Scholarship for STD risks and test accuracy is extremely bad. The information on this topic is awful.

One paper on HSV IgG (herpes, many cases of which are called "cold sores") testing stood out to me because it had a good section:

Summary of Test
1. Prepare 1:51 dilutions of Calibrator(s), Controls and samples in the test set Diluent. Mix well.
2. Place 100 μl of the dilutions in the Coated Wells; reserve one well for the reagent blank.
3. Incubate at room temperature for 30 ± 5 minutes.
4. Drain wells thoroughly. Wash wells 4 times with Wash Solution and drain.
5. Place 2 drops (or 100 μl) of Conjugate in wells.
6. Incubate at room temperature for 30 ± 5 minutes.
7. Drain wells thoroughly. Wash wells 4 times with Wash Solution and drain.
8. Place 2 drops (or 100 μl) of Substrate in wells.
9. Incubate at room temperature for 30 ± 5 minutes.
10. Stop the enzyme reaction with 2 drops (or 100 μl) of Stop Reagent.
11. Read absorbance at 405 nm against reagent blank.

It's great to specify details like washing 4 times and the 5 minute error margins on incubation times.

This is much better than most "scientific" papers I've seen which do not give repeatable procedures for doing the experiment with this sort of detail. I think maybe it's because herpes testing is actually repeated a lot (to test many different people), whereas most scientific experiments are only done once or a few times.

No excuses though. All science should meet this sort of standard or higher. (Honestly it's really not that hard or amazing. This shouldn't be unusual.)

But later the paper says something awful:

A negative serological test does not exclude the possibility of past infection. Following primary HSV infection, antibody may fall to undetectable levels and then be boosted by later clinical infection with the same, or heterologous virus type. Such an occurrence may lead to incorrect interpretations of seroconversion and primary infection, or negative antibody status. [my emphasis]

Heterologous is a prestigious word meaning, basically, it's a different strain of the virus.

So they are saying something may later be boosted by infection with the same virus or a different virus. Why would you say it could be either the same or different? And why present that like it's a fancy, complex point requiring sophisticated and hard-to-read language? They are using fancy words like "heterologous" but I think they didn't really think through what they are actually trying to say. The content is confused and confusing.

And the comma after "the same" is incorrect grammar. They're trying to write in a fancy way but are getting the basics wrong. This is written to impress and intimidate people, not to communicate.

The authors are more interested in sounding like smart medical researches than actually communicating effectively.

This reminds me of a Richard Feynman story:

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read – something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I have this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Another interesting part of the paper was the data that around 70% of adults have herpes (and another roughly 15% test ambiguous, and 15% negative). This is in line with other sources I've seen. The result is that most STD testing skips herpes (unless there's a visible lesion), even though it's a common STD! Many doctors discourage blood tests for herpes. Some clinics or government run healthcare services don't do herpes blood testing at all, or refuse it to most people. People sort of act like herpes is too common to worry about, so just don't make any effort to avoid infection. No doubt this attitude contributes to so many people having herpes. (You may want to consider getting a herpes test. Herpes is contagious some of the time even if you have no visible sores.)

On a related note, many people who "get tested" for STDs don't even pay attention to which STDs they've been tested for. Lots of people are promiscuous without giving much thought to what STDs exist, what tests exist, how good the tests are, how long things take to show up on the tests with what accuracy, etc. (People are also extremely reckless about believing their partners' claims about safety. People lie to their spouses about their sexual activities, so believing someone you're hooking up with – who has to say how safe s/he is to get laid – is pretty foolish.)

Many people also think if they use a condom that is "safe sex" and they don't really have to worry about anything. This is stupid and dangerous. Using condoms doesn't make you immune or take away the value of thinking about what you're doing, researching STDs, etc. (I think one of the reasons STD information is so bad is that no one cares. People don't try to research this stuff in any kind of reasonable way. At most they just find some doctor saying don't worry about something, or assume percentages over 90 are high, and go back to their social life. For example, lots of people seem to think 97% is a high and safe accuracy for an HIV test. I'm not even joking. For fucking HIV, 97% is not something to treat as plenty safe!)

Apple blog Daring Fireball posted bad scholarship today:

YANKEES PRESIDENT CALLS COMCAST ‘GUTLESS’

DSLreports:

“It’s a typical gutless act by a cable carrier seeking to promote its own self-interest,” Levine told the NY Daily News. “This amounts to nothing more than a money grab. Comcast, who said it had an agreement in principle with YES, is saving millions of dollars now by not airing YES in the offseason.”

Calling one of Comcast's acts gutless is not calling Comcast gutless.

This kind of sloppiness with the facts is inexcusable. I know it's not the most serious, scholarly blog in the first place, but that's no excuse for misquoting people. And it's a news site which gets access to some Apple press conference invites and review units of new products, so it should at least not post things which are blatantly, factually false.

The false Daring Fireball title is a truncated version of the linked article's title which has the same mistake. So DSL Reports also messed up too, but that's no excuse.

I contacted Daring Fireball about the error and will update this post if it's fixed or there's a response.

I enjoyed this mini biography article about Ann Coulter. Read it! I even updated my Fear of Future Employers post with a quote from it.

There was one really bad part that stood out to me. Coulter's father used ~$200,000 as a bludgeon to sabotage her writing career. Sighhhhhhhhh :((((((

After Cornell, Coulter wanted to postpone law school to try to become a conservative writer, but knowing the reality of making a living being as controversial as a lion killer, her father said, "That's fine, but I'm not paying for it if you put it off." So off she went to law school.

Parents are so controlling and awful.

After this, Coulter could easily have never become a writer. She could have easily gotten stuck in law jobs she didn't like. Her wonderful career was put in jeopardy, by her own parent, to protect her employability in a profession she didn't really want to be in.

Ann Coulter tweeted a bunch of praise for A Review of Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own today. She told people to buy the book. And she indicated her agreement with the "parable of the vases" .

I disagree with the parable. Here it is:

The parable begins with a simplifying assumption. This is that it takes exactly two workers to make a vase: one to blow it from molten glass and another to pack it for delivery. Now suppose that two workers, A1 and A2, are highly skilled—if they are assigned to either task they are guaranteed not to break the vase. Suppose two other workers, B1 and B2, are less skilled—specifically, for either task each has a 50% probability of breaking the vase.

Now suppose you are worker A1. If you team up with A2, you produce a vase every attempt. However, if you team up with B1 or B2, then only 50% of your attempts will produce a vase. Thus, your productivity is higher when you team up with A2 than with one of the B workers. Something similar happens with the B workers. They are more productive when they are paired with an A worker than with a fellow B worker.

So far, everything I’ve said is probably pretty intuitive. But here’s what’s not so intuitive. Suppose you’re the manager of the vase company and you want to produce as many vases as possible. Are you better off by (i) pairing A1 with A2 and B1 with B2, or (ii) pairing A1 with one of the B workers and A2 with the other B worker?

If you do the math, it’s clear that the first strategy works best. Here, the team with two A workers produces a vase with 100% probability, and the team with the two B workers produces a vase with 25% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces 1.25 vases per time period. With the second strategy, both teams produce a vase with 50% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces only one vase per time period.

The example illustrates how workers’ productivity is often interdependent—specifically, how your own productivity increases when your co-workers are skilled.

This is a dirty math trick (using the prestige and authority of math to trick people about a non-math issue) and the author doesn't explain what's going on. The different results are due to different amounts of idle vase-packing labor. In one scenario, A2 sits around doing nothing half the time (a loss of .5). In the other, B2 sits around doing nothing half the time (a loss of .25). A2 sitting idle is a bigger loss. That's all it is. Both potential pairings have a total of 1.5 value. They come out to 1 or 1.25 simply based on whether .25 or .5 value is sitting idle.

This can easily be fixed by hiring more appropriate labor ratios. If you have vase packers sitting idle, hire more vase blowers. You basically want two B workers doing vase blowing for each vase packer, not 1-to-1. They will on average produce one vase per vase-blowing cycle for the packer to work on. Then everything works out OK and, basically, you get the expected results: that 50% efficient workers are worth half as much as 100% efficient workers. (That's ignoring cost of materials, transaction costs to hire more people, needing a bigger factory to fit more workers, etc. When you factor all that stuff in, then yes one 100% efficient worker is better than 2 50% efficient workers. That's not what this parable is about, though).

(This is all on the assumption that people are simply assigned one job and stick to it, and that A1 and B1 do the vase blowing and A2 and B2 do the vase packing. If the packers would simply do some extra blowing when there's nothing to pack, that would also solve the problem and ruin the parable in the same way that hiring more blowers than packers would ruin the intended result.)

It's not efficient workers working with inefficient workers that's wasteful in general. It's people sitting around doing nothing that's wasteful. The parable hides people having time spent idle which is where the entire mathematical difference is coming from.

The book reviewer is very impressed with his bad parable:

To illustrate the latter effect, Jones’s constructs an example, which I call “the parable of the vases.” In a moment I’ll explain the details of the example, but first let me briefly discuss its importance. The example has significantly affected my thinking, and it is one of the highlights of the book. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the parable ranks as one of the all-time great examples in economics. Although it is not quite as insightful and important as Ronald Coase’s crops-near-the-train-track example (which illustrates the efficiency of property rights), I believe it is approximately as insightful and important as: (i) Adam Smith’s pin-factory example (which illustrates the benefits of division of labor) and (ii) Friedrich Hayek’s example of an entrepreneur knowing about an unused ship (which illustrates the value of particular, versus general, knowledge).

This kind of bragging about something that's wrong and misleading is not very notable. What was notable to me was that Ann Coulter was fooled and thought it was a good point.

The example generates an even more remarkable implication. It says that, if you are a manager of a company (or the central planner of an entire economy), then your optimal strategy is to clump your best workers together on the same project rather than spreading them out amongst your less-able workers.

I actually do agree with something like this conclusion, although I don't consider it remarkable at all. But the parable of the vases is a bad argument. A good argument covering part of this issue is The Mythical Man-Month.

I'd add that this point about mixing workers applies to peers. Putting a better worker in a leadership and management role interacting with inferior workers does make sense.

So I propose that instead of bringing in lots of low skill workers here, we should encourage a few top quality Americans to emmigrate and be leaders that run the governments and major businesses of other countries.

The video The Last Interview of Thomas Szasz has an interesting story. I'll paraphrase:

For context, the interviewer was bringing up the issue that insane people don't make sense. You can't talk with them. They played a couple clips of some people saying nonsense. So how do you deal with that?

So Szasz says, at 19:15, that he had this same discussion 20 years ago. A reporter from The Newyorker called Szasz and brought it up. So Szasz made a trip to New York and met him for an experiment. They went to central park and found a homeless schizophrenic guy and tried talking with him.

The conversation was perfectly normal. There were some wine cartons nearby, and they talked about wine. The guy knew how to get his welfare check, he'd been in Bellview several times, he gave a long description of how to stay out of the mental hospital (the last thing he wants to be in). He said where he can get a shower sometimes and how he gets food.

But the reporter didn't publish the story. His axe to grind was to show how crazy these people are and how they need mental healthcare. So when the experiment didn't fit his agenda, he didn't publish.

Leonard Peikoff is not a philosopher.

I transcribed his podcast, episode 22, starting 4min in:

And the fact is that I'm not an epistemologist, let alone a technical one. The older I get, I realize I'm not a philosopher, and never really was. My real interest in life is cultural analysis. How does philosophy influence, for instance, the rise of Hitler or kind of educational system we have or great plays ... that's always been the kind of thing I've done. The only exception is OPAR, which was pure philosophy, but that was simply paying off a debt. I had to do that to Ayn Rand in exchange for what she had, you know, taught me for 30 years. But other than that I never would wanna write or really lecture on philosophy. I don't see that there's anything wrong with that, but that is just not what I do.

So OPAR isn't Peikoff's kind of thing. Ayn Rand couldn't find an heir who actually wanted to be a philosopher. Ayn Rand couldn't find a better student to teach philosophy to than a non-philosopher.

It's not that Peikoff tried and failed. It's not that he values philosophy, like Objectivism, above all else, but isn't good enough at it. He doesn't even care about it like that.

How can a man like this be any kind of leader in a philosophy community?

How can any self-proclaimed non-philosopher consider themselves an Objectivist? Doesn't he know what Objectivism says philosophy's role in life is? Everyone should be a philosopher. Everyone needs philosophy. Everyone has a philosophy. The question is just how interested they are in thinking it through and getting their philosophy right.

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Update 2021-12-09: I think my last paragraph is unfair. I withdraw it. Peikoff was saying he didn't want to study philosophy in detail, or write or teach it, not that he didn't want to have philosophy in his life. What he said can be charitably interpretted as him caring about philosophy enough to want to learn and understand Objectivism and use it in his life, and just excluding optional advanced stuff. That makes him an inappropriate Objectivist or philosophical leader but not a bad person or non-Objectivist. In other words, he wasn't rejecting philosophy; he just wanted something else for his profession.

The following is a guest post by Alan Forrester. It summarizes the Paths Forward idea. These concepts are really important and people have a hard time with them, so summarizing is valuable. Here's another summary I wrote.

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People say you should be willing to open minded. You should be willing to consider new ideas because they might be better than your current ideas. But people don’t give substantive advice on how to do this.

This is a difficult problem because you only have a limited amount of time in the day, and you may have stuff to do.

What you need is a path forward: a way to advance a discussion or disagreement (including discussions and disagreements in your own mind).

A bad path forward impedes progress by rejecting ideas without answering them, regardless of your reason for doing that. Examples include authority, social status, curation, moderation or gatekeepers.

A good path forward lets you get ideas from anyone. A good path forward always involves discussion because only rational discussion can solve problems.

This may sound like it’ll take a lot of time. But you need not write a fresh answer to every question. You can direct people to stuff that was written before the question was asked. And the answer could also have been written by somebody else. What matters is whether it answers the question, not who wrote it or when it was written.

If you refer somebody to a pre-written answer, you should give specific references where possible, e.g. - a page or chapter of a book instead of a whole book. You should also be willing to fix flaws in those answers.

Good answers will be public so lots of people can read them. They should also be written since written material is easier to quote, edit and analyse in detail.

You should also take responsibility for your paths forward. If you recommend stuff written by somebody else, you should be willing to answer questions about it and address flaws.

Good paths forward make general claims. General claims solve more problems and are easier to criticise than more limited claims. So if they are right they are very useful, and if they are wrong it is easier to find the flaw.

Here are some thoughts on how to write well for the Fallible Ideas Discussion Group. I think people could benefit from using them at other forums, too.

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i suggest most of you should try writing most of your posts with the following format:

1-2 sections. (a quote and a reply is one section)

80-400 words per section.

quote at most the same amount as you write, plus 200 words. (not counting attributions. the number of people quoted should usually be kept to 3 or fewer, but sometimes more is ok.) try to think about quoting like you were writing a blog post and consider what quotes you would actually copy into it.

try not to quote partial thoughts from other people. as a loose guideline, a thought is typically around one medium sized paragraph. generally avoid breaking up their text mid sentence or mid paragraph. or if they write several short paragraphs that go together, leave them together. let them say their thought. then reply to the thought overall.

if you want to make a small detail point, you can break in in the middle of their thought. try to keep the break in on the shorter side, and only one break in per thought they have.

some people will take a thought i write and then break it up into 4 pieces and write a bunch of little detail replies. the forest gets lost for the trees. what i was saying gets lost, and the replies don't have a big picture to them.

if you have a lot to say about an email, reply multiple times.

if your thoughts are separate, they don't need to be in the same email. if they are related, but exceed 2 sections of 800 total words, then it's hard to put them together. you're now trying to write something a bit longer, and make it fit together. generally i recommend you don't try that. think about how to separate or shorten your points.

if you want to write something too short, like a one sentence question, or i "yes i agree, go on", then consider what you can add to make it better. replies like that are often boring to everyone except the one person you're replying to.

you can add some extra thoughts on the topic. you can add an explanation of why you're asking a question or why you agree. you can add some additional questions. you can add some clarification of what you agree with or what your question means. you can add an argument you think is true, or one you're unclear about. you can add a statement about why this topic is important and you want to discuss it. you can add a statement about why the audience should care and join in.

don't give up. think about the topic more and make your post better. getting up to 80 words for your section shouldn't be that hard. if you get really stuck, just write that you couldn't think of anything else to say, and maybe a guess at why or how you got stuck. ask for advice how to think of stuff to say, or examples of what you could have said, or whatever you think would be helpful.

also, if you have at least one meaty section of general interest, then having one (or even several) really short sections is way better than if they were the whole post.

FYI this post is around 500 words. 400 words is pretty long. most of you should usually end a section by 250 words.