Hacker News Reader

Comment by klmadfejno | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com