From the reckless oh so reckless Bundesminister für Gesundheit
Wir haben als EU die Impfstoffentwicklung erfolgreich unterstützt u uns gemeinsam Impfdosen gesichert. Alle nötigen Daten zu BioNTech liegen vor. UK + US haben bereits Zulassungen erteilt. Eine Prüfung der Daten u die Zulassung durch die EMA sollten schnellstmöglich erfolgen.
Es geht dabei auch um das Vertrauen der Bürgerinnen und Bürger in die Handlungsfähigkeit der Europäischen Union. Bund und Länder sind ab dem 15.12. in der Fläche einsatzbereit: Erste Impfdosen stehen quasi bereit und könnten direkt nach der Zulassung verimpft werden.
Jeder Tag, den wir früher beginnen können zu impfen, mindert Leid und schützt die besonders Verwundbaren.
In other words, he is pissed that the EU has not yet approved any vaccines. Link here, via Andreas Backhaus. Of course, if you are a good Bayesian this also should lead you to update your sense of the speediness of the FDA…
Monday assorted links
1. Ross Douthat says have more kids. And Scott Sumner random thoughts.
2. Income More Reliably Predicts Frequent Than Intense Happiness.
3. Revision of an earlier FT report: Chinese Belt and Road lending isn’t falling off by as much as reported.
4. More on battery progress. And speculative claims about iron powder as a power source.
*A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music*
That is the new book by Paul Morley, with the parenthetical subtitle “(And Decided to Rewrite its Entire History)”.
It is one of my favorite books of the year, though I recommend it most to those who already have a background in the topic. It is wide-ranging, with plenty of emphasis on the contemporary and why Harrison Birtwistle is the brilliant composer you never properly understood. If you grade music books on “how many different pieces of music does it make me want to listen to/relisten to,” this is one of the best music books of all time.
Here is one excerpt I liked:
Eno said that he was interested in the Borgesian idea that you could invent a world in reverse by inventing the artefacts that ought to be in its first. You think what kind of music would be in that world — in this case, background music made as art — then you make the music and the world forms itself around the music…
Bang on a Can produced a live instrumental version of the four pieces, and Eno has humbly said that their interpretation moved him to tears. Husband-and-wife artists Lou reed and Laurie Anderson heard it performed live and they said it was heartbreaking. Without thinking, or rather, with thinking, Eno had composed a piece of music that is all at once flat and multidimensional, barren and detailed, near and far, music and sound, feeling and unfeeling, spiritual and vacant, real and unreal, mundane and magical.
It is the kind of book that suddenly stops and reels off 89 numbered points you are supposed to be interested in. And I am. But sprawling it is, and your mileage may vary. And yes most of it is about actual “classical” music, whatever that is supposed to mean these days. This is one book I will not throw out.
Remote Work Impact on Ending The Great Stagnation?
Jeff Allen emails me:
If the Great Stagnation is ending (we will see), it seems as if the COVID-forced remote work revolution has to have played some sort of role.
Speaking from personal experience as a white collar Exec, the productivity gains for our highest value workers has been immense. The typical time-sucks and distractions of in-office work have been eliminated, as have their personal time investments like physically visiting the grocery store or running errands. Mental focus on productive efforts is near constant.
Perhaps most importantly, work *travel* is not happening. Valuable collaborations with colleagues, customers, regulators or other partner companies aren’t delayed by the vagaries of the various groups’ availability to meet in person, navigating being in different cities, flights, hotels, etc. Collaboration happens as soon as you have the idea to meet via Zoom. And a lot *more* collaboration happens as a result. It may be lower productivity collaboration than meeting in person around a whiteboard (maybe), but the sheer quantity of it means on net there’s perhaps been a boom in cross-pollination of ideas.
Not to mention all of the wasted productivity time that work travel eats up by putting high value workers in low productivity transit mode….Uber to airport, security lines, wait for flight in the terminal, maybe grab an hour of in-flight WiFi to catch up on email, land, taxi on the airstrip for 20 minutes, Uber to hotel…is completely gone from our lives.
In general, I think we drastically overrate the value of work travel.
I’m sure this Mass Virtualization event doesn’t benefit all workers equally.
But could it be an accelerant for certain high-value innovations worked on by the best of the best in science and technology?
I’m not saying I don’t want the world to go back to normal. Travel is great. In-person human interaction certainly has many benefits (duh). But I think we should ask ourselves how we can retain some of the best advantages this last year has brought us, even after the vaccines and herd immunity bring us back to something resembling normalcy in 2021.
Here is a related Robin Hanson post on the importance of work from a distance. Of course remote work is, to some extent, a way around both immigration and NIMBY restrictions. You will note this is all very much in line with my earlier take that, if the great stagnation ends, it will be because we have placed the internet at the center of our institutions, rather than using the internet as an add-on.
From my email, on bioethicists
Hi Tyler. I had a brief career as an ethicist. I realized quickly that the incentives are all wrong if what we want is people who will think hard about humanity’s pressing ethical dilemmas and who will suggest intuitively appealing solutions.
Since almost all ethicists are academics, they have to publish, and in order to publish you have to be novel, and since the basic principles of ethics are little changed for millennia the incentives to do thorough homework on the basis of principles which are widely understood and accepted is not great.
Furthermore, if you decide to be a utilitarian, then basically all ethical issues will boil down to cost/benefit analyses which you have to outsource to technocrats, so your unique expertise as an ethicist will be worth little.
For whatever it’s worth, one could justify most of the widespread opinions of bioethicists and other ethicists who reach conclusions quite repugnant to utilitarians on the basis of “care ethics”. The result is not important and even the rule is not important, what is important is the amount of personal concern you project to specific human beings. Most people would prefer not to expose their close family members to mortal danger so adopting a policy deliberately exposing strangers to such danger appears un-caring.
If ethicists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
The name of the author has been anonymized to protect the innocent.
Sunday assorted links
1. That Biogen conference in Boston was worse than you thought. And Swedish deaths now at 2/3 of April peak.
2. The bull semen storage culture that is India.
3. Will the French invest in “enhanced soldiers”?
4. The Economist on hydrogen-powered flight.
5. James Flynn has passed away.
6. Very good Ross piece (NYT).
What might an end to the Great Stagnation consist of?
If indeed it did, they are asking a similar question at The Economist. In recent times you might cite the onset of Apple’s M1, GPT-3, DeepMind’s application of AI to protein folding, phase III for a credible malaria vaccine, a CRISPR/sickle cell cure, the possibility of a universal flu vaccine, mRNA vaccines, ongoing solar power progress, wonderful new batteries for electric vehicles, a possibly new method for Chinese fusion (?), Chinese photon quantum computing, and ongoing advances in space exploration, most of all from SpaceX. Tesla has a very high market valuation, and Elon is the world’s second richest man.
Distanced work is very important, and here is a separate post on that.
I would say that almost certainly the great stagnation is over in the biomedical sciences. It is less obvious that the great stagnation is over more generally, as we might simply retreat into our former sloth and complacency once we are mostly vaccinated. Applied Divinity Studies has posed some pointed questions about why we might think that stagnation is over.
If you are looking for a quick metric to indicate the great stagnation might be over, consider total factor productivity. It is entirely possible that tfp in 2021 will be 5 or more, its highest level ever. (To be sure, this will show up as a measured increase in inputs more than as tfp, but we all know why those inputs will be increasing and that is because of science…yes this is a problem with tfp measures!) Over the two years to follow after that, we should be seeing very high tfps around the world. So that will be very high tfp for a few years.
Again, that is not proof of a permanent or even an ongoing end to the great stagnation. But it is something.
Two more general points seem relevant. First, many of the biomedical advances seem connected to new platforms, new modes of computation, new uses of AI, and so on, and they should be leading to yet further advances. Second, there are (finally!) some very real advances in energy use, and those tend to bring yet other advances in their wake, and not just advances in bit space.
But not all is rosy. If you recall my paper with Ben Southwood, the obstacles standing in the way of faster scientific progress, such as specialization and bureaucratization, mostly remain and some of them will be getting worse.
My The Great Stagnation, published in 2011, offered some pointed predictions. It argued that the “next big thing” was already with us, namely the internet, but we simply hadn’t learned to use it effectively yet. Once we put the internet at the center of many more of our institutions, rather than treating it as an add-on, the great stagnation would end. Numerous times (using roughly a 2011 start date) I predicted that the great stagnation would be over within twenty years time, though not in the next few years. The Great Stagnation in fact was an optimistic book, at least if you read it to the end and do not just mood affiliate over the title.
By no means would I say that specific scenario has been validated, but as a prediction it is looking not so crazy.
The gains from truly mobilizing the internet may in fact right now be swamping all of the accumulated obstacles we have put in the way of progress.
I also wrote, in 2011, that as the great stagnation approaches its end, we will all be deeply upset, and long for the earlier times. That too is by no means obviously wrong.
That was then, this is now; science and chaos edition
A blast from the past, circa 1688 and thereabouts:
Even as the House of Lords was starting to consider what to do after the departure of James, many sprang to settle old scores and reopen old issues. Legal toleration made the Church of England more defensive and less tolerant of sceptical or heterodox opinions. The Nine Years War from 1688, in which England at first suffered severe reverses at sea, strained the economy and finances of the country almost to breaking. The great silver recoinage of the late 1690s aggravated the problems; Halley was then deputy controller of the country Mint in Chester. He may have suffered from the great disaster of 1693, the loss of many ships of a Levant Company fleet off Lagos. The war lasted for much of the time that Halley was Clerk, and it undoubtedly delayed his project to observe the magnetic variation in the Atlantic. It was an anxious decade, a dangerous decade for anyone holding responsible office; in it [Edmond] Halley had some of his most original and influential ideas.
That is from Alan Cook’s Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Halley was a contemporary of Newton, Wren, Pepys, Hooke, Purcell, Locke, and Dryden, among others.
The rude people who comment on Derek Lowe’s blog
Gotta love the logic of bioethicists…
>> Hey guys, can we maybe run a vaccine challenge trial to help accelerate research? We’ve got 30k volunteers signed up already
Aw jeez, that would be horrible! Humans are unable to consent to taking a deadly risk! (though lets ignore doctors volunteering to work despite PPE shortages or soldiers volunteering to fight in remote countries) We might harm a few hundred people with this challenge trial so its best if we just run a Phase 3 trial and wait for months and months to get the results. Who cares if lives could be saved by accelerating the research?
>> Hey guys, we’ve got this vaccine candidate that’s only effective on young people. Can we just launch a Phase 3 trial for young people while we run a separate Phase 1/2 trial for older people?
Aw jeez, that would be bad! Old people are people too and we might hurt someone’s feelings if we declare that there’s a vaccine that’s only available for young folks. Lets just delay it by many months instead to the point where it becomes irrelevant, even if it could’ve saved tens of thousands of people in the meantime.
>> Folks, I’ve got this Oxford vaccine that’s 62% effective and has no major side effects. Can we start using it?
Aw jeez, absolutely not! Some people might get offended because they could’ve received the 90% effective vaccine instead, even if that 90% vaccine is in short supply and wouldn’t actually be available to them for many months to come. Rather than offending people, we should just let them die from COVID – that way we’re not to blame for anything. So lock that vaccine up until you run many more trials and ignore the fact that this causes tens of thousands of extra deaths. Bio ethics above all!
Here is the post link. From myst_05.
How should the possible end of the Great Stagnation influence your media diet?
I’ll soon write more on whether the Great Stagnation truly is over, and how we might know, but for now it suffices to mention a lot is going on in science and also in applied science and actual invention, not just nifty articles in Atlantic. On net, this means you should spend more time consuming YouTube videos (try this one on protein folding). They tend to be current, and to explain difficult matters in visual and also in fairly memorable terms. There will be such videos for virtually every new advance. You should read fewer normal books, more vertigo-inducing books, and spend less time on social media. You should read more Wikipedia articles, and when you read books you should select more from the history of science and times of turmoil. You should read this blog more often too.
Are the elites worse than you think?
Here is a new and important paper by Joshua D. Kertzer, noting that it mainly confirms what I observe every day (aren’t those the very best research studies?) Here is part of the abstract:
…political scientists both overstate the magnitude of elite-public gaps in decision-making, and misunderstand the determinants of elite-public gaps in political attitudes, many of which are due to basic compositional differences rather than to elites’ domain-specific expertise.
My rewrite of his sentence is that elites are arguing from their class and demographic biases (a bias can be positive, to be clear), not from their expertise. That lowers the marginal value of expertise, at least given how our world operates. I recall earlier research blogged by Alex showing that if you are a French economist, your views are more influenced by being a French person than by being an economist. And so on.
This is one of the very most fundamental facts about our world, and elites are among the people least likely to have internalized it.
Have a nice day.
What should I ask Noubar Afeyan?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is a partial bio:
Noubar was born in Beirut to Armenian parents in 1962, did his undergraduate work at McGill University in Montreal, and completed his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987.
He founded Flagship Pioneering:
Flagship has fostered the development of more than 100 scientific ventures resulting in $30 billion in aggregate value, thousands of patents and patent applications, and more than 50 drugs in clinical development.
During his career as inventor, entrepreneur, and CEO, Noubar has cofounded and helped build over 50 life science and technology startups.
Here is that link, and he is by the way co-founder and chairman of Moderna. And on the board of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
So what should I ask him?
Friday assorted links
1. Using K-Pop to teach economics.
2. Redux of my April 4 post on tethered pairs.
4. Long blog post on DeepMind and protein folding, interesting throughout, but the most interesting section is toward the end on why DeepMind outperformed academic groups.
5. To be clear, I don’t know the answer, but why is no one even asking: “Can’t we just use the Sanofi vaccine on the young people only?” Is it that the answer is so obvious? Or is there excess confomism in this sphere? Is this simply the “this would cause the public to lose confidence in vaccines” mantra, an increasingly under-theorized and unsatisfactory substitute for an actual answer? (Would it even get a “B-” on an undergraduate, upper division psychology term paper or honors thesis?) Inquiring minds wish to know.
5b. And AstraZeneca is testing together with Russian options. Still an open question, but I’ve been saying that the Russian vaccine is underrated.
6. Good evidence for an Italian case of Covid in early December 2019.
How to build Haitian state capacity
Strengthening state capacity in low income countries requires raising tax revenue while maintaining political stability. The risk of inciting political unrest when attempting to increase taxes may trap governments in a low-tax equilibrium, but public goods provision may improve both tax compliance and political stability. To test these questions empirically, I partner with the national tax authority and a local mayor’s office in Haiti to cross-randomize both tax collection and public goods across one of the country’s largest cities. Effects are measured both via administrative data on tax revenue as well as through novel measures of political unrest. In the paper’s main result, I show that hand-delivering property tax invoices reduces individual tax compliance by 48%, and increases independently observed measures of localized political violence by 192%. In contrast, providing a valuable and visible public good (namely municipal garbage removal) increases tax compliance by 27%, and reduces localized political violence by 85%. Importantly, public goods provision significantly mitigates the adverse effects of tax collection in neighborhoods receiving both treatments. A cost accounting exercise suggests that providing the public good in this setting could pay for itself within the first year. These findings suggest that it may be possible to peacefully shift to a new equilibrium of higher tax compliance with a sufficient initial investment perhaps financed through foreign aid or other transfers.
That is a paper from Benjamin Krause, a job market candidate from UC Berkeley. Here is his home page and CV. He was also four years Chief of Staff to Sean Penn, check out the vita.
One marginal Covid-19 and Fast Grants update
A number of scientists (including, but not only, those funded by Fast Grants) have reported some interesting findings related to fluvoxamine, SSRIs and sigma-1 receptor (S1R) agonists more broadly.
- A small RCT at Washington University (n=152) published in JAMA found that patients receiving fluvoxamine had a 0% hospitalization rate (vs. 8.3% for placebo). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2773108
- Another group reported (data not yet published but reported here with permission) a 0% hospitalization rate in a fluvoxamine-treated cohort compared to 11% in the non-treated group. (n=146)
- A large observational analysis (n=7345) of hospitalized French patients found that those on SSRIs (of which fluvoxamine is one) had a very substantially reduced risk of death. (n=257, HR = 0.56.). SSRIs with the highest Sigma1 activation showed the greatest protection. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20143339v2
- Fluvoxamine is a potent sigma-1 receptor agonist. Following their initial report on the role of S1R in SARS-CoV2 – host interaction, Nevan Krogan’s group found that patients receiving another sigma-1 agonist (indomethacin) had a materially reduced likelihood of requiring hospitalization compared to those receiving celecoxib, which doesn’t activate sigma-1. This work was supported by Fast Grants. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6521/eabe9403.full
- Lastly, a genetic screen by a Fast Grants-funded lab (not yet published but reported here with permission) has found that genes upregulated by fluvoxamine significantly inhibit SARS-CoV2 mediated cell death.
On the off chance there is something here, fluvoxamine is relatively safe, cheap, and widely available. We are very open to both positive and negative data in this area, and have funded a further effort. Do let us know if you hear anything on this topic!