The conference on Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights this past weekend had many boring parts and a few interesting tidbits.
Many of the speakers were left-wing ideologues who seemed to be directing their speeches only to others from the same small set of left-wing academics. There were fewer libertarians at the conference than I expected, but still enough that it was strange how much of a disconnect there was between the ideology shown in the speeches and the ideology I knew from elsewhere that many people held but were being quiet about.
There was plenty of concern about whether increased control over one’s body would decrease diversity, but I heard little that enlightened me on that subject. There have clearly been many technologies that increased diversity, such as tattoos. There are some that have decreased diversity because there is a substantial consensus about what’s best (e.g. eyesight – it’s unclear why we should be concerned about a shortage of people who can’t see well enough to drive). Then there are a few traits such as degree of autism where there’s some uncertainty whether reduced diversity would be good. There are some pontificators (I didn’t hear anyone this focused at the conference) who think they know better than the masses what the right amount of diversity is, and that their opinions should be imposed on the masses. But the evidence for the pontificators’ expertise and the masses propensity to make mistakes is generally underwhelming, so I can’t find much reason to be as concerned about the effects of enhancement technology as I am about the desire to impose expert opinion on those who don’t want it.
Hank Greely pointed out that the letter of the law authorizes the FDA to regulate anything that could be considered a body enhancement, including clothing. So only the FDA’s interest in obeying the spirit of the law will deter them from regulating external enhancements.
One amusing report of unwanted side effects of an enhancement technology is the increase in sexually transmitted diseases in seniors following the introduction of Viagra.
Aubrey de Grey made an interesting argument that the most effective approach to convincing people to support a cure for aging is to persuade them that they are being logically inconsistent when they fail to do so. He has a point, but it’s weaker than he thinks. He gave several examples of problems that were allegedly solved by persuading society to be more logically consistent, but I generally doubt that’s what happened. One example was tolerance of homosexuality. I see few signs that logical arguments had much effect on that. I think the biggest change came from peer pressure, which became increasingly popular as gays became able to migrate to places where there were enough gays to safely start exerting peer pressure. Another factor was the shift away from the belief that the main purpose of sex should be reproduction. That initially happened due to changing circumstances (reduced reliance on children to support elderly parents). I’d say that has generally produced beliefs that are more inconsistent as people abandon the least convenient symptoms of the belief (e.g. contraception) but are much slower to abandon symptoms that are remote from their experience. I think similar theories could be made about some other examples he gave (slavery becoming more expensive to enforce when railroads made it easier for slaves to escape to a non-slave state).
Next time you hear someone implying that commercial development is the primary enemy of the environment, remember stories such as this one about how much harm a single wasteful Army Corps of Engineers project is doing to wetlands.
Book Review: Operation Yao Ming: The Chinese Sports Empire, American Big Business, and the Making of an NBA Superstar by Brook Larmer
This book is a very readable biography of Yao Ming.
But I had been led to hope that it would inform me about China’s future. I’m disappointed at how little it tells me about that subject. It provides some moderately interesting tidbits of information about China’s recent history, but the book doesn’t attempt to provide the kind of understanding of China that would tell us whether those tidbits are a glimpse of a past that is being abandoned or whether they contain useful indications of China’s future.
Richard Timberlake’s article in the June 2006 issue of Liberty makes some arguments about the causes of the Great Depression that are tempting to believe but at best only partly convincing.
Much of the article is about the Fed becoming dominated by followers of the real bill doctrine. While he presents evidence that leaders of the Fed liked the doctrine, and I can imagine that following that doctrine could explain much of the 1930-1932 contraction. But if the Fed was fully following that doctrine and that were the primary cause of the contraction, the narrow measures of the money supply (which are the ones most directly under the Fed’s control) would have contracted, when they actually expanded during 1930-1932. So I doubt that the Fed was as influenced by the doctrine as Timberlake suggests. But as a factor contributing to the Fed’s caution about expanding the money supply further, it’s fairly plausible, and causes me to be a bit more skeptical of the Fed’s competence than I was before.
The more interesting part of the article is the attempt to deny that the gold standard did anything to cause the contraction. Timberlake notes that the Fed’s gold reserves remained well above the legally required minimum, and claims that shows the Fed wasn’t constrained from expanding the money supply by risks to the gold standard. But that’s true only if the legally required reserves were either sufficient to cover all potential claims or to convince holders of paper dollars that all likely claims would be satisfied. I’m not aware of any clear reason to think this was the case, and it’s easy to imagine that the Fed knew more than Timberlake does about how eager holders of paper dollars would have been to demand gold if the Fed’s gold reserves had dropped further. So I’m still inclined to think that the Fed’s restraint in late 1931 and 1932 resulted from a somewhat plausible belief that it couldn’t do more without taking excessive risk that the gold standard would fail and that we would be stuck with the kind of inflation-prone system that we ended up with anyway.
Book Review: Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective by J. Philippe Rushton
Rushton has a plausible theory that some human populations are more k-selected than others. He presents lots of marginal-quality evidence, but that’s no substitute for what he should be able to show if his theory is true.
Much of the book is devoted to evidence about IQs and brain sizes, but he fails to provide much of an argument for his belief that k-selected humans ought to have higher intelligence. It’s easy to imagine that it might work that way. But I can come up with an alternative based on the sexual selection theory in Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind that seems about as plausible: r-selected humans have more of their reproductive fitness determined by success at competition for mates (as opposed to k-selected humans for whom child support has a higher contribution to reproductive fitness). Since The Mating Mind presents a strong argument that human intelligence evolved largely due to such competition for mates, it is easy to imagine that r-selected humans had stronger selection for the kind of social intelligence needed to compete for mates. Note that this theory suggests the intelligence of k-selected humans might be easier to measure via standardized tests than that of r-selected humans.
Rushton’s analysis of the genetic aspects of IQ makes the usual mistake of failing to do much to control for the effects of motivation on IQ scores (see pages 249-251 of Judith Rich Harris’s book The Nurture Assumption for evidence that this matters for Rushton’s goals).
He also devotes a good deal of space to evidence such as crime rates where it’s very hard to distinguish genetic from cultural differences, and there’s no reason to think he has succeeded in controlling for culture here.
Rushton mentions a number of other traits that are more directly connected to degree of k-selection and less likely to be culturally biased. It’s disappointing that he provides little evidence of the quality of the data he uses. The twinning data seem most interesting to me, as the high twin rates of the supposedly r-selected population follow quite clearly from his theory, it’s hard to come up with alternative theories that would explain such twinning rates, and the numbers he gives look surprisingly different from random noise. But Rushton says so little about these data that I can’t have much confidence that they come from representative samples of people. (He failed to detect problems with the widely used UN data on African AIDS rates, which have recently been shown to have been strongly biased by poor sampling methods, so it’s easy to imagine that he uses equally flawed data for more obscure differences). (Aside – the book’s index is poor enough that page 214, which is where he lists most of his references for the twinning data, is not listed under the entry for twins/twinning).
Rushton occasionally produces some interesting but irrelevant tidbits, such as that Darwin “affirmed human unity” by ending the debate over whether all humanity had a common origin, or that there’s evidence that “introverts are more punctual, absent less often, and stay longer at a job”.
Edward M. Miller has a theory that is similar to but slightly more convincing than Rushton’s in a paper titled Paternal Provisioning versus Mate Seeking in Human Populations.
Book Reviews: Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (Paperback)
by Pat Califia
and Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex by Pat Califia
Sex Changes provides a good history of nonstandard genders. It describes a rather dramatic change in how typical transsexuals see themselves, from a time when sex change operations were considered attempted cures for a somewhat embarrassing disease and strongly desired to fit in to a standard gender stereotype to a time when many celebrate their diversity and see their gender (both before and after any hormones or surgery they may get) as something different from male or female.
I was a bit surprised by some things the book reports, such as that cross-dressing was illegal in parts of the U.S. as recently as the 1980s, or that some people approach sex reassignment with the same mindset as they do when getting tattoos.
The book has fairly good discussions of the problems with access to surgery and hormones that are created by disagreements over whether they are cures for a disease or something closer to cosmetic surgery. It is disturbing how much incentive there is to lie to doctors (and maybe insurers) in order to fit a somewhat arbitrary stereotype of someone with more mental problems than the average transsexual experiences.
I’m disappointed that the book does little to analyze the politics of how gender-segregated restrooms deal with people who don’t consider themselves male or female. It seems likely that this will generate political controversy soon, but few people seem prepared for it.
The book mostly deals with U.S. culture, but one chapter deals unusually-gendered roles in other cultures, mainly Berdaches in Native American cultures, and arguments about whether they should be thought of as transgender roles.
I have a few objections to what the book says:
The roots of prejudice against homosexuals and the hatred and fear of transsexuals are so closely woven together that it is not really all that difficult to educate people simultaneously about both communities.
This seems only half right. There are ways to argue for queer rights that apply to both groups, but I don’t see how they address many of the fears of bigots. Prejudice against gays has little to do with the fears that restrooms will be unsafe for some women if there is no clear boundary between male and female, or the fear that someone will put a lot of time and prestige at risk courting a potential mate only to discover that it won’t be possible to produce children via such a mating. Fear of transsexuals has little to do with the fear that gay men will spread sexually transmitted diseases.
There are many things that could have been done better to advance respect for transsexuals without hindering homosexuals. We could have used the word queer a good deal more often, and we could have tried harder to insure that queer was used in an inclusive way. (The obstacles to that weren’t just conservative tendencies among some homosexuals, but also intolerance among radicals who want to show off their ideological purity by distancing themselves from non-radicals who could be called queer).
Another way would be for gay rights advocates to focus more on disagreements about whether the primary purpose of sex and romance is reproduction. Many leading gay marriage opponents are trying to maintain or recreate a culture in which sex is more strongly connected to reproduction than I think the swing voter is comfortable with. Yet too many gay rights activists prefer to stereotype opponents as simply ignorant rather than having controversial but coherent goals.
These two approaches could have helped transsexuals somewhat without any cost to gays, but much of the reason gays have been accepted faster than transsexuals is that there have been more gays around to demand respect from their friends and neighbors, and no change in queer activist strategies would have much effect on that difference.
despite the fact that SRS has been performed for three decades, most insurance companies and HMOs classify it as an experimental procedure, and will not cover it. This should be compared to the response to organ transplants
Yet there’s much clearer evidence that organ transplants usually accomplish their goals well than there is that sexual reassignment surgery does. Insurers treatment of SRS doesn’t seem significantly more arbitrary than their decision to not cover experimental treatments in general. The main problem is the inadequate innovation in the surgical practices.
Public Sex is a fairly good survey of unconventional sexual practices. Much of it simply reports that people (often the author) are proud to engage in this and that practice. The book occasionally makes arguments that attempt to convince people to approve of those practices, but mostly it will fail to change many minds. People who are unashamed of sex will mostly already agree with the ideas in the book, and prudes will be unwilling to consider them.
The rants against puritanical feminists might convince a few gays that some feminists are their enemies, but mostly they will just reinforce existing beliefs.
Many of the essays were written in the 1980s, and the sometimes tedious descriptions of legal and political details of that time are of little value except to historians.
Some of the older essays include an occasional annoyingly overbroad quasi-marxist class struggle rant, but the more recent essays indicate the author has become more sensible over time.
The rants against puritanical feminists might convince a few gays that some feminists are their enemies, but mostly they will just reinforce existing beliefs.
Many of the essays were written in the 1980s, and the sometimes tedious descriptions of legal and political details of that time are of little value except to historians.
Some of the older essays include an occasional annoyingly overbroad quasi-marxist class struggle rant, but the more recent essays indicate the author has become more sensible over time.
Ramesh Ponnuru, a somewhat respectable conservative, has published a book titled “The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life”.
I have nothing newsworthy to say about the claim that the Democrats are a party of death. What puzzles me is why Republicans think they should be considered opponents of a culture of death. I haven’t heard any leading Republicans criticize Leon Kass, who recently served as chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics under Bush, for statements such as:
the finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not.
See this article for a longer version of his argument that people ought to die.
I wonder if what Ponnuru really means is that the Democrats are a party of unnatural death, whereas the Republicans are a party of natural death.
A recent report says that switching from a meat-heavy diet to a vegetarian diet is as valuable for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions as switching to driving the right car. And that if you eat fish, switching from large fish to things like sardines and anchovies makes a big difference.
I’m unsure whether to believe the magnitudes of the differences, but the general idea appears right.
I went to an interesting talk Wednesday by the CTO of D-Wave. He indicated that their quantum computing hardware is working well enough that their biggest problems are understanding how to use them and explaining that to potential customers.
This implies that they are much further advanced than the impressions I’ve gotten from sources unconnected with D-Wave suggest is plausible. D-Wave is being sufficiently secretive that I can’t put too much confidence in what they imply, but the degree of secrecy doesn’t seem unusual, and I don’t see any major reasons to doubt them other than the fact that they’re way ahead of what I gather many experts in the field think is possible. Steve Jurvetson’s investment in D-Wave several years ago is grounds for taking them fairly seriously.
The implications if this is real are concentrated in a few special applications (quantum computing sounds even more special purpose than I had previously realized), but for molecular modelling (and fields that depend on it such as drug discovery) it means some really important changes. Modelling that previously required enormous amounts of cpu power and expertise to produce imperfect approximations will apparently now require little more than the time and expertise needed to program a quantum computer (plus whatever exorbitant fees D-Wave charges).
Book Review: When Genius Failed : The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein
This is a very readable and mostly convincing account of the rise and fall of Long-Term Capital Management. It makes it clear to me how the fairly common problem of success breeding overconfidence led LTCM to make unreasonable gambles, and why other financial institutions that risked their money by dealing with LTCM failed to require it to exercise a normal degree of caution.
The book occasionally engages in some minor exaggerations that suggest the author is a journalist rather than an expert in finance, but mostly the book appears a good deal more accurate and informed than I expect from a reporter. It is written so that both experts and laymen will enjoy it.
One passage stands out as unusually remarkable. “The traders hadn’t seen a move like that – ever. True, it had happened in 1987 and again in 1992. But Long-Term’s models didn’t go back that far.” This is really peculiar mistake. The people involved appeared to have enough experience to realize the need to backtest their models better than that. I’m disappointed that the book fails to analyze how this misjudgment was possible.
Also, the author spends a bit too much analysis on LTCM’s overconfidence in their models, when his reporting suggests that a good deal of the problem was due to trading that wasn’t supported by any model.