On Monday I did an interview for a TV show (to appear in 2010), and they put me up at a famous expensive hotel. I’m sure others get extra value from this hotel, but it didn’t do much for me. I asked the show manager about this and he said that they have ethical problems with paying cash to interviewees, but want to compensate them for their trouble. I sighed, thinking: what exactly could go wrong with cash that couldn’t go wrong with generous travel compensation?
I suppose we could make sense of this by assuming that observers can’t be bothered to notice the amount of cash given or the quality of the travel provided, all they can tell is if you were given cash, travel expenses, or both. But I’m kinda skeptical this is really what’s going on.
Today is my 50th birthday. I’m very glad to be part of a species that lives so long, and it appears that I should thank other lusty old men, and especially the fertile young women who find them attractive. The details:
Evolutionary theory predicts that senescence, a decline in survival rates with age, is the consequence of stronger selection on alleles that affect fertility or mortality earlier rather than later in life. Hamilton quantified this argument by showing that a rare mutation reducing survival is opposed by a selective force that declines with age over reproductive life. He used a female-only demographic model, predicting that female menopause at age ca. 50 yrs should be followed by a sharp increase in mortality, a ‘‘wall of death.’’ Human lives obviously do not display such a wall. Explanations of the evolution of lifespan beyond the age of female menopause have proven difficult to describe as explicit genetic models.
Here we argue that the inclusion of males and mating patterns extends Hamilton’s theory and predicts the pattern of human senescence. We analyze a general two-sex model to show that selection favors survival for as long as men reproduce. Male fertility can only result from matings with fertile females, and we present a range of data showing that males much older than 50 yrs have substantial realized fertility through matings with younger females, a pattern that was likely typical among early humans. Thus old-age male fertility provides a selective force against autosomal deleterious mutations at ages far past female menopause with no sharp upper age limit, eliminating the wall of death.
So from old men everywhere to young women everywhere: Thank you thank you!
But researchers such as Robin Hanson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., wonder whether the big picture really looks so promising when it comes to advanced life. Hanson supports SETI but finds it telling that humans haven’t come across anything yet. “It has been remarkable and somewhat discouraging,” Hanson says, “that the universe is so damn big and so damn dead.”
More here, but little you don’t already know. The reporter and I discussed lots of interesting issues, such as burning the cosmic commons, but this is what made the cut. Other folks were cut entirely; I guess it pays to swear to reporters.
A talk I gave a year ago at Oxford on “Catastrophe, Social Collapse and Human Extinction” is now available as an online vid here. Slides here, related paper here. The talk went beyond the paper to introduce the idea of refuge markets, which I blogged here.
I’m supposed to be on Dyland Ratigan’s MSNBC show at 9am EST this morning, talking about medical reform.
While I think I have a solid grasp of the long-term basics, I feel very conscious of all the things I don’t know about who exactly has just said what about which proposals that may or may not have what features depending on who makes what deals. I suspect the fear of looking stupid on all those ephemeral details detracts most pundits from taking the time to really understand the fundamentals.
Added: Here is one video. I was on twice before then, but can’t find those yet.
This Tuesday I’ll debate Bryan Caplan at GMU on “Liberty vs. Efficiency”:
We don’t actually disagree that much; basically we both like debates but couldn’t find anyone else to debate us. So we looked for something we sorta disagree on, and will at least have fun discussing it. Hey, I’ll be happy if Bryan changes my mind.
The topic, as I see it, is the relative value/importance for economists of pushing “liberty,” i.e., a policy of minimal government interference, and “efficiency,” a standard policy evaluation metric that attempts to neutrally weigh policy consequences for different people. The “debate” will be recorded, and I’ll post a link when I can.
Added 12Apr: Bryan responds here.
To encourage people to sign up for cryonics, I've offered to debate influential bloggers on the subject. Spurred by recent successes, and failures, I'll up the ante:
I hereby offer to talk for one hour on any subject to anyone who can show me they've newly signed up for cryonics. You can record the conversation, publish it, and can sell your time to someone else.
Yes, I know, this may not exactly be a huge incentive to most people, but its what I have to offer.
Added: The Blogging Heads TV folks are interested in a cryonics debate, if that tips any of you influential bloggers over the line.
Six months ago I asked here what Tyler Cowen and I should discuss on Blogging Heads TV. I got sick on our scheduled day, but we are finally on again for Tuesday. Your suggestions from before are fine, but an awful lot has happened since – not quite 28 Days Later scale, but a lot. So I thought I'd ask again; Tyler also asked at Marginal Revolution.
Also, March 24 I will debate Bryan Caplan at GMU on "Liberty vs. Efficiency." What a fun month!
I have an American friend (same guy as in this earlier post) who lived for a number of years in Mexico. He married a Mexican woman, and while he always spoke to his kids in English, their real first language was Spanish. He recently moved back to the U.S., and he enrolled his oldest daughter in kindergarten. The school gave her some kind of language evaluation, and they concluded that she was slightly behind in English, and said they would like to give her some kind of limited special instruction if her parents wanted it. My friend and his wife were inclined to go along with what the teachers thought, but they wanted to know the answers to a few common-sense questions: how behind was the kid really, was what they would do for her during the special instruction time really worth giving up whatever she would miss in the regular class, and so on. The problem was, they were having a hard time getting any straight answers out of the teachers, and they were pretty sure they knew why: these very nice, well-meaning teachers were so worried about offending them that they couched every answer in a million caveats and weasel words. My friend said he said he was dying to say something like: "I hereby unconditionally vow not to sue you, hate you, or speak or think ill of you in any way. Now will you please just tell me what’s going on with my kid?!?"
Don’t get me wrong: that hyper-sensitivity comes mostly from a good place, and I certainly don’t want to go back 50 years when a kid like that would just be thrown in the deep end of the pool. But come on!
I have a relative who has cancer and has been taking a particular chemotherapy drug. It has been very successful; all of the tests and scans have been coming back negative for some time. Recently I went along to an appointment with a fancy consulting oncologist to get his opinion about how much longer to continue with the drug. Going into the appointment, I had the idea (based on nothing but what seemed to me like common sense) that there was a tradeoff: more chemo means a higher chance that the cancer won’t reappear, but also means a higher chance of serious side effects, and that we were going there to get his opinion on whether in this case the pros outweighed the cons or vice-versa. What he said instead was that there was "no evidence" that additional chemo, after there are no signs of disease, did *any* additional good at all, and that the treatments therefore should have been stopped a long time ago and should certainly stop now. I asked him what was incorrect about the (seemingly) common sense notion that additional chemo might get rid of the last little bits of cancer that are too small to show up on scans, and he said, more or less, that it’s not my idea of common sense that matters, it’s the evidence, and there is no evidence that things work that way. So then I asked him whether by "no evidence" he meant that there have been lots of studies directly on this point which came back with the result that more chemo doesn’t help, or whether he meant that there was no evidence because there were few or no relevant studies. If the former was true, then it’d be pretty much game over: the case for discontinuing the chemo would be overwhelming. But if the latter was true, then things would be much hazier: in the absence of conclusive evidence one way or the other, one would have to operate in the realm of interpreting imperfect evidence; one would have to make judgments based on anecdotal evidence, by theoretical knowledge of how the body works and how cancer works, or whatever. And good people, maybe I’m being unfair and underestimating this guy, but I swear to you that this fancy oncologist in this very prestigious institution didn’t seem to understand the difference between these two types of "no evidence." So while he had a very strong and very (generally) laudable instinct that one ought to base one’s medical opinions on evidence rather than instinct, he seemed to be unable to avoid what strikes me as a pretty fundamental mistake.* I’d love to hear thoughts about this, particularly from doctors who either have something to say about whether this is a common mistake among doctors or who have something to say about the chemotherapy question itself.
*The most generous possible interpretation of what went on, but which would require me to attribute to him a thought process that he did not express at all, is that he understands the difference between the two types of "no evidence" but has come to believe that doctors’ interpretations of imperfect evidence will systematically lead them to over-treat and so has adopted a rule of "do nothing unless there is strong evidence that you should do something" as a second-best optimum.
