Speaking of public pressure to adopt better policies, let’s form a twitter campaign to #unclogthefda. We’re campaigning to decrease FDA red tape and accelerate vaccination approvals using tired-and-tested healthcare reform organizing techniques! You can read and comment on the plan here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QYkMWMZqQg49SrTdf/unclogthefda-a-twitter-storm-to-approve-vaccines
Tim Liptrot
this is good and you should feel good
Assigning a base rate here is difficult. We know presidential systems have more coups, and there are very few multi-century presidential systems. If your base rate is based on only those factors its low because of New Zealand and Sweden and the UK, which almost never have divided legislatures or divided judiciaries. This is a real problem—all the democracies that last as long as us look different. The democracies that are most like us had coups long ago.
If you ignore that problem, the base rate is like .3%. If your reference class is presidential democracies, then your base rate is more like 3%.
Chile had lots of other risk factors:
Of Chile’s three neighbours, two experienced 7 or more coup attempts in 1950-89. The other, Peru, experienced 5. Executive and parliament not just divided, the legislature in coalition against the executive President elected with just 36% of the vote Riots and protests were common. Escalating political violence Inflation 140%/year Judiciary publically criticizing the executive Failed coup just one month prior Economic contraction
All of those combined I say make coups quite likely. Over the 5 year period from 71 to 76, maybe 25%.
- 20 Oct 2020 23:02 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on A tale from Communist China by (
This is misleading. Firstly, it selects on the depenent variable. Secondly it implies that the USA is responsible for the the majority of backsliding instances, which is not correct. Thirdly, it overstates the role of the US in several backsliding instances and understates local dynamics.
I just did a very quick search. The literature focuses really heavily on the relationship between federalism and interethnic violence at the national level (if we give tribe B their own province, are they more or less likely to launch a coup/civil war). Your question is addressed much less often, but if I had the time to dig I could find something. One note—among non-democratic states I doubt a relationship. Soviet Union was federal and high-coup.
In the US case, I strongly agree with your explanation. There are two plausible mechanisms.
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The states would resist any coup in distant Washington. GW and TJ could not name themselves kings because the states had much larger armies. Similarly like Macron and Merkel cannot take over Europe by couping the EU. Biggest reason.
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Any faction has a reduced incentive to launch a coup. This is more subtle, but it explains the large divergence in regime length in the Christian and Muslim world from 1,000 AD on (because Christian feudalism is “federal”). Each faction controls the wealth of a state/province/barony and has rich opportunities for rent seeking there. They can increase their rent-seeking by couping the capital, but the increase is actually low. They will still have to share with the states, and they already control their base. So the incentive for each faction to coup is much lower.
Imagine, by comparison, being an Ottoman Mamluke. Choose not to coup—you have 0 wealth. Win the coup, you get all the wealth. Huge incentive to take risks.
Caveat—not all coups are about rent-seeking. Actors may launch a coup to avert a national crisis, like the many coup attempts against Hitler. These are a minority (although everyone pretends they aren’t rent seeking).
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This an interesting essay and seems compelling to me. Because I am insufferable, I will pick the world’s smallest nit.
The Wright Brothers took 4 years to build their first successful prototype. It took another 23 years for the first mass manufactured airplane to appear, for a total of 27 years of R&D.
That’s true but artisanal airplanes were produced in the hundreds of thousands before mass manufacture. 200k airplanes served in WW1 just 15 years in. So call it 15 years of R&D.
There were also a number of risk factors where the treatment and control groups had significant differences, most notably diabetes (present in 2.5x as many patients in the control group).
Firstly, two risk factors were more common among the treatment groups: <60 years of age, immunosuppressed & transplanted. Secondly, 3 treatment group patients (6%) were diabetic and 5 control (19.23%) were. Let us take the most generous assumptions for your position, and say that the 3 patients with diabetes in the treatment group did not require ICU and that the 5 in control group all required ICU. This is a strong assumption (aka unlikely).
With these generous assumptions, the study results are now that 1⁄47 patients in treatment required ICU and that 8⁄21 in control required. The p value remains .0001. *In order to achieve a p<.05 the lack of blinding/fuzziness would must have failed to send 16 of the 46 treatment group members to the ICU.* That is still not likely without deliberate fraud.
Basically, cities want secure stores of groundwater for the long term. But farmers will use up all the water if they can. Right now most countries let total anarchy reign because the farmers are hard to stop (they’re everywhere and they constantly dig wells and they hide and bribe and shoot at regulators. So our primary question was “if we look at a country with really severe urban deficit, does that motivate the government to go out and reduce overuse? Or are the challenges and perverse incentives impossible to overcome?
We found that the Jordanians took advantage of the fact that barriers to regulation are unevenly distributed between aquifers. So you can find aquifers that are cheap to enforce and have few people capable of rioting/couping (the Jordanians fear revolt more than coup, but usually expect the reverse). The current preferred approach is to tax all the farmers in every basin (aquifer) to close a few less productive farms in each basin. But then you’re spending your scarce enforcement and “pissing people off” budget in low yield basins. Instead the Jordanians targeted one area as “preserve” for future urban use and successfully shut it down completely (way lower enforcement costs). Then you concentrate your resources on protecting one area.
Ooo I can make an analogy to wildlife preserves!
By coincidence the easiest area to make preserve was 600 km south and 1 km below Amman. So they paid probably an extra 2billion usd (1B Capital + 100 M/year energy) over 10 years to pump that water. They always framed the “pissing people off” budget as about “unemployment”, but it wasn’t about unemployment because they could have used 2 billion to reduce unemployment more efficiently with almost any other policy!
You’re right, thanks for that. I removed that sentence and changed the tone a bit.
“Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy. ”—Big Yud
I really doubt that people in the comment section will start siding with the RSF or the SAF and turning arguments into soldiers here. To almost all westerners Sudan todays is as distant as “Louis XVI during the French Revolution”.
| They’re almost as horrified as people who’ve tweeted for years about sex and astrology and pineal glands are to discover that half their mutuals are actually LessWrongers.
I cracked up at that
Fun Autocracy Facts:
This type of bureaucratic malpractice is particularly common in autocracies. The regime (top leadership) regime wants to know the problem and provide good policies to protect from overthrow. Their desire to avoid embarrassment is a bit lower. The bureaucrats are different. They care much less about the regime being overthrown but want to avoid embarrassment and hard work. So for bureaucrat the incentives to non-comply are strong. Democratic systems have the same problem, but have independent judiciaries and legislatures to share in overseeing the bureaucracy. To conclude:
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This narrative is highly plausible. Our prior that mass data faking happens should be high.
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We cannot assume that the regime (Putin) is aware of this.
For a paper on similar problems in China see or my paper on Jordan
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Zvi has repeatedly cited a paper arguing that the FDA kills more people by preventing effective treatments than it saves by preventing bad treatments. Not having followed that link personally, the results suggest that pub health statisticians are miscalibrated in expectation.
One explanation for why pub health statisticians are miscalibrated in a causing-death-by-inaction direction is that they are punished for deaths caused by action but not deaths caused by inaction. I’m this model, conservatism (aka miscalibration toward inaction) is a result of the lived and publicized experiences of people in the field. This seems a great explanation for both the experts norms and the paper results.
Are you contesting that statisticians are miscalibrated in expectation in the utility they cause?
I think the “Bailey to your Motte” is that people are bad at predicting who they might infect, so this advice could lead to greater deaths. I think Zvi could have phrased it more carefully. But the broader point needed emphasis, that we are loosing so much for something we could fix. And that fix might not be so hard. That point is more important than quibbling one darn sentence.
Going into academia was a mistake. It takes years of sacrifice and lots of luck to become a professor. The optimization is so intense you actually have less control over your research than you think. But even worse, being a professor sucks (in poli sci at least). You probably have to move to a rural area, the pay is like 60 or 75 if tenure track. The hours are the same as a normal job. The only benefit is doing your own research, but the pressure to compete squeezes the fun out of that.
I think someone wrote classic LW post about this. Yud mentions it in Inadequate Equilibria. Anyone know where that is?
Those are some really strong critiques. The framework did do something valuable for me. I have a few professors at my PhD program who are properly clueless. I’ve been trying to speak straight talk to them for a while, with negative results. It just strains the relationship. After reading this, I will try some babytalk. Frame my research agenda with some woke jargon, stuff like that.
Also the passage on woke talk and professors is spot on.
Thanks! An error in my markdown was causing most paragraph breaks no to appear. Fixed.
I was teaching my students Huntington’s clash of civilizations last week, an essay with similar problems. I had them nail down the testable assumptions, causal arguments, and falsifiable predictions of the piece. Got them to emotive the fuzziness themselves. It was a pretty rewarding way to teach.
Many people on this website are hardcore social distancers, interacting only with essential workers. To them it seems natural that essential workers are the majority of the transmission and do not have immunity yet. But most people aren’t social distancing very hard at all. In Nashville, were I currently am, the bars and restaurants are often full. My immune brother when to house parties and indoor concerts on New Years Eve. I doubt that essential workers constitute even a majority of current transmission.
So we vaccinate 80 million people and reduce transmission by 50%, maybe. That would take months. Meanwhile, there are only 50 million Americans over 65, doing >90% of the dying, and we could vaccinate them in just two months.
TLDR; The transmission argument for essential workers assumes people comply with social distancing. People aren’t doing that anymore, so vaccinate the vulnerable.
I have a hard time blaming the people of Oklahoma for giving up.
We’re all tired of social distancing. We’re all depressed. Unemployment is at 7%, and underemployment is definitely way up. The legislature didn’t rise to the occasion. I myself have forgotten how to make pleasant conversation.
The people who benefit from lockdowns are the most isolated, so people don’t see their benefit. The people who suffer the most from the policy are the unemployed, and people see them often. Sociotropy isn’t magic; We care about the people we see suffering. The more isolated we become from eachother, the more selfish we will become.
Few Americans wake up and look at the scary COVID numbers and feel the suffering of the infected because of scope neglect. It’s the same reason we didn’t care about children dying of malaria before.
Totalitarianism is not a very useful political category. Authoritarianism is a preferred concept. In general democracies tend to have larger and more effective bureaucracies. China and the Soviet Union are outliers in this regard, inaccurately suggesting that authoritarian states are necessarily large and interventionist. They are usually much less competent.
Authoritarian states can emerge from democracies. The following risk factors are observed
Young democracies
Presidential systems rather than parliamentary
Poorer countries
Countries with large natural resources. This is well established
Weak democracies are sometimes created to protect the outgoing elites. Examples include Lebanon, Burma, Hungary, and (sort of) the US. The resulting democracies are less successful at creating legitimacy and may backslide more often. This theory is debated. See https://faculty.washington.edu/vmenaldo/Articles in Journals/BJPS Article.pdf
There’s coupcast model. It’s not very good https://oefresearch.org/activities/coup-cast
Because the US is a presidential model with many veto points and FPTP, it is more likely to have a coup. This makes it unusual among long established democracies. Japan is also a younger democracy (first regime change in 1994).