Upward Social Mobility; COVID19 Probabilities - Dinner Table Digest № 7 - April 19, 2020
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley.
Pete Olsen’s Good Friday Reflection, a week later:
Pete Olsen is one of those guys who stays with you long after you first meet him, one of those people who is equal parts inviting and brusque. A former pastor, Pete has not only seen the Evangelical experience from the inside, he’s lived the worst parts of it. Now working with Mennonite Central Committee, he is in charge of leading teams of students through experiential learning on the streets of Toronto, where they learn the realities of homelessness in Toronto. Instead of the voyeurism that characterizes most evangelical inner city ministries, Pete is able to bring the focus back to real relationships with real people. He is one of my personal heroes, a father figure in a many ways. When he wrote this piece on Good Friday, I knew I had to share it.
"Occasionally I walk amongst the poor and the broken of this world here in our context. It is humbling and uncomfortable on many levels. Their language is rough (though mine is not much better), their hygiene is unique and their actions and choices are edgy. It is not easy to be there but...it is beautiful in some ways. It is beautiful because it is real. And then a sadness comes over me when I realize they wouldn’t be welcome in 99% of church gatherings that I’ve experienced.
Why is that? (I experienced a church I worked in actually turning a panhandler away and it left me so confused and angry). It was like a bad joke.
It’s a mess people."
One of the most unique musical experiences one can have is listening to experimental folk band Heilung. German for ‘Healing,’ Heilung creates a style of ritualized, hypnotic beats and rhythms that find their genesis in the sights and sounds of early medieval northern Europe. A kind of “Amplified History,” Heilung “blends the cinematic clang of human bones, reconstructed swords and frame drums with brooding lyrics borrowed and re-contextualized from rune stones, amulets and other ancient artifacts.” Here is their new piece, Norupo.
My Social Mobility Shame - Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey - April 1, 2019 - Unherd.com
One of the more common sayings I hear when discussing my politics with older folks is famously, but falsely, attributed to Winston Churchhill: “If you are not a Liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a Conservative at 35 you have no brain.” I’ve often been frustrated with this saying, indignant that that it would never happen to me or my friends. And yet, as I look around me, I can’t help but notice that social and economic upward mobility has a strange effect on people. Here’s an essay about what it feels like to feel yourself change political and economic allegiances.
"Some of you know what I mean, don’t you? Those of you who can still recall the moment you were offered a seat. You recall the sudden tension between concerns about your community and concerns about yourself; your earnings, your social-standing, your legacy and your next move up the board. When you began to see yourself as your colleagues, contemporaries or an audience might see you, and your incorruptible principles developed a sudden and convenient elasticity which, rather than a lack of moral fibre, became evidence of your fair-minded maturity."
A Failure, but not of Prediction - Scott Alexander - Slate Star Codex
One of the tools needed to fully understand the nature of the spread of COVID-19 is a working knowledge of probability. It’s not as easy as looking at a 2% or 5% death rate, seeing a small number, and moving on with our lives. Those probabilities actually look pretty scary if they’re applied in the wrong contexts. Unfortunately the media got probabilistic reasoning wrong, resulting in headlines that downplayed the coming crisis, and encouraged people to view health warnings as ‘alarmist’ or ‘over-reactive.’
First, a bunch of generic smart people on Twitter who got things exactly right – there are too many of these people to name, but Scott Aaronson highlights “Bill Gates, Balaji Srinivasan, Paul Graham, Greg Cochran, Robin Hanson, Sarah Constantin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nicholas Christakis.” None of these people (except Greg Cochran) are domain experts, and none of them (except Greg Cochran) have creepy oracular powers. So how could they have beaten the experts? Haven’t we been told a million times that generic intelligence is no match for deep domain knowledge?
I think the answer is: they didn’t beat the experts in epidemiology. Whatever probability of pandemic the experts and prediction markets gave for coronavirus getting really bad, these people didn’t necessarily give a higher probability. They were just better at probabilistic reasoning, so they had different reactions to the same number. There’s no reason why generic smart people shouldn’t be better at probabilistic reasoning then epidemiologists. In fact, this seems exactly like the sort of thing generic smart people might be.
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