Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013)

journals.plos.org

139 pointskristianc86 comments

I do believe that parasitic load probably has significant effects on a variety of psychological variables and preferences. But the web of causation here is extremely complex; neither do I think testing this hypothesis by looking at state-level governance is particularly useful. Instead, you would want to attain individual psychological response measures related to preference or acceptance of authoritarianism, and related that to individual parasitic load within a particular community; even better would to get longitudinal data showing that within-individual changes in parasitic load are correlated with changes in preference (controlled experiments here face ethical hurdles four obvious reasons). Even then, you are going to have to account for factors that may be correlated with the likelihood of getting parasites and having attitudes that are favorable to authoritarianism.

“Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats to human welfare.”

There are so many varied and interacting and nonlinear threats to human welfare that I don’t know if the number of variables to control for (if even identifiable and measurable and appropriately transformed) would allow for meaningful result with only a few hundreds countries as data points.

There has been some psychological research which hints at this relation of how diseases from outsiders bias decisions against those communities. The literature seems to suggest that it's an evolutionary response to protect the community and these biases are difficult to detect because they are so innate in how we assess risk and process threats to a group.

I was just saying the other day that we're one Coronovirus-like pandemic away from seeing sweeping changes in government policy that lend themselves to authoritarian rule. Changes that go beyond what we've seen on removing the red tape around how hospitals are run and how the spaces within them can re-purposed for other use.

Imagine a virus that has the properties similar to covd-19 but a higher mortality rate, affecting children and working age groups. Containment of a pandemic would be trivial if you knew the location of infected patient and everybody with whom they've been in contact with over a 14 day period. That data is already available from the fact most people are mobile phone users. It's just the data is not shared. Containment would be more specific and targeted. At the moment health professionals rely on self-reporting by patients to follow the spread of a pandemic.

The pretext for dissolving these artificial boundaries between the pools of data owned by corporations, intelligence services, health institutions would be easy to provide in the interest of protecting the government and the public. It would seem both responsible and reasonable to the public if the mortality and symptoms were terrifying enough. It can be argued that China's alleged effectiveness in dealing with the virus in cities with populations larger than LA, London and NY was due to an authoritarian government model. We also see our governments working with the private sector to handle this pandemic.

Governments are scared because they do not have visibility on the pandemic's spread because of problems in scaling tests, using numbers of confirmed cases serve as poor proxies for decisions to be made. I don't think it would be long before someone starts asking the question, if we had richer data on confirmed patients and who they'd been in contact with, could we have nipped this in the but before it had the impact its had on the economy and put the health system at risk.

I'm actually surprised that we haven't had a government try to access that kind of data. They've been generally going at it for all kinds of "small" stuff, burglary, riots, and they're not trying to get their hands on it to combat a pandemic?

It might happen eventually. Possible explanation for why it hasn't happened yet: it's influenced by how the government employee views their relationship to the individual.

I work with very detailed patient data in a state health department. It's been drilled into me that patient privacy is above everything. Everyone I work with is out to help these people. We would be ashamed if we looked at, let alone made decisions with, data beyond what was necessary.

Law enforcement is different. One of their major tasks is to gather data. Data on people suspected of a crime. Or data from innocent people that can lead to suspects.

Maybe convincing public health to push the boundaries of collecting personal data to combat this disease will be as hard as convincing law enforcement to be less gung-ho. It goes against long history of professional ethics.

I have no sources, so take it with a tub of salt.

I thought I had read that South Korea was using cellphone geolocation data of people who had tested positive in order to identify/alert others who may have had contact with them while they were contagious?

Edit: Not quite as big brothery as I thought it would be https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronaviru...

Reportedly happening in Israel, though they don't call out the method of cellular tracking they use: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/coronavirus-cases-in-isr...

... The government approved the tracking of cellphones by the Shin Bet security service in order to inform people who were unwittingly close to someone diagnosed with the virus during the two weeks prior to the diagnosis. ...

A large exception would be Russia, and to a lesser extent, all of Eastern Europe. The extreme cold in Russia helps suppress parasites, yet it has historically been authoritarian. It’s also worth noting some of those countries that for awhile provided interesting exceptions, such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories.

> such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories.

Liberia wasn't particularly free as most of us here might understand the term. While the freed slaves’ constitution was modeled on the US Constitution, civil and political rights applied only to the freed slaves who came over from North America and their descendants, while Liberia’s indigenous population was neglected at the best of times, oppressed at the worst. (And even among the freed slaves’ descendants, those connected with Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge formed a political elite that others could never hope to enter). To a considerable degree, the political strife of the late 20th-century was due to rage at this skewed system of government.

> Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge

I'd heard of the Freed-Slave-vs-Local-Pop thing in Liberia before, but never about the Masonic Lodge. Got a source?

This is so prominent an aspect of Liberian history that a simple Google search "liberia masonic lodge" will give you a great deal of reputable reading material.

Even Russians know that there is Russia and there is Moscow. It's like two different countries. Moscow has 10% of Russia's population and 90% of wealth (probably even more). Moscow has moderate climate. This winter temperature was above 0C most of the time (though this winter was the warmest in centuries).

Though I don't believe in that parasite bullshit. The only "parasites" that cause authoritarianism are a parasitic thoughts and parasitic mindset of the population. This is a dead circle since creative people leave authoritarian countries all the time (or being killed if they try to counter the system).

I admit to not having done more than skim the abstract, but couldn't it be just as likely that authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease (and famine, etc.) through ineptitude?

That’s seems especially reasonable to assume if we look at the divide between North Korea and South Korea, a division that has only existed since 1950. South Korea has had increasingly better governance and increasingly less parasites, in contrast to North Korea.

South Korea really took off after General Park Chung-hee seized power, he built the economy and modernized the country. One of the great success stories is the praziquantel story. Korea had a schistosomiasis problem; they developed a process to synthesize praziquantel cheaply (the original Bayer process was more complicated) as part of the eradication campaign. That was in the late 60s. The Park dictatorship was overthrown only in 1979.

It should probably be noted that the Park dictatorship was overthrown by another dictator, General Chun Doo-hwan, who's party controlled South Korea until 1988. So the demise of the Park regime was not the end of authoritarianism in South Korea.

And even up until 1972 the command economy in the north and the (more) liberalized economy in the south hadn't really diverged. NK's growth slowed as they lost the support of the USSR and went negative during the collapse. Not really what you'd expect if authoritarianism was the cause of economic collapse, but exactly what you'd expect if during that time, a hostile state ascended from superiority to supremacy.

It's absurd to view the Koreas in isolation since they were both extremely obviously the subjects of a proxy war in which one side lost decisively. The two countries' economies were driven by export and the US and USSR were by far their largest partners. That wasn't an accident.

I mean that's pretty clearly much more reasonable. It's even likely that unstable countries which don't foster services to fight disease are also more susceptible to authoritarian coups.

More to the point, I think framing it as "authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease" is misleading. The spread is not caused by accident or economic failure, it's caused by apathy (although obviously a failed state can't fight parasites). The reason hookworm is found in relatively wealthy southeast asian countries is the same as the reason it has been found in rural Alabama; the governments don't care about everyone. It's not accurate to call that authoritarianism and it's misleading to assume it's simply economic failure.

Was considering this, that the debates about authoritarian vs democractic philosophy are moot currently. There are times where your population must be treated as a herd. While we often see the "father" metaphor for authoritarian leaders, they're really playing the role of shephard. When not dealing with situations where people may totally screw over others unintentionally, this shepharding becomes unnecessary, & ends up only being a power grab

> According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens

This predicts that governments will become more authoritarian during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. This is unsurprising given the widespread demand for large scale government interventions. Among the major damage Covid-19 leaves behind may be to give authoritarianism a better reputation.

Errr, so if I get this, nations where there are high rates of individual stress are more likely to welcome authoritarianism - and parasites in people indicate one such stress. Pretty much everyone welcomes peace from a "strongman" over chaos of war or economic dislocation.

It is hardly "we are all ruled by a secret state of bugs".

How do they address causation in these studies? At first glance, it seems like authoritarianism would be predictive of parasite presence rather than the other way around.

(2013)

also (Plos One)

If I was Canadian I'd be really angry knowing my tax money funded this man's career. After reading Murray's previous publications I feel like the world is really unfair and I certainly think less of Social Psychologists and Tulane University and UBC.

Correlation is not always causation.

I don’t understand why this comment is made as frequently as it is. Do you think the authors of the paper aren’t aware of this fact? Do you think they didn’t think of this when they did their research?

I imagine that the authors are so likely to be aware of this fact that you can take for granted that they are.

Having said that, there is absolutely a valid question of did they incorrectly rationalize their approach, or rely on studies that did so, such that they in their own minds thought they addressed the issue when in reality they hadn't. My sense is that parent comment to which you replied probably didn't read the study, the original studies, or consider the point I'm making (sounds like a shot from the hip after reading the title), but the viewpoint isn't necessarily invalid.

Given that some authors have a very real and emotional attachment to ideas they are trying to prove out in such studies... the rationalization error is one to watch for...

What you say is true. I like the way you phrased things. What you write about the authors potentially having a bias that blinds them is nicely put. If someone has reason to think this I’d welcome reading their commentary.

I am tired with people just saying that correlation does not always imply causation. As if this is somehow insightful. Whenever I see this I think less of the person who writes it. It’s as if they don’t have enough common sense to assume that authors of a study that relies on statistical analysis don’t know this.

The comment isn't for educating the authors, it is a reminder for those reading the article not to misinterpret the authors' work.

I may be jaded and cynical but it seems to me that when people just write, "Correlation does not always imply causation" they are trying to demonstrate how smart they are and how dumb the authors are. I notice this comment come up a lot when papers by social scientists are posted on HN. It appears to me that the people who make such a comment are making a low effort attempt to discredit research by pointing out some trivial statistical fact.

I see comments of this type all the time on HN. People criticize posted research articles by pointing out some obvious reason why it might be false. As if this obvious roadblock wasn't thought of by the authors. Such people almost never read the actual article and have a tendency to believe that their non-expert opinion on a possible issue is sufficient to discredit the research article.

On HN it seems to me that most people commenting on research in the social sciences believe that their cursory understanding of a topic is on par with the knowledge of experts in the field.

I believe the authors are aware of this.

Guess we’ll have to do something drastic about our billionaire load if we want to get rid of Trump.

The title is a tautology.

The elephant in the room is almost certainly that poverty causes both parasites and authoritarianism

Or is it authoritarianism that causes poverty and parasites?

What came first?

"First" does not equal to "cause" either.

Second rules out cause though. If you have A=>B and B=>A as possibilities, and you can rule one of them out with a very simple question, that's a good way to start.

If computers came after electricity, they didn't cause electricity. That says nothing about the possibility of electricity causing computers, but it brings us forward nonetheless.

First doesn't necessarily cause second, but second almost certainly doesn't cause first.

Disclaimer: I don't know if this article is correct or not. I have no stake in it being correct or not.

But, as the previous posters touched upon, there are some interesting philosophical issues at play here.

First, we have the old correlation vs. causation issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

Then even if there is causation, we need to ask which came first, the parasite prevalence, or the authoritarian government.

Then even if we know the answer to that, we then need to ask if a circular relationship is present, in other words A causes some of B, which in turn causes more of A, which in turn causes more of B.

Basically, if a virtuous or vicious cycle is present (virtuous if more of A and B are desired; vicious if less of A and B are desired; in this case vicious, since presumably less of A and of B are desired...)

It's sort of like you could ask if "breakdowns in society" are responsibile for authoritarian governments -- or if authoritarian governments are responsible for breakdowns in society...

Or, if a little bit of one caused a little bit of the other, which in turn caused more of the first, which in turn caused more of the second, and the cycle became a vicious cycle...

So, the roots of what could be a fascinating philophical discussion in that.

Its sort of like in Star Wars -- we could ask if the breakdown of society caused the early elements of the Empire, which in turn caused the Rebellion, which in turn caused the furher breakdown of society, which caused the further strengthening of the Empire, which in turn caused the further strengthening of the Rebellion (by opposition)...

Vader may have been a key player on one side... but he did not start all of those cycles going...

Why not parasites causing both poverty and authoritarianism? A big part of the reason Bill Gates is so committed to fighting parasite diseases like Malaria is that there's strong evidence that this alleviates poverty. After all, it makes sense when you consider the effects a case of Malaria would have on a family: children unable to go to school, adults unable to work. If the baseline load of Malaria cases is high enough then it's not hard to see how that would continually depress the economy.

The article notes that famine also predicts authoritarianism, which is predominantly caused by things outside human control like weather and plant diseases. Even the Great Chinese Famine was started by much of the agricultural land getting no rain, though the authoritarian government's response was what led to most of the deaths.

This would say that the criseses that impact the poor are what lead to authoritarianism. You need the support of the poor to grab power for yourself, but it's hard to make supporting such a cause appealing unless death is the alternative.

> The article notes that famine also predicts authoritarianism, which is predominantly caused by things outside human control

Amartya Sen's work showed that famine is caused by failures of government, not agriculture. There are plenty of cases of people dying of famine when their countries were producing surplus food.

Frustratingly, i can't find a good accessible writeup of Sen's work online, but here's his original book:

https://www.prismaweb.org/nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Pove...

Wikipedia has some detail about the Ethiopian famine in the '80s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%931985_famine_in_Et...

In the modern age of efficient transit, the deaths caused by famine are becoming more and more a result of bad state/world governance. The famines still usually have a nonhuman cause that originally caused that assistance to be necessary.

There are exceptions of course, like Yemen.

Famines can he and were caused by goverment (whether local or occupying) taking away resources (for war or other place) or mishandling storage of resources.

As I said, there is usually a nonhuman cause and exceptions exist.

All the massive famines I recall from history were in the exception category.

Plus, keeping enough supplies is one of government functions - through those prior French revolution the famines I recall were not in this category.

>All the massive famines I recall from history were in the exception category

I'll provide another example. The cause of Ireland's Great Famine was the potato blight, and no one thinks that the British intentionally imported the blight to Ireland. The million deaths were the fault of the British, who chose to export food for more money rather than feed the starving people.

I don't think authoritarianism intrinsically causes either of those things. It could just easily do the opposite -- it depends entirely on what the authoritarian government decides to use its power for.

Yeah, I have to be skeptical when a study is titled in such a way that your mind latches on to a seductively fascinating causation hypothesis ("parasites cause authoritarianism!") when in reality it's just a correlation, and that correlation has other much more banal explanations.

The title states that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism, not causes it. That's not a causation hypothesis.

My point is that the way it's phrased guides the mind to jump to a particular conclusion.

No, you jumped to a conclusion. "Predicts" is not a synonym of "causes," and any confusion you may experience would be solved by reading what they wrote.

You're intentionally ignoring what I'm saying and I'm not going to continue engaging with it.

Please don't, even if another commenter is being unfair or provocative.

I'm sorry for the unnecessary attack.

I don't see how "predict" can be seen to lead one to saying it "caused" something. I think context also matters, a journal title has exact meanings for words in mind unlike most of the media.

It's not a direct synonym but it's also where my mind went after reading the title

So what other word would you have used for an article about a statistical prediction? This is a scientific text, "to predict" has a well-understood meaning within the field of statistics and it's not a synonym for "causes".

Does "correlate" or "correlation" work? Confession: I didn't read the article.

"correlates"

Correlation is a symmetrical relationship between two properties, prediction is not.

Please don't pile on another commenter like that. The diminishing returns of being in the right decline exponentially, and then it just creates ill feeling. Curious conversation doesn't fit well with defeating others, and we're here for the former.

the way it's phrased causes me to jump to a conclusion but I would not claim that it guides my mind. The error is in my reasoning (system 2 being lazy), _not_ in the phrasing.

I've been wondering if there's a correlation between authoritarianism and lead pollution. Like how leaded gasoline seems to correlate with violence and crime. Then that cohort (boomers, more or less) became the largest voting block and changed politics.

In my grossly oversimplified worldview, authoritarianism is shorthand for heightened fear response and lowered empathy.

> shorthand for heightened fear response and lowered empathy

Isn't it plausible that those are related? Fear takes the driver seat and pushes empathy into the backseat.

I wish I knew. It seems like a state of fear overrides other behaviors. But I have no idea what a population's "normal" level of empathy is.

Then what word would you use describe the political leanings of a nation whose people feel threatened by something, like maybe the World Bank and IMF rolling in, and want a stronger government to prevent it from happening?

Liberal?

I'm the most left leaning person I know and am involved in local politics. I'm pretty sure most of my cohort opposes forfeiting our sovereignty to financiers.

But I'd say outrage, vs fear, is my prime motivator.

FWIW I've adopted Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, until something better comes along. None of the personality traits are correct or incorrect. They just are. I'm just trying to understand other people better, esp those I disagree with.

Edit, TMI warning:

My SO voted for Trump. And about 1/2 my family are #MAGA. We largely have the same values, culture, upbringing. So it's fascinating to me how we reach different conclusions. I was truly surprised to learn about fear, anxiety, and so forth.

My SO's prime motivator is fear, which she proclaims openly. Whereas I have near zero fear response. That difference is the basis for most of our quarrels. And, frankly, I just didn't grok the difference, so was being quite the knucklehead.

Haidt's pretty cool, but I disagree with how you explained his ideas. Best executive summary of Haidt I know of is this bar chart: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dh7OHIPVMAA-OJk.jpg Usually folks I know who lean as far left as you prefer labels like anarchist, or socialist -- since liberal is what the imf / world bank people call themselves!

I currently believe something like OCEAN explains something like MFT.

Ya, labels suck. I'm "liberal" in the sense that I support whatever works and embrace change. Adam Smith, Marx, others all made some great points, many of which have been lost, but progress marches on and we must adapt.

Smith and Marx are interesting but they're two sides of the same coin. Capitalism, communism, what does it all serve? Greasing the wheels of progress. Everyone supports progress. But how do we define it? Computation! We need more neurons, transistors, etc. so we can tackle more complex problems. Look at how far we've come, compared to microbial goo. It is our manifest destiny to embark on a long march through the galaxy to harvest and reorganize all its matter/energy into a singular united planck scale computer. We're going to need an authoritarian galatic empire to get us there. Are you with us comrade?

Service guarantees citizenship.

If you read the study, this is obviously addressed - please try to provide specific feedback on the methodology they used that you feel do not address your concerns rather than assuming the authors did not consider obvious points.

Low power study, sample size of 31, p-value of 0.04, and a regression stating that somehow gdp per capita, gini coefficient were not significant?

Shrug. Sounds tenuous.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Respectfully I don’t think that was particularly shallow. Those are a lot of shaky numbers. They are not convincing of much.

That's not the elephant in the room. That some obvious speculation over the contents that everybody will understand but has no place in a scientific paper.

Or, in other words, the paper's title does mean "hey, we got some more evidence that poverty causes authoritarianism (or the other way around)", it's just encoded in Academish.

What about parasites -> poverty -> little surplus time across the population -> little scrutiny or protest of political leaders -> authoritarianism.

...because researchers are idiots and HN knows better.

It's a problem, but supercilious disses don't help anything.

a plosone paper published in 2013, enough said

Can you elaborate? Thanks.

plos one is one of the journals that most people treated as none significant one in the field, and institutions in China effective ban researchers publish papers on it (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5). And the retractions from this journal is increasing (https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706...).

The reputation is so bad that wikipedia includes a sentence in the entry as "In 2016, Jeffrey Beall described PLOS One as a scientific spammer. Owing to concerns about the peer review process at the time, he considered the journal more as a digital repository than a scholarly publication.[41]" A recent event resonates with this which is described as "CreatorGate" on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate), which even in the abstract of the paper, as quoted from retractionwatch (https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-retracting-p...), "The paper, about the biomechanics of hands, gives a shout out to “the Creator” as early as the abstract, which contains this sentence: 'The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.'" If this can be slipped by review process, any thing can happen. I still yet to met any senior scientist who is proud to say in public whose group published on plos one.

Thank you

So roughly the plot to V for Vendetta in how the far right UK government came to power.

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