Science, Expertise, Trust…and Peanuts

by

Yann LeCun, who is  Chief AI Scientist at Meta and an ACM Turing Award Laureate, is obviously a very smart and accomplished guy.  At X, he has been arguing for the trustworthiness of science and scientists and asserting that it makes sense for scientists to lean Left…because “they care about facts.”  (here, for example)  I don’t think many of us would disagree with the value of the scientific method and the importance of objective information; I do feel, however, that Yann’s remarks fail to address the importance of funder pressure, peer pressure, and Groupthink on scientific priorities, scientific conclusions, and especially on what gets asserted as The Science by media and politicians.

There has also been some discussion of this cartoon and various experiences that various people have had with doctors who wouldn’t listen.

Very relevantly, there is an article in today’s WSJ about peanut allergy.  The writer, Dr Marty Makary, says that concern about these allergies that began to rise in the 1990s…but that in fact, peanut allergies at that time were rare and mostly mild.  But starting in the year 2000, the prevalence began to surge:

What had changed wasn’t peanuts but the advice doctors gave to parents about them. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond to public concern by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids from peanut allergies. There was just one problem: Doctors didn’t actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take. Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children 0 to 3 years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts.

The AAP committee was following in the footsteps of the U.K.’s health department, which two years earlier had recommended total peanut abstinence. That recommendation was technically only for children at high risk of developing an allergy, but the AAP authors acknowledged that “the ability to determine which infants are high-risk is imperfect.” Using the strictest interpretation, a child could qualify as high-risk if any family member had any allergy or asthma.

Dr Makary notes that the peanut allergy epidemic is largely a US and UK phenomenon…his African students report no such allergies in Africa, and Makary says that there is also no peanut problem in his own origin country of Egypt.  And, interestingly, Jewish children in Israel have one-tenth the rate of peanut allergies compared with Jewish children in the UK, suggesting that genetic predisposition is not responsible for the country-to-country difference.

Many Israeli children are fed a peanut-based food called Bamba, and Dr Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist in London, suggested that early consumption of peanuts leads to a low prevalence of the allergy at older ages. He coauthored a paper making this point in 2008, but (this) publication was not enough to uproot groupthink. Avoiding peanuts had been the correct answer on medical school tests and board exams, which were written and administered by the American Board of Pediatrics. For nearly a decade after AAP’s peanut avoidance recommendation, neither the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nor other institutions would fund a robust study to evaluate whether the policy was helping or hurting children.

From 2005 to 2014, the number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in the U.S. By 2019, a report estimated that 1 in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools continued to ban peanuts, and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared.

and

In a second clinical trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, Lack compared one group of infants who were exposed to peanut butter at 4-11 months of age to another group that had no peanut exposure. He found that early exposure resulted in an 86% reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared with children who followed the AAP recommendation. 

From 2005 to 2014, the number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in the U.S. By 2019, a report estimated that 1 in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools continued to ban peanuts, and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared.

Makary is basically asserting that peanut allergy is largely an iatrogenic disease.  One would think that if this was the case, the original recommendations on draconian peanut-avoidance might need to be modified.  But after talking with an allergist friend, Dr Makary said:

The AAP’s absolutism in 2000 had made the recommendation hard to walk back.

I am sure that there are many, many other examples like this, some of them with a lot worse consequences than the Peanut Panic.  It is actually dangerous to treat any individual or institution as beyond challenge.  In aviation, the reluctance to challenge authority (as in the case of a Captain and a First Officer) was identified as a significant safety problem quite a few years ago, and is explicitly addressed in the training of flight crews.  The same principle should apply more broadly.

The Platonic Form of what Science should be, is subject, when translated into operational form, to all the factors that affect other human activities and institutions: incentives, groupthink, political pressure, ambition, cliquishness, etc.

See also my related post Starvation and Centralization.

Loud Exhaust and Public Space

by

Matthew Crawford, noted writer and gear head, is not happy about a recent trend in automobile modification:

The new thing is modern V8 muscle cars (Chargers, Challengers, Mustangs and Camaros) with exhaust cut-outs. They are deafening, and they are everywhere where I live in San Jose (which is not one of the genteel areas). They are also illegal, of course. . .  For those not satisfied with inflicting low-level hearing loss, a special Platinum A[**]hole feature is available on the aftermarket. It alters the engine’s spark and fuel map to deliberately induce explosive backfires that sound like a 12-gauge shotgun at close range.

We have these cars in our neighborhood though they tend to be heavily modified Camrys, Kias, and other small sedans. He’s right about the modifications to produce backfires, even from ½ mile away it sounds just like an old 12-gauge Mossberg I used to own.

I had always classified such car owners as narcissists, but he cites another possibility:

Julie Aitken Schermer is a professor of psychology, at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She conducted a study of people who modify their cars to make them louder (n=529), using a standard inventory of psychological traits. She was expecting to find narcissism, but what she found instead was “links between folks with a penchant for loud exhausts and folks with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.”

“The personality profile I found with our loud mufflers are also the same personality profiles of people who illegally commit arson,” she told a reporter. These are people who have a hard time with “higher-order moral reasoning with a focus on basic rights for people.”

Crawford goes on to cite the impact of one particular miscreant in Seattle, the reaction (or lack thereof) of the police to said miscreant, and the impact the guy is having on the neighborhood. Crawford then gets to, for me, the interesting part:

… that the fabric of the world is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space.

This can have an unfortunate resemblance to conquest, if those making a nuisance of themselves recognize one another as like beings, bound up in a common fate, and notice also that the space vacated by those sufficiently annoyed or intimidated is now theirs, collectively.

The interesting concept that Crawford introduces is public space and how it can be disrupted. We Americans typically speak of public space in fairly legalistic terms; what is public property and the things that are and are not permitted therein.

However there is another conception of public space which is defined as the geographic space within which people interact together; it doesn’t have to be a park, publicly owned property, or even a public accommodation such as a grocery store (as found in civil rights law). It can be something as amorphous as where your private property interfaces with public property such as your front yard or your porch (ask your HOA) or a public event such as an Independence Day celebration or a school play. The term “public space” could also be termed “community space.”

A key observation is one that Crawford implicitly makes which is the ability of a very small percentage of the population, if so motivated, to degrade if not destroy that public space. There is the previous example of the modified car owner in Seattle and the impact this man had on the local neighborhood, but it could just as easily be other factors which convey menace and disorder: a street encampment, widespread open-air drug use, or a flash mob. Or…. to use our expanded notion of public space, do you feel safe leaving your car in the driveway or wonder what you’ll see in your front yard in the morning?

Our notion of public space and how we interact with it has changed over the years. It was within our lifetimes that it was expected that men and women dress and in general comport themselves according to certain public social customs. Now that has changed and not only from the sense of crime and disorder on the streets, but also a general lack of courtesy and “social grease” used to smooth interactions among strangers. That problem will loom greater both with more “diversity” and the demarcation of the population into various identity groups that lack a common identity.

Crawford also points to another dimension of public space, transportation, specifically roads and how we interact with it. From his book, Why We Drive:

Before the arrival of automobiles in significant numbers in the 1920s, the urban street was a place dominated by pedestrians, horses, and streetcars that ran on tracks. It was the place where children played—and why not?

We share a public space through the use of our private property, cars. However, transportation, that is how we convey ourselves through public space, is also a matter of public policy and viewed as a strategic choke point by the Left for reconstruction. The street and other parts of the local/regional transportation system are being physically reconstructed, not only to discourage cars and in favor of public transportation but also to drive use of vehicles with limited range such as bicycles and personal mobility scooters. I should also note that the introduction of self-driving cars, their inability to share the streets with human-oriented automobiles, and the introduction of the public space into cars themselves through technological kill switches will have a similar effect.

In addition to the physical dimension, the transportation system is also being socially reconstructed because these alternate methods of transportation are limited in their range and flexibility. This social remodeling will entail, either directly or indirectly, changing the places where we live (“the 15-minute city”) due to our limited ability to travel and our ability to physically access the wider world beyond.

If socially reconstructed ideas of transport sounds suspiciously like the COVID lockdowns and the resultant vision of a “Great Reset” you are not alone.

More on driving and the exercise of citizenship another time. For now, exercise your sovereignty of human agency, gas up your truck, and just go some place far away for the day. Just because, in the wonder that is still 21st Century America, you can and don’t have to justify it to anyone.

Life in the Fully Politicized Society

by

…and the choice before us.

Many will remember Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech, in which she  said:

Barack Obama will  require  you to work. He is going to  demand  that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will  never allow you  to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed….You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eight years from now, you will  have to be  engaged.

Victor Davis Hanson  notes that she also said:

We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.

…which is, of course, entirely consistent with the assertion made by Barack Obama himself, shortly before his first inauguration:  “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the  United States of America.”

It should be clear by now that all aspects of American life and society are rapidly becoming politicized. Obama greatly accelerated this movement, but he didn’t initiate it.  The “progressive” political movement, which now controls the Democratic Party, has for a long time been driving the politicization of anything and everything.  The assertion  “the personal is political”  originated on the Left in the 1960s…and, if the personal is political, then everything is political.

Some people, of course,  like  the politicization of everything–for some individuals, indeed, their lives would be meaningless without it.  In his important memoir of growing up in Germany between the wars, Sebastian Haffner noted divergent reactions from people when the political and economic situation stabilized (temporarily, as we now know) during the Stresemann chancellorship:

The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries…There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.

But this return to private life was not to everyone’s taste:

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.

and

To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. They began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

I’m afraid we have quite a few people in America today who like having “the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions.”  But for most people, especially for creative and emotionally-healthy people, the politicization of everything leads to a dreary and airless existence.

In her novel  We the Living, based partly on her personal experiences in the early Soviet Union (which is probably why it is, IMO, the best of her books from a literary standpoint), Ayn Rand paints a vivid picture of what day-to-day life in the politicized society is like.  Her heroine, Kira Argounova, is a strong anti-Communist, but absent other options has found a job (which she got through intervention of a Communist friend) in something called “The House of the Peasant,” which is dedicated to “a closer understanding between workers and peasants,”  under the slogan “The Clamping of City and Village,” celebrated with posters bearing slogans like “Comrades, strengthen the Clamping!”

Kira’s boss at the House of the Peasant is an older woman “thin, gray-haired, military and in strict sympathy with the Soviet Government; her chief aim in life was to give constant evidence of how strict that sympathy was, even though she had graduated from a women’s college…” But the boss lives in fear of “a tall girl with a long nose and a leather jacket, who was a Party member and could make Comrade Bitiuk shudder at her slightest whim, and knew it…” All the office staff members also live in fear of the Wall Newspaper, which carries criticisms of individual workers both for their personal behavior as well as their work performance:

Comrade Nadia Chernova is wearing silk stockings. Time to be reminded that such flaunting of luxury is un-proletarian, Comrade Chernova…Comrade E Ovsov indulges in too much talk when asked about business. This leads to a waste of valuable time…We hear that Comrade Kira Argounova is lacking in social spirit. The time is past, Comrade Argounova, for arrogant bourgeois attitudes.

After reading this last, Kira “stood very still and heard her heart beating. No one dared to ignore the mighty pointing finger of the Wall Newspaper…No one could save those branded as “anti-social element,” not even (Kira’s Communist friend) Andrei Taganov… At her desk, she watched the others in the room, wondering who had reported her to the Wall Newspaper…”

All workers in the office are expected to be member of the Marxist Club (ie, to be “engaged,” as Michelle Obama would put it), which meets after hours and for attendance at which the workers are not paid. The club met twice a week: one member read a thesis he had prepared and the others discussed it.  When it is Kira’s turn, she reads her thesis on “Marxism and Leninism,” which she has copied, barely changing the words, from the “ABC of Communism,” a book whose study is compulsory in every school in the country.

She knew that all her listeners had read it, that they had also read her thesis, time and time again, in every editorial of every newspaper for the last six years. They sat around her, hunched, legs stretched out limply, shivering in their overcoats. They knew she was there for the same reason they were.  The girl in the leather jacket presided, yawning once in a while.

After mandatory discussion  (“Kira knew that she had to argue and defend her thesis; she knew that the consumptive young man had to argue to show his activity; she knew that he was no more interested in the discussion than she was, that his blue eyelids were weary with sleeplessness, that he clasped his thin hands nervously, not daring to glance at his wristwatch…”), the meeting finally comes to a close. “We shall thank Comrade Argounova for her valuable work,” said the chairman. “Our next meeting will be devoted to a thesis by Comrade Leskov on ‘Marxism and Collectivism.’”

If this sort of thing sounds like a lot of fun to you, then you should be applauding the increased politicization of America.  Of course, to a certain type of person–the type represented above by the girl in the leather jacket–such a society is something to look forward to.

Read more

Random Thoughts

by

One, watching the rolling campaign of exploding Hez electronic devices I cannot help but think about the wisdom of checking the sourcing of critical components of civilian and military infrastructure. Given current Chinese military and strategic doctrine, I would think twice about using a Huawei broadband router.

Two, surprise, surprise, the Fed is going to do a rate cut. Who had that on their bingo card, less than 50 days before an election? Note that it won’t have much of an effect on the economy before November, but the news of the cut and the resulting short-term bump in the stock market will crowd out any negative news about the economy. Once again economic and fiscal policy yoked to short-term political objectives.

The story within the story is that the “best economy ever” needs to be goosed.

Three, one of the issues that’s driving the high-stakes nature of this election is something no one is talking about, control of the archives. Politicians and bureaucrats may lie to you, they may eventually destroy the records (see: Hillary and the Hard Drives), but what records do exist rest on some elements of truth. It is those elements that are keys to the kingdom of the Deep State.

You can think of the Kennedy Assassination files or stuff at Langley, but it could be even something as mundane as records at the State Dept. dealing with Iran or NAID and COVID. What were the Twitter Files but the release of archival material from the private side detailing government censorship? There’s a lot of stuff they really don’t want to see the light of day,

The counter-argument to this is that Trump was already president and nothing happened then, so why should we expect anything now? Yes, Trump is on his Revenge Tour, but things really escalated when RFK, Jr. endorsed him because it is this guy who has built his whole public persona on uncovering conspiracies.

Whatever Trump’s intent, the Deep State and DC in general see this as entering the Thunderdome part of the election, two enter but only one leaves.

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (3): Chaffapalooza Edition

by

Wrapping up from Monday’s post

First, from the comments section, Nate Winchester writes:

I like to call the second method the “chaff” method (referencing missile defenses of planes). Especially since it’s pretty effective to throw up so much stuff people get too exhausted to ever bother seeking out the truth.

Chaff, that’s perfect and catchier than my term “diversion.” Thank you, Nate. Consider your idea stolen.

Second, regarding the media’s use of chaff, I cited a clip from NBC News which placed the second Trump assassination attempt within the context of “increasingly fierce rhetoric” by implicitly linking Republican claims about Haitians in Springfield to bomb threats in that city.

This is the classic “tomato, tomahto ploy” used to depict both sides as guilty of a misdeed (when only one is), so let’s just call the whole thing off. Except that on Monday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine stated:

“Thirty-three threats; Thirty-three hoaxes,” Gov. Mike DeWine announced during a press conference. “I want to make that very, very clear. None of these had any validity at all.”

DeWine said during the press conference that many of the threats came from “overseas.”

“We have people unfortunately overseas who are taking these actions,” DeWine added. “Some of them are coming from one particular country.”

Overseas? Well now. I doubt there are many people overseas who are being incited by JD Vance to call in bomb threats, so what do you think is going on? DeWine used the term “many” and not “all”, but I bet the rest of them stemmed from the same information warfare campaign chaff dispenser, one that also has the dual purpose of depicting the average Trump voter as a “gap-toothed Cletus.”

As far as Lester Holt and NBC News goes, mission accomplished.

And… as far as the identity of that “one particular country,” does anybody know what Thierry Breton is up to these days or where he is? He’s all into misinformation, meddling in our elections, and I heard he’s got time on his hands. 

 
Third, I had the over/under of the Trump assassination story disappearing as Thursday. Well it looks the under was the way to go. Yesterday the top headlines on CNN, New York Times, and the Washington Post were P. Diddy, exploding pagers, and Kamala at NABJ. Well yes there is the NY Post and Fox, but only them. As for the through the day, a story or two about the near-assassination would emerge way down below the digital fold, like the body of a Mafia victim that briefly bobbed to the surface of the water before sinking forever into the deep.