Hey readers,
"Science progresses one funeral at a time," as the saying goes — and as my colleague Dylan Matthews writes below, social change may happen the same way. Read on for more of our selections from around the internet, including unreported lab accidents, AI-generated art, and the fall of the economists. Enjoy! —Kelsey Piper
Societies change their minds faster than people do (The Economist)
The General Social Survey is one of my favorite American institutions. It's a massive enterprise, entailing over 2,000 interviews of ordinary US residents usually conducted in-person by trained staffers, every two years. A majority of people contacted still reply; by contrast, even other high-quality pollsters like Pew report that as few as 6 percent of respondents pick up the phone to answer questions. The result is an unusually rich dataset of how Americans' opinions have changed from 1972 to present.
This Economist piece from 2019 (which I was reminded of by Stefan Schubert and which fell off the back of a truck for non-subscribers to read here) highlights a few big GSS findings: the plummeting share of Americans saying Communists' books should be banned from public libraries, the rising share supporting interracial and same-sex marriage and legal marijuana. In most of these cases, the Economist finds that the big shift in opinion was more due to demographics than to persuasion. The people who wanted to ban Communist books and interracial marriage simply died out. Same-sex marriage and marijuana, by contrast, were cases where persuasion was slightly more important. It's a fascinating look at how societies evolve, which can sometimes take place even faster than individual humans do. — Dylan Matthews
Experimenting with disaster (The Intercept)
The debate over how the Covid-19 pandemic began — a spillover from animals or a leak from a lab — has flared up again, thanks to a preprint paper claiming it found evidence of synthetic design in the SARS-CoV-2 virus and a major investigative report arguing there were serious safety concerns at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the pandemic. The former has been largely debunked, as Vox's Kelsey Piper wrote last week, and the latter has been criticized for mistranslating key Chinese documents. Chances are we'll never have a definitive answer, but a new three-part investigation in The Intercept should remind us of something important: Even seemingly benign virological work can be dangerous, and lab accidents can and do happen.
Intercept writer Mara Hvistendahl surfaced buried correspondence between universities and funding agencies, discovering that hundreds of accidents at US biolabs have gone largely unreported. One of the most shocking stories involves accidents in a lab that undertook gain-of-function research on the H5N1 bird flu virus. Such mishaps are precisely why enhancing pathogens can be dangerous, and why such work needs closer regulatory scrutiny. —Bryan Walsh
AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan's anime community (Rest of World)
In September, AI-generated art tools, like Stable Diffusion, became publicly available to use; around that time, I shared John Herrman's arguably prescient analysis of the ethical debates that will sprout in the art world. Now, we have some IRL examples!
Rest of World's Andrew Deck dives into the insular world of anime artists and their reaction to AI tools encroaching on tradition and legacy. There's an interesting moral quandary here: AI tools are trained on work from human artists, so what happens when they can't consent to their work being used for this purpose? In Japan, furor erupted when someone used South Korean illustrator Kim Jung Gi's work a few days after his death. Of course, technology will always change our standards of what we consider art — look at photography's impact on portraiture — but the stakes are different when it comes to AI. AI has the potential to create art on its own, and the ramifications on artists' livelihoods will be huge. —Izzie Ramirez
Large language models can self-improve (arXiv)
In this new paper about recursive AI, Google researchers show how you can get a large language model to improve its own reasoning. You present the AI with a question — it then comes up with different predictions as to what might be a good answer, picks an answer, and memorizes or learns from its own answer. The AI pulls itself up by its own bootstraps! This technique allowed the researchers to get impressive results on reasoning tasks. But what's striking to me is that it took researchers this long to uncover this recursive technique. The paper reminds me of decades-old papers on the idea that children "bootstrap" their language learning. Researchers like Alison Gopnik, who argue that kids' brains hold the secret to building better AI, really seem to have a point. —Sigal Samuel
What really happens when emissions vanish (Bloomberg)
Where governments have been slow to act on climate change, corporations have stepped in with ambitious pledges to slash their greenhouse gas emissions and, in some cases, follow-up reports that they've exceeded those pledges. But it turns out that some of it is little more than hot air. Bloomberg analyzed almost 6,000 corporate climate reports and found that at least 1,318 used a misleading carbon accounting method called "market-based accounting." This allows companies to buy clean energy credits and subtract those emissions savings from their own emissions tally, even if they didn't run more of their operations on clean energy.
For example, Procter & Gamble committed to cut its emissions in half by 2030, and then announced in 2020 it had surpassed its goal. Using a more accurate carbon-accounting method, it had only cut its emissions by 12 percent. Cisco recently claimed it had cut its emissions by more than 60 percent, but it had actually increased by 22 percent. Even modest reductions, like Procter & Gamble's, should be praised. But the exaggerations, based on misleading accounting methods, are a critical reminder that corporate pledges only mean so much unless there's rigorous follow-through. —Kenny Torrella
May God save us from economists (The New Republic)
In this longform essay, Timothy Noah chronicles the rise of "Economism" as a dominant ideology in the United States. Economism involves the ascendance of the economics profession and its practitioners into every agency of the US government, embedding ideas of free market supremacy into the inner workings of policy. As Noah recounts, the rigor and empiricism of the economics profession has done some real good, such as the successful cap-and-trade program that greatly reduced acid rain. But habits of the profession can make it ill-suited to tackling many policy areas, including its overreliance on modeling. There is also a deep insularity that stems from a stark lack of diversity in the field as well as its lack of conversation with other fields.
Unfortunately, Economism's hegemony in the US meant that economic reasoning too often became the only tool in the policymaking process. This has, at best, led to long delays in the implementation of policies that would address issues like traffic deaths; at worst it has greatly worsened American health care and criminal justice. Since the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, the Economism dominance in DC appears to be fading, as the massive federal spending the Biden administration undertook over the past two years — against the advice of many economists — demonstrates. I agree with Noah that economics is at its core a flawed profession and tool, and while it has its uses, it certainly cannot and should not be the only tool at any government's disposal. —Muizz Akhtar
High demand for amoxicillin is causing shortages amid child RSV surge (Washington Post)
You wouldn't necessarily think that surging cases of a viral infection would contribute to antibiotic shortages, but antibiotics are often prescribed to treat a secondary bacterial infection — or just in case. RSV, short for Respiratory Syncytial Virus, usually causes nothing worse than mild cold-like symptoms in adults, but young children, with their smaller and immature lungs, can be hit hard. Experts are especially worried about this winter's surge; thanks to Covid lockdowns, children under 3 have had much less immune system exposure to common viruses. (A vaccine is hopefully on its way, but won't yet be available for this winter's cold and flu season.)
Drug shortages aren't new, or limited to the US; in Europe, two critical drugs used to treat heart attacks and strokes are also falling short. The FDA site warns of 183 drugs that were recently or are still in short supply, including the recently reported Adderall shortage. Ultimately, this shows the fragility of the global supply chains, a situation worsened by the strain of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that has been flagged for over a decade. — Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
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