Month: November 2020
My favorite fiction of 2020
Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel.
Anne Enright, Actress: A Novel.
Susannah Clarke, Piranesi.
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet.
Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults.
Of those Hamnet was my clear favorite, then the Enright. Here is my non-fiction list, which also explains why the lists have come earlier this year.
Best non-fiction books of 2020
Usually I give this list much later in November, but shopping rhythms are off this year. Furthermore The Strand bookstore in NYC is rather desperately asking for your business, as is Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, and many other independent bookshops. Nor would it hurt Barnes & Noble if you spent your money there, and I hear Amazon is hiring and boosting the macroeconomy. I believe bookstores in England will be closing in a few days, so hurry now. Finally, I hope you will stay home and read these rather than traveling for Thanksgiving!
As usual, these are (roughly) in the order I read them, not ranked by preference or quality.
Anton Howes, Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation.
Garett Jones, 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust the Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less.
Bruno Macaes, History has Begun: The Birth of a New America.
Thane Gustafson, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe.
Dietrich Vollrath, Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success.
Ronald S. Calinger, Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius of the Enlightenment.
Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit.
Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton, The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life.
Hollis Robbins, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African-American Sonnet Tradition.
Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.
Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story.
Joe Henrich, The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
Oliver Craske, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar.
Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.
Deirdre Mask, The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power.
Daniel Todman, Britain’s War 1942-1947.
Brent Tarter, Virginians and Their History.
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures.
Matt Yglesias, One Billion Americans.
Ed Douglas, Himalaya: A Human History.
Michael Wood, The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilization and its People.
Kevin Davies, Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.
Nicholas McDowell, Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
This is indeed a fantastic list, really strong, and apologies to those I have forgotten (there are always some). I will be doing a revised, updated, and last two months filled in list much later in December.
And here are the additions:
Darmon Richter, Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide.
Monday assorted links
1. That was then, this is now: Daniel Defoe vs. Covid-19. And the pandemic has reduced affective polarization.
2. Interview with a retired PLA colonel about U.S.-China relations.
3. The rise of Platonic co-parenting?
4. You will not remain known for your contributions, a striking poll. Not even Thomas Schelling. That said, this is a potential source of comparative advantage for you. If you are willing to give up traditional notions of “receiving credit,” often you can be far more effective.
5. Prominent British epidemiologist unable to answer basic questions about trade-offs (about ten minutes). Embarrassing and indicative.
6. Russian holidays predict troll activity. And the sauna crossbow Sausage King-killing culture that is Russia.
7. Lower-education people (lower status people?) feel more knee pain for a given ailment.
Vaccine politics will soon replace electoral politics
That is the title and theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
And who should get the vaccine first? The elderly are more vulnerable, but the young are more likely to spread Covid-19. Some recent results suggest it would be better to vaccinate the young first, but that is less politically likely. Again, it is easy to see potential conflicts over this question, cutting across traditional party lines.
An even more complex problem would arise if one good vaccine is available but other, possibly better, vaccines are imminent. Does everyone get the “good enough” vaccine, disrupting the ability to conduct clinical trials to see if the other vaccines are better? How much patience do Americans have, really?
Americans would probably resent having to wait. But if they end up choosing a lesser quality vaccine, over the long run they might be unhappier yet. It is not clear the U.S. public health bureaucracy is up to the task of approving one vaccine and restructuring the other trials (possibly by paying participants more to stay in, or by shifting to other countries for data) so they can continue.
Be prepared for a mess, with almost everybody unhappy.
Blog and Substack contest winners
To date there are three:
1. Anton Howes for his Substack Age of Invention. He is a historian of invention, often but not exclusively focusing on the eighteenth century, here is Anton on Twitter. As a separate matter, don’t forget Anton’s excellent recent book Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation.
2. Works in Progress. Here is their About page: “Works in Progress is a new online magazine dedicated to sharing novel ideas and stories of progress, and features original writing from some of the most interesting thinkers in the world.” The major individuals behind Works in Progress are Sam Bowman, Saloni Dattani, Ben Southwood, and Nick Whitaker, all with bios at the previous link, all strong intellectual forces.
Note also: “Works in Progress is always looking for new writers for upcoming issues and our blog. Reach out if you want to talk about writing for us, with a short summary or abstract of your piece.”
3. Alice Evans, lecturer at King’s College London. Here is Alice on Twitter. She is working on “”THE GREAT GENDER DIVERGENCE” What explains global variation in gender relations?” and here is her related blog on that same topic. Here is her famous post on gender relations in north vs. south India. Her home page also links to her podcast.
I do expect there will be further awards, and I will keep you posted (here is the original announcement). If you just started writing a blog and submitted, you may still be in the running for the future. In the meantime, congratulations to these winners!
The Wisdom of the Inner Crowd
Abstract: Many decisions rest upon people’s ability to make estimates of some unknown quantities. In these judgments, the aggregate estimate of the group is often more accurate than most individual estimates. Remarkably, similar principles apply when aggregating multiple estimates made by the same person – a phenomenon known as the “wisdom of the inner crowd”. The potential contained in such an intervention is enormous and a key challenge is to identify strategies that improve the accuracy of people’s aggregate estimates. Here, we propose the following strategy: combine people’s first estimate with their second estimate made from the perspective of a person they often disagree with. In five pre-registered experiments (total N = 6425, with more than 53,000 estimates), we find that such a strategy produces highly accurate inner crowds (as compared to when people simply make a second guess, or when a second estimate is made from the perspective of someone they often agree with). In explaining its accuracy, we find that taking a disagreeing perspective prompts people to consider and adopt second estimates they normally would not consider as viable option, resulting in first- and second estimates that are highly diverse (and by extension more accurate when aggregated). However, this strategy backfires in situations where second estimates are likely to be made in the wrong direction. Our results suggest that disagreement, often highlighted for its negative impact, can be a powerful tool in producing accurate judgments.
From a paper by Van de Calseyde and Efendić.
What this means is that diversity can improve group thinking but you need cognitive diversity, i.e. you need people in the group who disagree with one another not people who all agree despite superficial differences.
Another simple tool to make judgment more accurate is the premortem.
Hat tip: The excellent Steve Stewart-Williams.
Uncertainty and the import of norm adherence
The cabinet agreed the measures during an emergency Zoom meeting after being presented with data that showed the NHS would run out of bed capacity by the first week in December.
That is from the London Times, and it is the government’s rationale for a new and very strict lockdown plan. Once you are in this position, there are truly no good choices, nor will you succeed in “protecting the vulnerable” under any of the paths before you.
But let’s turn the clock back a wee bit, shall we say to Liverpool, circa July 2020. At that point, in the “clubby” part of town, drunken youths were walking around, arm-in-arm, serenading each other and singing. Without masks. Barber shops were full, the barbers are wearing plastic visors (often no masks, and it seems the visors are less effective) and many of the patrons were wearing no masks. Overall the mask-wearing rate did not seem to exceed ten percent, if that. People on the (closed window) trains to and from Liverpool often did not have masks, and they were gabbing rather than silent. Few natives were looking aghast at any of this. And unlike in London and parts of southeast England, there was no plausible reason whatsoever to believe in herd immunity for Liverpool.
The recommendation is simply that Liverpool and most or all other parts of England needed stronger norms back then. To stop later severe lockdowns.
And here is Max Roser on testing.
If someone talks about “protecting the vulnerable,” ask a simple follow-up question: how much are they also talking about masks and testing (and biomedical advances)?
You can argue about exactly how effective masks are, or how much the current Covid return is a purely seasonal effect, or what about Peltzman effects (mask wearers will take more risks), and so on. There is typically uncertainty about just how strong norms will be in their final effects, but that is not reason to toss out those norms.
But if people aren’t even trying, you know something is very, very wrong. Blame the elites. Blame the people themselves. Those two alternatives are not nearly as distinct as they might seem.
And I am not asking for the impossible or for the totalitarian. Liverpudlians and the now on the run cohorts of Europeans would be much better off if they had only matched the rather ragged norms and safety record of my own northern Virginia, which is full of immigrants I might add. People here made many mistakes, but on the whole never became altogether negligent.
Europe is seeing a major second wave of its current magnitude because, in so many places, people simply stopped trying. With vaccines on the way, those were indeed grave errors.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Scrutiny of this proposition through the lens of rational choice theory suggests, however, that exorcism was inferior to executions as a technology choice for the congregant-maximizing Puritan ministers in Salem Village in 1692.” Link here.
2. Good Ross column! (NYT)
4. Economists give reasons why they voted. What do you think?
5. Is this true?: “Iran bypassing American sanctions by nationalizing cryptocurrency miners. A new regulation requires miners to sell their coins directly to the Iranian central bank for use to fund imports.”
6. Bruno and his substack on Islam, good piece.
*Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art*
By Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an excellent book, a very responsible treatment of what we do and do not know about Neanderthals, with a bit on Denisovans as well. It is a book full of sentences such as: “Micro-morphology has also provided proof that, far from being slovenly, Neanderthals were regularly disposing of their rubbish.” It seems they enjoyed mussels and also grubs, among many other foodstuffs. The hearth was the center of the home and they had fairly advanced systems for butchery. They used leather and deployed pigments.
I enjoyed this segment:
Parisians, Londoners or Berliners today with ostensibly European heritage have very little connection even to Mesolithic people just 10,000 years ago. The vast majority of their DNA comes from a massive influx of Western Asian peoples during the Neolithic. This means that many of the first H. sapiens populations are more extinct than the neanderthals; not a great sign of evolutionary dominance.
Recommended, you can order here.
Micro-hemorrhages and the importance of vaccination
Neurological manifestations are a significant complication of coronavirus infection disease-19 (COVID-19). Understanding how COVID-19 contributes to neurological disease is needed for appropriate treatment of infected patients, as well as in initiating relevant follow-up care after recovery. Investigation of autopsied brain tissue has been key to advancing our understanding of the neuropathogenesis of a large number of infectious and non-infectious diseases affecting the central nervous system (CNS). Due to the highly infectious nature of the etiologic agent of COVID-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), there is a paucity of tissues available for comprehensive investigation. Here, we show for the first time, microhemorrhages and neuropathology that is consistent with hypoxic injury in SARS-CoV-2 infected non-human primates (NHPs). Importantly, this was seen among infected animals that did not develop severe respiratory disease. This finding underscores the importance of vaccinating against SARS-CoV-2, even among populations that have a reduced risk for developing of severe disease, to prevent long-term or permanent neurological sequelae. Sparse virus was detected in brain endothelial cells but did not associate with the severity of CNS injury. We anticipate our findings will advance our current understanding of the neuropathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 infection and demonstrate SARS-CoV-2 infected NHPs are a highly relevant animal model for investigating COVID-19 neuropathogenesis among human subjects.
That is from new Fast Grants supported research by Tracy Fischer, et.al. And here are some related earlier results from Kabbani and Olds. Here are some more general recent results about brain damage.
How bad are these micro-hemorrhages anyway? I don’t know! You may notice I have hardly lunged at the “permanent damage” papers that have been coming out on Covid (in fact many of them already have collapsed or not replicated). But there are genuine reasons for caution, these results do not seem to be collapsing, and Covid-19 is not just a bunch of people trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. And “exposing the young” decisions should not be taken lightly either. The people who are very cautious about reopening may be too risk-averse given realistic alternatives, but they are not all just statists, Trump haters, lazy teachers’ unions, and so on. There are very genuine concerns here.
New results on vaccine-mask interaction
However, if face mask use is reduced by 50%, a vaccine that is only 50% effective (weak vaccine) would require coverage of 55-94% to suppress the epidemic in these states [CA, NY, TX, FL]. A vaccine that is 80% effective (moderate vaccine) would only require 32-57% coverage to suppress the epidemic. In contrast, if face mask usage stops completely, a weak vaccine would not suppress the epidemic, and further major outbreaks would occur. A moderate vaccine with coverage of 48-78% or a strong vaccine (100% effective) with coverage of 33-58% would be required to suppress the epidemic.
That is from a new paper by Mingwang Shen, et.al., via Alan Goldhammer.
As for the European lockdowns currently under way, I do not know which choices those nations should be making. The British one, which I know the most about, seems far too strict to me. No matter what your exact point of view, surely there is something to David Conn’s comment:
Government gone from spending £500m paying people to eat out, to closing all the restaurants, in 2 months.
In any case, if those nations had continued (or in some cases initiated) widespread mask use, they would be facing much, much better trade-offs today.