lambdaphagy

Elsewhere in the thread I argue why efficient market hypothesis arguments are unlikely to fully apply in this case.

OP has a reasonable concern, I just don't think it's the only consideration at play.

My own view is not that self-experimentation is an appropriate, let alone likely efficacious, substitute for reconciliation to the idea of one's death. I certainly don't endorse interference in others' treatment, however well-intentioned. If you want to say: "you shouldn't treat your terminal illness like a science fair project unless you possess extreme sang froid and are precommitted to the acceptance of your death", I'd find that totally reasonable.

But my own view is rather that institutional epistemology is somewhat overrated, and self-experimentation somewhat underrated, relative to the conventional wisdom. (Though some people go too far in this direction.) This leads to general overconfidence in epistemic efficient market hypothesis arguments ("if a protocol were worthwhile, someone would have found it already") and underconfidence in the value of crowd-sourcing trying a bunch of stuff and writing it down. This view was principally informed by developing cancer drugs for a living and coming to appreciate that it's really hard, your knowledge of what's going on during a clinical trial is highly abstracted, and you can't be everywhere at once. It was secondarily informed by watching people do bro science on certain important questions and making interesting progress in large part because they could move much faster than academic or corporate research.

If we recast the point of contention as: "what is the largest effect size that could be found by an institution outside of academia or industry?", my position is that it's plausibly non-zero.

I'm sorry for your friends and I hope they found peace.

I admire your optimism in epidemiology. In point of fact, though, we have a rough natural experiment in the form of a food that doesn't cure a disease, but rather makes half of all drugs worse. That's very valuable knowledge, and under ideal epistemic conditions it might have been discovered within a few years of organized drug discovery as such. Yet was not widely known until the 1990s. So that's a failed positive control, which suggests that our practical capabilities to detect these kinds of effects are limited. Understandably so, given that there is no general requirement for dietary logging in clinical trials.

That said, "a food that cures cancer when eaten" is not the bar for experimentation. More realistic might be something like "a dietary or behavioral protocol that, in some way, ameliorates this or that illness".

For organisms with our body plan, "a cure for cancer" is like talking about "a cure for defection". But clearly there's "stuff that is efficacious against particular instances of cancer", a lot of which we found through techniques like natural product screens, i.e. "just trying stuff", rather than via rational drug design.

To give a practical example, grapefruit juice contains some compounds that inhibit CYP3A4, a metabolic enzyme that influences the metabolism and absorption of many drugs, which is why many prescriptions tell you not to drink it while taking a given medication.

This interaction was not discovered until 1989, and not reported until two years after that. So before 1991, a simple dietary intervention that affected like half of all drugs and that could in principle have been noticed by patient who felt bad after drinking a common household beverage, was bro science.

Which is not to say "and therefore just do whatever", but just to point out that there's plausibly a lot of low-hanging fruit still left if you can figure out where to pick it.

My impression formed from my time in cancer drug discovery is that bro science is, within practical bounds, a perfectly reasonable option for one arm of a comprehensive plan for treatment.

A lot of things that sound like bro science are actually broadly supported in the literature. But studying this stuff is hard because of all of the usual issues with human subjects, the less than complete reliability of our epistemic institutions, and the infeasibility of running enough trials to address every indication in every subcohort. So if anecdata supports some intervention that that isn't aggressively inconsistent with basic theory, won't make you miserable for what might be the rest of your life, and which you could try with the sober understanding that your One Weird Trick might not work, why not?

If nothing else, a well-documented case study with good adherence tells us of one more thing that didn't work, which is hardly the worst parting gift to the world.

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that attempts to account for a very difficult problem: why there are apparently two different realms of phenomena, physical and mental, that are at once tightly connected and yet as different from one another as two things can possibly be.

Broadly speaking you can think that the mental reduces to the physical (physicalism), that the physical reduces to the mental (idealism), both reduce to some other third thing (neutral monism) or that neither reduces to the other (dualism). There are many arguments for dualism but I’ve never heard a philosopher appeal to “magic spirits” in order to do so.

Here’s an overview: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/

If architectural beauty is subjective, that’s an even stronger argument for building stuff that broad majorities find pleasing instead of stuff designed by architects who write manifestos about how much they hate beauty.

Consider the analogy: the difference between two programs is one line of source, and most end users couldn’t tell you the practical consequences of that change.

The Orthodox allege that the Filioque amounts to a demotion of the Holy Spirit. Comparing the liturgies, disciplines and general character of the two churches, it’s difficult to feel totally confident that they don’t have a point.

I guess I've just never felt as though my condolences for a grieving family were a prize to be earned.

I recently had the occasion to visit the deathbed of a relative who died with much of his family deeply wounded by, and angry at, him. Had you known him, you might have called him a horrible person and not without some backing for that claim.

But I went because I felt a duty to my relatives that isn’t released just because they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain: he had indirectly given me life, even if he had done much ill besides. And moreover I felt an obligation to the office of the head of my family that transcended the particular man.

It would be a grim world in which comfort for the grieving is a service the deceased must have earned in advance, and we the comforters decide whether they have really earned it.

Maybe a more charitable reading is: "make every good faith effort to cooperate with your family's attempts to mourn your death"

Sound advice. Conversely: always have a funeral.

I know several people who expressed a wish not to have a funeral. Sometimes this wish stems from a desire not to be an inconvenience, or a sense of guilt or shame that one's life was not well-lived. Sometimes, simply the view that funerals don't matter, so why bother.

In every case, I think this desire is mistaken. The need to mourn the dead is an instinct older than our species itself, and in dismissing it we wound the people closest to us.

If you're the sort of person to whom the idea of skipping your own funeral sounds tempting, I kindly ask you for the sake of your loved ones that you reconsider.

It's difficult to characterize the social sciences as a whole. There's some great work, some mediocre but honest work, some deliberate fraud, and an awful lot of venial epistemic sins.

But for the most part, the social sciences have become identified with a certain political worldview, to the point where the suppositions of this worldview can be assumed in papers without needing to be consciously articulated or defended. Indeed a lot of this work is explicitly concerned with finding ways to engineer public opinion in order to make this worldview more palatable to gen pop.

Putting aside the question of whether that's good or bad, it's always puzzled me that the experts on social behavior are surprised when the people on the other side of that social engineering project get mad about it. Of all the imponderables of human nature, that seems like one of the easiest things to understand.

Also peer review in its current form was a postwar invention, meaning that for the majority its history it was not regularly employed, let alone considered to be a line of demarcation between science and non-science.

Having been on both sides of the peer review process many times, I can assure you that it does not pick out all and only “actual science”

It’s often unclear whether the decision to remove politically unfavorable content is a pure business decision or the result of informal lobbying of such companies by the government. The White House has often made requests about the removal of material about certain stories, including e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop affair, and it’s rarely clear whether these requests are entertained due to general political sympathy, the threat of unfavorable regulation, or what. If the government directly censors citizens’ speech that’s a 1st Amendment concern, but if they strongly insinuate that a company will face a hostile legal climate unless it censors a citizen’s speech, that is afaict not illegal.

Thanks, yours too!

My impression is that "gospel" (evangelion, G2098) is used exclusively to refer to something like "the good news of the Kingdom of God" rather than this or that manuscript or written account. The word is used extensively by Jesus in that sense: "the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mk 1:15) means "believe the good news that I am telling you", not the (rather meta-literary) "believe the literal document that you are now reading, in which I am a character".

This sense carries over straightforwardly to the Epistles. So "false gospels" seems better interpreted in context as "false teachings about Jesus" rather than "counterfeit manuscripts" in particular. In fact, AFAWCT there were no written Gospels when Paul was writing, so he couldn't have been referring to manuscripts.

We do know that there were non-canonical gospel manuscripts floating around at some point, which is not that surprising if we consider a gospel manuscript to be "something somebody wrote down about Jesus". But the non-canonical gospels are for the most part very late, and I'm not aware of any serious early debate about the list of canonical gospels, with one exception: Marcion rejected all of the canonical gospels, along with all of the OT, and substituted his own Gospel of Marcion (based on Luke and composed ~150 AD). There are debates about some of the minor Epistles, but there's no (surviving) argument about this or that community proposing to replace John with Thomas or anything like that.

There is a common misconception that if an Ecumenical Council pronounces a doctrine at a certain date, then the Church must have started believing it on that date. But more often the definitive ruling comes only when a long-held but unarticulated belief is challenged and the Church is forced to respond to the controversy. (Think of how the rules of sports evolve when a player exploits a loophole that obviously isn't in the spirit of the game.) So the fact that the canon was formally defined at a certain date doesn't seem to require that there was no practical fact of the matter as to which accounts were accepted before then: the early sources we have seem pretty unanimous on Gospel canonicity.

But I could be garbling all of this and don't want to overstate my case.

The claim that the authorship was not reported for ~90 years (not 140!) is an inference based on the surviving material from a literary culture very different from our own, separated from us by 2,000 years. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy is highly recommended to those interested in the question of how different typographical print culture can be from manuscript culture, let alone from oral culture (of which the 1st century Mediterranean was a kind of intermediate form).

The primary argument against the traditional assignation of authorship of the Gospels is that they're not referred to by name in the Church Fathers before Irenaus (~180 AD). But by the literary standards of the ancient world, that just doesn't seem that weird to me? The early Fathers were referring to works by authors in living memory, and the prevailing bibliographical standards were somewhat lax for even further removed sources. We wouldn't claim that anyone who referred to Aristotle as "the philosopher" or Isaiah as "the prophet", as often happened, didn't know their names. Moreover, Justin Martyr (~150 CE) is often cited as evidence against named Gospels, but in the same source he refers to the Gospels collectively as "the memoirs of the Apostles", which doesn't help the case for anonymous authorship.

The biggest problem for the anonymous theory, however, is simply that there are no manuscript witnesses to support it: all the early manuscripts have titles. So the anonymous theory has to posit:

- The last Gospel, John, was reduced to writing about ~95 AD.

- The Gospels circulated throughout the Mediterranean in anonymous form.

- At some point before 180 AD, the Church decided to get its story straight and assigned names to the Gospels.

- At that point, everyone from France to India started referring to the Gospels with their present names, without any controversies or mixups.

- All of the earlier anonymous manuscripts were lost to history.

I'm not saying that definitely could not have happened, just that it doesn't seem especially more plausible than the traditional account.

I've read a suspiciously large amount of historical criticism for someone who doesn't do this for a living, thinking I would finally get to the bottom of what the New Testament was "really" about. I came away with the impression that the optimal amount of attention to pay to NT hist crit is either a lot, or zero. Every generation of hist crit somehow comes away with the conclusion that the NT is really about the issues of concern to that generation. In fact this has been going on ever since the field was founded by 19th century German Romantics, who discovered that the NT was the product of national ur-spirits expressed through folklore [!]

Our cultural familiarity with the NT sometimes keeps us from seeing how strange a collection of documents it really is. It is perhaps the best attested collection of sources in the ancient world, yet contains a mixture of Greco-Roman biography and history, supernatural events, and mystical theology. I am not trying to persuade you of any particular view about NT scholarship so much as challenge the idea that there's anything cut and dry about it.

Maybe I missed it but the article doesn’t appear to control for genetics. This is crucial because:

1. Dysfunctional reward processing in parents plausibly causes early life adversity in their children, and

2. Dysfunctional reward processing, like practically every other mental trait, is to some degree heritable.

Without controlling for genetics it would be impossible to distinguish the effect of early life adversity from the effect of being the child of the type of parent who creates an environment of early life adversity.

I think it’s plausible that shared environment plays a role, but papers that don’t even try to address genetic confounding aren’t serious.

I find it odd how often people feel obliged to make these kinds of disclaimers about Catholic philosophers (one can find more downthread), as though we ought to handle their work with mental ice tongs or something.

When I first studied philosophy, I expected that there would be sober, serious, fat-free answers to philosophical questions, all of which would be clearly distinguished from mystical woo. Having studied philosophy, I now can’t help but notice:

- Philosophy doesn’t solve philosophical problems (even as judged by the very lenient criterion of whether a majority of philosophers even agree that the problem has been solved!)

- In many cases, including some very simple ones like “what is knowledge?” the closest thing to a respectable consensus view requires an appeal to counterfactuals, which are way spookier / mystical / wooey than the things they’re invoked to explain. The most worked out systematic account of counterfactuals—- by David Lewis, one of the most cited Anglophone philosophers of 20C so hardly a cherry-picked example—- is so infamously out there that his colleagues refused to believe that he actually believed it.

- The above point is quite generic: systematic commitment to essentially any philosophical position will eventually require you to bite some bullet that will make you sound completely insane. Lewis thought that all possible worlds were real, Fodor thought the mind had 50k innate concepts and no more, the Churchlands thought consciousness is an illusion. As far as I could tell, that is just the way it is.

By contrast, much of Thomistic philosophy is a lot more reasonable than might be supposed. Take his doctrine of the soul, for example.

Modern people tend to think souls are nonsense because they’re thinking, consciously or not, of a more or less Cartesian doctrine of the soul, a spooky mental substance somehow connected to the body, perhaps through the pineal gland. But for Aquinas, the soul is just the pattern of the body, the information required to arrange matter into a particular organism rather than pink mist.

So far so naturalistic, but what’s with the immortality of the soul? This is just Aquinas’s solution to the problem of universals: if human beings can have knowledge of a priori truths like math, then that can only be because a part of the soul is already there in a realm of perfect unchanging necessary truths, hence immortal.

Now you can take this argument or leave it, but I can assure you that by prevailing standards in philosophy of math it’s actually quite tame, because there are no non-spooky options in that field.

I've done judo for years, but I don't think knowing how to fall helps much when you get hit by a car.

I'm a pretty proficient cyclist (lifetime mileage in the tens of thousands) but there have still been a handful of incidents where I've been very grateful to have had a helmet.

It might be the case that helmets are a net negative for casual riders. But whenever I've done a spontaneous unplanned dismount at 20mph I didn't find that knowing how to fall helped me much.

Florman's _The Existential Pleasures of Engineering_.

OP originally disputed the claim of a "crime wave", arguing with mistaken math that homicides--the most statistically reliable measure of crime--have only increased by 2% since 2014. (In fact it's more like 50%.)

I corrected OP's math and OP edited the comment to remove the claim about the increase in homicides being negligible, so now the thread doesn't really make any sense. But that's why I was talking about homicides.

> These are good at solving crimes, but not preventing them.

In the long run, solving crimes is preventing them because crime (especially serious violent crime) is Pareto-distributed.

> This is true, but you still have to get the patient into the hospital in time. Gunshots and stab woulds turn fatal really fast.

The major innovation of shock trauma units just was getting patients to high-end hospitals really fast. In the 1970's, Baltimore began using helicopters to airlift critical patients to a city-wide shock center, which was considered outlandish at the time but paid off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_Adams_Cowley_Shock_Trauma_Ce.... The system works well enough that Baltimore now has roughly two non-fatal shootings for every fatal one. That's great for the survivors but tends to mask the scale of the violence, as a lot fewer of those victims would have survived without Dauphin helicopters.

> We are aging, but our largest demographic currently is between 19-40 (prime time age).

This sounds like a statement about one possible way to divide the population into histogram bins in 2023 rather than a comparison of population structure between 1950 and 2023. Since 1950, the most murder-prone fraction of the population (men in their 20's) has decreased by about 10%. (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...). There are various reasonably ways of making that comparison but they all give the same qualitative answer supporting the common-sense observation that the US population pyramid has aged.

It's not my method, it's the calculation of the percentage increase, which is the way of comparing 2021 and 2014's homicide rates that you originally proposed.

The y-axis of the chart you linked records the national homicide rate in units of homicides / 100k capita / yr, the standard units for reporting homicide rates. Those aren't percentages-- they have exactly the dimensions that the chart, and I, are talking about. So it's not correct to refer to "6.81%" in any way, because it's not a percentage. Subtracting the 2021 rate from the 2014 rate gives you a difference of 2.41 homicides / 100k / yr, which is also not a percentage. In order to express that as a percentage increase, you need to divide by the rate against which you're comparing (4.4 homicides / 100k / yr), which gives you ~1.5, i.e. a 50% increase.

We can discuss why that might have happened and whether you consider it notable, but we really can't debate a "2% increase" because that's just mathematically incorrect.

To your broader point, when we make diachronic comparisons of crime there's no particular reason to start the clock in 1990. The homicide rate is still higher than it was in 1950: https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-h....

And, crucially, there were many changes between 1950 and 2023 that made it easier to prevent homicides: material technology got way better in the form of smartphones, ubiquitous cameras, DNA evidence, shock trauma units (that turn would-be murders into attempted murders), and an aging population that's less prone to homicide in general. If you took all of those things away and tried to fight 2023's homicide rate with 1950's tech, you'd find we have quite a few thumbs on the scale today.

The data you linked and the comparison you suggest (2014 vs 2021) shows a ~54% increase in homicides over that time period ((6.81 homicides / 100k people / yr) / (4.40 / homicides / 100k people / yr) ~= 1.54.

Cheng talks a lot about colonialism inn _Is Maths Real_ but here is the closest thing to an argument for the claim that I could locate:

> “Now, at the same time as all this, it is true that mathematics as a field has grown carefully and rigorously according to a carefully constructed framework of logic and rigour. It is, arguably, the framework that is keeping some maths in and keeping some maths out. But... there are questions about the values built into the framework of mathematics. That framework is geared towards the principles of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. Deep down I have an uncomfortable suspicion that those principles are indelibly linked to colonialism, imperialism and the urge to conquer others.” (p. 320-1)

That's the argument in its entirety. What humanity was up to in the ten millennia of recorded history before formal mathematics is left unexplained.

The most parsimonious explanation for the military's funding of mathematics research is that mathematics often has applications to military technology. But even here, we have to be careful: it's typically applied math that's the most, well... applicable, which is precisely the sort of thing that pure mathematicians are supposed to look down upon as "not really math". (The pure math work at DARPA is AFAICT more a consequence of DARPA's idiosyncratic governance structure that gives program managers wide latitude to swing for the fences, accepting that there will be some strikeouts.)

But the fact that modern Western mathematics is indispensable for advanced engineering projects at all, in a way that Sanskrit prosody and Inuit kayak architecture are not, is pretty crucial to understanding the funding situation: it's funded because it's useful, not useful because it's funded. If we don't grant that math is actually unreasonably effective in explaining / predicting / manipulating the world then sure, what math gets funded looks like another courtly intrigue. But it seems that the unreasonable effectiveness is precisely what needs to be explained away on Cheng's view.

I'm all ears for the contrary view, but we've already written more on the topic than Cheng did in the entire book, which is light on argument and regrettably heavy on insinuation.

I think that if I were being interviewed and my interviewer said "you also discuss how colonialist ideology has influenced modern mathematics?", but I didn't think that colonialist ideology has influenced modern mathematics, I would say: "What? I don't think colonialist ideology has influenced modern mathematics at all."

Rather than insinuating that Europe must have stolen math from other parts of the world and pawned it off as its own, or been really mean about rigor, or whatever.

There were several totalizing ideologies in the 20th century that attempted to make all of human affairs about themselves: everything from literature to science to birdwatching had some sort of party line: Did this literature say the right things? Was this science done by the right kind of scientist? Is this bird the right kind of bird to be watching? Judging by their results, I wouldn't look forward to a do-over of that line of thinking.

I appreciated Eugenia Cheng's youtube lectures on category theory and I know interviews aren't the best format for sustained exposition, but the remark about mathematical rigor being a European colonialist thing seemed pretty forced. If anything, it underestimates the strangeness of the history of math in an effort to cram it into a simple frame: "Europeans bad".

There was something distinctive about work in foundations of math in the late 19th / early 20th centuries, work which came out of European cultures (or more accurately Latin Christendom). Plausibly, this work was centuries in the making, the culmination of a trend towards increasingly analytic and systematizing modes of thought that begins with the recovery of Greek philosophy in the middle ages.

But, ok, even if you don't buy that, how do you get from the Congo Free State to Frege, Hilbert and Goedel? It's a radical claim that would be utterly fascinating if it were true. But Chang just kind of tosses it off at the end and asks us to accept it as an unremarkable truism.