TimeGhost History
Published 23 Feb 2025In 1946, the world’s fate is rewritten in fire. The first peacetime nuclear tests shake the Pacific, while Stalin accelerates the Soviet push for the bomb. With the power to destroy the entire world now a reality, global leaders face a defining choice — will the bomb usher in the peace of our time, or lead to nuclear doom? The arms race has begun, and there’s no turning back.
(more…)
February 24, 2025
Dawn of the Atomic Age – W2W 007
February 15, 2025
QotD: The absurdly high early expectations for genetic research
For decades, people talked about “the gene for height”, “the gene for intelligence”, etc. Was the gene for intelligence on chromosome 6? Was it on the X chromosome? What happens if your baby doesn’t have the gene for intelligence? Can they still succeed?
Meanwhile, the responsible experts were saying traits might be determined by a two-digit number of genes. Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins estimated that there were “about twelve genes” for diabetes, and “all of them will be discovered in the next two years”. Quanta Magazine reminds us of a 1999 study which claimed that “perhaps more than fifteen genes” might contribute to autism. By the early 2000s, the American Psychological Association was a little more cautious, was saying intelligence might be linked to “dozens – if not hundreds” of genes.
The most recent estimate for how many genes are involved in complex traits like height or intelligence is approximately “all of them” – by the latest count, about twenty thousand. From this side of the veil, it all seems so obvious. It’s hard to remember back a mere twenty or thirty years ago, when people earnestly awaited “the gene for depression”. It’s hard to remember the studies powered to find genes that increased height by an inch or two. It’s hard to remember all the crappy p-hacked results that okay, we found the gene for extraversion, here it is! It’s hard to remember all the editorials in The Guardian about how since nobody had found the gene for IQ yet, genes don’t matter, science is fake, and Galileo was a witch.
And even remembering those times, they seem incomprehensible. Like, really? Only a few visionaries considered the hypothesis that the most complex and subtle of human traits might depend on more than one protein? Only the boldest revolutionaries dared to ask whether maybe cystic fibrosis was not the best model for the entirety of human experience?
Scott Alexander, “The Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-09-13.
January 18, 2025
Incentives matter even to “objective” scientists
A 2019 Canadian “study” ideally illustrates that scientists are just as human as anyone else where they are incentivized to provide “desired” outcomes:

“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Earlier this year, a major Canadian study on alcohol policy provided an excellent illustration of this. As news headlines across the country reported, 16 scientists and researchers at various universities and institutions had, through their Canadian Alcohol Policy Evaluation, shown that provincial governments are “failing to address alcohol problems”.
The scientists evaluated provincial government policies and assigned a grade in the “D” range to seven of Canada’s 13 provinces or territories, while five received an “F”. The policy evaluation, however, was a curious one. Strangely, the policy evaluation did not evaluate whether government policies were beneficial to those who want to buy or sell alcohol.
Instead, provincial governments were evaluated more favorably if they devoted greater efforts toward afflicting buyers and sellers of alcohol through punitive taxes, price controls, heavy restrictions on the sale and marketing of alcoholic beverages, higher minimum legal drinking ages, and so on.
Even in the most restrictive markets, the researchers found that alcohol was too cheap, or that its purchase was too convenient, or that governments did not do enough to discourage or restrict its sale and consumption.
Predictably, and perhaps exemplifying Berlinski’s point on scientists grasping for government funds, the report authored by 16 scientists whose livelihoods involve raising public alarm about alcohol consumption concluded that there ought to be more government funding for public education on the dangers of alcohol consumption.
The report also advocated more government funding for bureaucracies to discourage drinking, more government funding for a lead organization to implement restrictive alcohol policies, more government funding for independent monitoring of such implementation, and more government funding to track and report the harm caused by alcohol consumption.
Like the CEO of a domestic automobile company insisting that tariffs against car imports — which would cause a massive wealth redistribution from consumers’ wallets into his own and those of the company’s shareholders — are in the national interest, the anti-drinking scientists insisted in the name of public health and wellness upon income redistribution from taxpayers and consumers to their own industry.
November 29, 2024
November 8, 2024
“The Science™, that thing we’re supposed to believe in and obey – is distinctly and increasingly political”
President-elect Donald Trump has a vast array of options to tackle in the traditional first hundred days of his administration. Chris Bray says that one of the very first of these should be the depoliticization of the federal science agencies:
Donald Trump has spoken very clearly about his day-one determination to end the mutilation of children in the service of gender ideology, but let’s look for the roots of that poison tree. Via Billboard Chris, here’s a sample descriptive section from a National Institutes of Health grant given to a pediatric gender physician in Los Angeles, and read this carefully to find the most important sentence:
Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy has worked to push gender hormone treatment down to eight year-olds, with research funding from the federal government. Now, big finish: the dates on the NIH grant that Billboard Chris highlighted:
This is a project — gender hormones for eight year-olds — that operated with federal funding during the first Trump administration. Policy expressed in words meets policy expressed in cash. This is what matters, year after year, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike (click to enlarge):
The money, the money, and the money. What you fund is what you’re doing. It may not seem like a big target, but the politicization of federal science funding is a root cause of institutional decay and pathological narrative-making, and cutting the money pipeline to politicized science is the policy action that will matter for decades. Remaking the funding pipeline for federal science grants is a day one priority, because the money will shape policy far more than any declaration of intent.
The problem is everywhere: the NIH, the NSF, NASA, NOAA, and so on. SpaceX is catching rockets; NASA is funding this: “21-EEJ21-0020 ASSESSMENT OF THE GULF COAST ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE LANDSCAPE FOR EQUITY.”
And this: “EXPLORING SYNERGISTIC OPPORTUNITIES BETWEEN CHARLOTTE-AREA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES AND NASA EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION.”
Pick a federal science grant website and spend some time exploring it. Here’s the National Science Foundation’s funding opportunities page. Sample grant program: “Growing Research Compliance Support and Service Infrastructure for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity”.
Today’s funded program for transformative science equity and environmental justice is tomorrow’s new policy measures. This is the pipeline to programs. What you fund today is what you’re going to do in five years.
October 13, 2024
The Soviet Union’s surplus of math nerds
The most recent review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf is John Psmith’s musings on Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers by Alexander Zvonkin, and he starts by talking about something the Soviets did better than the west:
To me, one of the greatest historical puzzles is why the Cold War was even a contest. Consider it a mirror image of the Needham Question: Joseph Needham famously wondered why it was that, despite having a vastly larger population and GDP, Imperial China nevertheless lost out scientifically to the West. (I examined this question at some length in this review.) Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?
The puzzle was partly solved for me, but partly deepened, when those of us who grew up in the ‘90s and ‘00s encountered the vast wave of former Soviet émigrés that washed up in the United States after the fall of communism. Anybody who played competitive chess back then, or who participated in math competitions, knows what I’m talking about: the sinking feeling you got upon seeing that your opponent had a Russian name. These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way above their weight, demographically speaking. Today, those same Russians are all over Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Ivy League math departments, still overrepresented in technical fields. What explains it? Are Russians just naturally better at math and physics?
When I related these questions to an Ashkenazi-supremacist friend of mine, he immediately suggested that “maybe it’s because they’re all Jewish”. (I’ve noticed that the most philosemitic people and the most antisemitic people sometimes have curiously similar models of the world, they just disagree on whether it’s a good thing.) My friend’s question wasn’t crazy, since there are definitely times when asking “were they all Jewish?” yields an affirmative answer. But in this case I had to disappoint him with the knowledge that many of these Russian math and chess superstars were gentiles.2 What’s more, by the ’60s and ’70s the Soviets had an entire discriminatory apparatus dedicated to keeping Jews out of the scientific establishment, so it would be impressive indeed if they were the foundation of its success.
Another possible explanation actually hinges on the relative poverty of the Soviet Union. Assume there are a lot of people out there with natural mathematical talent, but who given their druthers would major in underwater basket-weaving instead. The United States, because it’s so wealthy, can afford to “waste” a huge proportion of our talented population on humanities, arts, and other stuff that doesn’t involve you sitting in the school library until 3am. In other words, not going into a technical field is a form of luxury, which America can afford to consume. The Soviets, rather like the Chinese today, were forced by their underdog status to allocate human capital more efficiently (and had the authoritarian means to do so by force if necessary). This theory is related to the curious fact that, on average, the more feminist your society, the fewer women there are in math and science — which makes total sense if you assume that on average women are good at math but uninterested in it.
The thing is, the émigré superstars I encountered didn’t seem at all grudging or resentful about their studies. If anything it was the opposite. I’ve previously complained about how much I hate Russian mathematician Edward Frenkel’s3 book, but one thing it gets across well is just how important passion is to being a great mathematician, and passion was the thing the émigrés seemed to have a surfeit of. In college, the joke was that seminars by American professors would last an hour, whereas seminars by Russian professors would turn into boisterous debates lasting all night. People have been writing for centuries about Russians having a tendency towards “maximalism” — whether aesthetic or ideological or anything else. Maybe a culture-wide commitment to not doing anything by half-measures explains it?
1. There are scientific sub-disciplines where even at the end the Soviets had a clear lead, including several fields of math. Even crazier, there are sub-disciplines where we have not yet gotten back to where the Soviets were (for instance phage therapy).
2. Undeterred, my friend pointed out that many modern Russian gentiles have significant Jewish ancestry. The Soviets actively promoted mixed marriages, to the point where in some cities the average urban gentile Russian is as much as 25% Jewish. I still don’t think this explains Soviet scientific prowess, but it’s an interesting data point because the most highly urbanized areas are the ones where most of the mathematicians (and most of the émigrés) came from.
3. Before you ask, I looked it up and Frenkel is half Jewish, half gentile. I will leave it to you whether you count that as evidence for or against my friend’s theory.
August 29, 2024
QotD: The Price of Speed
Recently, over lunch, Mrs. Muros regaled me with tales of authors who treat their readers to several new novels a year. As she waxed rhapsodic on the subject of the people who put the “p” in “prolific”, I scribbled notes on a credit card receipt. “Why is it”, I wrote, “that these ink-strained Atalantas can fill several pages with reasonably readable prose in the time it takes me to assemble a simple Substack post?”
The answer, I mused, might have something to do with sex. All of the authors mentioned by My Yankee Sweetheart, after all, were fully paid-up members of the distaff half of humanity. Could it be that my words fail to flow like summertime honey because my brain has been pickled in androgens? Or, to be somewhat less of a bio-Calvinist, could it be that my refusal to engage in the formal study of literature — a policy which owed much to my belief that the subject was “for girls” — left me bereft of some of the most useful tools of the writer’s trade?
Later that day, as I ransacked back issues of obscure journals in the hope of finding an uncooperative fact, a warm yellow bulb of incandescent understanding appeared above my head. ‘Twas not the writing that slowed me down, I realized, but the research. Indeed, were it not for the pesky puzzle piece I was trying to find, my article would have been done and dusted well before The Love of My Life and I sat down to our midday meal.
Before it faded, my wee epiphany bore two sprogs. The elder of these reminded me that, like other forms of mass production, the prodigious productivity of the quill-drivers in question owed much to the avoidance of novelty. That is, they were able to write so much because, in effect, they made repeated use of familiar formulae, tried-and-true tropes, and recurring turns-of-phrase. The younger of my mind-sparks added that, in addition to taking up time that an writer might otherwise spend at the keyboard, the discovery of a new fact will often lead to a quest for fresh forms of expression.
So, to quote the immortal words of David Crowther, you pays your money and you takes your choice. You can write quickly, or you can say something new, but you can’t do both.
Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, “The Price of Speed”, Extra Muros, 2024-05-21.
August 26, 2024
The craft of the historian, then and now
At Extra Muros, Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson contrasts the way historians used to research and write their books with the much more convenient, yet still imperfect methods of modern historians:
In days of yore, when visiting an archive required long journeys by sea, or, at the very least, a tiring trek o’er moor and mountain, considerate historians stuffed their works, with extensive excerpts from primary sources.1 Later, when trains, planes, and automobiles made it easier for people to visit the places where original documents could be found, these quotations shrank, eventually to the point where the word “citation”, which had once described the products of scholarly stenography, came to designate the label that enabled readers to locate the one-of-a-kind text in question.
No doubt, this development saved many trees from the woodman’s axe. At the same time, however, it changed the role played by historians. Rather than showcasing selections from the correspondence of old-timey movers and shakers, Clio’s children devoted most of the ink that they spilled to the explanation of texts that, despite the blessings bestowed by coal and petroleum, most readers would not be able to read.
Many a noble soul resisted the temptation to sacrifice verbatim reproduction on the altar of erudite interpretation. Realizing that readers might prefer a faithful facsimile of the real McCoy to a ponderous paraphrase, these saints of the scriptorium prepared primary sources for the press. However, rather rewarding these benefactors of the historically curious with condign praise, the denizens of the faculty lounge often dismissed them as “editors” and, in moments of especial cruelty, “antiquarians”.
In the fullness of time, the convenience provided by recent interpretations led many historians to prefer them to the relics of bygone bureaucracies. After all, reading a fresh-smelling, neatly-bound, clearly-printed, recently-written book asks less of a scholar than the deciphering of unfamiliar turns-of-phrase scribbled on the dusty, mite-bitten contents of cardboard boxes. Moreover, while the reader of a scholarly monograph often enjoys a wide choice of restaurants and coffee shops, and, at the very least, the delights of his own kitchen, the archival archaeologist must often make do with the decidedly institutional offerings of a ground-floor cafeteria.
Ostentatious reliance on recent interpretations also enables a scholar to exhibit his collegiality. “See”, the favorable footnote screams, “someone noticed your work and, marvelous to say, made use of it”. Conversely, failure to cite the work of a peer, let alone a scholar of superior standing, signals a degree of nonchalance bordering on contempt. “I am fully aware”, it says to the author of the unreferenced work, “that you poured your heart and soul, as well as a dozen years of your life, into your study, but I could not be bothered to type out its title, let alone turn a page to discover its date of publication”.
Finally, the making of new monographs out of the pieces of slightly older ones honors the founding fable of the research university, the myth of scholarly progress. The monograph still warm from the press, we presume, offers more in the way of insight and understanding than one that has been sitting on the shelf for decades. (If you wish to drive a dagger into the heart of an older academic, describe one of his earlier works, especially one that once made a splash in the kiddie-pool of his subfield, as “somewhat dated”.)2
Prejudice in favor of up-to-date interpretations creates a paradox. Historians, who exist to bring the past to life, favor interpretations created on the eve of now. The speakers for the dead (hat tip to Orson Scott Card) limit themselves to the thoughts of the living.
1. For a brief, and delightfully documented, description of the work of the paragon of this approach to the writing of history, Angelo Fabroni (1732-1803), see Anthony Grafton The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) pages 82 and 83.
2. Ask me how I know!
August 19, 2024
Bret Devereaux on Nathan Rosenstein’s Rome at War (2004)
Although Dr. Devereaux is taking a bit of time away from the more typical blogging topics he usually covers on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, he still discusses books related to his area of specialty:
For this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004). This is something of a variation from my normal recommendations, so I want to lead with a necessary caveat: this book is not a light or easy read. It was written for specialists and expects the reader to do some work to fully understand its arguments. That said, it isn’t written in impenetrable “academese” – indeed, the ideas here are very concrete, dealing with food production, family formation, mortality and military service. But they’re also fairly technical and Rosenstein doesn’t always stop to recap what he has said and draw fully the conclusions he has reached and so a bit of that work is left to the reader.
That said, this is probably in the top ten or so books that have shaped me as a scholar and influenced my own thinking – as attentive readers can no doubt recall seeing this book show up a lot in my footnotes and citations. And much like another book I’ve recommended, Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003), this is the sort of book that moves you beyond the generalizations about ancient societies you might get in a more general treatment (“low productivity, high mortality, youth-shifted age profile, etc.”) down to the actual evidence and methods we have to estimate and understand that.
Fundamentally, Rome at War is an exercise in “modeling” – creating (fairly simple) statistical models to simulate things for which we do not have vast amounts of hard data, but for which we can more or less estimate. For instance, we do not have the complete financial records for a statistically significant sample of Roman small farmers; indeed, we do not have such for any Roman small farmers. So instead, Rosenstein begins with some evidence-informed estimates about typical family size and construction and combines them with some equally evidence-informed estimates about the productivity of ancient farms and their size and then “simulates” that household. That sort of approach informs the entire book.
Fundamentally, Rosenstein is seeking to examine the causes of a key Roman political event: the agrarian land-reform program of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, but the road he takes getting there is equally interesting. He begins by demonstrating that based on what we know the issue with the structure of agriculture in Roman Italy was not, strictly speaking “low productivity” so much as inefficient labor allocation (a note you will have seen me come back to a lot): farms too small for the families – as units of labor – which farmed them. That is a very interesting observation generally, but his point in reaching it is to show that this is why Roman can conscript these fellows so aggressively: this is mostly surplus labor so pulling it out of the countryside does not undermine these households (usually). But that pulls a major pillar – that heavy Roman conscription undermined small freeholders in Italy in the Second Century – out of the traditional reading of the land reforms.
Instead, Rosenstein then moves on to modeling Roman military mortality, arguing that, based on what we know, the real problem is that Rome spends the second century winning a lot. As a result, lots of young men who normally might have died in war – certainly in the massive wars of the third century (Pyrrhic and Punic) – survived their military service, but remained surplus to the labor needs of the countryside and thus a strain on their small households. These fellows then started to accumulate. Meanwhile, the nature of the Roman census (self-reported on the honor system) and late second century Roman military service (often unprofitable and dangerous in Spain, but not with the sort of massive armies of the previous centuries which might cause demographically significant losses) meant that more Romans might have been dodging the draft by under-reporting in the census. Which leads to his conclusion: when Tiberius Gracchus looks out, he sees both large numbers of landless Romans accumulating in Rome (and angry) and also falling census rolls for the Roman smallholder class and assumes that the Roman peasantry is being economically devastated by expanding slave estates and his solution is land reform. But what is actually happening is population growth combined with falling census registration, which in turn explains why the land reform program doesn’t produce nearly as much change as you’d expect, despite being more or less implemented.
Those conclusions remain both important and contested. What I think will be more valuable for most readers is instead the path Rosenstein takes to reach them, which walks through so much of the nuts-and-bolts of Roman life: marriage patterns, childbearing patterns, agricultural productivity, military service rates, mortality rates and so on. These are, invariably, estimates built on estimates of estimates and so exist with fairly large “error bars” and uncertainty, but they are, for the most part, the best the evidence will support and serve to put meat on the bones of those standard generalizing descriptions of ancient society.
July 20, 2024
Counting citation numbers in “Chomskys”
The latest anonymous reviewer in Astral Codex Ten‘s “Your Book Review” series considers the work of Noam Chomsky, and notes just how his works dominate the field of linguistics:

Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity’s prospects for survival in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States on 13 April 2017.
Original photo by Σ, retouched by Wugapodes via Wikimedia Commons.
You may have heard of a field known as “linguistics”. Linguistics is supposedly the “scientific study of language“, but this is completely wrong. To borrow a phrase from elsewhere, linguists are those who believe Noam Chomsky is the rightful caliph. Linguistics is what linguists study.
I’m only half-joking, because Chomsky’s impact on the study of language is hard to overstate. Consider the number of times his books and papers have been cited, a crude measure of influence that we can use to get a sense of this. At the current time, his Google Scholar page says he’s been cited over 500,000 times. That’s a lot.
It isn’t atypical for a hard-working professor at a top-ranked institution to, after a career’s worth of work and many people helping them do research and write papers, have maybe 20,000 citations (= 0.04 Chomskys). Generational talents do better, but usually not by more than a factor of 5 or so. Consider a few more citation counts:
- Computer scientist Alan Turing (65,000 = 0.13 Chomskys)
- Neuro / cogsci / AI researcher Matthew Botvinick (83,000 = 0.17 Chomskys)
- Mathematician Terence Tao (96,000 = 0.19 Chomskys)
- Cognitive scientist Joshua Tenenbaum (107,000 = 0.21 Chomskys)
- Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (120,000 = 0.24 Chomskys)
- Psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker (123,000 = 0.25 Chomskys)
- Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling (128,000 = 0.26 Chomskys)
- Neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth (143,000 = 0.29 Chomskys)
- Biologist Charles Darwin (182,000 = 0.36 Chomskys)
- Theoretical physicist Ed Witten (250,000 = 0.50 Chomskys)
- AI researcher Yann LeCun (352,000 = 0.70 Chomskys)
- Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt (359,000 = 0.72 Chomskys)
- Karl Marx (458,000 = 0.92 Chomskys)
Yes, fields vary in ways that make these comparisons not necessarily fair: fields have different numbers of people, citation practices vary, and so on. There is also probably a considerable recency bias; for example, most biologists don’t cite Darwin every time they write a paper whose content relates to evolution. But 500,000 is still a mind-bogglingly huge number.
Not many academics do better than Chomsky citation-wise. But there are a few, and you can probably guess why:
- Human-Genome-Project-associated scientist Eric Lander (685,000 = 1.37 Chomskys)
- AI researcher Yoshua Bengio (780,000 = 1.56 Chomskys)
- AI researcher Geoff Hinton (800,000 = 1.60 Chomskys)
- Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1,361,000 = 2.72 Chomskys)
…well, okay, maybe I don’t entirely get Foucault’s number. Every humanities person must have an altar of him by their bedside or something.
Chomsky has been called “arguably the most important intellectual alive today” in a New York Times review of one of his books, and was voted the world’s top public intellectual in a 2005 poll. He’s the kind of guy that gets long and gushing introductions before his talks (this one is nearly twenty minutes long). All of this is just to say: he’s kind of a big deal.
[…]
Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics. And this matters because he is kind of a contrarian with weird ideas.
May 25, 2024
Fathers of Light and Darkness – Rockets and Explosives – Sabaton History 126 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published Feb 7, 2024There are many inventors whose creations have been turned into weapons of war. A couple that really stand out are Alfred Nobel and Wernher von Braun. Today we’ll take a deep dive into their stories and the paradox of using destructive weapons for good, or creative weapons for destruction.
(more…)
May 24, 2024
Bernie Sanders finally finds a group of rich people who he thinks shouldn’t have to pay
As Tim Worstall points out, Bernie Sanders’ latest campaign is starkly at odds with his usual “make the rich pay” schtick:

“Bernie Sanders” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .
It’s possible to think that Bernie Sanders, Senator that he is, is more than a little confused. Well, he’d not be the first elderly politician to suffer that fate. Nor the first socialist. It is necessary for me to be fair here though — one of his honeymoons he took in the Soviet Union. Which makes perfect sense to me — after all, there was bugger all else to do there other than your own wife.
However, here we’ve got him complaining about the cost of the new miracle drugs:
Bernie Sanders has urged Denmark to rein in its most valuable company, Novo Nordisk, and force it to slash prices on popular weight loss and diabetes treatments Ozempic and Wegovy, taking his fight to lower “outrageously high” drug prices in the United States to the company’s doorstep as its profits soar amid ongoing struggles to meet booming appetite for the revolutionary drugs.
Hmm, dunno how well that’s going to work with the Danes really. Yes, to some extent they’re milder than when they tried to rape and pillage the entirety of Europe but not wholly. My brother worked out in Afghanistan (feeding the troops) and he had a Danish unit rotate through. So he tells me their senior sergeant type carried a double bladed axe on his backpack — it didn’t come back clean from every patrol either. They’re not all equality and gender rights these days, you know?
So, we can imagine a certain portion at least of the Danish population celebrating this rapine of Medicare’s pockets by the simple expedient of selling a weight loss drug that actually works — which is, when we come to think of it, something of an innovation. Fen-Fen didn’t work after all. Hey, you know, Vinland failed but we’ll get ’em this time? We’re charging high prices because we can?
A second pass at the argument would be that the drugs are in fact incredibly cheap. When it was shown that the same drug — semaglutide — works in stopping (that’s “stopping” as in ceased, stopped, dead, like Bernie’s career would if it were ever proven he had taken part in an act of voluntary capitalism) chronic kidney disease. So much so that the very day they announced the trials on the drug were being stopped a year early, so obvious was the success, the share prices of all the dialysis provision companies dropped 20 and 30%. That is, at near whatever price, this drug is a money saver. Which is, you know, good. J Foreigner turns up with this thing that saves America, Americans, lives and money and yet Bernie whines — so like a socialist, eh? Capitalism with markets makes us the humans who are living highest on the hog, ever, but they really never do stop whining about it, do they?
But Bernie’s real complaint is that Americans are paying more to burn off the cheeseburgers than everyone else has to. But from everything else Bernie says about anything at all this is at it should be — the rich should pay.
Back to our basics. The basic drug development problem is that the development of a drug is a public goods problem. It costs $2 billion to get a drug through the FDA and gain approval to actually sell it. Yes, of course we should slaughter much of the regulation that makes it cost that much (personally, against character type, I only recommend capture and humane release for the actual bureaucrats) but that’s another matter. It does. But if everyone can just copy the drug at that point then no one will spend $2 billion. So, OK, patents, so the developers have a decade (the patent is two decades, it takes a decade to gain approval) to make their $2 billion back then anyone can copy it. The price falls to manufacturing cost plus normal profit level and we’re about as good as we can get. This is not a perfect system but for mass market drugs it’s about as good as we’re going to get.
May 18, 2024
QotD: Academic research and the “phantom cite”
If you’ve done any academic work at all, in any field — scratch that, if you’ve done any competent, diligent work in any field — you’ve experienced the frustration of the “phantom cite”. This is where you see a startling assertion in Jones. You check his footnote — see Smith. You go pull Smith off the shelves, and his footnote says “see Williams”. Williams cites Parker, Parker cites Adams, Adams cites Rogers, until finally, you pull Rogers and … nothing. Not the “oh gosh, I’d have to travel to the British Museum to check this, and it’s in Medieval High Bulgarian anyway” kind of nothing, but the bald-ass assertion kind of nothing.
Happens all the time. There are a couple of reasons for this. Being as charitable as I possibly can, I’m going to call one “survivorship bias”. I’m sure you’ve seen this … Since, again, we’re being extremely charitable here, this isn’t actually a case of “just tell ’em what they want to hear”. I’ll illustrate from my own research experience. My dissertation asserts that General Ripper, commander of the 43rd Imaginary Infantry in Au Phuc Dup province, Republic of Vietnam, was convinced that the local provincial governor, Long Duc Dong, was a Communist infiltrator. Now, this is a 100% true fact, that Gen. Ripper believes Long Duc Dong is a Communist. Armies are awash in paperwork, and moreover Gen. Ripper was an obsessive letter-writer and diarist, so you can find hundreds if not thousands of citations stating it directly: “I, Gen. Ripper, believe that Long Duc Dong is a Communist”.
Which explains quite a bit about why Gen. Ripper made the decisions he did, which in turn is why this 100% indisputably true fact — that Gen. Ripper thought Long Duc Dong was a Communist — features so prominently in that study of the dynamics of command in the 43rd Imaginary Infantry.
The problem, though, is that some other historian comes along, looking at something very different — say, the effectiveness of anti-Communist propaganda in the IV Corps operational area — and comes across my dissertation. From this, he writes “So ineffective was the anti-Communist propaganda campaign that even the governor, Long Duc Dong, was strongly suspected of being a Communist infiltrator”. And from that, another historian, looking for the prevalence of pro-Communist sentiment, concludes that “despite the Americans’ best efforts, the extreme south of the RVN was so thoroughly indoctrinated that even the Governor, Long Duc Dong, was a Communist”.
Now, all of that is true except for the last bit. It is not, in fact, proven that Long Duc Dong was a Communist. Gen. Ripper sure thought he was. And Gen. Ripper continued to think so, even after the anti-Communist propaganda campaign, which means that the campaign indisputably failed in Long Duc Dong’s case — he carried on acting like enough of a commie to keep Gen. Ripper’s suspicions up. But thanks to the thicket of citations, it’s the last bit — the assertion that Long Duc Dong was, indisputably, a Communist — that has by far the most footnotes attached to it. Hell, the footnotes probably cite all the same things I did — the truckloads of letters and documents from Gen. Ripper saying “Damn that Long Duc Dong, he’s a Communist!!”
That’s because he lifted them straight from my dissertation, all impeccably footnoted — by which is meant, giving ME full credit — and do you see what I mean? None of the historians involved had any obvious axe to grind, no viewpoint to push. It’s just that everyone’s bibliography is a hundred pages long, and nobody has the time to read every page of every book in those hundred pages. Jones just skimmed Smith’s index, looking for names of commies. Smith did the same thing with my index, of course, in which he found “Dong, Long Duc, Communist sympathies of,” with dozens of page numbers referenced.
Severian, “‘Studies'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-22.
May 16, 2024
The replication crisis and the steady decline in social trust
Theodore Dalrymple on the depressing unreliability — and sometimes outright fraudulence — of far too high a proportion of what gets published in scientific journals:
Until quite recently — I cannot put an exact date on it — I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such.
Such naivety is no longer possible: instances of dishonesty have become much more frequent, or at least much more publicised. Whether the real incidence of scientific fraud has increased is difficult to say. There is probably no way to estimate the incidence of such fraud in the past by which a proper comparison can be made.
There are, of course, good reasons why scientific fraud should have increased. The number of practising scientists has exploded; they are in fierce competition with one another; their careers depend to a large extent on their productivity as measured by publication. The difference between what is ethical and unethical has blurred. They cite themselves, they recycle their work, they pay for publication, they attach their names to pieces of work they have played no part in performing and whose reports they have not even read, and so forth. As new algorithms are developed to measure their performance, they find new ways to play the game or to deceive. And all this is not even counting commercial pressures.
Furthermore, the general level of trust in society has declined. Are our politicians worse than they used to be, as it seems to everyone above a certain age, or is it that we simply know more about them because the channels of communication are so much wider? At any rate, trust in authority of most kinds has declined. Where once we were inclined to say, “It must be true because I read it in a newspaper”, we are now inclined to say, “It must be untrue because I read it in a newspaper”.
Quite often now I look at a blog called Retraction Watch which, since 2010, has been devoted to tracing and encouraging retraction of flawed scientific papers, often flawed for discreditable reasons. Such reasons are various and include research performed on subjects who have not given proper consent. This is not the same as saying that the results of such research are false, however, and raises the question of whether it is ethical to cite results that have been obtained unethically. Whether it is or not, we have all benefited enormously from past research that would now be considered unethical.
One common problem with research is its reproducibility, or lack of it. This is particularly severe in the case of psychology, but it is common in medicine too.
May 13, 2024
Unravelling the actual origins of Covid (aka Wuhan Coronavirus)
In Spiked!, Matt Ridley outlines some of the more recent admissions-against-interest of the people who used to accuse you of tinfoil-hattism and peddling conspiracy theories when the topic of the origins of Covid came up:
Two of the key figures in the story of Covid’s origins gave away vital new information last week before the US Congress.
One of these figures is Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina professor who invented ingenious techniques for genetically altering coronaviruses. He effectively taught scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China how to do “gain of function” experiments with bat-derived sarbecoviruses to make them more infectious or lethal in humanised mice. The other figure is Peter Daszak, the highly paid president of the non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance. Over many years, EcoHealth Alliance has channelled large sums of US taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for “gain of function” experimentation, and for finding new sarbecoviruses in bats.
Up until now, Baric and Daszak have taken slightly different approaches to (hardly) helping the world understand what went on in Wuhan before the Covid-19 outbreak in November 2019. Baric has remained largely silent, refusing to do interviews or sign up to articles in the scientific press. He remained silent last week, too, but the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released the transcript of a lengthy closed-door session it held with him in January.
Daszak, by contrast, has adopted a high profile, organising round-robin letters defending his friends and colleagues in Wuhan, giving interviews, writing articles and getting himself appointed to not one but two commissions investigating Covid’s origins, despite a glaring conflict of interest. He appeared before the subcommittee on 1 May.
Both men reluctantly admitted under oath to points that markedly strengthen the already strong hypothesis that the pandemic began with an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan. But before considering what they said, it might be worth briefly looking at the relationship between the two.
In comments on a draft of a grant proposal written in 2018, which were made public last year, Daszak boasted of how cheap it is to do experiments in Wuhan because they use a lower biosafety level (BSL-2), without negative-pressure work cabinets. Baric responded that US scientists would “freak out” at that. So a newly released email Baric sent to Daszak on 27 May 2021 smacks one’s gob somewhat. Responding to Daszak’s insistence that the Wuhan Institute actually used safer versions of these low safety standards for its experiments, Baric wrote:
Your [sic] being told a bunch of BS. Bsl2 [with] negative pressure, give me a break. There [sic] last paper mentioned bsl2 [with] appropriate PPE. This last part was the first and only time this was ever mentioned, never in earlier papers, and in the latest paper never defined either. I have no doubt that they followed state-determined rules and did the work under bsl2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.
Baric clearly does not have a high regard for the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s safety standards, or indeed for his virus-hunting grantrepreneur colleague, Daszak. Nor do some other scientists who have nonetheless defended Daszak in public. Thanks to freedom-of-information revelations, we now know that “Dastwat” and “EgoHealth” are just two of the epithets used about him by his friends. With friends like that …
Both men still insist, however, that the pandemic began naturally – but, to borrow from Mandy Rice-Davies, they would say that wouldn’t they? Before the subcommittee, where even the Democrats gave him a pasting, Daszak was forced to concede some key points on which he had previously stonewalled or said the opposite.
Firstly, he had to concede that a lab leak was possible. Yet back in 2020, Daszak told Democracy Now that “the idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true … So it’s just not possible.”