Category: Science
US Pandemic Policy: Failures, Successes, and Lessons
My talk at Bowling Green State University on US Pandemic Policy: Failures, Successes, and Lessons
This was not a black swan event. This was an entirely predicted and predictable event. We knew it was going to happen….And yet, we weren’t ready.
I am told that my talk made many people angry (not at me, natch).
Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort
Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.
Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.
Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers. Substack here.
Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!
Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.
Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.
Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore. Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.
Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.
Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.
Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.
James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.
Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.
Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.
Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.
Congratulations to you all! We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.
Who is working on creative solutions to limit nuclear war risk?
I don’t mean on the macro foreign policy side, but more the micro elements. For instance, how do we make sure all countries with nuclear weapons have accurate early warning systems, so they do not confuse flocks of birds with incoming missiles?
Your suggestions do not have to be credentialed in the traditional sense, but they should be smart, curious, and hard-working, at the very least.
I thank you in advance for the nominations.
Addendum: I am looking for actual suggestions and will delete all “soapbox” comments.
Jesse Michels interviews me at Hereticon
Jesse’s description was “Wide ranging discussion with the brilliant @tylercowen. Topics include: Satoshi’s identity, Straussian Jesus, the Beatles and UFOs. Taped in early January but he presciently expresses concerns around Russia/Ukraine”
Great fun was had by all, and they added in nice visuals.
Be Green: Buy an (Australian) Coal Mine!
In Be Green: Buy A Coal Mine! I wrote:
Buying a coal mine and leaving the coal in the ground looks like a cost-effective way of sequestering carbon dioxide.
Recall, the key idea is that there are coal mines that are barely profitable now so shuttering mines can be a cheap way of sequestering carbon dioxide. Well, it’s starting to happen in Australia.
Tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes has teamed up with international fund manager Brookfield to launch an audacious takeover bid for Australian energy giant AGL with the intention of setting stronger emissions-reduction targets and forcing the early closures of its remaining coal-fired power stations.
Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, is also involved. Unclear whether the bid will be accepted. The Australian government is actually against the idea.
Addendum: Philosopher William MacAskill also told me recently that he liked the idea because it would leave a source of energy that could be used to reboot civilization after an existential crisis. Hadn’t thought about that! MacAskill is always thinking ahead.
Hat tip: Sam Roggeveen.
There will be three JPEs
We are pleased to announce that the Journal of Political Economy is launching two new journals under the JPE umbrella. The Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics and Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics will broaden the scope of high-quality theoretical and empirical papers published by the JPE journals.
That is from my email. One meta-lesson is that to date brand names in academic journals have been underexploited for a long time!
Fishy Results on Ocean Acidification
The replication crisis isn’t just about social psychology. A meta-analysis of the effect of ocean acidification on fish behavior shows a big decline in effect size as the studies get larger and better.
Using a systematic review and meta-analysis of 91 studies empirically testing effects of ocean acidification on fish behavior, we provide quantitative evidence that the research to date on this topic is characterized by a decline effect, where large effects in initial studies have all but disappeared in subsequent studies over a decade. The decline effect in this field cannot be explained by 3 likely biological explanations, including increasing proportions of studies examining (1) cold-water species; (2) nonolfactory-associated behaviors; and (3) nonlarval life stages. Furthermore, the vast majority of studies with large effect sizes in this field tend to be characterized by low sample sizes, yet are published in high-impact journals and have a disproportionate influence on the field in terms of citations. We contend that ocean acidification has a negligible direct impact on fish behavior, and we advocate for improved approaches to minimize the potential for a decline effect in future avenues of research. [emphasis added, AT]
No one cared about Bryan’s spreadsheets
From Bryan:
The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.
I took quality control very seriously. About half a dozen friends gave up whole days of their lives to sit next to me while I gave them a guided tour of the reasoning behind my number-crunching. Four years before the book’s publication, I publicly released the spreadsheets, and asked the world to “embarrass me now” by finding errors in my work. If memory serves, one EconLog reader did find a minor mistake. When the book finally came out, I published final versions of all the spreadsheets underlying the book’s return to education calculations. A one-to-one correspondence between what’s in the book and what I shared with the world. Full transparency.
Now guess what? Since the 2018 publication of The Case Against Education, precisely zero people have emailed me about those spreadsheets. The book enjoyed massive media attention. My results were ultra-contrarian: my preferred estimate of the Social Return to Education is negative for almost every demographic. I loudly used these results to call for massive cuts in education spending. Yet since the book’s publication, no one has bothered to challenge my math. Not publicly. Not privately. No one cared about my spreadsheets.
Here is more from Bryan Caplan. I would make a few points:
1. Work is hardly ever checked, unless a particular paper becomes politically focal in some kind of partisan dispute. You can take this as a sign that Bryan has not dented the political consensus so much, a point I think he would agree with.
2. Researchers discuss and consider your work in a particular area far, far more if you are an insider in that area, making the seminar circuit at top schools. To be clear, Bryan’s work is discussed far more by intelligent humans who are not education researchers, compared to what virtually all of the education researchers have produced. Bryan writes in internet space, where the barriers to entry are much lower. Good for him, I say (duh), but of course not everyone wishes to lower the entry barriers in this manner. And internet writing does have entry barriers of its own. For instance, Bryan has been blogging steadily for many years, which many researchers simply do not wish to do or maybe cannot do well at all.
3. Overall I think we are entering a world where “research” and “idea production” are increasingly separate endeavors. And the latter is moving to the internet, even when it is supplemented by non-internet crystallizations such as books. Bryan’s ideas, of course, have been germinating on EconLog for some time before his education book came out. Do you like this new world? What are its promises and dangers?
Comparing dogs and wolves, with reference to human self-domestication
Based on claims that dogs are less aggressive and show more sophisticated socio-cognitive skills compared with wolves, dog domestication has been invoked to support the idea that humans underwent a similar ‘self-domestication’ process. Here, we review studies on wolf–dog differences and conclude that results do not support such claims: dogs do not show increased socio-cognitive skills and they are not less aggressive than wolves. Rather, compared with wolves, dogs seek to avoid conflicts, specifically with higher ranking conspecifics and humans, and might have an increased inclination to follow rules, making them amenable social partners. These conclusions challenge the suitability of dog domestication as a model for human social evolution and suggest that dogs need to be acknowledged as animals adapted to a specific socio-ecological niche as well as being shaped by human selection for specific traits.
That is from a new article by Friederike Range and Sarah Marshall-Pescini, via Michelle Dawson.
Institute for Progress
That is a new institution founded by Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney, here is the opening of their manifesto:
We’re excited to announce that today we are launching the Institute for Progress, a new think tank in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future.
Despite exhortations that the future is sprinting towards us at an ever-increasing pace, productivity growth has been in long-term decline since the 1970s. This is supposed to be the age of ambitious at the infrastructure investments in the battle to fight climate change, but we can’t even build new solar plants without being vetoed by conservation groups. Hyperloops and supersonic airplanes promise to revolutionize transportation, but building a simple subway extension in NYC costs up to 15 times more per kilometer than it does in other cities around the world.
There is much more at the link, substantive throughout. Science policy, high-skilled immigration, and pandemic preparation will be some of their major issues. Recommended! And supported by Emergent Ventures.
How does an electric car work?
Say you were trying to teach yourself, to a 99th percentile *layperson’s* level, how, say, an electric car actually worked. How would you go about doing that, precisely?
I am not sure exactly how high (or low) a standard that is, but here is what I would do.
1. Watch a few YouTube videos.
2. Read a book or two on how electric cars work, along the way finding an expert or mentor who could answer my questions.
3. If needed, read a more general book about electricity.
4. Try to explain to someone else how electric cars work. Try again.
I would recommend this same general method for many particular questions.
How do geologists think?
From Dinwar, in the comments:
As for what it means to think like a geologist….it’s complicated. There definitely is a particular way of thinking unique to geologists. I’m convinced that it’s something you’re either born with or not; training just finishes what you started. Engineers and geologists think VERY differently, in nearly incompatible ways, which is fun because we work together all the time.
The main thing is, geologists think in terms of the context of deep time. We view everything from the perspective of millions of years, minimum. When a geologist looks at a stream they see the depositional zones, the erosional zones, the flood plane–and they are thinking both how the local geology affected it and how the stream will look in five million years. (As an aside, you get really strange looks when you discuss this with your eight-year-old son at a park.) And I do mean EVERYTHING. I remember drinking some loose-leaf tea once, adding the tea to the cup then the water, and realizing as the leaves settled that the high surface-area-to-volume ratio combined with cell damage from desiccation made them get water-logged very quickly, allowing for certain flood deposits to form. I’d always been curious about that.
Another thing to remember is that geologists by definition are polymaths. You can’t be a third-rate geologist unless you have a deep understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, fluid dynamics, engineering, astronomy, and a host of other fields. Geology is what you get when those fields overlap. I learned as much about brachiopod anatomy from a structural geologist as I did from any paleontologist, and my minerology class started with “Here’s the nuclear physics of stellar evolution.” We’re expected to know drilling and surveying and cartography and…well, pretty much anything that could possibly affect dirt.
Ultimately, since we are dealing with historical sciences, we are detectives. We examine clues, make hypotheses, and look for evidence to support or refute them (for a fantastic discussion of this find the paper “Strong Inference”–that’s held as an ideal for geologic thinking). Like any scientist we look for subtle things, things that have a bearing on our particular field of study. I’m convinced, for example, that the soil in one area I work in has two distinct layers: a loose, fluffy depositional layer of clay, and a more firm layer of clay derived from the limestone bedrock dissolving. This is due to subtle variations in firmness, moisture content, color, whether or not limestone pieces are in the material, etc.–stuff that most people don’t notice. It’s no special ability on my part–my mother notices things about the weave of cloth that are invisible to me, because she makes the stuff. It’s all training. But the desire to look for it? That’s personality.
Field geologists are even worse–we do all that, only in conditions that would make any sane person run screaming. We’re expected to be athletes, MacGyver, scientists, managers, and Les Stroud all rolled into one. On bad days we add combat medic to the list. Hiking on a broken leg isn’t considered an unreasonable expectation (bear in mind I’m talking about the geologists–my safety manager would be VERY cranky to hear about someone doing that!). People who do this sort of thing routinely view the world in slightly different ways from most ordinary people. Most geologists go through a course called Field Camp, which is an introduction to field work. Walk into any geology department that has this and you can tell who’s gone through the class and who hasn’t.
Why I don’t care about geology
A reader request:
I also recently heard you mention on the Clearer Thinking Podcast that Geology is a field you are not as naturally curious about…would love a blog post on fields that you less interested in with a short reflection on why.
First, keep in mind what it means when I say I am not very curious about geology. I am for instance quite interested in the origins of geology, how they relate to the Enlightenment, why some of those origins were in Scotland, and how geology developed as a profession throughout the early part of the 19th century with the formation of geological societies for the first time. I’ve read James Hutton and Charles Lyell (a splendid book to teach reasoning from, among its other virtues), and have a sense of the import of Georges Cuvier for the development of geological science. And of course geological data had a big influence on Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Darwin at first thought he might be making contributions to geology (in a way he was right).
I know that John Playfair (1748-1819) was a founding father of geology. He was trained as a minister and worked as a philosophy instructor and later in mathematics. He became friends with Adam Smith and Joseph Black (an important figure in Linnaean botany) and he tutored Adam Ferguson, a leading light in the Scottish Enlightenment. His younger brother, William Playfair, wrote on political economy, though his work is no longer widely read, not even by history of thought specialists.
In terms of travel, I have been interested in seeing the different layers of geological strata in France and in China especially, Sicily too, and of course in the Western United States. Iceland! I was keen to visit Rotorua in New Zealand. I worry about super-volcanoes, and have read a book about them. How about the role of the Massif Central in French history? Fascinating.
Still I am not interested in geology per se. I cannot “think like a geologist,” whatever that might mean. I am interested in the facts of geology when they intersect with other things I am interested in, such as the Enlightenment or travel, or how geological disasters have shaped human societies. I am interested in economic geology and petroleum geology, and would be interested in any generated knowledge about how “exo-geology” (moons of Saturn!) might relate to the existence of life beyond Earth. I would like to know more about rare earths and why there is so much lithium in the Bolivian desert. I am interested in geology as a source of knowledge and data about climate change.
Still, I know very little about what is inside the crust of the Earth, and am comfortable with that. I couldn’t tell you much about sediments, or thermochronologic studies. I feel if I learned the models of geology, or how geologists use micro-computed tomography, it would not overlap much with my other interests. I could be wrong about that, but currently am short on time for figuring out and correcting such possible errors.
So no, I am not all that interested in geology, but it doesn’t hold such a special status either! I am not interested in most things. Geology may well come in above average.
One lesson of this post is that it is possible to be interested in things one is not interested in, and vice versa.
Malcolm Gladwell requests that I post a bleg
“What’s the best example of an experiment or trial that could be scientifically useful and informative but which can’t be done for legal, ethical or logistical reasons?”
Comments are open…
The mental health benefits of vaccines
We estimate that COVID-19 vaccination reduces anxiety and depression symptoms by nearly 30%. Nearly all the benefits are private benefits, and we find little evidence of spillover effects, that is, increases in community vaccination rates are not associated with improved anxiety or depression symptoms among the unvaccinated. We find that COVID-19 vaccination is associated with larger reductions in anxiety or depression symptoms among individuals with lower education levels, who rent their housing, who are not able to telework, and who have children in their household. The economic benefit of reductions in anxiety and depression are approximately $350 billion. Our results highlight an important, but understudied, secondary benefit of COVID-19 vaccinations.
Here is the NBER working paper by Virat Agrawal, Jonathan H. Cantor, Jeeraj Sood, and Christopher M. Whaley.