Economist.
Sherrinford
Karma: 527
Sure, it’s a frontpage feed: https://www.lesswrong.com/feed.xml?view=frontpage-rss&karmaThreshold=45
Why do the old Sequences posts suddenly appear in my RSS feed?
So here’s something that is not fomal theory, but may interest you: The Economist, March 27th, has a review of a new book on the history of constitutions called “The Gun, the Ship and the Pen” by Linda Colley.
Donating shoes/bicycles/etc. to developing nations is a bad idea, because it disrupts and destroys the local economy shoe-production. There simply isn’t enough regional demand, factoring in the large donations, to develop the proper economics of scale. I have no literature on this, but a well-thought out philantropist friend has noted this concept to me many times.
That is an argument I often hear or read, but I never see a good model showing that it would indeed be a consistent argument. Suppose you have an economy that gets all its shoes for free. Why shouldn’t people just be happy about that and produce something else?
The brain-drain argument is more complicated, also empirically, but concerning the “rebuild the country” argument: since this post is discussing ethics, I assume the question in this context would be: Why would an individual who is born in Syria be ethically obligated to stay there, while you are not ethically obligated to do everything to rebuild Syria?
Concerning climate goals: While I assume that nobody in Europe would consider starting a war against the US if the US government announces an NDC lacking ambition, I would be interesting which cases of abusing “the commons” actually led to “moral indignation, then war”.
Finally, if you invest in institution-building in your local community, the same things can happen. Other people around you don’t develop the capacity to contribute, you help people who could help themselves, and people can abuse the commons. If you can “reap the benefits of local status”, you could also reap the benefits of global status.
So I think all of your points may be worthwhile, but they seem somewhat incomplete.
Ok this may be a naive question, but given that John brews the stuff and expects certain results anyway: Isn’t being congested something that might simply follow from actual placebo effects?
Thanks for the observations.
Regarding the metta stuff, I wonder whether it is a nice-to-have but basically separate from meditation essentials. After all, Zen guys seem to say that zen is just the posture.
“Meditation for skeptics” – a review of two books, and some thoughts
And there’s still no mechanism.
Assuming that you refer to a biological mechanism, there are people who claim to have found just that.
The EMA report saying that there may be an association with very rare blood clots … came out after I hit the publish button. I agree that they then changed their tune from the pure explicit ‘no evidence’ line …
I may be naive and sound like a broken record but I still think it would be helpful if claims about what some said or did were backed up by a link or something.
When I say p-hacking, I mean that the search function was identical to what happens when people p-hack, with identical results—they’re looking at all conditions and subconditions, in all regions and subregions, with any possible lag ranges, in order to find something that happened above rate. And for the same reason—people are highly motivated to find a positive result somewhere.
So when you say p-hacking, you don’t really mean people p-hack? Or maybe I don’t understand the aim of your word choice—is this just rhetorics, and not meant to be accurate? It seems related to the questions whether MLK was a criminal, and tax is theft?
I don’t think anyone in a meeting said the word “p-hack”, but no one has denied that the search took place in this fashion, either, nor did they make any attempt to account for it, or notice any issues after they identified what they suspected was the issue. And there’s still no mechanism.
So no one has denied that—was there any public accusation to deny it? Any discussion where it would have to be denied? Or was there at least a serious indication that “the search took place in this fashion”?
I didn’t intend to explicitly say that the authorities are failing to use an adjusted background rate, but my prior is that they’re not doing so, because no one has mentioned doing the adjustment and in general no one silently does such adjustments when they make things seem more safe,
“the authorities” seems like a word that doesn’t explain anything. The health minister possibly does not “use an adjusted background rate”, he relies on judgement by a specialized agency. Assuming that this agency does not use an adjusted background rate seems quite a stretch; of course it’s possible, but where is the evidence for that in your summary? Where is the evidence for the claim that “no one silently does such adjustments when they make things seem more safe”?
because again everyone is on the ‘make the vaccines look unsafe’ team.
I have no idea why “everyone” should be on that side, and again, I don’t see any evidence for that. Asked by Watson, 220 German politicians today publicly stated their trust in AZ. Your implicit model of politics (or of whatever, I still don’t know who “everyone” is) seems to be wrong.
As always, interesting overview and very useful cost-benefit Fermis etc. As usual, I’m confused by some generalizing statements.
The WHO and EMA said there was no evidence there was an issue.
The EMA says:
EMA’s safety committee, PRAC, concluded its preliminary review of a signal of blood clots in people vaccinated with COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca …
the vaccine is not associated with an increase in the overall risk of blood clots (thromboembolic events) in those who receive it;
...
however, the vaccine may be associated with very rare cases of blood clots associated with thrombocytopenia, i.e. low levels of blood platelets (elements in the blood that help it to clot) with or without bleeding, including rare cases of clots in the vessels draining blood from the brain (CVST).
These are rare cases – around 20 million people in the UK and EEA had received the vaccine as of March 16 and EMA had reviewed only 7 cases of blood clots in multiple blood vessels (disseminated intravascular coagulation, DIC) and 18 cases of CVST. A causal link with the vaccine is not proven, but is possible and deserves further analysis.
… Overall the number of thromboembolic events reported after vaccination, both in studies before licensing and in reports after rollout of vaccination campaigns (469 reports, 191 of them from the EEA), was lower than that expected in the general population. This allows the PRAC to confirm that there is no increase in overall risk of blood clots. However, in younger patients there remain some concerns, related in particular to these rare cases.
The Committee’s experts looked in extreme detail at records of DIC and CVST reported from Member States, 9 of which resulted in death. Most of these occurred in people under 55 and the majority were women. Because these events are rare, and COVID-19 itself often causes blood clotting disorders in patients, it is difficult to estimate a background rate for these events in people who have not had the vaccine. However, based on pre-COVID figures it was calculated that less than 1 reported case of DIC might have been expected by 16 March among people under 50 within 14 days of receiving the vaccine, whereas 5 cases had been reported. Similarly, on average 1.35 cases of CVST might have been expected among this age group whereas by the same cut-off date there had been 12. A similar imbalance was not visible in the older population given the vaccine.
The Committee was of the opinion that the vaccine’s proven efficacy in preventing hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 outweighs the extremely small likelihood of developing DIC or CVST. However, in the light of its findings, patients should be aware of the remote possibility of such syndromes, and if symptoms suggestive of clotting problems occur patients should seek immediate medical attention …
The PRAC will undertake additional review of these risks, including looking at the risks with other types of COVID-19 vaccines (although no signal has been identified from monitoring so far). …
Sorry for the lengthy quote, but I think it’s worthwhile to read this, and I think it does not fit your description. I think that’s not saying there was no evidence of an issue, it’s saying there maybe was an issue among younger people and PRAC should look into that issue, but cost-benefit analysis says vaccination is still much better.
Given the different age groups affected and analyzed, I would like to understand what your “So it’s not remotely fair to use the background population rate when you’re explicitly targeting your elderly population for vaccinations.” sentence means. Which background population rate was used by the authorities? (By the way, the media in Germany noted that the difference between UK and EU may be due to the fact that the age groups receiving AZ in these places are different. That is, AZ in Germany was seemingly given to young nurses, many of which are women, because it was restricted to people under 65.)
For your “sequence of events”, as always I’d be happy to know whether “there’s extensive reporting of anything that happens to people right after getting the vaccine” is actually true. Intuition tells me that there’s also extensive reporting of symptoms of COVID-19 in times of a COVID-19 pandemic, but in fact there’s a relevant amount of unknown cases additional to official numbers. If headaches are the symptom of the relevant blood clots, should we really expect overreporting? My intuition would be that people underreported this symptom, in particular because everyone has heard that you should expect to feel sick etc after being vaccinated. On the other hand, after this discussion and media coverage, I expect people to report headaches more often, and this would also happen without any government-imposed interruption of the vaccination campaign—maybe even more so.
Being a European, I guess I must have lost my mind, so I don’t really understand what “All of this due, effectively, to pure p-hacking, without even bothering to pretend otherwise.” is supposed to mean. “p-hacking” would be intentional behavior, in particular combined with the “pretend” part. So you imply that there was an intention by analysts in some agency to stop the vaccination? And “without even bothering to pretend otherwise”, that is, they also said so? (But then again, seeing the Samo Burja tweet and the text around it, I guess it’s not even necessary to present a plausible mechanism how such things work. “Malice”, “madness”, etc. I can imagine the government meeting: “How do we cover up our failure?” “Let’s stop vaccination by pointing out blood clots! We understand statistics perfectly, so we know that the experts in the Paul Ehrlich Institute are wrong, but due to our malice and madness, we follow their recommendation.”)
“but you have a legal obligation to these people that forces your hand, because ‘there could be legal consequences’? And there’s no way to, say, pass a new law to fix that, even if you should have fixed it long ago? So that’s it, nothing you could do, huh? ”
If I am not mistaken about the Bundestag procedures, the interruption of vaccination did not take long compared to the time it takes to change a law.
Some people I know basically said they would not want to be vaccinated with AZ before the Paul Ehrlich Institute recommended a pause. I have no reason to assume that these people are particularly unrepresentative of the population. It is possible that the break, consideration, restart, communication (including cost-benefit considerations) works better.
Great, then maybe Daron Acemoglu’s review of the book is the right place to start.
It depends a bit on what you are searching for. Many interesting topics are covered in Persson/Tabellini’s Political Economics (they also have a book on constitutions, I cannot say much about that) and Drazen’s Political Economy in Macroeconomics. Or maybe you start by having a look at Acemoglu’s lecture notes. And there’s “Principled Agents?” by Besley, basically applying simple principle-agent models to governments. Which of these models are convincing is a different matter. Having spent a lot of time with Grossman & Helpman’s Lobby models, I think they don’t tell us as extremely much about lobbyism or politics.
Concerning the question of whom to call a murderer, there was a decision on that by the German Constitutional Court.
I had to sigh when I read “it can be hard to find editors who don’t have a strong opinion about the person. But this is very far from that, likely one reason why the NYT actually used David Gerard as a source”.
It would probably really take a lot of time to even understand what is and what is not considered to be in accordance with wikpedia rules. I note that, as in any other volunteer organization, a lot depends on who wants to put more time and effort into fighting for his/her convictions.
It should be noted here that /r/sleephackers and /r/sleep are supposed to be specialized communities, i.e. the kind that would care about even minor factual errors regarding this topic. And /r/ssc, as well as HN, should boast an audience that’s educated enough not to confuse science with a new global religion.
Just based on your description (I have never been there), it is possible that the reason for the behavior in these communities is that the supposed attitude of their members does not match their true motivations.
Maybe their perceived attraction to new members is not only that they are extremely scientific, sceptical, and open to discard their own ideas. Maybe some people go there because they like the idea that 1. science tells them that 2. they can improve themselves 3. in ways that the outside world usually overlooks. Then someone comes along and says: 1. Well no, that wasn’t really science, 2. so you basically cannot improve yourself this way, 3. and in fact the book is not even elite insight but popsci rubbish.
No matter whether people claim to be rationalist/scientific/self-critical/whatever, there are often in fact quite mixed motivations at play.
This is a nice post about an interesting topic. I think it may be helpful to mention that several of these points are discussed extensively in economics, polsci and game theory, though sometimes with a different vocabulary. (But maybe it is somehow intentional to not mention that, in order to keep the post shorter?)
“Successfully meeting up is still far more important than the location chosen, but given a successful meetup, you both disagree on preferred location.” This resembles the BoS game.
In the section “Powerless Underlings: Intentionally Destroying Communication Channels”, I like the idea of destroying communication channels after leaving a coordination message and find it an original idea. The store-clerk example could benefit from mentioning that there is a large literature on optimal delegation, for instance to a bureaucratic agent. This includes models of delegation as a commitment device, also modeling how much leeway you should leave to the agent you delegate to. Sometimes it makes sense to delegate to agents with preferences different from your own. In the 1980s that was the reason modeled in the literature on conservative central bankers. There are also papers on delegating the authority to bargain for you, I think I have seen that in the context of climate change papers.
Another point is that I think it would be helpful to define what exactly you call “negotiation game” more explicitly. Intuitively, I would say that the original usage of the term “Schelling point” or “focal point” suggests that it should be possible to write it down as a simultaneous-move game, and I don’t think that applies to every kind of negotiation (but I am no expert on how the term is used).
Ok, thanks.