Month: March 2022

News from Ukraine:

NEW: Russia has launched more than 300 sorties into Ukraine the last 24 hours: senior U.S. defense official.

???????? sorties are not "venturing very far and very long" into ???????? airspace, the official said. Russia still has more than 60 percent of fixed wing and rotary wing capability.

— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) March 21, 2022

Huh. So after three weeks 40% of all Russian aircraft have either been destroyed or are in nonworking condition. I'm just a civilian, but that sure seems like a lot. One thing we seem to have discovered during the Ukraine war is that Russia's air force really sucks.

What's the deal with all those loud allegations about biological laboratories in Ukraine? Do they exist? Are they making bioweapons? Are they dangerous? The answers are yes, no, and yes. The best short piece about them that I've read was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

The allegations have shocked those who are most familiar with the Pentagon’s post-Cold War initiative, called the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. That is because not only has Russia been aware of the Pentagon’s work securing chemical, biological and nuclear facilities across the former Soviet Union, but it had also been its beneficiary for many years.

....The program, which dates back to 1991 and continues today, stretches across the former Soviet Union. Since the program started, the Pentagon has spent approximately $12 billion on securing material used in weapons of mass destruction in post-Soviet republics, according to a DTRA spokeswoman.

....The president of Ukraine [in 2001], Leonid Kuchma, concerned about the threat of terrorism in his own country, asked the U.S. for help. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier, Ukraine had been starved of the funds needed to secure its biological facilities. Mr. Weber put together a team that visited Ukraine’s biological and chemical facilities, which ranged from large laboratories to small veterinary research centers. “We found that a number of them had dangerous pathogen collections left over from Soviet days,” he said. “They were in pretty bad shape.”

As we used to say back in the Golden Age of Blogging, read the whole thing if this is a topic you happen to care about.

Here is 60 Minutes on housing:

Nicely done @FairweatherPhD. Time to build! https://t.co/qw5zaNxdVK

— Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) March 21, 2022

I don't get it. People keep saying stuff like this, but:

There are housing shortages in California and in specific cities that are hot destinations right now, but overall the US has been building houses at close to the same rate as always. Since 2001, when this data series starts, we've built 24 million housing units for 22 million new households.

Temperatures have soared wildly over Antarctica during the past week, with the eastern part of the continent experiencing temps about 70 degrees above normal (i.e., about 10°F instead of -60°F). That sounds pretty spectacular, but the technical description is even more spectacular:

The warm conditions over Antarctica were spurred by an extreme atmospheric river [that] made landfall on Tuesday between the Dumont d’Urville and Casey Stations and dropped an intense amount of rainfall, potentially causing a significant melt event in the area.

The moisture from the storm diffused and spread over the interior of the continent. However, a strong blocking high pressure system or “heat dome,” moved in over east Antarctica, preventing the moisture from escaping. The heat dome was exceptionally intense, five standard deviations above normal.

A five-sigma event happens only roughly one in a million times. I don't know how many heat domes Antarctica typically gets in a year, but probably not many. That means the current one is a million-year event—or maybe a 2-million-year event or a 500,000-year event.

This is ridiculously unlikely, of course, and a much better hypothesis is that climate change has pushed temperatures up enough that a heat dome like this is now more like a two-sigma event, one that we'll see every few years.

But don't worry. After we've melted Antarctica away, I'm sure we can buy a new one on Amazon for an astonishingly low price and next-day delivery.

Wait. Is it now conventional wisdom on the Fox News right that masks just flat-out don't work? I know they've always hated masks and mask mandates—and think liberals are weenies for constantly wearing masks just to show off—but when did they decide masks had literally no value at all? What did I miss?

You remember Hunter Biden's laptop, don't you? Sure you do. What you may not remember is that a few weeks before the 2020 election a bunch of ex-intelligence folks wrote an open letter saying they suspected it was part of a Russian disinformation plot. That turned out not to be true—something the New York Times recently confirmed—and a variety of people are pissed off that no one is being drawn and quartered over this obvious attempt to prop up Joe Biden shortly before the election.

Yawn. It's true that the intel folks got it wrong, but that's the most trivial possible part of the whole Biden laptop story. In case you don't remember:

• Rudy Giuliani had been openly looking for dirt on Hunter Biden for over a year. Then, voila!, three weeks before the election he pops up to say that he miraculously found a hard drive with a bunch of compromising Biden emails on it. His rousing tale about how he came across the hard drive was bizarre to say the least.
• Giuliani shopped the story around but it was so thin that nobody bit—not even Fox News. So he finally gave it to the New York Post, the only outlet shameless enough to print it. And even there, it was no slam dunk. Everybody understood that the provenance of the hard drive was dubious to say the least.
• Real reporters spent the next couple of weeks desperately trying to confirm Giuliani's story. They begged him for access to the drive so they could see all the emails and have it forensically analyzed. Giuliani refused.
• In the end, that's why the press mostly refused to go down the rabbit hole of the Biden laptop. The story sounded preposterous. Giuliani was a massively unreliable source. They couldn't verify any of it. And none of it incriminated Joe Biden anyway, it just vaguely smeared him by association. The obvious conclusion was that the whole thing was a typical last-minute Republican ratfuck. The intelligence letter had almost nothing to do with any of this.

Remember all this when your local wingnut starts haranguing you about how the laptop was genuine all along and it goes to show that the mainstream media is corrupt blah blah blah. Whatever we know now, the media did the right thing in October 2020 based on what they knew then. Giuliani could have helped them verify his story anytime he wanted, but he didn't. So of course they didn't report on it. Nobody with a room temperature IQ would have done differently.

New COVID-19 cases are on the rise in Europe, but hospital admissions continue to fall in most countries. In the US, the trajectory for hospital admissions is straight down. If we continue at our present rate, we'll break our record low point by next weekend.

Here's a quasi-philosophical question for your weekend amusement that's probably been studied but is just obscure enough that I can't find anything relevant when I search for it.

Most philosophical systems assume that a life is a life, all equally valuable. This makes sense for any moral system that has to be universal, but in practice it's obviously not true. Every one of us systematically values some lives more than others.

What I'm curious about is whether anyone has done empirical research to find out just how much we tend to value different lives based on their relationship to us. Put differently, how much time/effort/money would we expend to save the life of, say, our mother vs. the life of an unknown Vietnamese peasant?

As an example of what I'm talking about, here are various categories of people with scores attached to them:

This suggests that, in practice, you'd spend a lot of effort to save the life of your mother, but still only about half of what you'd do to save your own life. For a random person with whom you have no plausible connection, you'd be willing to expend about a millionth the effort you'd expend to save yourself.

Obviously there are lots of possible systematic categories: kinship, nationality, geographic proximity, fame, etc. And the values would likely depend on your own culture, religion, etc.

Has anyone ever done empirical work of this sort? It seems like it might be useful to incorporate it in some way into a system of real-world ethics.

Over at Vox, Siobhan McDonough has a lengthy piece about a guaranteed income experiment being done in Georgia. The headline calls it "revolutionary," but I can't say I'm floored by the idea that giving poor people an extra $10,000 per year will vastly improve their lives. Of course it will. The drawback is that it would cost a lot to roll this out across the whole country, something the article doesn't address.

However, because the program is aimed at Black mothers, McDonough does address the racial politics involved:

Racially targeted programs such as affirmative action and reparations tend to be unpopular. Opposition to these programs is largely driven by white Americans; they tend to be far more popular, if not universally, among Black Americans and other Americans of color.

This didn't sound quite right, so I googled a bit and found something interesting if unsurprising. When you ask people if they support affirmative action, most say yes. But if you ask them if employers should take race into account in hiring decisions—which is practically the definition of affirmative action—the vast majority say no:

I'm using Gallup and Pew polls from 2018/19 here, but other polls provide similar results. There are two takeaways from this. First, the Black/white difference in support of "affirmative action" isn't all that big. Second, real-world programs of affirmative action in hiring are indeed unpopular, but they're unpopular with both white and Black respondents. The same is true of affirmative action programs for college admission.

This is not especially surprising. There are loads of things that people support in principle but don't support when they see the price tag. This is just one of them.

The moral of the story is to be careful about generalizing. Affirmative action and reparations break down very differently. Roughly speaking, everyone of all races hates affirmative action in actual practice.

The New York Times ran an editorial on Friday about "America's free speech problem," and naturally this has Twitter all atwitter. I myself find the whole "cancel culture" controversy exhausting, mainly because of the absolutism on both sides. My side denies the problem exists at all, while the Fox News set insists it's rampant.

For what it's worth—which is nothing much, unfortunately—here are some things I believe:

1. Cultural mores have changed over the years and everyone needs to acknowledge this in practice, not only in theory. That means adjusting how you talk about people (and groups of people) even if you privately roll your eyes at some of it.
2. If you're mad because you can't be racist in public anymore—not even a little bit—then you just need to get over it.
3. Young lefties have had a history of "callout culture" for years. At first, this meant that if someone said something offensive you should call it out instead of staying silent and providing tacit acceptance. This steadily got more and more aggressive and eventually morphed into what's called cancel culture these days.
4. "Cancel culture" is a terrible name, but it's what we're stuck with. Very few people who say something offensive actually get canceled—i.e., get fired or seriously disciplined, lose their ability to speak in public, or pay some other meaningful price—though it does happen.
5. Most of the damage is far smaller: being ostracized, shamed, or getting a lecture from HR for an offense that possibly—possibly—isn't worth it. This shouldn't be minimized, since it can cause genuine anguish and create lifelong enemies, but it also isn't the end of the world.
6. Don't confuse cancel culture with ordinary political fights. Disagreements—big, loud, vicious disagreements—are normal parts of human society. The side that eventually loses hasn't been canceled, they've just lost a cultural battle in the most ordinary sort of way.
7. It's really important to distinguish between at least two types of cancel culture. One type is entirely an intra-left issue, where lefties name and shame other lefties who have said something that's verboten. This is by far the more restrictive version of cancel culture, where people can be taken down for even tiny infractions.
8. The other type is left vs. right. I don't have much to say about this because it's just the modern version of lefties and righties yelling at each other. There's really nothing new about it and lefties simply have no power to cancel conservatives. The only example I can think of is university students who heckle conservative speakers and drive them off campus. This has happened only a few times and has very limited impact. On the other hand, the heckling business is stupid, and activists should be ashamed of themselves for doing it. Charles Murray is not Hitler.
9. The left-on-left version of cancel culture is really, really hard to get a handle on. There is literally no real data on how widespread it is and there probably never will be. This is because much of it takes the form of people just shutting up; another large portion never gets reported; survey data is all but useless; and there's no good definition of cancel culture in the first place. We have anecdotes and that's all.
10. That said, there are anecdotes. Lots of them. In addition to the ones that make news, I've heard personally from very normal, reasonable people who think cancel culture has become too stifling. They really do feel like they can't talk about sensitive topics for fear of being ostracized unless they toe the absolute latest and wokest line, and they often express a genuine fear of being shunned or worse if they make even a small mistake. This is real, and pretending it doesn't exist is just putting your head in the sand. Not only does it do a lot of damage to people who are shy or not especially verbal, but it's politically suicidal as well since it makes no friends. Any movement that's in thrall to its most extreme elements is doomed to implode at some point.
11. When issues come up within newsrooms or other companies, they are usually driven by young staffers. That's fine, but it shouldn't be a foregone conclusion that the young staffers are automatically right. Unfortunately, managers are often afraid to argue with them even if they think things have gone too far. But they should. This kind of guidance is what experienced managers are expected to provide to younger workers.
12. Note to managers: Don't take this as permission to dismiss those younger workers. They probably know more about this stuff than you do. Just because something doesn't exist in your social circle doesn't mean it's all a bunch of made-up snowflake-ness.
13. It should be possible to have normal, good faith conversations about what's acceptable and what isn't without the wokest or most oppressed voice automatically being assumed right.
14. Intentions absolutely have to be taken into account. There's a big difference between someone being willfully offensive and someone who just makes a casual mistake or who has an opinion that's not quite full-bore extreme lefty. For the latter, it's fine to disagree with them but they should otherwise be left alone.
15. One of the victims of cancel culture is the ability to speak plainly. Not everyone knows the approved academese ("conventionally coded as feminine" as opposed to "like a girl") for addressing touchy subjects, but that's OK: there's lots of value in feeling that it's safe to express ideas in simple, intelligible ways as long as they're offered in good faith. Even if this leads to poorly considered phrases on occasion, it's still better than feeling like you have to defensively lard up every sensitive opinion with the kind of endless nuance and caveating that buries your main point. Just let the occasional glitch go unless it happens all the time or there's real reason to think it's intentional.
16. Too much of the opposition to cancel culture comes from conventional liberals who simply don't want to change the way they talk because they figure that the way they talked in the '70s was fine and no one got hurt. That ain't so. People did get hurt but mostly kept it to themselves. Liberals who don't understand this need to, um, wake up.
17. Twitter sucks, and Twitter mobs make this whole problem infinitely worse. Unfortunately I can't say that this means you should ignore Twitter. That may be good advice for most of us, but there are times when Twitter mobs affect real-world decisions and need to be sharply fought. If they aren't, people will reasonably assume that the Twitter mob's opinion represents the whole world. If you disagree, say so!

Just generally, I believe that cancel culture is plainly a real thing that presents us with real dilemmas. However, its main problem isn't the idea itself, which is generally admirable. The problem is that in its current form it utterly lacks even a trace of empathy. It is too often a weapon of brute power and ideology, used to crush people into subservience. This is wrong on just about every possible level. It is hateful. It makes enemies. It doesn't work.

So first of all, we should hold on to the best ideas behind cancel culture: namely that cultural mores change; not everyone (especially us olds) is up to speed on them; and we should all press ourselves and others to do better. But second of all, we should commit to doing this with grace, not scorn and contempt. That's good advice for just about everything, and it's especially good advice for this.