison experiment. Philip Zimbardo split a group of undergrads at random into prisoners and guards. The guards were left free to choose how they would manage the prisoners, and within days the whole thing had to be called off as it had descended into a sadistic torture camp. At least that’s how Zimbardo has described it for the last 50 years. In fact, everything I just said is completely false. The undergrads were not split at random — the scheme had actually been dreamt up by an undergrad called David Jaffe who had run a previous experiment himself on abusing prisoners in a fake jail. He was carefully placed into the guards group. Nor were the guards left to choose their methods, instead they were briefed by Zimbardo and Jaffe that the purpose of the experiment (for which they were being well renumerated) was to see how people cracked under pressure. The experiment would be a failure unless they could put the prisoners under terrible stress. Even Douglas Korpi’s prisoner breakdown on day two, which, captured on camera, became the cinematic face of the experiment, was a fake he put on after discovering he wouldn’t be able to spend the time in jail revising, and being told he would only be allowed to quit if he suffered some sort of serious mental or physical breakdown.

Despite the pressure from Zimbardo and Jaffe, two thirds of the guards refused to take part in sadistic games, and much to their frustration a third continued to treat the prisoners with kindness. Nonetheless when Zimbardo came to write up the experiment about the effects on the prisoners, he realised it would be a much more compelling story if he turned it on its head, and made it about the guards instead. The truth of guards carefully drilled to be sadistic was swept away with a lie of ordinary people spontaneously becoming cruel when dressed in a uniform and given a position of power.

For years no one replicated the experiment — given the results first time round it was thought unethical, but in 2001 the BBC in search of new reality television commissioned a repeat (turns out reality television runs to different ethics than the average psychology department). Now unlike normal reality TV they didn’t bother manipulating the participants to be at each other’s throats — there was no need, in days it was going to be a bloodbath.

The result is the four most boring hours of television ever recorded. Nothing happens. The guards sit around chatting. When tensions arise with the prisoners, they defuse them by talking to them nicely. On day 6 some prisoners escaped. They headed over to the guards’ canteen and all had a smoke together. On day 7 they voted in favour of turning the whole thing into a commune.

May 29, 2021

Justin Trudeau is clearly not concerned about China or Chinese involvement in Canadian affairs

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson outlines the PM’s latest display of insouciance in regard to anything involving China, their ruling Communist party, or the Chinese military:

The Globe and Mail reported last week that Canada’s top infectious disease research centre, the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, had hosted and otherwise collaborated with guest researchers and scientists from China — including some with links to that country’s military or government. O’Toole asked about this in the House, and Trudeau gave a very routine Trudeauvian non-answer. O’Toole and other Tories kept up the questioning, Trudeau eventually responded with this (as per Hansard): “Mr. Speaker, we have always and will always take this threat seriously. Public safety officials have met with more than 34 universities to help them keep their research safe. In 2020, CSIS engaged more than 225 different organizations, including universities, to ensure that they were aware of foreign threats. I also want to mention that we are seeing a disturbing rise in anti-Asian racism. I hope that my Conservative Party colleagues are not raising fears about Asian Canadians.”

Sigh. Where do we begin?

First of all, though this may shock our readers, the Sun papers, and its columnists, have been known to exaggerate their criticisms of the PM. The PM gave a more substantive answer than Lilley gave him credit for. You can disagree with the PM — see below! — without getting cute with what he actually said. The racism line was dumb, and shitty. It was beneath the PM and unfair to the legitimate questions that were being asked. Trudeau shouldn’t have said it, and he was right to get called out for it.

So yes, a dick move by the PM — in a hundred years, maybe one of his descendants can apologize for it. But let’s not take our eye off the ball.

Trudeau’s answers were more than Lilley suggested, but they’re still not good enough. O’Toole and the Conservatives are onto something. China’s ruling regime is aggressive, brutal, and thuggish. They’re a threat to security abroad, they’re committing outright crimes against humanity against their own religious minorities, they’ve crushed Hong Kong underfoot, and they’re actively hostile to Canada. None of this is racist to note.

And yet our federal Liberals remain alarmingly unable to admit any of this. We don’t buy that it’s just a matter of political expediency, an awkward but necessary consequence of the ongoing detention of the two Michaels. Hell, we wish that the Liberals were just being publicly cautious with their real views on Beijing while remaining clear-eyed about the threat behind closed doors. The evidence continues to suggest that the federal Liberals, from Trudeau on down, remain hopelessly naïve about the nature of Beijing’s rulers, even as more and more of our allies are getting real about what the next generation or two of geopolitics is gonna look like for the Western alliance. (Which Canada remains a part of, whether Trudeau likes it or not.)

The growing tensions with a rising China are a big deal. It is only going to become a bigger deal. The Liberals need to get with the program. We hope to see more on this across the Canadian media — and hopefully it’s a bit more useful and productive than what the Sun ran with this week. The Liberals look terrible on this file already for entirely legitimate, serious reasons. We don’t need to pop our aging joints as we stretch and contort ourselves to make it seem so.

Depression and suicide rates during the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic

Filed under: Health, Japan, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Works in Progress, Scott Alexander looks at the details of rates of depression (which went up during the pandemic) and suicides (which surprisingly went down):

When COVID started spreading, life got more depressing, people became more depressed, but suicide rates went down. Why?

First, are we sure all of that is true? I won’t waste your time listing the evidence that life got more depressing, but what about the other two?

Ettman et al. conveniently had data from nationally representative surveys about how many Americans were depressed before COVID-19. They found another nationally representative sample and asked them the same questions in late March/early April 2020, when the first wave of US cases and lockdowns was at its peak. They found that 3 times as many people had at least one depression symptom, and 5–10x as many people scored in the range associated with “moderately severe” or “severe” depression.

This is a good study. It’s published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a good journal. It’s been cited 50+ times in 6 months. Really the only thing anyone could have against it is the implausibly large effect it found. But it matches similar studies from Australia, Portugal, and around the world. Let’s say it’s real.

Along with the increased depression came an increase in people who said they were thinking about suicide. According to the US CDC, more than twice as many Americans considered suicide in spring 2020 compared to spring 2018 (10.7% vs. 4.3%).

Yet completed suicide rates stayed flat or declined. It’s hard to tell exactly which, because suicide is rare and noisy, and you need lots of data before anything starts looking statistically significant. But there are studies somewhere between “flat” and “declined” from Norway, England, Germany, Sweden, and New Zealand.

We also have two more complete reports from larger countries that help us see the pattern in more detail. First is Japan. Studies by Tanaka and Nomura broadly agree on a similar pattern — a slight decrease in suicides in the earliest stage of the pandemic (spring 2020) followed by a larger increase during the autumn. Here’s Nomura’s data:

The top graph is women, the bottom is men. The blue and red lines represent the 95% confidence range for an “average” year. Months that differ significantly from the average have little dots on top of their bars. You can see that April 2020 had significantly less suicide than average, among both genders, and July/August/September have more than average for women (and trend on the high side for men too).

Second is the US. The US Centers for Disease Control recently released their “nowcast” of 2020 deaths. These use the limited amount of data they have now to predict what the trends will look like once all the data comes in; their prediction process seems reasonable and we can probably treat the figures as canonical. Here’s their main result:

Suicide rates were pretty normal until March, when they dropped off pretty quickly and stayed low until midsummer. They’ve since hovered around normal again. Overall, suicides declined by 5.6%.

All these countries combine to form a picture of suicide rates dipping very slightly during the first and most frantic period of the pandemic — March to May — and then going back to normal (except in Japan, where things have since gotten worse). Thus the paradox: increasing depression combined with decreasing suicides. What’s going on?

May 28, 2021

The essential — and largely non-replenishable — trust in government

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Tom posted a then-recent discussion he overheard at The Last Ditch:

[Click to see full-size flowchart]

Two svelte American ladies of a certain age were having coffee today at my West London health club. They were in the next “pod” to me outdoors as I had a post-swim coffee before heading home. Perhaps it’s those wide-open prairies but Americans, bless them, always speak a little more loudly than us so I didn’t really have a choice but to listen to their conversation.

The topic was their mothers. Both moms back in the States are apparently unsure of the wisdom of being vaccinated. One cost of parenthood no-one tells you about beforehand is that one day you will be judged and found wanting by humans you could not love more; your children for whom you would cheerfully die. I confess their mothers immediately had my sympathy, regardless of the correctness of their views.

There was a good deal of sneering about conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. I found it surprising that both errant moms believed 5G was involved, but having listened quietly for another few minutes discovered that neither had ever said so. Their daughters were simply assuming that if they doubted government advice on vaccines, they believed all the other stuff too. One of the mothers is apparently a 9/11 “truther” and her daughter’s observation that no government is capable of keeping such a dark secret struck me as fair.

[…]

There are available facts and facts that will only become available in the future. People must make their choices based on their own risk assessment today. That useless truism is not the point of this post. The truly significant thing I overheard was this. Having sneered at her mother’s belief that “we can’t trust government”, one of the ladies said;

    I thought to myself – Mom, I don’t want to believe what you believe because if it’s true I can’t have any of the things I believe in.

There, I thought, was a moment of insight; a moment (almost) of self-awareness. If government can’t be trusted, then the societal change she wants isn’t possible. Therefore, whatever the evidence, government must be trusted. That pretty much sums up the statist mindset.

I don’t know whether these mothers or daughters are right about this issue. I do know that one of the daughters (and her companion seemed to agree) is allowing her desires to displace her reason. In consequence, sadly, her mind will only ever be changed by a catastrophe I would never wish upon her.

I suspect many such earnest, well-meaning souls as Goneril and Regan (as I christened them) felt they needed to believe the state could be trusted at key points in the deadly history of the 20th Century. If the brave new world of Communism was to happen, for example, government had to be trusted with enormous power to make immense change.

Many Gonerils and Regans must have ruefully reflected on that in the Gulag.

May 25, 2021

536 AD – Worst Year in History

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Health, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kings and Generals
Published 11 May 2021

Start speaking a new language in 3 weeks with Babbel 🎉 Get 6 months FREE when you sign up for 6 months! ➡️ HERE: https://go.babbel.com/6plus6-youtube-…

Kings and Generals’ historical animated documentary series on the history of Ancient Civilizations continues with a video on the year 536 AD, which many historians consider the worst year in history, as plague, famine, volcanic eruption, and extreme weather patterns changed the fate of the millions, especially influencing Sassanid and Eastern Roman Empires.

Support us on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/KingsandGenerals or Paypal: http://paypal.me/kingsandgenerals We are grateful to our patrons and sponsors, who made this video possible: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o…

Art and animation: Haley Castel Branco
Narration: Officially Devin (https://www.youtube.com/user/OfficiallyDevin)
Script: Matt Hollis

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Production Music courtesy of EpidemicSound

#Documentary #WorstYearInHistory #536

QotD: Doctors and individual freedom

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The medical attitude, and the reason why doctors are so vulnerable to this anti-liberty political agenda, is that doctors typically see people at their weakest, at times when they are positively begging to be told what to do by the god-almighty doctor. Doctors are thus pre-disposed to neglect the distinction between them advising people what to do, and simply telling them, for their own good.

Brian Micklethwait, “Curbing liberty — except when they should”, Samizdata, 2005-10-10.

May 24, 2021

QotD: The internet is rewiring our brains

Filed under: Education, Health, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… there’s a reason 99.998% of the Internet is porn, and that reason is: The Internet, itself, has rewired our brains.

Yeah, I’m a history guy, not a biologist, and no, I can’t show you the specific spots on the fMRI that prove it, but look, you can test this yourself. Ever been around kids? It’s easiest to see in the early grades, so go to a daycare or afterschool program. Trust me, you can pick out right away, with 100% accuracy, the kids who spend more than 3 hours a day at daycare. This is not a knock on daycare providers, lots of whom are good, dedicated people doing hard work. Rather, it’s a knock on the situation, because if a kid’s in daycare that long, it means the parents both work long-hour, high-stress jobs. How do you think the kid’s home life is, under those conditions?

You know as well as I do that when the kid gets home from day care, he gets plunked in front of a tv, a video game, an iPad, a smartphone, some kind of glowing box. That’s what’s rewiring their brains. That’s not “ADHD,” which doesn’t really exist. “ADHD” is a cope, a bit of shorthand, to describe what’s actually going on, which is: These kids’ heads have been rewired. They need constant stimulation. Everything needs to be in five-minute chunks for them, because they’ve never known anything different. Asking them to sit down and pay attention for any length of time – say, in a 60 minute lecture, like our old Prussian (from the 18th century!) system requires – is like asking one of us to suddenly run a marathon, or bench press 300 lbs. It can’t be done; we don’t have the equipment.

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.

May 23, 2021

QotD: The psychological impact of extended lockdowns

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Claudio Grass (CG): A lot has been said and written about the economic and financial impact of the covid crisis and all the lockdowns and restrictions that came with it. However, the mental health implications haven’t really received the attention they arguably merit, at least not by mainstream media or government officials. Over the last year, we saw self-reported depression rates creep up in many Western nations, while excessive alcohol consumption and the abuse of prescription drugs also jumped. Do such trends raise concerns over longer-term problems or will we all simply snap back to normal once the crisis is over?

Theodore Dalrymple (TD): The first thing to say is that I do not like the term “mental health.” Was Isaac Newton mentally healthy, or Michelangelo? I think part of the problem is very concept of mental health. It implies that there is some state or condition of mind deviation from which is analogous to illness. Once this idea takes hold, it is clearly up to an expert to cure the person, or better still prevent him from getting ill in the first place. This expectation cannot be met, but the idea that it can be makes people more fragile.

Second, people clearly vary much in their response to confinements, lockdowns, closures of resorts of entertainment, etc. For myself, I have reached the age of misanthropy or self-sufficiency when these things make comparatively little difference to my life. I have plenty of space and plenty of things to do, in essence reading and writing. But that does not make me mentally healthier than a young man who is frustrated because he cannot play football with his friends and becomes ratty – moreover living in a very confined space.

Depression is so loosely defined a term that it has become almost valueless as a diagnosis. How often have you heard someone say “I’m unhappy” rather than “I’m depressed?” The semantic shift is very important. The proper response to someone who says that he is depressed is to give him antidepressants, even though these don’t work in the majority of cases, except as a placebo, and have potential side-effects. It is always tempting for people who are unhappy to drink alcohol – to drown their sorrows, as we say. Of course, if you drink too much, you might become really and truly depressed. A person who did not respond to the current situation with a little gloom would be odd.

Claudio Grass, “Theodore Dalrymple: Self-Control And Self-Respect Have Become Undervalued”, The Iconoclast, 2021-02-17.

May 20, 2021

The Birth Control Movement and Eugenics – A Curious Link | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.18 – Winter 1923

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, Greece, Health, History, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 19 May 2021

In the winter of 1923, a controversial activist takes a Catholic doctor to trial for libel. The proceedings capture a much bigger moment in the history of the interwar period: the controversial — but inherent — link between birth control and eugenics.
(more…)

May 19, 2021

QotD: School is prison for kids

Filed under: Education, Health, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I’m going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I’ve ever read.

School is child prison. It’s forcing kids to spend their childhood — a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder — sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they’ll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the “Burrito Test” — if a place won’t let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it’s an institution. Doesn’t matter if the name is “Center For Flourishing” or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs — if it doesn’t pass the Burrito Test, it’s an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED “THE BATHROOM PASS” IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN’T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don’t like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them — people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn’t prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we’d have “fewer middle-aged people on the streets” and “fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses”, then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists’ case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There’s the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can’t drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids’ parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it’s perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention — yeah, that’s fine, let’s just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they’re not allowed to run, that’ll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult’s 10 – 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of profound social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn’t, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can’t tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of “homework”! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review — The Cult of Smart”, Astral Codex Ten, 2021-02-17.

May 16, 2021

Gambling machines have come a long way from the “one-armed bandit” days

Filed under: Books, Business, Gaming, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is another reader book review for Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, looking at Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll. I’m incredibly risk-averse, so I’ve never even set foot in a casino, but from this review I do not regret my aversion one tiny little bit:

“Hiking the Las Vegas casinos” by davduf is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

    Sometimes employees at Netflix think, “Oh my god, we’re competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon” … [W]e actually compete with sleep.

    Reed Hastings

Randomness is addictive, in rats. B. F. Skinner learned that when he created his eponymous rat boxes. The boxes had levers that, when pressed, dispensed food pellets. Rats in boxes where one press resulted in one pellet pressed the lever when hungry. But rats in boxes where one press randomly resulted in no, one, or many pellets, became addicted to pressing the lever. That mammalian attraction to randomness lies at the heart of all gambling.

But machine gambling is not like other kinds of gambling. The book overflows with metaphors straining to describe how machine gambling is the supercharged version of table games like poker, blackjack, and roulette. Machine gambling is deforestation ruining the rainforest of diverse table games. Machines are invasive kudzu outcompeting and killing the native table games. Machine gambling is the crack cocaine to table games’ cocaine.

In about two decades, machine gambling went from being a side attraction to keep wives busy while their husbands played table games to the source of 85% of casino profits. You know how shopping malls have benches for husbands to sit on while their wives shop in stores? Imagine that those benches became the mall. (If you’re reading this in 2025, shopping malls were, uh, a collection of permanent pop-up stores under the same roof.)

The first time I went to Vegas, I knew a few tricks casinos would use to encourage me to gamble too much. I knew the hotel rooms were purposefully cheap, to entice me to visit Vegas. I knew casinos would have neither windows nor clocks, to help me lose my sense of time. I knew they would be full of bright lights and loud sounds, to overstimulate me. I knew nothing. Those tricks are old hat, as quaint as doilies. Machine gambling is a brave new world.

Machine gambling comes in the form of many games, but one example is enough to illustrate the pattern, so let’s discuss slot machines. Slot machines are games with reels with a variety of symbols on them, like cherries, diamonds, or the number 7. (Fun fact: fruit symbols were initially used on slot machines during the prohibition era to disguise them as gum vending machines.) The game is simple. The player spins the reels. If they land to show symbols in a row, the player wins. Because of their simplicity, these machines are favored by new gamblers and tourists.

Back when Moore’s Law was just Moore’s Prediction, slot machines were mechanical devices. The player would pull on a mechanical lever, which caused reels to spin. The reels would eventually slow down and then stop. The symbols in the middle of the screen when the reels stopped dictated whether the player won or lost.

Now, slot machines are digital. The lever, the reels, the symbols — they are all ones and zeros untethered from reality. This gives machine designers a terrifying amount of flexibility. They can optimize the game to maximize its addictivity.

May 9, 2021

QotD: Boys

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was also forced to acknowledge by the time I had two sons that the male mind really does approach problems differently than the female mind. Before I had the second son, I put down the differences between the male and female minds as all due to the socialization process. Two sons tipped the balance. It’s like this; the bookcases looked cool to climb to the Last Amazon. She tries once when my attention is on other matters; falls and deduced that it was a bad idea. The sons’ perceive the bookcases as a mountain to be conquered at all costs and they are prepared to pay any price to crown themselves King of the Bookcases. See the bookcases, take the bookcases; or die in the attempt. It did not matter how many times they were thwarted or injured, they refused to give up. Each time they went into the assault with the premise that this time it will end in triumph.

[ … ]

I admit to being a little more than angry and frustrated myself. Partially it is at a school system that won’t allow boys any physical activities where they can blow off steam. No football, soccer, hockey, baseball, dodge ball, or any other kind of game that “promotes aggression” or the “possibility of injury”. Volleyball and cross country running are all well and good but they are seasonal, and frankly, to a lot of boys; it blows. I do understand that not all boys are the “physical” sort but more are than not. While I realize no parent wants their child injured; it just seems that by denying that boys really do need a way to physically deal with aggression, you set them up for horseplay which eventually leads to fighting. How can anyone expect boys to spend all recess at the wall or standing around chatting about the weather?

Kate “The Last Amazon”, “When Biology is Destiny”, The Last Amazon, 2005-03-02.

April 29, 2021

SFU professor’s analysis of Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits

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

Economist Douglas W. Allen of Simon Fraser University recently published his Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits:A Critical Assessment of the Literature where he concludes that “it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history”:

In my forty years as an academic, I’ve never seen anything like the response and reaction to Covid-19. The research response has been immense, with estimates of over 40,000 papers related to the topic produced in one year. This research covers every imaginable aspect of Covid-19, and over the course of the past year knowledge about the virus, the human reactions to it, and the consequences of these reactions has exploded. In one word, the Covid-19 information cascade has been “overwhelming.”

In contrast, the ubiquitous media, public health, and political response to the pandemic has been one-sided, incomplete, and almost unchanging over the past year. With respect to lockdown policies, many political jurisdictions have repeated the same spring 2020 programs in 2021, ignoring what has been learned in the meantime. Often public announcements were made that were inconsistent with basic Covid-19 facts that were easy to look up if you know where to look. Furthermore, when research results contrary to the official government response were shared on social media, they were often pulled from social media platforms. As a result, for average Canadians the public media and official public health news conferences have been the only source of Covid-19 information.

This review of a small segment of the literature is intended to give some guidance for those who would otherwise not have access to academic research. The focus is to only critically assess the cost/benefit studies that have been written over the past year on lockdown policies related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The report covers over 80 different academic studies and related Covid-19 datasites. I have sought out studies that i) dealt with matters of “lockdown” either directly or indirectly, and ii) were related directly or indirectly to issues relevant to the costs or benefits of lockdown.

The term “lockdown” is used to generically refer to state actions that imposed various forms of non-pharmaceutical interventions. That is, the term will be used to include mandatory state-enforced closing of non-essential business, education, recreation, and spiritual facilities; mask and social distancing orders; stay-in-place orders; and restrictions on private social gatherings.

“Lockdown” does not refer to cases of “isolation,” where a country was able to engage in an early and sufficient border closure that prevented trans-border transmission, followed by a mandated lockdown that eliminated the virus in the domestic population, which was then followed by perpetual isolation until the population is fully vaccinated. This strategy was adopted by a number of island countries like New Zealand. Here I will only consider lockdown as it took place in Canada and most of the world; that is, within a country where the virus became established.

This is a complicated report because it covers a wide range of studies, and deals with a wide range of issues. Table 1 outlines the substance of the report. Sections II: A and B, discuss four critical assumptions often made within the context of estimating benefits and costs. Understanding these assumptions explains why early studies claimed that the benefits of lockdown were so high, and also explains why the predictions of those models turned out to be false.

Section II: C, examines major cost/benefit studies completed over the first six months of the pandemic, and then focuses on what I believe to be the critical factor: distinguishing between mandated and voluntary changes in behavior. This section concludes with an interpretation of some unconditional death comparisons across countries that are typically reported in the media. Section II: D surveys the research done on the costs of lockdown. Finally, Section III. presents a simple alternative cost/benefit methodology to generate two cost/benefit ratios of lockdown.

H/T to Stephen Green for the link.

April 18, 2021

Take a moment to reflect on the plight of those poor, alienated students at Haverford College in Pennsylvania

Filed under: Education, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay outlines some of the issues faced by the students of an expensive elite academic institution and how it impacts their mental health:

In December, I wrote a detailed report for Quillette about the race-based social panic that had recently erupted at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. One of the reasons why the meltdown seemed so surreal, I noted, is that this elite school appears to the outside world as picturesque and serene. The average annual cost of attendance is about US$76,000. And most of these students live extremely privileged lives, insulated (physically and otherwise) from what any normal person would regard as suffering. Nor is there much in the way of substantive political discord on campus. According to survey results released in late 2019, 79 percent of Haverford students self-identify as politically liberal, while only 3.5 percent self-identify as conservative. It’s as close to an ideological monoculture as you can find outside of a monastery or cult. On paper, it resembles one of those utopian micro-societies conceived by science-fiction writers or 19th-century social theorists.

The survey results I’m alluding to originate with Haverford’s “Clearness Committee,” an excellent resource for anyone seeking to understand the attitudes of students at hyper-progressive schools. The most recent Clearness survey, completed by more than two-thirds of Haverford students in 2019, contained 133 survey questions pertaining to everything from how much students sleep, to how many friends they have, to how they feel about campus jocks. There is also a substantial section dedicated to the theme of “marginalization.” Amazingly, 43 percent of respondents said they felt personally marginalized on campus because of some aspect of their identity. This included 61 percent of gay students, and more than 90 percent of trans students.

This is an odd-seeming result given the sheer number of LGBT individuals on Haverford’s campus. No fewer than 31 percent of student respondents identified themselves as something other than straight. In regard to gender, almost six percent self-identified as trans or some variant of non-binary. Both of these percentages exceed the overall American average by an order of decimal magnitude. Despite having only about 1,300 students (smaller than many public high schools), Haverford has a resource center for LGBT students, a pro-LGBT hiring policy, an LGBT studies program, dedicated LGBT living arrangements, a health insurance policy that covers hormone replacement therapy, and numerous other resources. Outside of other similarly liberal campuses, it is hard to imagine a more welcoming environment for LGBT youth anywhere on the planet.

It’s also telling that self-reported marginalization rates for Haverford’s gay students are almost identical to those for self-described bisexuals (62 percent) and asexuals (59 percent); and that the rate for students who self-identify under the loose category of “non-binary” (89 percent) is almost identical to the rate for students who, being trans, experience actual gender dysphoria (91 percent). The report authors conclude that there is “a series of immediate crises facing Haverford’s transgender population.” Yet despite the abundant write-in information supplied by surveyed students, no real evidence of these crises appears. What we get instead are vague testimonials about perceived attitudes and atmosphere. (“As a nonbinary person, athletics is inherently exclusive because it is gendered. We need to put that phrase to rest and start talking about the real divisions on campus—such as who feels comfortable going to parties hosted by athletes and who doesn’t.”) Even amidst the melodramatic throes of last year’s student strike, at a time when every imaginable identity-based grievance was described in lengthy student manifestos, no one could point to a single recent incident of real homophobia or transphobia targeting Haverford students.

April 13, 2021

“… loving a country also means being honest. We should never get high on our own own flag-covered, syrup-scented supply.”

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

In The Line, Lauren Dobson-Hughes sits Canada down for a bit of an intervention:

Once upon a time, there was a fairytale castle with soaring turrets and gabled windows. The castle had long been undergoing renovations, so the owners draped the scaffolding with trompe l’oeil cloths — fabric imprinted with the image of the historical building beneath, to maintain an impression of the beauty hidden below.

From the cloth, you imagined the castle must be stunning. And yet behind the façade, it is crumbling. Its walls are mold-ridden, and the floors are rotten. The scaffolding props up a shell.

This metaphor has come to represent the way I’ve come to think about Canada since this pandemic began. As a country, we are so fixated on the mythology we project out to others — the trompe l’oeil cloth — that we’ve allowed the actual capacities, systems and structures of our country to crumble.

The first inkling came early in the pandemic. As COVID-19 numbers rose, it was revealed that the Public Health Agency of Canada did not have nationwide case numbers. This piece delves further, but “Ottawa does not have automatic access to data in [provincial and territorial] systems.” Provinces were sending daily case numbers to Ottawa on paper. This is one small example, but a revealing one. In fact, we lack a nationwide public-health system at all. And as the auditor-general’s report showed, we also lack the knowledge and expertise — the skilled people — to manage crises like this, too.

Then came protracted discussions about financial support for Canadians affected by lockdowns. The debate was not about whether Canadians deserved help — it was that Canada’s financial systems are so outdated and disjointed, that we literally could not work out how to get money from the federal government into bank accounts. It shouldn’t be this complex. In a functioning country, the central revenue agency should be able to transfer money to people without task forces of bureaucrats and experts, the establishment of new IT systems, and McGyvering an assortment of existing programs.

[…]

The list it goes on — the chaotic vaccine roll-out, the fractured public communications, the devolving of responsibilities to the very most local level with little overarching purpose or even organization. All of it marked by disjointed, outdated systems, lack of skills and know-how, and no overall goal or narrative. We need to face it — we have allowed our nation to crumble from the inside, while holding tight to the mythology that we’re an effective, functioning country.

At this point, I feel the need for a disclaimer that I love Canada. But loving a country also means being honest. We should never get high on our own own flag-covered, syrup-scented supply.

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