Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Best songs of the 2010s according to science: 1-25

Everyone knows the best thing about the end of a year is reading and making lists. The end of a decade is even better! I sat down to make my top 10 songs, then accidentally made 100, and then forced myself to cut this to 25. I didn't allow listing more than 1 song by a single artist (otherwise some artists like Tera Melos and Buke and Gase would be listed too much). This ended up taking a lot of time therefore you are morally obligated to read it. I'm so sorry.

25. Dark Dark Dark - Daydreaming

I heard just a small clip of this folk song in the background of a TV show and spent a while trying to dig up what it was. The little repeating instrumental piano part seems like it shouldn't work on paper but it's so great and unique and never gets old.

24. Flying Lotus with Kendrick Lamar - Never Catch Me

They need to make a whole album together in this style.

23. Ian William Craig - A Single Hope

Very distorted and harsh sounds mysteriously adding up to something extremely calm and beautiful. Headphones required.

22. Norwegian Arms - Kiva Ikva

Mandolin-driven Animal-Collective-inspired freak-folk that I imagine SpongeBob would listen to.

21. Black Midi - BmBmBm

Best new genre (auction rock) and worst front-flip. A brand new band that I have a feeling will make some of my favorite music of the 2020s. They feel like the spiritual successor to The Mars Volta.

20. Julia Holter - Turn the Light On

I've listened to this song so many times and still don't feel like I understand it. What is the main "part"? What is the structure of it? What are even the instruments being played? It feels futuristic and alien and not acoustic, yet when I try to listen to each sound it appears they are all classical instruments like strings, horns, and piano? It feels very abstract and beautiful and different on each listen.

19. Dawn of Midi - Dysomnia

It's a little bit cheating that I'm putting the album instead of a track off the album, but really the whole album is a single song and it'd be impossible to pick just one track. It's very unique and hard to categorize, but they are mostly considered a jazz band acoustically playing techno. I don't really like jazz or techno, yet I haven't been able to stop listening to this. The way the instruments spiral around each other and slowly unfold into different shapes is really trance-inducing.

18. Tool - Fear Inoculum

I was happy for Tool to finally make a new album but had low expectations because I figured surely their glory days are over. And at first I just felt like this was "alright". But it really grows on you.

17. Kendrick Lamar - u

The song I've found myself going back to the most from the best hip-hop album of the decade. The transition around half-way through the song is the thing that stands out to me the most.

16. Olafur Arnalds - Near Light

A neo-classical pianist, who made this album "Living Room Songs" in his living room, writing and recording 1 song per day for 8 days. This one in particular mixes in electronic elements; he said "my mother and sister came by for a visit so I made them play some synths."

15. Folo - White Bear and The Birds

Israeli folk-tronica that I think any Radiohead fan would really like. As far as I know, they just made this album and then disappeared without it really being noticed, which isn't fair.

14. Dirty Projectors - Unto Caesar

When should we bust into harmony?

13. PJ Harvey - England

A rock goddess from the early 90s that can then make odd folk stuff in the 2010s and have it be her best music and maybe the best album of the decade.

12. Drop Electric - Empire Trashed

I remember hearing this for the first time, knowing absolutely nothing about them, and being taken aback several times by how the song evolves.

11. Kanye West - Lost In The World

I don't need to say who Kanye West is.

10. Sylvan Esso - Hey Mami

Started by making an a capella song that works as is, then with electronics added in a surprising and exactly-right way.

9. Animal Collective - FloriDada

Most instantly and consistently catchy song of the decade.

8. Cloudkicker - Oh, God.

Just one guy making music on his home computer as a hobby and making all of it available for free. Even though it's of a genre I mostly don't like (metal), I obsessed over all his music this decade, and when I make music I find myself frequently imitating his approach to things.

7. Buke and Gase - Your Face Left Before You

2 people strumming instruments they invented/built while drumming with their feet. Even though a lot of thought and experimentation has clearly gone into it, the songs feel extremely spontaneous and just more alive than other music. Nobody really knows how to classify it; I've seen it called anything from math rock to country pop.

6. Kishi Bashi - Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!

Feels like a song from some cult I want to join and live happily ever after.

5. Tera Melos - Purple and Stripes

If I kept making this list from scratch I'd pick a different Tera Melos song to be toward the top each time; throughout their last 3 albums they've been my consistent favorite artist of this decade. This song is like taking clips from unknown insanely catchy 90s punk pop songs, throwing them in a blender, then picking out some of the broken shards and piecing them together into a jigsaw puzzle.

4. Alt-J - Hunger Of The Pine

Only good because it samples Hannah Montana, obviously.

3. Son Lux and Lorde - Easy (Switch Screens)

The original song by Son Lux was already really good and unique. Then they started changing it up live, and also Lorde started covering it on her tour, and then they combined all that together to make it truly perfect.

2. Swans - Apostate

This is what the end of the world sounds like. If you are patient and also listen to it LOUD, it's a very rewarding and intense experience.

1. Sigur Ros - Ekki Mukk

Listen on headphones. By the end your breathing will be slowed to half its normal speed, and you'll have no idea whether the song lasted 1 minute or 1 hour.

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Links 2019/10/29

Kansas City spans two states, both of which have constantly competed for businesses to relocate to their side of the city with tax incentives. Obviously this was a negative-sum game, and the governors of both states have worked out a deal to end it (link). Everyone appears to correctly recognize this as a good thing to stop, but isn't this what's happening across all cities and states offering tax incentives to specific businesses!? Should we not pass a federal law to end this at a higher level?

The PATRIOT Act created special warrants that were supposed to give federal agents more power to stop terrorism. It turns out, this new power has been used a lot, but almost entirely on the war on drugs instead of terrorism. Link.

And yet... per capita US drug deaths have doubled every decade for the last 4 decades! That's a far bigger increase than I realized. Link.

A long-term look at California's Paid Family Leave Act suggests that it "tended to reduce the number of children born". That seems very surprising to me, and I don't know whether to consider this a case where evidence should overturn common sense or it's safer to brush this aside as noise in the data? Link.

ICE accidentally deported an American citizen with mental disabilities to Mexico with only $3. It took 125 days of living on the streets of foreign countries before he was able to get back. Yet another reminder that you can lose all your rights as soon as you are suspected of being an illegal immigrant. Link.

A guy who was born in Greece, then moved to America as a kid, was deported by ICE to Iraq because he was ethnically Iraqi. He had never lived there, did not speak Arabic, had diabetes, and of course... died, apparently from a from lack of insulin. Link.

"65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians ... down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated ... now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009." Link. There has also been an especially rapid drop in religiosity the last few years in parts of the Arab world, without almost half of young adults in Tunisia now identifying as not religious (link). I expect these trends to continue, but... if religiosity remains somewhat heritable and correlated with larger family size, then in the long-run, maybe those less naturally inclined to be religious will fade from the gene pool and religion will make a major comeback?

People often mention Trump's deregulation efforts without ever getting into any details. The Brookings Institution keeps a running list here. As noted here, the deregulations are largely environmental, such as less restrictions on pollution and removing the rule requiring humane treatment of animals in order to be officially "certified organic". On the other hand, regulations of the labor market have increased in many ways, e.g. "employers have been asked to document every possible project a prospective immigrant employee might work on over the next three years".

Per "average fine particulate matter" measurements, American air pollution decreased by 24.2% from 2009 to 2016, then reversed course and increased by 5.5% between 2016 and 2018. "The increase was associated with 9,700 additional premature deaths in 2018." Link.

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Links 2019/07/03

"What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong": "Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from fishing ships or poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices... Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100%". Throwing stuff away is probably fine most of the time. We're just taking stuff out of the ground, making use of it, then putting it back in the ground.

"An investor-led building boom has almost doubled the size of the Sydney apartment rental market in two years, forcing landlords to drop rents more than $100 a week in some areas to secure tenants" (link). It almost makes you wonder if restrictions on increasing housing supply, happening in cities all over, are bad and increasing our cost of living!

"I’m begging you: Stop donating canned goods to food banks". Canned food drives are maybe the best example of ineffective altruism. Among other things: "that $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee".

A government policy passed today will affect younger people more, because they will live longer. So wouldn't it be more fair to make votes count more the younger you are? The case for age-weighted voting.

Tax preparers are capturing 13-22% of the value of the EITC (link). So if the government did pre-filled tax returns, people would get much more out of the EITC without us having to spend an extra penny on it (link).

Comparing states that accepted the ACA Medicaid expansions to those that did not finds a "reduction in disease-related deaths" which "grows over time" in states that did the Medicaid expansion (link).

Replacement of manned toll booths with electronic ones greatly reduce vehicle emissions in the area. And a study of one example of making that transition in a populated area found that it "reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2 kilometers of a toll plaza by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, relative to mothers 2-10 km from a toll plaza" (link).

Related: schools downwind of a highway have "decreases in test scores, more behavioral incidents, and more absences" than ones upwind. To help control for other variables, this is comparing students who move campuses from one side of the highway to the other (link).

Related again: when Volkswagen cheated on emission tests, they were selling cars "which secretly polluted up to 150 times as much as gasoline cars". That's a lot! So a study tracked where these vehicles were used as a natural experiment on the effects of sudden and randomly dispersed increases in air pollution from cars. And it found "a 10 percent cheating-induced increase in car exhaust increases rates of low birth weight and acute asthma attacks among children by 1.9 and 8.0 percent" (link).

A Dallas-born teenage citizen was mistakenly arrested under suspicion of being an illegal immigrant and kept in one of our special detention centers for asylum-seekers. He was not given basic rights like a phone call, because those rights do not apply to people who are not believed to be citizens. In the 23 days it took before the error was recognized and he was released, he apparently lost 26 pounds (link). In contrast, read this excerpt on how well we treated Nazi prisoners. Were we wrong to not treat them worse? Or is being a brown person seeking asylum a worse crime than Nazism?

Trump is now telling non-white women in Congress, who were born in America, to go back to the countries they came from (link). In a follow-on rally, his supporters chanted "send her back" about a Somali-born American citizen (link). I wonder what David Duke saw in him.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Links 2019/05/29

The state agency that regulates and licenses plumbing in Texas is being abolished. According to one state representative, "our plumbing shortage is solved because we can all become plumbers." Link. Yee-haw!

Sweden has a tradition called "Lordagsgodis" (Saturday candy), where you shouldn't eat candy on any other day of the week, but on Saturday you eat as much as you want. "When participating in the 'Lordagsgodis' tradition, the average Swedish family of four eats about 1.2 kilos (2.65 lbs.) of candy!" Link.

Does College Turn People Into Liberals? In a study following 7,000+ students across 120+ colleges through their first couple of years, "48 percent viewed liberals more favorably in their second year of college than when they arrived on campus. However, among the same students, 50 percent also viewed conservatives more favorably. In other words, college attendance is associated, on average, with gains in appreciating political viewpoints across the spectrum, not just favoring liberals."

One Step For Animals is an animal welfare organization that, instead of advocating vegetarianism, is focused just on getting people to stop eating chicken. "If we can convince someone to stop eating birds, they would go from being responsible for the factory farming and slaughtering of more than two dozen land animals per year to fewer than one." "It takes more than 200 chickens to provide the same number of meals as one cow."

Everyone learns about the Stanford Prison Experiment, but the whole thing was basically bad science and a sham. People know this and still teach it because, in the words of one professor, it teaches a lesson "bigger than the science". THIS REALLY GETS ON MY NERVES! Link.

"Paying American students cash incentives causes them to do better on the PISA, an international standardized test of math skills. But similar incentives had no effect on Chinese students, implying that Americans are slacking while Chinese students are trying hard." Link. IMO, it's often the case that what people are "good" or "bad" at is more matter of how motivated they feel to do it.

In a study trying to determine why people deny science: "Subjects were asked to justify their rejection of the scientific consensus. In 33% of cases... subjects simply restated their position, essentially giving no justification." Link. ...

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Links 2019/05/22

The Day The Dinosaurs Died: The asteroid's impact "formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon". Hollywood has really dropped the ball on cool/scary asteroid explosions.

"Our belief in the benefits of low salt consumption are largely based on mis-information and myth-information." Link.

"Saudi crown prince defends China's right to put Uighur Muslims in concentration camps." ??? This has been up to 1 million people. Link.

"August birthday (read: enter school younger) associated with 30% increase in ADHD diagnoses relative to September birthday. But only in states with September school cutoff." Hmmm... Link.

California used to allow medical and non-medical exemptions for school-mandated vaccines. Then, to try to increase vaccination, they repealed non-medical exemptions. But this only led to a 1% decline in total exemptions, seemingly because many of the people who were getting non-medical exemptions switched to medical ones instead. What a coincidence! It makes you doubt how effectively we can change people's behavior in general... Link.

"A Women's March planned in Eureka has been postponed by the organizers over fears that participants were not diverse enough." Link.

You Have No Right to Your Culture: "Do you have more cultural ground in common with your grandparents - or with foreigners of your own generation?"

After reading the full Mueller report, Justin Amash, a GOP congressman, now says that "Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller's report", "Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct" (obstruction of justice), and "few members of Congress have read the report". Link. I have no doubt that nothing will come of this.

Saturday, March 30, 2019

Common sense regulations to save children's lives

In the U.S., according to the CDC, gun accidents are the #1 cause of injury deaths for children ages 1-4, mostly caused by guns kept in the home. For ages 1-14, it is the #2 cause of unintentional injury-death, behind only car accidents (link and link). Yet many people insist on keeping guns in their homes. And many oppose simple regulations that could reduce these deaths, such as child locks. Do they just not care about the deaths of so many children?

Sorry, I read that wrong. That was the data for drowning and pools, not guns.

I'm guessing that, of the people who strongly support gun control laws and have fond memories of swimming at their or friends' homes growing up, most dislike the idea of "pool control" laws. If so, why do you feel that way? Do you think, maybe, people who have enjoyed gun ownership have the same negative reaction to gun control, for the exact same reasons?

Should there be more regulations on swimming pools?

Monday, February 18, 2019

Does anyone really care about abortion?

Pro-lifers claim that abortion is murder. But I don't think they, for the most part, truly believe that.

To be clear, I'm questioning people's subconscious motivations, not accusing people of consciously lying. Politics, on all sides of all issues, is surely full of people who don't have a clear understanding of why they believe what the believe. So even though this particular post is about pro-lifers, I'm not claiming this basic type of problem is unique to them. I personally struggle with what to believe about the ethics of abortion, and there are good arguments for being pro-life.

6 pro-life mysteries

Mystery 1

Consider this thought experiment from Patrick Tomlinson. You're escaping a fire in a fertility clinic. In one room, you see a 5 year old child crying for help. In another room, you see a frozen container labeled "1000 Viable Human Embryos". You only have time to save either the child or the embryos. Which should you save?

I suspect most pro-lifers believe you should save the child. But that would mean they do not truly feel that an embryo's life is nearly as valuable as other human lives. What is the amount of embryos that would be worth saving instead of a child? What if the frozen container said 5555 instead of 1000? According to the CDC, 1 in 5,555 pregnancies kill the mother in the U.S.. If you value 1 born human's life greater than 5555 embryos, then the expected value on life of an average abortion in the U.S. is positive, because the risk of killing the mother outweighs the moral worth of the embryo.

Mystery 2

Consider what the president of the March for Life said: "No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion". If you believe abortion is murder and therefore should be illegal, why would you feel that a murderer should face no punishment? And what does it even mean that something should be illegal, if there should be no punishment for doing it? Do you think this is because most pro-lifers don't want murder to be punished, or do you think it's because they don't really believe abortion is murder?

Mystery 3

In polls, 68% of pro-lifers say that abortion should be legal when the mother's health is endangered (arguably, pregnancy and giving birth just is a danger to your health). And 59% of pro-lifers say that abortion should be legal when the pregnancy is caused by rape or incest. Why would you believe those things if you believe it is murdering a baby? Does anyone think it's ok to kill a baby after birth if the above scenarios are true?

Mystery 4

Part of U.S. foreign aid goes to family-planning NGOs. The MCP is a rule that prohibits a family-planning NGO from receiving U.S. money if they so much as provide information about abortion to those who receive their services. Whenever a Democrat is President, that rule is removed. And whenever a Republican gets elected, it is put back into place, and pro-lifers cheer. However, when the rule is removed, abortions decrease, and when it is re-instated, abortions increase (link). Why? Because it effectively reduces funding for family-planning in general, which leads to less access to other family-planning services like contraception, which then increases unwanted pregnancies, which obviously increases the number of pregnancies that the parents want to abort. So why do pro-lifers support the MCP rule? Do you think, when considering this evidence, most would change their mind, and become upset with Republican presidents for it? Or, perhaps, is reducing abortion not really the motivating goal?

Mystery 5

The ACA mandated that health insurance cover contraception. As mentioned above, increasing access to contraception is an effective way to reduce unwanted pregnancies, and therefore reduce abortion. If you cared deeply about reducing abortion, this would be one of your favorite government policies. However, this was overturned by the Supreme Court in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Is that case reviled by pro-lifers, second only to Roe v. Wade? If someone truly believed abortion was murder, they should. But AFAIK, the average pro-lifer cheered this abortion-increasing Supreme Court decision. And the people who brought this to the Supreme Court in the first place were pro-lifers!

Mystery 6

The most pro-life group in the U.S. is evangelicals, who officially only accept the Bible as the sole authority on God. But as far as I can tell, the Bible is not pro-life. Here are the 2 parts of the Bible which come the closest to directly addressing the morality and legality of abortion:

Exodus 21:22-25 declares that the punishment for killing someone else's fetus in a fight is only to pay a fine. You may object that the punishment is so light because it's probably only referring to accidental killing of the fetus. But notice that it doesn't suggest going light on punishments for any other accidental harms that are caused by the same fight. And other passages, like Exodus 21:28-32, are quite willing to prescribe the death penalty for negligent homicide. This pretty strongly indicates that fetus' lives were not considered nearly as valuable as other human lives.
Numbers 5:11-22 says that when a woman cheats on her husband and gets pregnant, a priest should give her poisoned water to abort the baby.

If evangelicals are not getting their pro-life beliefs from the Bible, where are they getting it from? Abortion was legal in the U.S. in the earlier (more religious!) years. Criminalizing abortion didn't really start until the 1800s, and the leading pro-life advocates were doctors (link). Even up until the time of Roe v. Wade, abortion wasn't a big issue among evangelicals; it was considered a Catholic issue. As time has passed, this has flipped, where now evangelicals are the ones that are predominately pro-life (link). Why?

Possible explanations

The above mysteries lead me to believe that something else, other than a belief that abortion is murder, is what motivates most pro-lifers to be pro-life.

Some pro-choicers like to say that the pro-life movement is really just about misogyny. But I don't know how that can be reconciled with the fact that there's basically no gender gap on this.

The following 2 alternatives seem like a better fit.

Ring-bearers vs. freewheelers

I heard about this on the Rationally Speaking episode with Jason Weeden.

Basically, suppose you broadly categorized people into two groups with regard to attitudes about sexuality: ring-bearers and freewheelers. Freewheelers are people who have more sexual partners throughout their life, have fewer kids, wait longer to have kids, etc. Ring-bearers are the opposite. This is highly predictive of one's view of abortion, perhaps even more so than political affiliation (link). It also predicts a person's opinion on the ethics of similar topics like birth control.

Weeden proposes that people mostly vote out of self-interest, and abortion is no exception. Freewheelers want a society that enables of their preferred lifestyle, such as having the option of an abortion in the case of an accidental pregnancy. But ring-bearers want a society with less freewheelers, and so they want laws that are less conducive to that lifestyle.

This would explain some of the pro-life mysteries, especially the question of why pro-lifers tend to oppose increasing access to contraception. If their motivation is to decrease abortions, that doesn't make sense. If their motivation is to have a society less conducive to freewheelers, then it does make sense. It also would explain why the average pro-lifer thinks abortion is OK if the mother is at risk or if it was the result of a rape. In those situations, the abortion is no longer about freewheelers.

So, this solves a big piece of the puzzle, but gaps still remain. For example, I can't imagine that this motivation would lead to abortion being as major of an issue as it is for some people. Why would so many pro-lifers be single-issue voters just because they want freewheeling to be less convenient?

A rallying flag for political tribalism

Suppose you are a politically tribal Republican. You are loyal to your tribe, and you hate the other tribe. You don't care for a careful assessment of issues and facts on a case-by-case basis; you'd really prefer to not even listen to the arguments from the other side. It'd be nice to have an issue where the other side is clearly extremely evil, so that you can feel justified in supporting your team no matter what. For example, imagine a hypothetical scenario where your party's presidential nominee is a corrupt ignorant celebrity conspiracy theorist. You may feel uncomfortable throwing your full support to your team. But you can simply say "the other side supports murdering babies" and feel good with your tribe again! You don't need to think through the implications of that; the point is actually not to have to worry about thinking too much. You just want to feel good rooting for your home team and booing the away team.

This is similar to what Scott Alexander calls a rallying flag in tribalism. What's different compared to how he talked about it is that this rallying flag is formed after the tribe is formed, rather than before.

The advantage of this theory of what motivates pro-lifers, over the ring-bearer theory, is that it explains why many people seem to care so much about being pro-life, even though the pro-life mysteries suggest they don't actually care much about abortion itself. It also explains why evangelicals in particular are so pro-life, compared to other religious groups, and despite the Bible not giving much to support being pro-life: it's just because evangelicals happen to be more Republican.

So...

Do I think these two things are the only motivations for pro-lifers? No. I just think they are both significant subconscious motivations to varying degrees for many pro-lifers.