Month: August 2018

My Conversation with Michelle Dawson

Here is the transcript and audio, I am very pleased (and honored) to have been able to do this.  She is an autism researcher, and so most of the discussion concerned autism, here is one excerpt:

COWEN: What would be the best understanding of autism, from your perspective?

DAWSON: The best understanding is seeing autism as atypical brain functioning, resulting in atypical processing of all information. So that’s information across domains — social, nonsocial; across modalities — visual, auditory; whatever its source, whether it’s information from your memory, information coming from the outside world, that is atypical. So that is very domain-general atypicality.

What autistic brains do with information is atypical. How it’s atypical, in my view, involves what I’ve called cognitive versatility and less mandatory hierarchies in how the brain works, such that, for example, an autistic brain will consider more possibilities, will nonstrategically combine information across levels and scales without losing large parts of it, and so on. And that applies to all information.

That is strictly my view. I’m not sure anyone would agree with me.

And:

COWEN: Now often, in popular discourse, you’ll hear autism or Asperger’s associated with a series of personality traits or features of personality psychology — a kind of introversion or people being nerdy in some regard. In your approach, do you see any connection between personality traits and autism at all?

DAWSON: There is a small literature that shows some connection. I think it’s very weak, and I say no, I don’t think autism is about personality. Autism is sort of orthogonal to personality. The two are not related. Whatever relation there is does not . . . arises from some third factor, let’s say. If there is one — and again, the evidence is, I think, very weak connecting autism to personality — so just say that maybe, if there’s something, let’s say that personality in autistics might be more high variance. That would be my totally wild guess, but I don’t think autism itself is about personality.

And here is Michelle again:

We don’t — I hope we don’t look at a blind person who is a successful lawyer and assume that he is only very mildly blind or barely blind at all, and then look at a blind person who has a very bad outcome and assume that they must be very severely blind.

We do make those kinds of judgments in autism, saying, “The more atypical the person is, the worse they must be in some sense.” That kind of bias has not only harmed a lot of autistic people, it really has impeded research.

Here is Michelle on Twitter.  We discuss and link to some of her research in the discussion.

How phony was the “phony war”?

It is misleading to think of 1939-1940 as the phoney war or twilight war, or the Sitz-krieg, or bore-war, with all the sense of lack of authenticity and reality these terms now convey.  This was war as Britain and France wanted to wage it and win it.  The dominant propaganda line in Britain in the early months of the war was ‘assurance of victory’, the policy was economic offence and military defence.  Britain was fighting a war ‘for King, for Empire, and for Freedom’, as British propaganda put it.  One reason we still think of the early war as phoney is that the air force was not used for bombing and that Germany was not attacked on land either.  But the navy went on the offensive.  German shipping and trade were swept from the seas.  Imports into Germany were blocked, and from November 1939 its exports too, both extraordinary changes to a world economic system in which Germany was a more significant trader than France.

That is from the quite good Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War, by David Edgerton.

Dan Wang on how technology grows

It is a short essay, here are a few scattered bits:

The real output of the US manufacturing sector is at a lower level than before the 2008 recession; that means that there has not been real growth in US manufacturing for an entire decade. (In fact, this measure may be too rosy—the ITIF has put forward an argument that manufacturing output measures are skewed by excessive quality adjustments in computer speeds. Take away computers, which fewer and fewer people are buying these days, and US real output in manufacturing would be meaningfully lower.) Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at nearly 20 million workers; it fell to 17 million in 2000, 14 million in 2008, and stands at 12 million today. The US population has grown by 40% since 1979, while the number of manufacturing workers has nearly halved.

And:

I think we should try to hold on to process knowledge.

Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine is an extraordinary example in that genre. Every 20 years, caretakers completely tear down the shrine and build it anew. The wooden shrine has been rebuilt again and again for 1,200 years. Locals want to make sure that they don’t ever forget the production knowledge that goes into constructing the shrine. There’s a very clear sense that the older generation wants to teach the building techniques to the younger generation: “I will leave these duties to you next time.”

And:

There’s an entertaining line in the Brad Setser piece I linked to earlier. He tells us that one of the reasons that the US has such a high surplus in the services trade is that Americans have a low propensity to travel abroad. I don’t view that as a great way to earn a trade surplus.

There is much more at the link.