Poison Ivy Halls

I’m going to review Bryan Caplan’s new book, The Case Against Education. Will discuss it, and general educational issues, with James Miller [in an upcoming podcast]. This will eventually include a definitive prescription for fixing American education, not that anyone will pay any attention.

The GoFundMe linke is here. You can also send money via Paypal ( Use the donate button) , or bitcoins to 1Jv4cu1wETM5Xs9unjKbDbCrRF2mrjWXr5. In-kind donations, such as copies of Claudius’ Etruscan dictionary, or Pytheas of Massalia’s “On the Ocean”, or James’s Schmitz’s “Karres Venture”, would be appreciated as well.

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Some of my earlier thoughts on education

Here. With more to come.

Generalized Homeopathy

Back in the early 1800s, some nut [ Samuel Hahnemann ] conceived the idea that all effective medicines, in large doses, produce symptoms in healthy individuals similar to those of the diseases they cure. He advocated treatment using extremely diluted versions of those drugs – often so diluted that the preparation did not contain a single molecule of the original drug. This was of course complete nonsense. It was also quite effective: people had significantly better outcomes when treated with homeopathic medicine than conventional therapies.

You see, on average, conventional medicine was worse than useless in those days, as it had been for thousands of years. Doctors killed more people – a lot more – than they cured.

While homeopathic medicine was a sophisticated way of doing nothing at all – and thus vastly superior to conventional medicine.

The success of homeopathic medicine did not last. For one thing, it sounded ridiculous. The idea that infinitely-diluted substances had potent effects was unbelievable. Also, its rivals learned from homeopathy’s success. Some people in conventional medicine began to realize that it was usually harmful and some of their most stupid therapies became less common. Some MDs moved all the way to therapeutic nihilism – the idea that it is impossible to cure people through treatment. Close to true at the time. Later, with the development of anatomy & physiology, and in particular germ theory, effective therapies were developed, eventually putting many areas of medicine in the black.

However, there are other fields that could benefit from homeopathy’s example. Simply look for disciplines that are, on average, worse than useless. Academic fields that have net negative predictive power, fields that produce graduates that are less effective than barflies. We could construct alternative, low-cost approaches that succeed by doing nothing at all.
They’d inflict less harm, and they would also be considerably cheaper.

Examples are left as an exercise for the reader. Remember that even while doing nothing, you have to pretend to do something, cause you gotsta get paid.

Starting Over

Looking back on it, human health would have materially improved if every physician and surgeon in 1800 had walked behind a horse and vanished. The next question is how that would have influenced health in later years, say in 1900. Medical traditions would have been interrupted, and presumably other people would have drifted into the medical niche. If those vanished medicos had been replaced by astronomers and physicists, progress would likely have been faster – since they were practitioners of the scientific method, which was not often the case for physicians.

What disciplines today would benefit from firing everyone and starting over?

DALYs per doctor

The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden – the number of years lost. I’m wondering just much harm premodern medicine did, per doctor. How many healthy years of life did a typical doctor destroy (net) in past times?

Consider Semmelweis. Between 1839 and 1847, the First Clinic at the Vienna General Hospital had 20,204 births and 1,989 maternal deaths. The Second Clinic, attended by midwives, had 17,791 birth and 691 maternal deaths. An MD’s care conferred an extra 6% chance of death. Births at home were even safer, with maternal mortality averaging about 0.5%

In that period, MDs caused about 1200 extra deaths. Today ob-gyns deliver about 12-15 babies per month; assuming that caseloads were similar back then, there would have been something like 14 doctors working there ( a very rough guess: 2500 births a year, 180 births per doctor). So each MD was responsible for something like 85 extra deaths over that period. Since some were students, who surely didn’t spend the whole 8 years there, probably the per-doctor fatality rate was less that that. Maybe only 50 deaths per doc. Of course a doctor’s career was longer than 8 years…
Assuming 30 years of life lost per mom, 1500 DALYs per Victorian ob-gyn sounds like a minimum.

Ob-Gyn was especially bad, but most doctors, over most of history, must have had significantly negative effects. We know that wounded men in the Civil War had a better chance of surviving when they managed to hide from Army surgeons. Think how many people succumbed to bloodletting, over the centuries.

It looks as if the average doctor (in Western medicine) killed a bunch of people over his career ( when contrasted with doing nothing). In the Charles Manson class.

Eventually the market saw through this illusion. Only took a couple of thousand years.

Luzia woman

Luzia woman is an 11,500-year-old funny-looking skeleton found in a cave in Brazil. According to Wiki, “Her facial features include a narrow, oval cranium, projecting face and pronounced chin, strikingly dissimilar to most Native Americans and their indigenous Siberian forebears. Anthropologists have variously described Luzia’s features as resembling those of Negroids, Indigenous Australians, Melanesians and the Negritos of Southeast Asia. Walter Neves, an anthropologist at the University of São Paulo, suggests that Luzia’s features most strongly resemble those of Australian Aboriginal peoples.

There are a large number (81) of similar skeletons at this site, ranging from around 11,500 to 7,000 years old.

from the PNAS article: “The results obtained from all multivariate analyses confirm a close morphological affinity between SouthAmerican Paleoindians and extant Australo-Melanesians groups, supporting the hypothesis that two distinct biological populations could have colonized the New World in the Pleistocene/Holocene transition.”

This is right in the area where we find the pseudo-Andamanese, Australo-Melanesian genetic signal.

If those skeletons really do look like Australo-Melanesians, it’s not because they carry a 2% admixture. They would have to be mostly Australo-Melanesian. Which means that they got there first.

Since there are so many skeletons of this kind, there should a fair chance that at least one will have useable DNA, particularly since we’re getting better aDNA recovery.

I wonder if this isn’t already underway.

Rise and Fall

Every society selects for something: generally it looks as if the direction of selection pressure is more or less an accident. Although nations and empires in the past could have decided to select men for bravery or intelligence, there’s not much sign that anyone actually did this. I mean, they would have known how, if they’d wanted to, just as they knew how to select for destriers, coursers, and palfreys. It was still possible to know such things in the Middle Ages, because Harvard did not yet exist.

A rising empire needs quality human capital, which implies that at minimum that budding imperial society must not have been strongly dysgenic. At least not in the beginning. But winning changes many things, possibly including selective pressures. Imagine an empire with substantial urbanization, one in which talented guys routinely ended up living in cities – cities that were demographic sinks. That might change things. Or try to imagine an empire in which survival challenges were greatly reduced, at least for elites, so that people had nothing to keep their minds off their minds and up worshiping Magna Mater. Imagine that an empire conquered a rival with interesting local pathogens and brought some of them home. Or one that used up a lot of its manpower conquering less-talented subjects and then importing masses of those losers into the imperial heartland.

If any of those scenarios occurred, they might eventually result in imperial decline – decline due to decreased biological capital.

Right now this is speculation. If we knew enough about the GWAS hits for intelligence, and had enough ancient DNA, we might be able to observe that rise and fall, just as we see dysgenic trends in contemporary populations. But that won’t happen for a long time. Say, a year.