What should I ask Chris Blattman?
I will be having a Conversation with him, rooted in his forthcoming book Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. Though not only!
Chris is a political scientist at University of Chicago, but with training in other fields as well and indeed he is also an economist. He has done extensive fieldwork in Colombia and East Africa, both on conflict and also on cash transfers. He is active blogging and tweeting, and is a Canadian too.
Here is my previous Conversation with Chris. So what should I ask him this time around?
Fractional Dosing Trials
My paper Testing fractional doses of COVID-19 Vaccines, co-authored with Kremer et al., has now been published at PNAS. I covered the paper in A Half Dose of Moderna is More Effective than A Full Dose of Astra Zeneca and other posts so I won’t belabor the basic ideas. One new point is that thanks to the indefatigable Michael Kremer and the brilliant Witold Wiecek, clinical trials on fractional dosing on a large scale have begun in Nigeria. Here are a few key points:
WHO SAGE Outreach: The authors have met and presented their work to the World Health Organization (WHO) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE), with follow-up meetings to present evidence coming from new studies.
DIL Workshop and Updates: In the fall of 2021, the Development Innovation Lab (DIL) at UChicago, led by Professor Kremer, hosted a workshop on fractional dosing, collecting updates from clinical researchers from multiple countries conducting fractional dosing trials for COVID-19 vaccines. The workshop also covered issues relating to trial design and included participants from Belgium, Brazil, Ghana, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Thailand, South Africa, UK and the US.
CEPI Outreach: Professor Kremer has also presented this research to The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which is now pursuing a platform trial of fractional dosing.
Country Trials – Nigeria: With the support of DIL and the research team and generous support and advice from WAM Foundation, the charitable arm of Weiss Asset Management and Open Philanthropy, a trial is being conducted in Nigeria by the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, National Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Development, National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, and the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, in coordination with the Federal Ministry of Health.
A comprehensive list of all the trials on fractional dosing conducted to date is at the link. Fractional dosing may come too late for COVID-19 vaccines but perhaps next time a shortage of a vaccine looms we will be more quick to consider policies to stretch supplies.
You want to have strong analytical abilities on your side
No, you don’t always have to agree with the majority of the educated people, but I would say this. For whatever set of views you think is justified, try to stick to the versions of those views held by well-educated, reasonable, analytically-inclined people. You will end up smarter over time, and in better places. Peer effects are strong, including across your ideological partners.
When I hear that a particular group defends liberty, such as the Ottawa truckers’ convoy, while this is partially true it makes me nervous. As a whole, they also seem to believe a lot of nonsense and to be, in procedural terms, not exactly where I would want them on scientific method and the like. Fair numbers of them seem to hold offensive beliefs as well. Whine about The Guardian if you like, but I haven’t seen any rebuttal of this portrait of the views of their leaders. Ugh.
I recall taking a lot of heat for my 2007 critique of Ron Paul and his movement, but that example illustrates my points perfectly. Those people did defend liberty in a variety of relevant ways, but so many of them have ended up in worse spaces. And that is exactly what I predicted way back when.
Look for strong analytical abilities, and if you don’t see it, run the other way.
Here is a defense of the Freedom Convoy. You can read it for yourself, but it doesn’t change my mind. Here is I think a wiser account. I’ll say it again: “Look for strong analytical abilities, and if you don’t see it, run the other way.” I’m running.
TheZvi on Long Covid
Here is a long and characteristically thoughtful post, from his Substack. Here is the opening part of his summary (no double indentation):
“My core model of Long Covid after writing this post:
- Long Covid is real, but less common than many worry it is.
- Reports of Long Covid are often people who have symptoms, then blame them on Long Covid whether or not they even had Covid. The exception is loss of taste and smell.
- Long Covid severity and risk is proportional to Covid severity and risk.
- If you didn’t notice you had Covid, you’re at very very low risk for developing Long Covid.
- Vaccination is thus highly but incompletely protective against Long Covid.
- Children are thus at minimal risk.
- Omicron is thus less likely to cause serious Long Covid than Delta.”
Recommended. Whether or not you agree with every point, I would say that Zvi has enough context to effectively reason across multiple domains — you can’t say the same for everyone!
From my email, on Putin and nuclear war
I just visited the front page of the NYT, WaPo, Der Spiegel’s International section, and FT and there is not a single story about Putin casually inserting the threat of nuclear war in yesterday’s press conference. However, if you scroll down on Daily Mail’s front page Putin’s threat of nuclear war is mentioned.
I think post-Cold War we have irresponsibly decreased our fear of nuclear war than is wise.
That is from Naveen K. Here is news.google.com on the threat, as I am reading the Colorado Springs Gazette is the leading entry.
My podcast with Rabbi Zohar Atkins
Here is the link. We talked about time management, whether books are overrated, Leo Strauss and whether a lot of it isn’t just garbage, why the important thinkers will be religious thinkers, whether contributions to method outlast contributions of thesis, how to “stay in the game,” philosophy more generally, the role of overrated vs. underrated in CWT, whether God exists, and of course Judaism. And Islam. And more!
Note this:
Read more from Zohar at his Torah newsletter Etz Hasadeh or his philosophy newsletter What is Called Thinking.
Here is Zohar on Twitter.
Thursday assorted links
1. Words better known by men than by women, and vice versa.
2. Words better known by American than Brits, and vice versa. I had more cross knowledge on this one.
3. The secret to Joe Rogan’s success.
4. Game theory of a rejoined but weaker Iran nuclear deal.
5. Could an AI revolution cause a new Great Divergence?
6. “So how did Harvard allegedly obtain a Title IX complainant’s third-party, private mental health records without her consent?” And what the commies are saying about it.
7. Thomas Kalil interviews Martin Borch Jensen about longevity research and speeding up philanthropy.
The emergency is over. It’s time to pivot to preparedness
Jonathan Rauch has an excellent column in Persuasion, The emergency is over. It’s time to pivot to preparedness. One bit from yours truly:
A useful suggestion comes from Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University who has been saying smart things about the pandemic since it began. “When vaccines were coming, it made a lot of sense to put off a lot of other good things in life—to do what economists call intertemporal substitution,” he said in a recent interview. “Once vaccines are available and widespread, you can’t intertemporally substitute anymore because there’s no more cavalry coming. This is it. Before vaccines, costly actions can delay your getting COVID until after you’re vaccinated, which is highly valuable. But the corollary is that once you move to the permanent scenario and are vaccinated, costly actions that mostly delay when you get COVID have much less value.”
…That being the case, Tabarrok proposes a rule of thumb: “Whatever we do, we should be thinking about, ‘Do we make this permanent or not?’” If measures are not candidates for permanence, “We might as well stop them now or soon.”
Read the whole thing.
“Context is that which is scarce”
A number of you have been asking me about this maxim, so here is some background on what it means:
1. Ever try to persuade another person? Let’s say it is even of an uncontested idea such as supply and demand. You might “final exam them into admitting that the demand curve slopes downward.” But still, if they do not understand enough of the uses of supply and demand thinking, they will find it hard to think in terms of supply and demand themselves. They will not have the background context to understand the import of the idea.
2. Why did economists for so long stick with cost of production theories of value, rather than adopting the marginal revolution? They didn’t see or understand all the possibilities that would open up from bringing the marginal calculus to microeconomics, and then later to empirical work. Given the context they had, which was for performing simple comparative statics experiments on developing economies, the cost of production theory seemed good enough.
3. One correspondent from a successful company wrote me:
“- I’ve been onboarding ~5 people every two weeks for my team.
– The number of them that actually learn all the important stuff in under a month is zero. The number of them that have a self-guided strategy to learn what is relevant is almost zero.
– Remember these are people with fancy college degrees, that passed a hard interview, and are getting paid $X00k!
– I’m now spending entire days writing / maintaining an FAQ, producing diagrams, and having meetings with them to answer their questions.”
4. Ever wonder about the vast universe of critically acclaimed aesthetic masterworks, most of which you do not really fathom? If you dismiss them, and mistrust the critics, odds are that you are wrong and they are right. You do not have the context to appreciate those works. That is fine, but no reason to dismiss that which you do not understand. The better you understand context, the more likely you will see how easily you can be missing out on it.
5. I use “modern art” or “contemporary art” (both bad terms, by the way) as good benchmarks for whether a person understands “context is that which is scarce.” “Contemporary classical music” too (another bad terms, but you know what I mean). If a person is convinced that those are absurd enterprises, that is a good litmus test for that person not understanding the import of context. You may not prefer things to be this way, but in many cultural areas appreciation of the outputs demands more and more context (Adam Smith called this division of labor, by the way).
6. If you think a great deal of things are “downstream from culture and ideas,” as I do, you also have to think they are downstream of context.
7. Many attributions of bad motives to people, or attributions of conspiracy, spring from a lack of understanding of context. It is easy enough for someone to seem like he or she is “operating in bad faith.” But usually a deeper and better understanding is available.
8. Lack of context is often a serious problem on Twitter and other forms of social media, as they may deliberately truncate context. In some parts of our culture, context is growing more scarce. “When I’m Sixty-Four” makes much more sense on Sgt. Pepper than it does on Spotify.
9. So much of education is teaching people context. That is why it is hard, and also why it often does not seem like real learning.
10. When judging people for leadership positions, or for jobs that require strongly synthetic abilities, you should consider how well they are capable of generating an understanding of context across a broad range of domains, including ex nihilo, so to speak. How to test for understanding of context is itself a topic we could consider in more depth.
Addendum: MR, by the way, or at least my contributions to it, is deliberately written to give you less than full context. It is assumed that you are up to speed on the relevant discourse, and are hungering for the latest tidbit on top of where you are currently standing. Conversations with Tyler also are conducted on a “I’m just going to assume you have the relevant context and jump right in” — that is not ideal for many people, or they may like the performance art of it without it furthering their understanding optimally. But it keeps me motivated because for me the process is rarely boring. I figure that is more important than keeping you all happy. It also attracts smarter and better informed readers and listeners, which in turn helps me keep smart and alert. I view my context decisions, in particular the choice to go “minimal upfront context” in so many settings, as essential to my ongoing program of self-education.
My Conversation with the excellent Sebastian Mallaby
Venture capital most of all, hedge funds as well with the Fed tossed in. Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is one excerpt from the Conversation:
COWEN: What do you think of the view that in recent years, there’s been a huge consumer retail tech boom? Basically FAANG stocks, right? And when that is over — it might be over now — the excess returns to VC will go away. If you look at venture capital for biotech, which has been hammered lately, as we’re speaking here, late January 2022 — and maybe venture capital is a limited model for one period of time, and otherwise, it just does okay. True or false?
MALLABY: False. I say that because, in a cyclical sense, you might be right, but I think there’s a deep structural shift, which is really important. That is that intangible capital has become more and more important in our economy. The nature of intangible capital is that it’s hard to measure it in financial reports.
To understand whether a particular software investment, for example, is worth a huge amount or, really, nothing, you need to understand what that software development within the company is doing. You need to be hands-on. You need to have the technical skills to evaluate that software project. The more that intangible capital rises as a share of new GDP creation, the more this venture-style hands-on expert investing is going to be valuable.
COWEN: Your explanation — if I understand it — to me seems to suggest that venture capital for biotech won’t work very well. You’re portraying it as something that’s very, very hard to do, a very limited skill, so you’re going to be wrong a lot of times. That means the times you’re right, the product has to be scalable very rapidly.
But in biotech, there are regulators. You often need a sales force. It’s not scalable in the way that, say, LinkedIn or Netflix are scalable. Doesn’t that mean VC will just stay limited to a very small area of those things that are super rapidly scalable? Or if you think it’s pretty easy to pick winners, then you have to think the rents get exhausted.
MALLABY: [laughs] Yeah, this is a version of, actually, a wider debate which goes beyond biotech, which is the claim that venture capital is really only good for software projects, that software can be scaled very, very fast; there are network effects once you get product-market fit, and you don’t need much capital.
And this:
COWEN: I have some questions about other topics. You have some highly regarded books about hedge funds and about the Fed. In the late ’90s, the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management — was that a kind of original sin that just set us on a path of bailing more things out at higher and higher price tags? Should we have just let LTCM fall?
MALLABY: No, I think the original sin was Continental Illinois, much earlier in 1986, I believe, when the Fed bailed out this bank which it thought was too big to fail. I’m not sure it really was too big to fail, but it was a moment when the Latin American debt crisis was still casting a shadow, when the banking system was perceived to be fragile, and the Fed just wasn’t willing to let it go. That was the original sin because taxpayer money was used to bail it out.
There is much more at the link, and I am very happy to recommend Sebastian’s new and very good book The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Caetano Veloso profile (New Yorker).
4. How it started, and now how it is going.
*The Jesuits: A History*
That is the forthcoming book by Markus Friedrich, a kind of definitive history at 671 pp. of text but also interesting throughout. It is the book this year I am so far most excited about, and it is highly likely I read the entire thing. The Jesuits started off as ten men, they had major impact on many parts of the world, and centuries later they still exist and with broadly the same mission. How’s that for success?
Here is one passage that for obvious reasons caught my eye:
The Jesuits invested the lion’s share of their bureaucratic efforts in personnel planning. We have already encountered the Society’s obsession with the quality, education, and development of its members several times — this passion was translated into bureaucratic procedures to an astounding degree. Every Jesuit’s mental, spiritual, intellectual, and physical capacity was routinely evaluated. The Society devised elaborate procedures for conducting such examinations. Even the wording of these assessments was prescribed. A kind of grading system with standard content was devised that was then used to answer about a dozen questions from each member. Every three years, local and provincial superiors were required to prepare interviews of the staff under their authority, whom they were required to assess in table form. These catalogues have justly been celebrated as an outstanding example of the bureaucratization of the modern period.
Definitely recommended, I am keen to read more.
Writers and status
The problem isn’t that writing generates status, but rather that this status is grossly out of proportion to the wages they are earning in the market. Amongst other problems, this selects for people who value status over wages (often because they are independently financially secure). In this light it’s not surprising the community has become so geographically concentrated – there are enormous rewards to living with the people the most recognize and grant this status. This is not unto itself a problem until that concentration is part of greater demand for what is already some of the most expensive real estate in the world. I’d wager there are more than a few writers with non-trivial followings out there whose Brooklyn lifestyle is a net monetary loss every month. Thats bad, but honestly I think its even worse than it sounds.
And:
Status rewards incentivize geographic concentration, which will in turn intensify herding behavior. If the bulk of your compensation is in-group status, you’re going to want to spend as much time with that group as possible. Your social life will become more important than ever. That also means, however, that anything that might risk disdain or ostracism within the group is to be avoided whenever possible. This means opinions, particularly on subjects that don’t directly impact your life, will tend to become more and more homogeneous over time. It also means hypotheses born of motivated reasoning i.e. the next mayor will be super progressive or want to “defund the police” can acquire a life of their own and quickly evolve from idea spoken aloud in a Brooklyn cocktail bar to universally accepted truth within an insular community. This classic herding phenomenon is relative to the broader world in this case because this particular community spends its working hours delivering the news to us.
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.