Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism (2013)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Dupe: 17 days ago
Here's the next paper from the group:
Distance from equator is predictive of authoritarianism. The more constant daily cycle causes a yearning for rigid routines, predisposing populations to authoritarian rule.
If you think I'm merely taking the piss, is it more or less plausible than the proposed causal mechanism here:
"Because many disease-causing parasites are invisible, and their actions mysterious, disease control has historically depended substantially on adherence to ritualized behavioral practices that reduced infection risk [9]."
Or maybe it's because we've already seen the data our whole lives, know which countries are authoritarian and can select any variable which separates democracies from authoritarian countries and bang, you've got p < 0.05.
There's a reason why science as a philosophy places so much value on experimentation that makes predictions and tests them. Testability is a fundamental. Untestable theories are not just wrong, they're nonsensical to science. Take Ostrom's "Simulation hypothesis." Is it pseudoscientific? Depends. Is it testable? Is a simulated universe different in a testable way? A theoretically testable simulation hypothesis makes predictions. One that isn't, doesn't. A simulation which is 100% unknowable cannot be a scientific theory. This doesn't strictly mean that it isn't true, it just means we can't gain scientific knowledge of it. If it's masquerading as a scientific theory, then it is pseudoscience.
On the "softer" level, there's a reason why science as a cultural, intellectual institution places so much value on eliminating observer effects. Scientists own bias has always been a major detriment to science. Often in the history of science, generations have had to die off before bias can be shed and science advanced in some area.
Basically and practically, the "double blind" designs of experiments are the heart of this. People's objectivity is not to be trusted, not even scientists, not even a little.
Economics, sociology and such have shifted from one flavour of pseudoscience to another. Back in Popper's day, they would create big untestable "theories" that explained everything and nothing. Today, they make micro-theories after they analyze the data.
I think this may be peaking though. The way machines do "data analysis" is starting to shift the way we think on the margins. Machines make predictions, but not theories. They don't care which way causality runs.
Exactly.
There's something that's always bothered me about the "evolution by natural selection is science and everyone who doesn't immediately buy into every aspect of it is an idiot".
I personally believe in evolution. It probably makes quite a few good predictions. And I'm sure some experiments have rigor.
But a lot of it seems pretty untestable. Add a stress to a population, and it will either die off or evolve to improve fitness. If it dies off, does that contradict the theory because no evolution happened? If it evolves, how much will it evolve? Will the population reach a smaller equilibrium, larger, or the same? Does any change count as "evolution" or is someone quantifying which ones actually improve fitness? What about changes that don't seem obviously connected to fitness, like ridiculous peacock feathers, would those be predicted? Are we coming up with falsifiable predictions before the tests, or just explanations afterward?
I'm sure someone with more knowledge of the field has answers to all of these questions. But my guess is that they are more nuanced than the "evolution is science and if you question any aspect you are an idiot".
Isn't some species dying off a pretty major component of what evolution is?
Doesn't sound like science to me.
Biology is traditionally considered a "hard science" by people who subscribe to a 'hard/soft science' worldview.
Evolution is a fact, but many people's individual mental models of evolution are flawed. It's easy to remain unconvinced if you have a series of conversations with such people and successfully ferret out those flaws.
If you have the time for it, maybe now (covid stay at home) would be a good time to get on Amazon and take a deep dive into evolution and evolution denial?
As a skeptic and contrarian I've encountered the "evolution is science and if you question any aspect you are an idiot" people, and worse. Many ignorant people believe in evolution without understanding it, without understanding the evidentiary basis for it. They have chosen the correct cultural 'team' to side with, but usually for the wrong reasons.
In practice though, most evolution skeptics don't believe in science.
I think it's helpful to get distance from the idea of "fitness" in discussion with laypeople, as it is often loaded with presumptions. Evolution selects for what it selects for. It's true that surviving to maturity and producing offspring is vital for evolution (for the forms of life that work this way), but that's far from the whole story and our intuition about 'fitness' is often wrong.
Darwinism is is a scientific theory par excellence. A lot of that "testable predictions" philosophy of science was inspired by darwinism.
First, a scientific theory doesn't need to make only testable predictions. It just needs to make a testable prediction. Testing it doesn't "prove" the theory, it just subjects the theory to falsification.
Second, "testable/falsifiable" doesn't strictly mean "testable in practice." Even if it's not practical to test a prediction. EG, new species of bat will emerge in the future. We don't live long enough to test this in practice, but theoretically, it is a testable prediction. That doesn't make it unfalsifiable.
"Origin of Species" itself is full of predictions, some tested by Darwin himself and after is death. At this point, evolution has made so many predictions, that it is very very unlikely to be true. Unlikely, but nothing in science is proven beyond doubt ever.
Newtonian physics was "disproven" by Einstein. To do that though, Einsten's theory had to predict Netwonian physics.
In the middle you have the Caribbean/Northern Latin America, Central Africa and then like Indonesia out in Asia. A lot of warm, wet places with lots of history of malaria, other parasites, and terrible economic development.
What's interesting and cuts the other way right now is the small evidence that warmer and wetter makes COVID less infectious/effective. Have yet to see a good reason 'why' that's the case here, but it would be the first time you kinda want to be near the equator in order to avoid an infectious disease.
My understanding is that coronaviruses such as the SARS-CoV family or influenza die more quickly in warmer, more humid conditions. Some sources:
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2014/the-reason-for-the-se...
The reason it's called "parasite-stress theory" is not because parasites are so important for the selection of government, but because it's a reference to parasite-stress theory in biology.
It makes sense. If you don't even have basic healthcare or security, a strongman willing to swoop in and take decisive action does sound appealing. Unfortunately, though, they usually just make things worse.
Or maybe a group of people facing existential calamity actually do need fairly strong leadership?
Taiwan and especially Singapore might be characterized as much less 'liberal democratic' than the US, and they have already tamed coronavirus while the US flails and a lot of people are dying. Maybe that's not a perfect example, but it surely illustrates the point.
This seems like a dangerous meme right now
Citation? Examples? Where is the evidence of this?
I think Trump is an excellent example of 'Completely lacking in competency 'fake' strong man' - but there are plenty of counterexamples.
However, long term, authoritarian leadership makes things worse due to lack of transparency and accountability to the people. They can clean things up short term, but then they hold onto power and rot society.
I guess there could be a place for temporary authoritarian governments to swoop in, sweep up the mess, and then hand over things to liberal democracies, but they don't hand over power easily.
A book I read on Vietnam (A Bright Shining Lie) floated the idea that communism never delivered on its promise to make society more equitable, but communist revolutions have played a role in eliminating backwards feudal governments and clearing the way for liberal democracies to take over. Kind of like a shock treatment, but with a very high price in terms of human suffering.
Anyway, we should all be very suspicious and ready to oppose authoritarian creep, because we're all susceptible to it right now, and it could stick around even after this virus passes.
It seems to me the authoritarian way would be that the strong man issues an edict which may or may not be legally allowed or based on reason, and then his stooges, which may be the police or military, enforce it in a draconian manner, without regard to what the written law may permit.
Now that's not to say the paper is accurate as I am not a scientist, but it is to say I find it an interesting read.
So I think that while the theory would be hard to prove, the power of parasites causing complex physiological changes should not be ignored.
var allFactor = @[poverty, authoritarianism, bad_health];
foreach(var factor in allFactor)
{
var otherFactors = allFactor.arrayByRemoving(theFactor);
print($"{factor} predicts {otherFactors}");
}
}I stopped reading when I realized they meant microbiology.
It may be that our two-party dynamic, being focused primarily around left vs. right, largely ignores the authoritarian/libertarian axis of the political compass [1], meaning both parties have authoritarian wings internally. In times of stress/shock, real and/or perceived, it seems that each political tribe is willing to cede power to its authoritarians, based on its values: currently, the left does so for health and the environment, and the right for border security and violence from the "other". And of course, these values can shift based on political winds and alliances of convenience; I'm watching HBO's "The Plot Against America", and from a modern perspective, it's strange to see the FDR economic progressives be the hawks, while the (original) America First-ers are the doves.
(While I lean libertarian on the political compass, I'm not a-priori judging all authoritarianism to be evil; there are arguably times such as a pandemic or a world war where some amount may be necessary.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/opinion/coronavirus-trump...
so don't worry about the axis affiliations and critique the ideas themselves (as you imply you already do by not judging a priori).
fear-driven decision environments (as with the current pandemic) are ripe for power seizures (even if just incrementally). we should remain vigilant against that.
afaict, most US residents are following governmental requests (like physical distancing, washing hands, and self-quarantining when sick) because it's a reasonable and prudent response to a virus that's still relatively unknown but has the potential to be bad, not because we're coerced by said government. those admonitions provide (sometimes sparse) evidence, information, and rationale for doing so, rather than mainly relying on force.
that force is held back by governmental units because of the threat of backlash by residents. this keeps their power in check. don't give that up.
You seem to be implying that, absent such a threat, the government would be employing force against citizens regardless of their compliance, simply because they could get away with it. If so, is it not more likely that restraint is due to the purpose of the state's monopoly on force being to coerce compliance, and as such is simply not necessary when the public is already compliant?
In other words, that the government is holding itself in check far more than the public is?
No dispute. It's a classic leaky-abstraction problem; some models can be helpful in reasoning, but they're always imperfect at describing messy complex reality. (While it too is imperfect, I'm rather fond of the 8-axis political compass! [0])
A lot of our weird tribal coalitions are byproducts of a First-Past-The-Post voting system, which necessarily results in two parties, game-theoretically. IMO there is no more urgent policy issue than electoral reform, to something like Ranked Choice or Approval, so that our representatives are more reflective of our preferences.
> fear-driven decision environments (as with the current pandemic) is ripe for power seizures
This is true; I'm a big fan of Chomsky's admonition that "the burden of proof is on state power to justify itself". While I'm grateful for how many people are doing the right thing voluntarily (I'm genuinely surprised at the trust of citizens in science, at least in my neck of the woods), I do think a pandemic is a situation where judicious use of state power can be justified (forbidding gatherings over N people, for instance). It's a balancing act, and we must be very vigilant to see that "emergency" powers do not persist indefinitely, as they so often do (Patriot Act, etc).
totally, models/stereotypes are useful shortcuts and aids. i was mainly advising against soley/overly relying on them. (and online quizzes are always fun!)
yes to election reform! especially curtailing/leveling money's influence, and de-gerrymandering, as both are unnecessary consolidations of power.
as for temporary/emergency powers, skepticism and resistance should correlate with the size of the governing body (somewhat ok with my mayor but not keen on my president exerting power domestically).
"authoritarian governance is defined by highly concentrated power structures that repress dissent and emphasize submission to authority, social conformity, and hostility towards outgroups"
... is a very problematic way of articulating this - to the point of promoting ignorance, because it's frankly how someone with a Liberal Democratic mindset would describe the system, but not others. I would argue that it's not objective because it may not capture the essence of such systems, rather, it just highlights the 'downsides' as seen from the other side.
Others might describe systems as possibly more collective or communitarian wherein legitimate central authorities have considerably better ability to manage affairs, particularly wherein such controls can have a material effect, i.e. 'pandemic', 'war' and maybe even things like infrastructure or other national challenges.
What people in 'liberal democracy' might see as 'individual choice', others might see as 'selfish, self-interested' possibly 'greedy' behaviour, actions that show little regard for others, only the self. The natural result of such behaviours might be 'inability to respond in a coherent manner to collective problems'.
Of course, where there is centralised power, there's an opportunity for it to be corrupt wherein you might have arbitrary and bad acting here and there, but I don't think to describe a system by its downsides is right.
This is especially important because the correlation may not be with authoritarianism as described, but possibly with group unity, collectivism or something else.
Edit: I should add, systems with strong 'central control' that some might describe as 'authoritarian' like Singapore, South Korea etc., have tamed and controlled Coronavirus and have exemplary responses. Their economies are not collapsing, they are in school, they are not dying en masse.
Meanwhile, 'Liberal Democracies' economies are collapsing, facing massive casualties, dying in hordes.
Imagine how stupid we must look to them? They literally showed us 'how to do it' but we're either too self-focused or possibly 'don't understand' how they are organized.