I did note that he says:
urbanization erodes community i.e. makes the family more nuclear. But your report seems to indicate either more change than he implied, or that he was wrong about Finland in 1983.
I assume that “universalist” corresponds to “community”?
No, universalism is a separate dimension, probably resulting more from equality than from community.
He comes across as a low-key anarchist
I did not get that impression from reading the book (a long time ago). Instead, I got the impression that he was a competent scholar who was somewhat reluctantly reporting evidence that didn’t support his political views.
Here a clear denial that he’s an anarchist.
It’s vaguely paleo-ish. Here’s a summary. For more detail, see his book The End of Alzheimer’s Program.
That paraphrase is mostly good. I’m trying to separate monetary phenomena, which are the main problem in recessions, from reckless debt levels, which are the main contributor to government debt crises.
Yes, my explanation is mostly compatible with yours.
I didn’t try to explain how a system becomes vulnerable. I think that happens via recency bias causing misjudgments, plus competitive pressures that Romeo mentions.
An alternate perspective that I sometimes use is to view the crash as a short squeeze.
Going into debt is equivalent to selling short a currency. It’s usually safer than shorting a stock, because currencies are designed so that their value is stable, rather than to usually go up.
Just like someone who owes GameStop shares needs to have the ability to buy back those shares, a player in debt needs the ability to regain dollars.
There are important limits to how many dollars one can safely owe, and it depends a fair amount on how other traders of dollars behave.
If one big player, or many little players, misjudge their risks, they need to acquire more dollars. Sometimes everything works out fine because lenders are optimistic enough to lend more. Sometimes big players expect things to work out poorly, and that causes them to compete for drive up the price of dollars (as they would drive up the price of GameStop) in order to cut their risks. Guesses about what others will do can play a key role here, which is part of why the result is hard to predict.
One somewhat unique feature of modern currencies is that central banks are at least nominally able to supply unlimited quantities of them, and there are widespread expert opinions that they out to do roughly that when the value of the currency is being bid up (i.e. when there’s deflation). There’s some sign of a trend towards central banks doing better at that. But it’s still not obvious what’s preventing them from doing better. (This is mostly relevant to standard recessions, which are caused by an unexpected decline in the inflation rate; some debts can’t be handled by stabilizing the currency, so I’m a bit hesitant to accept your broad framing of the term debt crises).
Note that the review of The Premonition is by Alex Tabarrok, not Tyler.
Too much calcium can be harmful, although that one doesn’t have much. Harm from calcium can probably be avoided by getting enough vitamin K2 from fermented foods or a supplement. You’re probably not getting K2 from the multivitamin.
Potassium deficiencies are common (but likely less so in vegans). Supplements aren’t allowed to have much potassium, but it’s easy to get potassium chloride and use that in place of salt.
The iodine comment is confusing, but not clearly wrong. I experienced low thyroid levels that were likely due to excess iodine from kelp powder. But I wouldn’t worry about getting too much iodine from a multivitamin.
I’m currently taking chromium supplements, due to a test result showing I had below average levels, plus the advice of someone whose opinion I trust a lot more than I trust Louie’s opinion.
Crappy drugs that only slow the decline a bit might need an aducanumab comparison, but why would a drug that reverses the decline need that?
See also this clinical trial of Bredesen’s approach (press release here).
The book Noise by Daniel Kahneman et al sometimes uses the terms statistical thinking and causal thinking as substitutes for outside and inside views.
These terms seem better at reminding me what the categories are meant to be, and why evolution prepared us less for one of them. But they still leave some confusion about how to draw the boundary between the concepts.
Companies already knew beforehand that Alzheimer drugs are a multi-billion dollar market.
But they didn’t know how willing the FDA was to approve placebo-like drugs.
Cassava Sciences, whose Alzheimer drug candidate doesn’t target beta amyloid, rose in response to that approval. I doubt that many people will be satisfied enough with this drug to deter signups for new trials.
I don’t know what the net effect will be on the development of good drugs, and I doubt that anyone else does either.
Part of what I’m asking is how long would Taiwan resist assimilation if assimilation is the only way to re-establish trade with the world?
Why would the Beijing government invade Taiwan? Couldn’t it get most of what it wants by taking control of the airspace and shipping lanes around Taiwan?
I disagree. Much of what’s going wrong is differing meanings of the word evidence.
Most people are oblivious to the Bayesian meaning of the word evidence. When I hear an ordinary person say “no evidence”, I usually interpret it as “no evidence that’s admissible in a court”, or maybe even “no proof”.
Ticks: I’ve found more ticks on me in the bay area than I did when I lived in Connecticut and Rhode Island. I don’t think that’s fully explained by behavioral changes.
I have a good deal of control over my exposure to ticks. I haven’t put much effort into avoiding them. Well over 90% of the times I’ve found ticks on me were after going off-trail. Brushing against tall grass seems especially high risk. Wide trails seem to have very low risk. The clearest exception I’ve seen to this pattern may have involved transmission via a dog.
I started getting more tick bites after I stopped using sunscreen. That’s definitely not due to getting more ticks on me. I think the sunscreen caused them to wander around much longer before deciding where to bite, giving me more time to find them when they’re still crawling.
I’ve never found a tick more than 24 hours after my suspected exposure. I don’t think I’m unusually diligent about checking for them.
The big caveat here is that the ticks that transmit Lyme are smaller than the ones I’m used to finding on me. I had a recent test that detected small amounts of a Lyme virus in my blood. I haven’t seen any corresponding symptoms, so I don’t have any guess as to where I lived when I got infected. I presume I never detected the tick that caused it.
Other insects: those mosquito maps seem misleading. There’s a lot of local variation. Most parts of California seem pretty mosquito-free. The few parts that I’ve found bad were in mountains where the snow recently melted. The median location in New England has significantly more mosquitoes, and also a wider variety of other distracting insects, than the median location in California. My impression is that Maine is the worst state overall for insect distractions of the states that I have enough experience with to evaluate (mainly New England and the area from Colorado west), yet those maps suggest it’s good.
I consider grass pollen to be a bigger negative than insects. Grass pollen bothers me much more in New England than it does anywhere in the west.
My overall preferences (for reasons mostly involving weather, outdoor recreational options, and political climate): Of the top 5 places that you mention, Reno is my top choice, Bellingham is 2nd, New Hampshire is 3rd. Colorado also seems worth considering.
There’s a significant chance I’ll want to stay in the bay area, probably moving to somewhere a bit less urban than Berkeley.
The best answers to these questions that I’ve seen are in the book Expected Returns, which I reviewed here.
He uses it pretty broadly, without a clear definition:
His description of the opposite is maybe clearer: “all the forms of parochialism, all types of ethnocentricity”.