The Antisocial Darwinist

Black sheep science from the Right side of campus. Plus music reviews.

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Support Musicians!

Posted by Jeff Morris on April 30, 2020
Posted in: Music Reviews. Leave a comment

As my readers know, I’m an huge supporter of underground music.  Life is tough for musicians during the COVID shutdown; the prospect of live music venues remaining shuttered for months after the rest of society re-opens is particularly depressing to those of us who live for great shows.  One thing we can all do, though, is to go out and financially support bands we like listening to — especially those who we listen to for free on the Internet.  Tomorrow, May 1, Bandcamp is foregoing their share of profits from any download sales of music on their site, so it’s a great time to go pony up for some music from great bands.  Here are some records I’ve bought recently that you should check out:

Mestarin Kynzi by Oranssi Pazuzu: excellent psychedelic black metal from Finland, just came out (but check out their back catalog as well)

Floppy Disk Overdrive by Master Boot Record: “Dehumanized”, all-electronic metal from Italy.  Not a single human element, but bad-ass nevertheless.  Again, check out the back catalog as well.

Mareridt by Myrkur: I wrote a not-so-great review of Myrkur’s first EP a bunch of years ago.  Since then she has become one of my favorite metal performers.  This album has some tracks that will become classics, like the masterful Ulvinde:

New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol​.​1 by Me and That Man: Yes, Nergal from Behemoth did a country record.  Several country records.  And they’re fucking awesome, and evil as shit.  You can be the first kid on your block to get the chorus of “Burning Churches” stuck in your head:

Deserted by Gatecreeper: Classic death metal from the American desert.  I picked up these guys’ last record, Sonoran Deprivation, based on an off-hand comment by a friend of mine who saw them live, and I’ve been hooked ever since.  These guys are recording some of the best death metal riffs on the market today, seamlessly blending boot-stomping mosh pit crunch with Mach 3 speed.  If you miss the heyday of bands like Carcass and Entombed, these guys will not disappoint.

The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness by Panopticon: Okay, this guy is some kind of lefty anarchist, and there’s at least one cringeworthy anti-Trump song in the second half of this two-album set, but never mind, the music is amazing.  The first half is black metal, the second is literally country.  Both are very well done.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that his politics are sufficiently antisocial to qualify for the angry metalhead stamp of approval.

Palindrome by d’hiver mort: This one is kind of old.  It was once described as sounding like a swarm of angry robots chasing you through the ruins of a cathedral.  Sort of an experimental industrial/metal sound with tons of atmosphere layered onto it.  It’s also by your friendly narrator, ASD, from a very different life many many years ago.

Great Depressions vs. Plagues

Posted by Jeff Morris on April 7, 2020
Posted in: Data, Economics, Politics. Tagged: coronavirus, epidemiology, great depression, pandemic, spanish flu. Leave a comment

A good bit of ongoing kvetching between left and right involves the relative importance of preventing spread of the coronavirus vs. preventing the complete collapse of the planetary economy in the wake of a months-long whole-hog shutdown of human activity.  To the left, the idea that we should be willing to sacrifice some number of lives to prevent going into a Great Depression is typical heartless capitalist “grind the poor into sausage” awfulness.  To the right, the cowardice and mind-destroying blandness of staying locked inside while the world falls apart is untenable; our ancestors charged machine gun nests to free the world from tyranny, but I’m going to huddle in my bedroom because I might catch the flu?  Bah.

As usual, these arguments are largely emotional and therefore mostly bullshit.  But fortunately, it might be possible to inject some numbers into the debate.  Specifically, we can ask how massive pandemic plagues and depressions affect the overall death rate in societies they afflict.  Presumably, there is some equilibrium point where deaths caused by the one equal deaths caused by the other; at that point of economic horror, it makes more sense to throw your society into the jaws of the virus and hope for the best, rather than waiting to starve to death or get blown up in a resource war or something.

As is usual, ASD isn’t going to try to do some deep-level analysis of this problem, I’m just going to hoover up data from easy-to-find websites to get a first-run idea of how the numbers look.  (As I’ve said before, this is so easy to do, it’s a shame that everyone doesn’t do it before puking up an opinion on Twitter…)  In this case, I’m just going to use numbers from the US Census, which will let us understand how the US population has changed over the past 230 years.  The first US census was performed in 1790, and is mandated by the US Constitution to occur every 10 years.  There’s one going on right now, in fact.  So here is the data, obtained from https://www.thoughtco.com/us-population-through-history-1435268:

Slide1

I will point out three things about this graph.  First, I’m assigning variable names to the Census year (t, for time) and to the total US Population (N).  Second, I’ve plotted the data with the y-axis on a logarithmic scale.  That’s because populations usually expand exponentially, which means the numbers form a straight line on a semi-log graph, but a hyperbolic curve when the y-axis is in regular numbers.  This makes it a lot easier to understand growth trends — it’s how you ought to be looking at the COVID-19 numbers on that website everybody is refreshing every 30 minutes, for instance, as it demystifies why every day the number of new cases goes up.  It’s not because “it’s getting worse out there”, that’s just how living things increase.

The third point is that the growth rate — that is, the slope of log N vs. t — is pretty constant for the first century of the Census, but decreases consistently throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.  That’s a general trend throughout the Western world; as material prosperity has increased, the rate of population expansion has gone down.  For the most part, this has been driven by a decrease in the birth rate — modern women tend to have fewer babies, and to have them later, than did their colonial counterparts.

But the growth rate isn’t only controlled by the birth rate — it’s also controlled by the death rate.  In general, death rates have decreased over time as well, but if we assume that trends in family creation are relatively consistent over time (maybe not the best assumption but it’s the one I’m making), then it’s likely that we can spot periods of increased death as anomalies in the growth rate during certain periods.  To see that, let’s plot the first derivative of the census data:

Slide2

In this graph, each data point represents the exponential growth rate over the decade ending in a given year.  For example, the 1810 data point is about 0.03, which means that the population grew by about 3% per year between 1800 and 1810.  As was sort of clear from the first graph, you can see there’s a general downward trend in growth rate throughout the history of the US.  But now a few data points stand out as lying outside of the trend — all of them on the downward side, possibly representing anomalously increased death rates.  The two biggest downward deviations are 1860-1870, representing the enormously bloody US Civil War, where a sizable percentage of marrying-age men died or were permanently fucked up from warfare, and 1930-1940, corresponding to the Great Depression.  I’ve also highlighted two other relevant decades, 1910-1920, encompassing both World War I and the infamous 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and 1940-1950, covering World War II and the biggest years of the “Baby Boom” generation.  Strikingly, the Spanish flu barely made a dent in the overall growth rate trend of the US population during its generation, even when casualties from World War I were added.  World War II, the bloodiest war in human history, actually resulted in an increase in US growth rate during its decade.  In comparison, the Great Depression looks like an enormous outlier.

We can see this effect even more clearly by taking the second derivative of the data — that is, the rate of change of the growth rate from one decade to the next:

Slide3

Here we can see that there have been about as many decades where the growth rate has gone up compared to the previous decade as decades where the opposite trend occurred.  The gray box represents one standard deviation of the mean above and below the mean growth rate change of -2% per decade.  There are only two data points that lie outside of this confidence interval — the Depression and the subsequent Baby Boom.  Not even the Civil War, and definitely not the Spanish Flu, can compete with the killing power of a major economic disturbance.

It’s possible that the huge change in growth rate caused by the Depression involved lower birth rates in addition to death rates, but in a world prior to the invention of reliable birth control, my money is on the Reaper controlling that data point.  I honestly don’t know what lesson this leaves us with regarding our current troubles, but it’s worth considering that a few million deaths concentrated into a single year, as jarring and horrifying as the concept is, can’t compare to the sustained nightmare of economic depression in terms of total numbers of bodies accrued.  Surely there is some strategy available to our country that balances death rate with economic stability.  But one despairs of politicians finding it, especially in an election year.

Mr. Publisher, Tear Down This Wall

Posted by Jeff Morris on April 6, 2020
Posted in: Academia. Tagged: journals, Open Access, publishing. Leave a comment

Anybody working in academia for the last 10-20 years is aware of the movement toward open access publishing.  For those of you “on the outside”, the traditional model for publishing scientific articles has been through professional journals who make their money via subscription fees paid by universities and research institutions.  In the Internet Age, those subscriptions aren’t for print journals, but rather for online access to the articles.  As a consequence, the large majority of articles in legacy journals, including the big prestige journals like Nature, Science, and Cell, sit behind paywalls.  A layperson would have to pay a shockingly high fee to access any of these articles via the Internet.  Most of us gain access through a University library.  For me — at a major research university — I generally have to be on campus, physically, to gain access.  There are ways around that — for instance using the University’s VPN — but they are finicky and don’t always work.

There are lots of problems with this publication model.  The most obvious is that most University research is publicly funded, suggesting that the results should be available to the public for no additional charge — since, of course, they already paid for it once with their taxes.  Another problem is that it establishes profit-seeking entities, and possibly politically motivated bad actors, as gatekeepers of what gets published — a problem compounded by the anonymous peer-review process, and one I intend to revisit more thoroughly elsewhere.  But perhaps the biggest problem is that it impedes access to the literature to the very scientists working in the field — slowing research, and increasing the likelihood of labs going in wrong directions or duplicating effort because of incomplete knowledge of what’s already been published.

I’m writing this right now, though, because it seems ESPECIALLY egregious to me that the paywalls remain up during the current coronavirus crisis.  Basically the entire scientific community is trying to work from home right now, and one of the only things we can do is write.  But my capacity to write papers or prepare grant applications is hindered pretty seriously by not being able to reliably access other people’s recent research.  Add to that the fact that I am also trying to teach undergraduates, and I enjoy using current research for that purpose, but neither they nor I can easily access the most recent papers thanks to ubiquitous paywalls (I’m looking at you, PNAS).

Full disclosure, I’m an officer in a professional society that makes its living to a large degree off of subscriptions to its journal, a journal that sits behind a paywall right now.  We justify it by the fact that all of that revenue is used to bolster the careers of young scientists in the field and to subsidize an annual meeting to get all of us together in one place to science like crazy for a week.  That’s a pretty good argument on a typical day — but this isn’t a typical day.  We are living through an extraordinary time, a time when almost none of the things we normally spend that money on are happening.  There’s no national meeting this year, nobody is getting any research done in our field, and basically everything is on hold until further notice.  In my opinion, all of those paywalls should be dropped, for our journal and for all other journals — ESPECIALLY the big prestige journals — for the duration of this crisis.

Unfortunately, these decisions are largely in the hands of multinational corporate publishing houses, not the scientists who provide them with content.

Diversity vs. Wokeness: A Follow-up

Posted by Jeff Morris on March 11, 2020
Posted in: Data, Politics. Tagged: Bernie Sanders, Election 2020, race, Super Tuesday. Leave a comment

In case you were wondering, US Democrats voted again yesterday.  I decided to check to see if the trend observed in my previous post was maintained:

Super Tuesday 2

Yep.  The green triangles and associated trendline are for last night’s elections; the blue circles are for last week’s “Super Tuesday” elections, and the red diamond is Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont.  You can’t directly compare last week and this week because there were two fewer candidates on the ballot this week.  The R-square is just a little bit lower, but still pretty darn high for only 5 social-science data points.  The slope is even more pronounced though — for every 1% of extra Black population share, Bernie lost 0.8% of the vote.

What’s really interesting about this is that the more diverse the state, the less support there is for the “Woke” candidate.  Don’t forget that Bernie is the chosen candidate for the “progressive” people who scream at you about microaggressions and spread racist conspiracy theories like “white fragility”.  It is extremely striking that support for him decreases dramatically as the racial diversity of a state increases.  One might speculate that, outside of the hyperborean Internet academic bubble, people see Wokianity for what it is — a deranged cult — and want nothing to do with it.

The Democrat Chimera

Posted by Jeff Morris on March 5, 2020
Posted in: Politics. Tagged: Bernie Sanders, Election 2020, Joe Biden, Super Tuesday. Leave a comment

Well, we had a big election here in the US — “Super Tuesday” as they call it, where many states hold primaries to let the two political parties select their candidate for the upcoming presidential election.  Here in Alabama, and in most other states, “Sleepy Joe” Biden won handily, defying predictions that a 78-year old dementia patient with no platform could never win the support of a major first-world party.

Comrade Bernie Sanders and his trustafarian partisans were left in shock.  How could their message of radical change, so popular across the Internets, have lost so thoroughly?

Well, I figured it out:

Super Tuesday

You get that, data nerds?  That’s an R-squared value of OH-POINT-EIGHT, if you run the stats without Bernie’s home state of Vermont*.  I ran these numbers on a whim, based on an observation that has been increasingly on my mind: the Democrat party in the US has largely become a chimera, a two-headed monster comprised of sensible Black people on the one hand, and batshit crazy white people on the other.  These two constituencies have basically nothing in common; the former tend to be socially conservative, capitalist (at least on a small scale), and individualistic, whereas the latter are prone to embracing every wacky social fad that comes down the pike, hate themselves for having money, and brutally punish nonconformity.  It is difficult to imagine a candidate, or a platform, that could represent these two diametrically opposed groups, but perhaps a palimpsest like Sleepy Joe is what we can expect from them from now on.

Two things jump out at me about this graph.  First, having grown up and spent most of my life in the South, it boggles my mind that there are whole states in this country where only 1% of the population has African descent.  This isn’t a geographical phenomenon, either — the states on the far left side of this graph feature Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Utah in addition to Maine and Massachusetts. My state is the point at the far right end of the graph — 26% African-American.  Are states with no Black people really even American?  And why is it that the loudest voices chattering about “white privilege” come from places that are essentially 100% northwest European?  It’s almost like they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  Almost.

But the second thing that jumps out to me is that the graph predicts that, in a state with 0% African-Americans, Bernie would get 33.8% of the vote.  Thus, if it hadn’t been for those pesky PoCs, Bernie would have shellacked Biden everywhere.  So when you hear a Bernie Bro talking about how Sanders still has a shot at the nomination, remember that what he’s really saying is that there are still a lot of Whitopias out there left to vote, and therefore it remains possible that the Good Guy white kids might be able to deliver benighted Black America from the horrors of capitalism and freedom and into the welcoming arms of the State.

The Republican Party has been completely reorganized in the last few years to actually represent its civic nationalist, somewhere-between-conservative-and-libertarian constituency.  It’s more united under Trump than it has been since the 1980s.  One suspects a similar reorganization is coming for the unwieldy, two-headed Democrat chimera.  I’m hoping that the sensible head wins, but my money is on the devious, rich, crazy-ass Communist head.

* For the record, there was no significant trend between the Sanders vote and the proportion of the population identifying as “white”, or the “other” (e.g. immigrant) population.  I didn’t try to run numbers based on income, Gini index, or any of the other stuff that might be a predictor, or autocorrelated with the proportion of African-Americans in a state.

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