Post-Revolution

This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies need the policing of social norms.

Fractals Everywhere

The genes that cause Romanesco, a kind of cauliflower, to grow in a fractal pattern have been identified. “we found that curd self-similarity arises because the meristems fail to form flowers but keep the ‘memory’ of their transient passage in a floral state. Additional mutations affecting meristem growth can induce the production of conical structures reminiscent of the conspicuous fractal Romanesco shape. This study reveals how fractal-like forms may emerge from the combination of key, defined perturbations of floral developmental programs and growth dynamics.”

It’s the fact that this gene appears to function in other plants, though, that is blowing my mind. Give this technique another 10 or 20 years, and the resulting experiments—and the subsequent landscapes—seem endless, from gardens of infinitely self-similar roses and orchids to forests populated by bubbling forms of fractal pines, roiling oaks, and ivies.

Link Rot

I was able to analyze ~2m externally facing links found in NYT articles since its inception in 1996. We found that 25% of deep links have rotted. If you go back to 1998, 72% of the links are dead. More than 50% of all NYT articles that contain deep links have at least 1 rotted link. The benefits of the internet and web’s flexibility—including permitting the building of walled app gardens on top of them that reject the idea of a URL entirely—now come at great risk and cost to the larger tectonic enterprise to, in Google’s early words, “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” What are we going to do about the crisis we’re in? A complementary approach to “save everything” through independent scraping is for whoever is creating a link to make sure that a copy is saved at the time the link is made. Authors of enduring documents—including scholarly papers, newspaper articles, and judicial opinions—can ask Perma to convert the links included within them into permanent ones archived at perma.cc; participating libraries treat snapshots of what’s found at those links as accessions to their collections, and undertake to preserve them indefinitely. A technical infrastructure through which authors and publishers can preserve the links they draw on is a necessary start. But the problem of digital malleability extends beyond the technical. The law should hesitate before allowing the scope of remedies for claimed infringements of rights—whether economic ones like copyright or more personal, dignitary ones like defamation—to expand naturally as the ease of changing what’s already been published increases.

Cell Size Regulation

“It’s been a profound mystery for many, many decades in biology, how cells are able to accomplish this task of almost magically knowing what their size is”. Shape and size regulation are important because they are closely tied to how a cell functions: Too large and it can be difficult for the cell to quickly retrieve information contained in its own DNA; too small and the cell doesn’t have enough space to split properly, causing errors in division and growth that could lead to disease. The secret to cell size regulation lies in the concentration of KRP4 in each new cell. Though the daughter cells inherit an equal amount of KRP4, because they might be different sizes, the concentration of this protein in each cell isn’t necessarily the same. Smaller cells started with a higher concentration of KRP4 and spent more time growing. For bigger cells, the concentration was diluted, so they grew less. Overall, this balanced out any asymmetries in cell size.

LSD lowers priors

An important aspect of predictive processing is that each hypothesis generated by a level in the hierarchy is associated with a notion of confidence in the hypothesis, which in turn is based on prior expectations. Could psychedelics be altering our perception of reality by messing with this process? Friston and Robin Carhart-Harris think so. If psychedelics mess with prior beliefs, that might also explain why they cause one to hallucinate a reality that’s untethered from real-world expectations.

Lockdown Effectiveness

1: Various policies lumped together as “lockdowns” probably significantly decreased R. Full-blown stay-at home orders were less important than targeted policies like school closures and banning large gatherings. Talking about which ones were “good” or “bad” is an oversimplification compared to the more useful questions of when countries should have started vs. stopped each to be on some kind of Pareto frontier of lives saved vs. cost.

2: If Sweden had a stronger lockdown more like those of other European countries, it probably could have reduced its death rate by 50-80%, saving 2500+ lives.

3: On a very naive comparison, US states with stricter lockdowns had ~20% lower death rates than states with weaker ones, and ~0.6% more GDP decline. There are high error bars on both those estimates.

4: Judging lockdowns by traditional measures of economic significance, moving from a US red-state level of lockdown to a US blue-state level of lockdown is in the range normally associated with interventions that are debatably cost-effective/utility-positive, with error bars including “obviously good” and “pretty bad”. It’s harder to estimate for Sweden, but plausibly for them to move to a more European-typical level of lockdown in the early phase of the pandemic would have very much cleared the bar and been unambiguously cost effective/utility-positive.

5: It’s harder to justify strict lockdowns in terms of the non-economic suffering produced. Even assumptions skewed to be maximally pro-strict-lockdown, eg where strict lockdowns would have prevented every single coronavirus case, suggest that it would have taken dozens of months of somewhat stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. This might still be justifiable if present strict lockdowns now prevented future strict lockdowns (mandated or voluntary), which might be true in Europe but doesn’t seem as true in the US.

6: Plausibly, really well-targeted lockdowns could have been better along every dimension than either strong-lockdown areas’ strong lockdowns or weak-lockdown areas’ weak lockdowns, and we should support the people trying to figure out how to do that.

7: All of this is very speculative and affected by a lot of factors, and the error bars are very wide.

Indian Legalese

The modern form of Babu English turns up most frequently in the language of India’s legal system. Here’s a single sentence from an order from the Himachal Pradesh state high court issued in 2016: “However, the learned counsel appearing for the tenant/JD/petitioner herein cannot derive the fullest succour from the aforesaid acquiescence occurring in the testification of the GPA of the decree holder/landlord, given its sinew suffering partial dissipation from an imminent display occurring in the impugned pronouncement hereat wherewithin unravelments are held qua the rendition recorded by the learned Rent Controller in Rent Petition No. 1-2/1996 standing assailed before the learned Appellate Authority by the tenant/JD by the latter preferring an appeal therebefore whereat he under an application constituted under Section 5 of the Limitation Act sought extension of time for depositing his statutory liability qua the arrears of rent determined by the learned Rent Controller in a pronouncement made by the latter on 6.11.1999, wherefrom an inference spurs of the JD acquiescing qua his not making the relevant deposit qua his liability towards arrears of rent within the statutorily prescribed period, application whereof suffered the ill fate of its dismissal by the learned appellate Authority under the latter’s order recorded on 16.12 2000.” When the matter came up in appeal before the Supreme Court, the baffled judge sent it back to the high court, observing, “We will have to set it aside because one cannot understand this.” “It seems that some judges have unrealized literary dreams. Maybe it’s a colonial hangover, or the feeling that obfuscation is a sign of merit… It can then become a 300-page judgment, just pontificating” In October, Subhash Vijayran filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, which is in the process of hearing his petition requesting that legal writing be simplified. “The writing of most lawyers is: (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous and (4) dull,” his petition states. “We use 8 words to say what can be said in 2. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas.”

See also the elements of bureaucratic style:

What became clear to me in this exchange is that the passive voice is itself unsuited for the lexical landscape of United’s email, which itself is part of a larger world we now find ourselves in, where corporate and government bureaucracies rely heavily on language to shape our perception. Munoz’s email relies heavily on the passive voice to evade culpability, but he also employs a host of other rhetorical moves that collude to put the blame on the man who was assaulted and carried out on a stretcher. Like a well-trained bureaucrat, Munoz used an array of syntactical choices in a predictable, quantifiable, and deliberate manner, and it’s time we recognize it for what it is.

The Ideal University

The people who write and grade the students’ tests would not be their instructors. Students would have to acquire a genuine general knowledge base, not just memorize what is supposed to be on the exam. It would not have assistant deans, student affairs staff or sports teams. The focus would be on paying more money to the better instructors. Instructors would not have tenure, but would have to compete for students — by offering them classes and services that would help them graduate and improve the quality of their certification pages. The school would hire online instructors too, many of them from poorer countries and working at lower wages. None of the instructors would be required to have any undergraduate or advanced degrees.

2021-11-09: Tyler is involved in a new university:

To the historian’s eyes, there is something unpleasantly familiar about the patterns of behavior that have, in a matter of a few years, become normal on many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates. The denunciations of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancelations. The rehabilitations following abject confessions. The officiousness of unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.