Quotulatiousness

May 29, 2018

“[T]here’s just no way that we’re going to get to fentanyl harm reduction without [legalization]”

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

Tim Worstall reports on a recent Nebraska drug bust involving enough fentanyl “to kill 26 million people” (that is, about 120 lbs of the stuff) and explains why the current enforcement regime is going to have to change:

Now, I’m in favour of all of these drugs being legalised anyway. It’s the idiot’s body, up to them what they ingest in whatever manner. If it kills them, well, their choice. The argument that they shouldn’t therefore we must prevent them doesn’t cut much ice with me.

But put that aside and think in a utilitarian manner. If we can prevent overdoses and wasted lives then we should. But only if how we’re going to do it is better than the results of either not doing so or even using some other manner of dealing with the problem.

It’s arguable that clamping down on certain illegal drugs does at least limit their penetration of the market. I don’t think this is true of heroin but perhaps it is potentially true. It’s absolutely not true of fentanyl. For that’s a synthetic opioid. A decent chemist can synthesise it – a good one can make the precursors as well. There is no need to get opium, morphine or any other poppy related product that we already control.

It’s also, as we can see, alarmingly cheap already. Easy to smuggle in vast quantities of doses.

There’s another problem with it. The difference between a dose that gives a high and one that kills is pretty narrow. And it’s an extremely potent drug as well. Quantities for either are small – smaller than can generally be measured by users with candles and teaspoons.

It’s cheap, easy enough to make, has no precursors we can control, kills easily enough and dosage is alarmingly difficult to get right. So, what do we do?

We’re not going to get rid of it for all of the above reasons. So, we need to do damage limitation. Stopping people from dying from it sounds like a pretty good idea actually. And that means that we need it to be pure and in known dosages. That is, we need it to be legal.

I think all drugs should be legal, hey, your body and all that. But even if you think that harm reduction is a more important goal there’s just no way that we’re going to get to fentanyl harm reduction without legality of it. For that’s the only way we will get it in known doses which don’t kill people. And we’re most assuredly going to keep getting it even if we don’t legalise it. Our choices are people tooting on illegal fentanyl and dying or people tooting on legal fentayl and not dying. Not such a toughie that question, is it?

May 27, 2018

QotD: Epicurus on the ethics of pleasure

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

Epicurus begins with the question asked by Socrates at the end of the fifth century — what is the good life? His answer is that the good lies not in virtue or justice or wisdom — though these are not to be ignored — but in happiness.

“Pleasure” he writes, “is our first and kindred good. It is the starting point of every choice and every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.”

Now we have more than enough of Epicurus to know that he is not arguing for what are called the self-indulgent pleasures — of eating and drinking and sex and the like. Aristippus of Cyrene (c435-366 BC), we are told, had already argued for these. He also claimed that happiness was the highest good, but went on to claim that happiness lay in the pursuit of pleasure regardless of convention or the feelings of others or of the future.

This interpretation was attached to Epicurus in his own lifetime, and the attachment has been maintained down to the present — so that the words “Epicure” and “Epicurean” have the meaning of self-indulgent luxury.

What Epicurus plainly means by happiness is the absence of pain. We are driven to act by a feeling of discontent. We seek food because we are hungry. We seek warmth because we are cold. We seek medicine because we are sick. Once we have acted correctly and removed the cause of discontent, we are happy.

Turning to his own words, he says:

    When we say… that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice or wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul. Of this the beginning and the greatest good is wisdom. Therefore wisdom is a more precious thing that even philosophy; from it springs all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honourably and justly; nor live wisely, honourably and justly without living pleasantly.

In this scheme, therefore, happiness is to be defined as peace of mind, or ataraxia. This pursuit of happiness does involve bodily pleasure, but such pleasure is a means to the greater end of ataraxia. “No pleasure” he says, “is a bad thing in itself, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.”

His ethics of pleasure can be summarised as:

    The pleasure which produces no pain is to be embraced. The pain which produces no pleasure is to be avoided. The pleasure is to be avoided which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain. The pain is to be endured which averts a greater pain, or secures a greater pleasure.

And so the happy man for Epicurus is one who lives simply within his means, who seeks only those pleasures which contribute to his long term peace of mind.

And while hedonism is ultimately a doctrine of selfishness, what Epicurus had in mind was not a life spent in the pursuit of solitary happiness. He says: “Of the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.”

It may be that we seek friendship for selfish reasons. But friendship is to be persistently sought and maintained throughout life. Epicurus himself had an immense capacity for friendship.

Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.

May 25, 2018

Progressives: “Gender is a social construct!” Science: “Wait just a second there…”

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

Toby Young wonders why a woman can’t be more like a man:

A fascinating paper about sex differences in the human brain was published last week in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex. It’s the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain ever undertaken, involving over 5,000 participants (2,466 male and 2,750 female). The study has been attracting attention for more than a year (see this preview in Science, for instance), but only now has it been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

For those who believe that gender is a social construct, and there are no differences between men and women’s brains, this paper is something of a reality check. The team of researchers from Edinburgh University, led by Stuart Ritchie, author of Intelligence: All That Matters, found that men’s brains are generally larger in volume and surface area, while women’s brains, on average, have thicker cortices. ‘The differences were substantial: in some cases, such as total brain volume, more than a standard deviation,’ they write. This is not a new finding – it has been known for some time that the total volume of men’s brains is, in general, larger than that of women’s, even when adjusted for men’s larger average body size – but all the studies before now have involved much smaller sample sizes.

Does this paper have any implications when it comes to men and women’s intellectual abilities? The answer is yes, but they’re not clear cut.

May 7, 2018

“Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll”

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

In the June issue of Reason, Matt Welch looks at the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and notes that he’s not “the second coming”:

“If you think tough men are dangerous,” University of Toronto psychologist and overnight YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson writes in his new book, “wait until you see what weak men are capable of.” It’s a warning shot for would-be social engineers trying to defang maleness and for Peterson’s startlingly large audience of young dudes teetering on the edge of nihilism. Perhaps it is also a subconscious caution to the author himself.

January 2018 was the month Jordan Peterson went from unknown to inescapable. The two reasons for that were a Channel 4 News (U.K.) exchange that went viral after an increasingly hostile and flustered female interviewer failed to hang an unflappable Peterson as a misogynist, and then the appearance one week later of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada), which immediately shot up bestseller lists throughout the English-speaking world. “He has skyrocketed from relative obscurity to international celebrity in a couple of weeks,” Psychology Today noted with wonder.

As befits a lecturer fixated on the “tightrope” between chaos and order, good and evil, yin and yang, “the Jordan Peterson moment” (so christened by New York Times columnist David Brooks) has produced an almost perfectly polarized response. Celeb psychologist Jonathan Haidt called Peterson “one of the few fearless professors”; Houman Barekat in the L.A. Review of Books deemed him a peddler of “toxic masculinity” and “reactionary chauvinism.” He is “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan” (Camille Paglia), or an “an intellectual fraud who uses a lot of words to say almost nothing” (Nathan J. Robinson).

What is indisputable — and what makes the Peterson pop phenomenon more interesting than the quality of his work — is the way it has galvanized a generation of wayward young men, including many who have clustered around the “alt-right.” The numbers are staggering, and vaulting upward by the minute: As of early April, there were 49 million views of his YouTube videos, 1,008,000 subscribers to his channel (plus 584,000 Twitter and 256,000 Facebook followers), and, most impressively, an estimated $90,000 a month donated to his account on the crowdfunding site Patreon. By Peterson’s own reckoning, the solid majority of his sold-out audiences on the lecture circuit are males between the ages of 20 and 35; their gratitude for his “grow the hell up” message has moved the man to tears on several public occasions.

Peterson self-identifies as a classical liberal, frequently retweets content from the Cato Institute, and forthrightly criticizes the alt-right for playing the “collectivist game” of identity politics. Yet he’s a lightning rod among libertarians too. I first became aware of the psychologist last fall when his name came up serially at a private gathering of libertarian activists anxious about the real and perceived overlap between their world and the reactionary right. One participant counseled keeping Peterson at arm’s length, lest “we end up with another cult-leader libertarian.” Taking the opposite view at the website Being Libertarian was Adam Barsouk, who argued that “Peterson is able to do something no libertarian commentator before him could: he can argue that a freer, less coddled way of life is not just ethical, but also adaptive, better for humanity as a whole.”

Peterson’s popularity has demonstrated the happy fact that you can reach illiberal ears with a message that contains some classical liberal content. But he has gotten there not via persuasive argument about intellectual ideas but through the top-down, teacher-student, authoritarian exhortations of self-help. Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll.

May 4, 2018

Jordan Peterson – Winston Churchill predicted the Death of our Civilization

Filed under: Education, Health, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Dose of Truth
Published on 9 Apr 2018

Without tradition or culture and the diligence to keep it alive our value systems and lessons learned by our ancestors will be soon forgotten and Western civilization will descend in to chaos as a result of the forgotten history and disregard for its tradition and value structure. Jordan Peterson sits down with former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson and they discuss this topic and Jordan Peterson provides us with an education on concepts in psychology like memory and its function. John Anderson starts off with words of Churchill, as Jordan Peterson unpacks the statement made.

May 3, 2018

QotD: Resisting the black dog

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

Last week I was having a bad day — nothing tragic, just adult life’s vicissitudes — when I got an email from a complete stranger that knocked me on my ass.

I’ll call this guy John. John recently survived a brush with suicidal depression and anxiety. John’s story is both terrifying and inspiring because he faced that depression without a job, without medical insurance, and (until he reached out for help) without a support network, and came out on the other end. John took a leap of hope, sought help from a loved one, got treatment, and got through the crisis. Is he happy all the time? I doubt it. Who is? But he’s managing the illness successfully and living his life.

John thanked me for writing openly about my experiences with severe depression and anxiety and how they have changed my life. He expressed a sentiment that I also experienced as a powerful deterrent to getting help: the fear that medication, or hospitalization, and therapy somehow mark you as other and lead to the end of your plans and ambitions forever. It’s not true. It helps, John said, to see other people who have fought mental illness, taken the plunge into serious treatment, and come out the other side continuing to pursue their careers and families and lives. John thanked me for writing, and said I made a difference for him and helped him imagine recovery as a possibility. I’m going to remember that on my worst days, when I’m down on myself.

People who have fought mental illness — people who are still struggling with it, every day — can change people’s lives by offering hope.

Depression and anxiety are doubly pernicious. They don’t just rob you of your ability to process life’s challenges. They rob you of the ability to imagine things getting better — they rob you of hope. When well-meaning people try to help, they often address the wrong problem. “Your relationship will work out if you just talk,” or “I’m sure your boss doesn’t actually hate you,” or “things will look up and you’ll find another job” may all be true, and may all be good advice. But they don’t address the heart of mental illness. A depressed or anxious person isn’t just burdened with life’s routine problems. They’re burdened with being unable to think about them without sheer misery, and being unable to conceive of an end to that misery continuing, endlessly, in response to one problem after another. Solving the problems, one by one, doesn’t solve the misery.

The hope you can offer to someone who is depressed or anxious isn’t your problems will all go away. They won’t. That’s ridiculous (though certainly it’s much easier to solve or avoid problems when you’re not debilitated). The hope you can offer is this: you will be able to face life’s challenges without fear and misery. The hope isn’t that your life will be perfect. The hope is that after a day facing problems you’ll still be able to experience happiness and contentment. The hope is that you’ll feel “normal” again.

Ken White, “Why Openness About Mental Illness is Worth The Effort And Discomfort”, Popehat, 2016-08-09.

April 29, 2018

QotD: Impostor Syndrome

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

… the list of people who sometimes worry about being uncovered as an impostor is as impressive as it is long. Having to live with a nagging fear of being “found out” as not being as smart or talented or deserving or experienced or (fill-in-the-blank) as people think is a common phenomenon. So common, in fact, that the term “Impostor Syndrome” was coined to describe it back in the 1980’s. Indeed, researchers believe that up to 70% of people have suffered from it at some point. Myself included.

Apart from serial narcissists, super low achievers and outright crazies, no one is immune to the self-doubt that feeds Impostor Syndrome. But what matters most is not whether we occasionally (or regularly) fear failing, looking foolish or not being ‘whatever enough’; it’s whether we give those fears the power to keep us from taking the actions needed to achieve our goals and highest aspirations. Unfortunately, too often people do just that.

Impostor Syndrome is the domain of the high achiever. Those who set the bar low are rarely its victim. So if you are relating to what I’m sharing, then pat yourself on the back because it’s a sure sign that you aren’t ready to settled into the ranks of mediocrity. Rather, you’re likely to be a person who aims high and is committed to giving your very best to whatever endeavour you set your sights upon. A noble aim to be sure.

But giving your best is not the same as being the best. Likewise, there’s a distinct difference between trying to better yourself and being better than every one else. Overcoming the Imposter Syndrome requires self-acceptance: you don’t have to attain perfection or mastery to be worthy of the success you’ve achieved and any accolades you earn along the way. It’s not about lowering the bar, it’s about resetting it to a realistic level that doesn’t leave you forever striving and feeling inadequate. You don’t have to be Einstein to be a valuable asset to your organization and to those around you. Nor do you have to attain perfection to share something with the world that enriches people’s lives in some way.

Margie Warrell, “Afraid Of Being ‘Found Out?’ How To Overcome Impostor Syndrome”, Forbes, 2014-04-03.

April 28, 2018

Lab-Grown Meat Is Coming to Your Supermarket. Ranchers Are Fighting Back.

Filed under: Business, Food, Health, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 26 Apr 2018

The U.S. Cattlemen’s Association petitioned the USDA to declare that “meat” and “beef” exclude products not “slaughtered in the traditional manner.”

April 27, 2018

The rise of the “sexbot”

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Jacobite, Diana Fleischman discusses the appeal of sexbots to young (and not-so-young) men:

Sexbots are usually woman-shaped gynoid machines. At the present time, sex robots are simple: they’re silicone sex dolls that have some capacity for movement and response. Manufacturers are rolling out new models and new promises: sex robots that respond to touch and penetration, sex robots with interchangeable faces and bodies and sex robots with different personalities. Future robots will have all the allure of the cues of fertility in a flesh-and-blood woman combined with the artificial intelligence that creates compulsive reward directed behavior.

Sex robots are overwhelmingly gynoid because heterosexual men drive the market for sexual products like prostitution and pornography. Across cultures, men desire more sexual partners, need to know someone for less time before they want to have sex with them, and have lower standards for a sexual liaison than women. Looking at gay men is instructive here. Their sexual interactions are not limited by women’s sexual choosiness and they, on average, have many more sexual partners than straight men or lesbians.

It isn’t hard to see the reason for this. Men don’t get pregnant and don’t lactate, and they have smaller, easier-to-produce sex cells than women. For a man, the cost of producing offspring is cheap. Getting one’s genes into the next generation is the engine of evolution. The low opportunity costs make men motivated to take every opportunity, even if it comes in the form of a robot. Ever think a dog is dumb for growling at his reflection in the mirror? Human men can become aroused looking at flat images of nude women in black and white, our evolved psychology can respond in maladaptive ways towards novel stimuli.

[…]

My view is that the uncanny valley is something analogous to Capgras delusion, a psychological disorder that causes sufferers to believe that someone they know has been taken over by an imposter, often inhuman. According to VS Ramachandran, there are two aspects to recognizing faces: the identification of the external familiar representation and the “internal” validation – the warm emotion that goes along with it. In the uncanny valley, you recognize a robot as humanlike, but it’s missing the facial movement or some other characteristic that gives you a warm feeling of recognition. Many men won’t experience the uncanny valley, especially with regards to sex robots. These men are going to be the early adopters. Men are worse at identifying faces than women and are far more likely to have prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.

Sex is weird. Sex is gross and awkward. Natural selection addressed this issue by causing arousal to attenuate the human disgust response. It’s worth noting that men have a much lower baseline sexual disgust than women, and that sexual excitement further reduces disgust sensitivity in men. In a classic paper by Dan Ariely, aroused men had much more positive attitudes about all kinds of unusual sexual acts. Sexually aroused men were more likely to say that it would be fun to watch a woman urinating or that they could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal). 3-D pornography of video game or cartoon characters that might be creepy in a nonsexual context are popular genres. The most direct evidence that men won’t be put off by uncanny vulvas is from a paper that laments the “unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots” in comments on YouTube videos of robots. Bawdy comments on gynoids – “you’ll have to replace it monthly due to semen corrosion,” for example – were more frequent than comments expressing unease.

Perhaps we should encourage some men to use sex robots. Men who get environmental cues that they’re evolutionary dead-ends disproportionately menace society. In the 1980s, evolutionary psychologist couple Wilson and Daly found that perpetrators of violence and homicide had something in common: they were young, single and didn’t have access to the kinds of resources with which to win mates. Polygynous societies in which wealthier men have access to multiple women are more violent and less stable because they have a class of young men without the prospect of getting a mate. Monogamy, rather than being the state of nature, may have been an important cultural technology for reducing violence.

April 20, 2018

Disease, War and The Lost Generation I Between 2 Wars I 1918 Part 2 of 2

Filed under: Health, History, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost
Published on 19 Apr 2018

As World War One ends the dying takes on new proportions when the Spanish Flu ravages the world. A whole generation of young people that should be starting their adult life is instead decimated at a devastating rate. The suffering at the end of 1918 will have consequences that last until this day.

Join us on https://timeghost.tv
or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

Additional information from TimeGhost:

In the new episode of Between 2 Wars we look at death and suffering in 1918 from another source than the World War: the Spanish Flu and its effects on the young adults of the time. This is the first, but not the last episode in the Between 2 Wars series that focuses on non-military and non-geopolitical events.

To understand these decades we will look occasionally at fashion, technology, design, arts, culture and civil life in general. After all the 1920s and the 1930s is very much the time period when the world became modern in the true sense of the word.

Much of what we still consider contemporary (both things and thoughts) was created in the 20s and 30s. Already the next episode will also focus on civil life as we look at the birth of civil aviation and the radio. After that we dive right back into war with the Russian Civil War!

Memes for morons

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

On Facebook, SF author Larry Correia responds to a currently popular meme (NSFW language, so it’s below the fold):

(more…)

April 18, 2018

Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Finding Meaning in Responsibility

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 17 Apr 2018

Jordan Peterson is an unlikely YouTube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos, line up to hear his speeches, and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.

———

John Stossel asks: What could make a book about responsibility take off?

“People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom,” Peterson tells Stossel. “There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.”

The other side of the story, according to Peterson, is that “it’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.”

Peterson instead advises: “Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth….That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.”

Many leftists hate Peterson. They attack him for saying people should be “dangerous.” Peterson explains to Stossel that he means people should have the capacity to be dangerous, but control it.

“People who teach martial arts know this full well,” Peterson says. “If you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously you learn to control it.”

Advice about that, and responsibility, bring Peterson big audiences.

—–

The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

April 14, 2018

Alcohol and health – if you torture the data long enough, it will give you the answer you want

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

Tim Worstall isn’t convinced that a recent study summarized in The Lancet is either honest or useful:

We have a new study out, in the Lancet no less, telling us that the new, lower, limits for reasonable alcohol consumption are just right. Well, of course the report says that, right? The problem being that it’s entirely contrary to the more general experience we’ve got of booze consumption. For, yes indeedy, there’s a level of drinking which will – as always, on average – shorten life. But our experience to date is that it’s several times what is the current measure of safe consumption. This basic understanding of ours being that no booze lowers lifespan, too much lowers it, a modicum increases it. The argument being the definition of modicum of course.

Observation of large populations being that modicum is anything from some up to perhaps 40 or even 50 units a week. This isn’t what the current study shows at all […]

I’m not in any manner a medical expert but that does look odd. 5 million observation years on half a million people, looks like 10 years on average per person. They’re using this to predict lifespan at age 40? When lifespan at 40 is, these days, a further 40 to 50 years or so? OK, maybe there’s some sekkrit decoder ring for epidemiologists here but anyone want to try and explain it?

Ah:

    We focused our study on current alcohol drinkers

So the comparison doesn’t include those who don’t drink. We’re not therefore getting a baseline of no alcohol consumption to compare with. That is, by design, the study excludes the known to be higher death rates (or lower lifespans) of the temperance types. No, really:

    Third, never-drinkers might differ systematically from drinkers in ways that are difficult to measure, but which might be relevant to disease causation.

Our more general stats do indeed say that heavy drinkers (that 40 to 50 unit level perhaps) and never drinkers have about the same lifespans. Quick, gotta exclude that information, eh?

As far as we’re concerned that’s probably enough. We’ll see what Snowdon has to say about it, shall we? Because this finding is contrary to pretty much everything else we know about booze consumption. Explaining why it is will be important.

Update, 15 April: It’s no wonder that people are confused about the benefits and/or drawbacks of drinking…

March 28, 2018

QotD: Rent-seeking through “health concern” trolling

Filed under: Business, Economics, Food, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Producers too often shamelessly use whatever excuses are at hand to justify their prodding the state to prevent consumers from patronizing rival producers. Trumped-up health ‘concerns’ are a prominent set of easy excuses when the good in question is food or drink. “Those foods offered by our rivals are likely to kill or injure our beloved consumers!” cry rent-seeking producers, feigning an overriding concern for the health of the public. “For the health of our citizens, our rival producers must be stopped from selling their foul foods in our market!” Conveniently, of course, when such restrictions are implemented the favored producers no longer must compete as vigorously for consumers’ patronage. (Question: What does diminished competition do to producers’ incentives to maintain the safety of the foods they sell to the public?)

Anyway, here’s a history lesson: today’s expressed concerns about the safety of genetically modified foods and the calls for governments to restrict consumers’ freedom to buy these foods are, in their essence, nothing new. In the late-19th century similar ‘concerns’ over the safety of American beef and pork were used by some beef and pork producers to sic state restriction on rival beef and pork producers. European ranchers and farmers, disliking the competition from American ranchers and farmers, played the safety card as means of securing protection from their American rivals. Likewise within the U.S.: local butchers and local slaughterhouses throughout the U.S. played the same safety card as a means of securing protection from the upstart and wildly successful Chicago meatpackers such as Swift and Armour. That this safety card was illegitimate – that is, that charges of unsafe beef and pork were unwarranted – doesn’t matter if enough people believe the charges. The widely believed myth of dangerous foods enables the state to protect powerful producers from competition.

Cronyism and rent-seeking are nothing new. But they are perhaps becoming more widespread as the scope of state involvement in private affairs expands.

Don Boudreaux, “If Only We Could Be Protected From the Disease of Rent-Seeking”, Café Hayek, 2016-07-14.

March 27, 2018

Metrics are merely a tool. Like any tool they can be misused.

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

A big problem with depending on metrics is finding things to count that are actually useful measurements of whatever you’re tracking. A lot of bad management decisions can be traced to poorly chosen metrics. As a general rule, just because something can be measured doesn’t automatically mean that measurement will be useful. Tim Harford reviews a recent book on metrics:

Jerry Z Muller’s latest book is 220 pages long, not including the front matter. The average chapter is 10.18 pages long and contains 17.76 endnotes. There are four cover endorsements and the book weighs 421 grammes. These numbers tell us nothing, of course. If you want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of The Tyranny of Metrics you will need to read it — or trust the opinion of someone who has.

Professor Muller’s argument is that we keep forgetting this obvious point. Rather than rely on the informed judgment of people familiar with the situation, we gather meaningless numbers at great cost. We then use them to guide our actions, predictably causing unintended damage.

A famous example is the obsession, during the Vietnam war, with the “body count” metric embraced by US defence secretary Robert McNamara. The more of the enemy you kill, reasoned McNamara, the closer you are to winning. This was always a dubious idea, but the body count quickly became an informal metric for ranking units and handing out promotions, and was therefore often exaggerated. Counting bodies became a risky military objective in itself.

This episode symbolises the mindless, fruitless drive to count things. But it also shows us why metrics are so often used: McNamara was trying to understand and control a distant situation using the skills of a generalist, not a general. Muller shows that metrics are often used as a substitute for relevant experience, by managers with generic rather than specific expertise.

Muller does not claim that metrics are always useless, but that we expect too much from them as a tool of management. For example, if a group of doctors collect and analyse data on clinical outcomes, they are likely to learn something together. If bonuses and promotions are tied to the numbers, the exercise will teach nobody anything and may end up killing patients. Several studies have found evidence of cardiac surgeons refusing to operate on the sickest patients for fear of lowering their reported success rates.

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