Politicising Long COVID; Biden's cognitive abilities; the Hitler hoax; missing the point about the AI apocalypse; and how evil are the rich, really? Plus a collection of cool science links
"you know how the evolution-vs-creationism wars were pretty decisively won by the “evolution” side in the West, to the point that basically nobody ever talks about it any more?"
The Creationism that says evolution had no impact above the human neck - far more practically damaging than the 7 day variety - is as strong as ever in the West.
I don't know, I think calming down was pretty great advice. The COVID years were dominated by mass hysteria on an ahistoric scale. If people had listened to them, we'd be in a much better place.
“Calm down” was a quick gloss, but if you look at the piece you’ll see it was about people saying the virus would fizzle out, we’d never hear about it again, it would only harm a few people in China, etc. Whatever you think about what happened subsequently, those people were very far off!
I see. That's true on one level, but if you view what happened as a case of mass hysteria (or mass formation or whatever term you want to use), then arguably that's how it could have gone. In a parallel universe where governments and media were more cynical about scientists predicting doom, COVID would have been something that primarily concerned doctors and other medical specialists. Most people would read about it a few times in the news and go about their day, much as with Swine Flu. The actual real world impact of COVID outside of the self-inflicted impact was relatively low. A bit bigger than a regular flu season, worthy of being noted in some news stories, but it'd have been perfectly possible for people who don't watch the news to have simply never noticed it at all in the absence of the crazy mitigations.
So in that sense I can't get too worked up about these psychologists. Yes, they were wrong, but their mistake was placing a bet on rationality and losing. Sucks to be them but also, sucks to be all of us.
I don’t recall any mass hysteria. I do recall bodies massing in refrigerated trucks, and thousands of health workers dying because they tended to the infected. But good on you for thinking it wasn’t a big deal.
The refrigerated trucks only appeared in a handful of places which are terminally dysfunctional. New York was STILL keeping bodies in these trucks way into 2021! That isn't because COVID is so deadly, clearly, as it isn't.
Instead of latching on to emotional stories to frame events, focus on the data. That's a psychology best practice, isn't it? The data is clear. Death rates were elevated only by a tiny amount. If it weren't for media coverage and government overreach, the vast majority of people could have gone through the entire thing without noticing there was much happening.
I am a member of an organization that provides translations of various social science articles into Japanese. We am also translating your friend Jason Collins' article with his permission. We would like to translate your Substack article.
Not surprised to hear psychologist experts made poor predictions. The backlash to 'behavioural fatigue' tempted fate and lacked humility. Two members of SPI-B said it had had 'no basis in behavioural science': https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2982.long. Some critiques of behavioural fatigue were fair (what do you mean by fatigue exactly? can it be counteracted? would it appear so quickly as to undermine lockdown efforts?), but not appearing in behavioural science textbooks isn't one of them. (In fact, as you've written in Unherd there was 'basis in behavioural science', after all! https://unherd.com/2021/02/behavioural-science-wont-save-us/).
I'd venture (not helped by how politically motivated them and others seemed at that time) that they didn't ask whether the supposed lack of evidence was a failure of behavioural science or behavioural fatigue. The wider issue contributing to this, I think, is of social science focusing on statistical significance and researchers assuming that 'highly statistically significant' implies 'strongly predictive', which it doesn't (https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/159/9/882/167475). (If only people would look at their R-squareds.) The pandemic was a prediction problem, largely.
What do you think the solution to this is? I'm an academic researcher. I wonder if superforecasting or prediction market-type exercises could improve things by forcing people to be transparent and specific about their expectations and be compared against them later. Not sure how they could be made widespread.
You got some things wrong in your Biden piece. First, it's just not the case that his supporters "barely ever" discuss his age. They've no choice but to discuss it -- all the time. They're asked about it constantly, and polls show Democrats are pretty concerned about it. They're constantly having to acknowledge and minimize his age, mostly due to the extreme difficulty of replacing incumbent party leaders here.
Second, Biden has been notoriously gaffe-prone his entire political career, going back for decades. He has a speech impediment that he copes with in part by switching what he's going to say when he starts to stutter. You can't just point to all his gaffes now that he's old and suggest it's suddenly evidence of his cognitive decline. (I wonder if you've inadvertently bought into Fox's framing here; they've been suddenly presenting every gaffe as evidence of dementia since he became a candidate -- with no context about his long history of this.)
The last bit I'll dispute is what kinds of intelligence matters for a president's skill set. Presidents don't need fast reflexes or great memory to deal with emergencies. Authority to respond to most emergencies has already been delegated by law, and presidents are given options to deal with the ones that require a sign-off. What matters for those kinds of situations is having the wisdom to realize you're not smarter than your expert advisors (which thankfully most presidents know).
Where a president's intelligence DOES matter is in knowing how the nation's complex legislative and administrative processes work, and that's a form of crystalized intelligence he's clearly managed to demonstrate. He's gotten a shocking amount of key legislation through Congress at a time when partisan divides have completely paralyzed the legislative process here. There are very few American leaders who have the temperament and knowledge to pull that off right now. So the experience argument does have some merit in his case.
1) I’ve noticed a STRONG tendency in Democrat-leaning commentators to have focused very strongly on Trump screwups during his Presidency, but almost completely ignore Biden’s similar ones now he’s President. David Pakman, for instance (who I watch regularly to balance out Tucker), still puts out videos almost every day about Trump’s disastrous speech mistakes, and even has a soundboard repeating some of Trump’s most silly errors that he plays all the time. He has mentioned Biden’s errors VERY reluctantly on a couple of occasions.
2) I say this in the piece, WRT Bush Jr. But I still think the “he has a speech impediment” thing is mainly desperate cope. The errors he makes are not that, and if you believe they are you’ve bought into glaringly obvious propaganda yourself.
3) I don’t think this is a mistake I’ve made, just your view on how the Presidency works. I think it’s pretty clear that being sharp in time-pressured situations where lots of info needs to be integrated and fast decisions have to be made is better than being not-sharp. Sure, a big part of it is picking advisors and not thinking you’re smarter than them, but if you’re going for that then you (not you personally, just people on the pro-Biden side) have to drop all the criticisms of Trump’s mental state too.
1. I'll concede there's a partisan double-standard, which I appreciate is your underlying point.
2. He's had a speech impediment his entire career. He was satirized for it when I was in university in the 90s. That's explicitly relevant context to understanding his gaffes. I don't think adding the GWB caveat is enough after you give examples of a lifelong verbal behavior as examples of Biden's decline.
3. You could undoubtedly point to a lot of partisans who ridicule Trump's incoherence. If you drill down though, I think what most people are concerned isn't his intelligence. It's that he won't or doesn't know he needs to listen to people around him. ("Sir, we'd like your permission to let the National Guard secure the Capitol" sort of thing.)
"the 'experts on human behaviour' are no better than the average participant at predicting this stuff."
This is true of experts in just about every field outside the physical sciences, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in study after study, so I'm not sure why psychologists are your focus other than their general popularity as a punching bag.
So you’re saying you agree with the point I made, and it provides further evidence for your pre-existing view, but you wanted to leave a stupid, aggressive comment about it anyway. Thanks mate!
"you know how the evolution-vs-creationism wars were pretty decisively won by the “evolution” side in the West, to the point that basically nobody ever talks about it any more?"
The Creationism that says evolution had no impact above the human neck - far more practically damaging than the 7 day variety - is as strong as ever in the West.
Feel like I've gone through the same thing re: AI.
I don't know, I think calming down was pretty great advice. The COVID years were dominated by mass hysteria on an ahistoric scale. If people had listened to them, we'd be in a much better place.
“Calm down” was a quick gloss, but if you look at the piece you’ll see it was about people saying the virus would fizzle out, we’d never hear about it again, it would only harm a few people in China, etc. Whatever you think about what happened subsequently, those people were very far off!
I see. That's true on one level, but if you view what happened as a case of mass hysteria (or mass formation or whatever term you want to use), then arguably that's how it could have gone. In a parallel universe where governments and media were more cynical about scientists predicting doom, COVID would have been something that primarily concerned doctors and other medical specialists. Most people would read about it a few times in the news and go about their day, much as with Swine Flu. The actual real world impact of COVID outside of the self-inflicted impact was relatively low. A bit bigger than a regular flu season, worthy of being noted in some news stories, but it'd have been perfectly possible for people who don't watch the news to have simply never noticed it at all in the absence of the crazy mitigations.
So in that sense I can't get too worked up about these psychologists. Yes, they were wrong, but their mistake was placing a bet on rationality and losing. Sucks to be them but also, sucks to be all of us.
I don’t recall any mass hysteria. I do recall bodies massing in refrigerated trucks, and thousands of health workers dying because they tended to the infected. But good on you for thinking it wasn’t a big deal.
The refrigerated trucks only appeared in a handful of places which are terminally dysfunctional. New York was STILL keeping bodies in these trucks way into 2021! That isn't because COVID is so deadly, clearly, as it isn't.
Instead of latching on to emotional stories to frame events, focus on the data. That's a psychology best practice, isn't it? The data is clear. Death rates were elevated only by a tiny amount. If it weren't for media coverage and government overreach, the vast majority of people could have gone through the entire thing without noticing there was much happening.
Someone has a very good imagination.
Nice to meet you.
I always enjoy reading your interesting articles.
I am a member of an organization that provides translations of various social science articles into Japanese. We am also translating your friend Jason Collins' article with his permission. We would like to translate your Substack article.
https://econ101.jp/about/
Not surprised to hear psychologist experts made poor predictions. The backlash to 'behavioural fatigue' tempted fate and lacked humility. Two members of SPI-B said it had had 'no basis in behavioural science': https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2982.long. Some critiques of behavioural fatigue were fair (what do you mean by fatigue exactly? can it be counteracted? would it appear so quickly as to undermine lockdown efforts?), but not appearing in behavioural science textbooks isn't one of them. (In fact, as you've written in Unherd there was 'basis in behavioural science', after all! https://unherd.com/2021/02/behavioural-science-wont-save-us/).
I'd venture (not helped by how politically motivated them and others seemed at that time) that they didn't ask whether the supposed lack of evidence was a failure of behavioural science or behavioural fatigue. The wider issue contributing to this, I think, is of social science focusing on statistical significance and researchers assuming that 'highly statistically significant' implies 'strongly predictive', which it doesn't (https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/159/9/882/167475). (If only people would look at their R-squareds.) The pandemic was a prediction problem, largely.
What do you think the solution to this is? I'm an academic researcher. I wonder if superforecasting or prediction market-type exercises could improve things by forcing people to be transparent and specific about their expectations and be compared against them later. Not sure how they could be made widespread.
You got some things wrong in your Biden piece. First, it's just not the case that his supporters "barely ever" discuss his age. They've no choice but to discuss it -- all the time. They're asked about it constantly, and polls show Democrats are pretty concerned about it. They're constantly having to acknowledge and minimize his age, mostly due to the extreme difficulty of replacing incumbent party leaders here.
Second, Biden has been notoriously gaffe-prone his entire political career, going back for decades. He has a speech impediment that he copes with in part by switching what he's going to say when he starts to stutter. You can't just point to all his gaffes now that he's old and suggest it's suddenly evidence of his cognitive decline. (I wonder if you've inadvertently bought into Fox's framing here; they've been suddenly presenting every gaffe as evidence of dementia since he became a candidate -- with no context about his long history of this.)
The last bit I'll dispute is what kinds of intelligence matters for a president's skill set. Presidents don't need fast reflexes or great memory to deal with emergencies. Authority to respond to most emergencies has already been delegated by law, and presidents are given options to deal with the ones that require a sign-off. What matters for those kinds of situations is having the wisdom to realize you're not smarter than your expert advisors (which thankfully most presidents know).
Where a president's intelligence DOES matter is in knowing how the nation's complex legislative and administrative processes work, and that's a form of crystalized intelligence he's clearly managed to demonstrate. He's gotten a shocking amount of key legislation through Congress at a time when partisan divides have completely paralyzed the legislative process here. There are very few American leaders who have the temperament and knowledge to pull that off right now. So the experience argument does have some merit in his case.
1) I’ve noticed a STRONG tendency in Democrat-leaning commentators to have focused very strongly on Trump screwups during his Presidency, but almost completely ignore Biden’s similar ones now he’s President. David Pakman, for instance (who I watch regularly to balance out Tucker), still puts out videos almost every day about Trump’s disastrous speech mistakes, and even has a soundboard repeating some of Trump’s most silly errors that he plays all the time. He has mentioned Biden’s errors VERY reluctantly on a couple of occasions.
2) I say this in the piece, WRT Bush Jr. But I still think the “he has a speech impediment” thing is mainly desperate cope. The errors he makes are not that, and if you believe they are you’ve bought into glaringly obvious propaganda yourself.
3) I don’t think this is a mistake I’ve made, just your view on how the Presidency works. I think it’s pretty clear that being sharp in time-pressured situations where lots of info needs to be integrated and fast decisions have to be made is better than being not-sharp. Sure, a big part of it is picking advisors and not thinking you’re smarter than them, but if you’re going for that then you (not you personally, just people on the pro-Biden side) have to drop all the criticisms of Trump’s mental state too.
1. I'll concede there's a partisan double-standard, which I appreciate is your underlying point.
2. He's had a speech impediment his entire career. He was satirized for it when I was in university in the 90s. That's explicitly relevant context to understanding his gaffes. I don't think adding the GWB caveat is enough after you give examples of a lifelong verbal behavior as examples of Biden's decline.
3. You could undoubtedly point to a lot of partisans who ridicule Trump's incoherence. If you drill down though, I think what most people are concerned isn't his intelligence. It's that he won't or doesn't know he needs to listen to people around him. ("Sir, we'd like your permission to let the National Guard secure the Capitol" sort of thing.)
"the 'experts on human behaviour' are no better than the average participant at predicting this stuff."
This is true of experts in just about every field outside the physical sciences, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in study after study, so I'm not sure why psychologists are your focus other than their general popularity as a punching bag.
Er, it’s because I’m a psychologist. Glad to have cleared that up.
So you’re saying you agree with the point I made, and it provides further evidence for your pre-existing view, but you wanted to leave a stupid, aggressive comment about it anyway. Thanks mate!