The Right Amount of Wokeness

Don’t miss the sequel to this post: “Getting the Best from Wokeness by Having the Right Mean, Reducing the Variance and Mitigating the Losses from Extreme Values.”

Lance Morrow, in his August 2, 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed “Dawn of the Woke,” and Andrew Michta, in his July 31, 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Captive Mind and America’s Resegregation,” mince no words about the dangers of too much wokeness.

Here is a sample of Lance Morrow (bullets added to distinguish different passages):

  • … cancel culture … is the 21st century’s equivalent of McCarthy’s marauding. The country’s myriad cancelers emit the odor not of sanctity but of sanctimony, and of something more ominous: the whiff of a society decomposing.

  • The indignant woke, who imagine themselves to be righteously awake and laying the foundations for a more just and humane world, ought to pause—to draw back for a moment, and consider the possibility that they are, as it were, fast asleep, caught up in strange, agitated dreams: that they have become a mass joined in a cult of self-righteousness, moral vanity and privilege. One of these days, they will have to be deprogrammed and led back to the real world. Woke institutions will need to be fumigated.

  • McCarthyism and the cancel culture—which is the military wing of wokeness—are most alike in their power to conjure fear. It was fear that kept McCarthy up and running for several years, and it is fear—of losing a job, losing an assistant professorship, losing one’s good name, one’s friends, fear of saying the wrong thing and bringing down ruin on one’s head, fear not to sign a party-line faculty petition—that fortifies and sustains the cancelers.

  • The woke, like hyenas, hunt in packs, and those in authority are craven.

  • Wokeness will prove harder to kill than McCarthyism. McCarthy was a B-movie monster. Wokeness is a zombie apocalypse.

And here is a sample of what Andrew Michta writes:

  • The ill-named progressivism that has inspired shrill demands to dismantle police forces and destroy statues is only a small manifestation of a massive project aimed at the re-education of the American population. The goal of this project is to negate the story of the American republic and replace it with a tale anchored exclusively in race categories and narratives of oppression. The nature of this exercise, with its sledgehammer rhetoric that obliterates complexities in favor of one-dimensional “correct” interpretations, is as close to Marxist agitprop as one can get. 

  • … radicals destroying monuments and issuing wholesale denunciations of America’s past are wreaking destruction on ordinary Americans and their history, not on the elites and their ideology. Today’s elites as a rule do not believe they have any obligation to serve the public, only to rule it, and so they express little or no disapproval of college students toppling statues on federal land or looters raiding supermarkets. To criticize them would open elites to the charges of “populism” and “racism.”

  • The current radical trends carry the seeds of violence unseen in the U.S. since the Civil War. The activists ascendant in American cities insist on the dominance of their ideological precepts, brooking no alternative. Such absolutism forces Americans away from the realm of political compromise into one of unrelenting axiology, with one side claiming a monopoly on virtue and decency while the other is expected to accept its status as perpetually evil, and thus assume a permanent penitent stance for all its real and imagined misdeeds across history. 

  • The U.S. is roiled by spasms of violence and intolerance today because government at all levels—public education systems, states that allow universities to promulgate speech codes and “safe spaces,” court decisions that define constitutionally protected speech as, in effect, everything but political speech …

  • ideologues have nearly succeeded in remaking our politics and culture; they are reinforced by a media in thrall to groupthink, by credentialed bureaucrats, and by politicians shaped in the monochrome factories of intellectual uniformity that are America’s institutions of higher learning. 

At a minimum, I have sympathy for concerns that too much wokeness might hurt freedom of speech, which I care deeply about, as you can see from all the posts flagged in “John Stuart Mill's Brief for Freedom of Speech.” So, at least for the sake of argument, let’s concede that too much wokeness can cause bad things to happen. What does that say about how much wokeness we should wish to have on average in society?

We can do some simple analysis. Take a look at the following figures, which I will explain. To match our usual left-right political conventions, I draw greater wokeness as being further to the left.

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A key assumption I will make is that, whatever the average level of wokeness in society, there will be people with higher and lower levels of wokeness. For simplicity, I’ll model this as a normal distribution, which seems pretty reasonable since it might well be that many approximately additive forces (additive for an OK metric of wokeness) contribute to one’s level of wokeness.

The probability distribution of wokeness interacts with a loss function that shows how losses are generated from a wide variety of situations impacted by differing levels of wokeness. (I will draw the loss function upside-down so higher values are better.) One can and should argue about the shape of the loss function, but to make my point, let me assume it is symmetric. If a normal distribution interacts with a symmetric loss function, then we should wish that the mean (average) level of wokeness be right at minimum of the loss function—the top of the hill as I draw it above.

What would it look like in our world if the mean of the normal distribution of wokeness were at the minimum of the loss function? There is a simple answer: the horrors from too much wokeness would be as great as the horrors from too little wokeness. I don’t think we are there yet. Anyone who has been paying attention lately and tried to get a historical perspective should realize that the horrors from too little wokeness are still truly awful. The horrors from too much wokeness are still not at the same level. So from where we are now, increasing the average level of wokeness (while retaining the same standard deviation of the normal distribution) would be a good thing. It will cause some horrible things to happen from the highest extremes of wokeness, but it will prevent many other horrible things from happening from the lowest extremes of wokeness.

The Artery-Aging Properties of TMAO and the TMAO-Producing Effect of Animal Protein Consumption

In injecting TMAO ( trimethylamine-N-Oxide) into mice makes their arteries look like those of older mice. Blocking TMAO makes the arteries of mice look like those of younger mice:

… treatment with 3,3-dimethyl-1-butanol for 8 to 10 weeks to suppress trimethylamine-N-oxide selectively improved endothelium-dependent dilation in old mice to young levels …

The quotation is taken from the abstract of the Hypertension article “Trimethylamine-N-Oxide Promotes Age-Related Vascular Oxidative Stress and Endothelial Dysfunction in Mice and Healthy Humans” whose abstract is shown at the top of this post.

Lisa Marshall’s CU Boulder Today article “What makes arteries age? Study explores new link to gut bacteria, diet” on this finding, goes on to make the point that two amino acids common in animal protein, L-carnitine and choline, are converted into TMAO by gut bacteria:

Eat a slab of steak or a plate of scrambled eggs, and your resident gut bacteria get to work immediately to break it down. As they metabolize the amino acids L-carnitine and choline, they churn out a metabolic byproduct called trimethylamine, which the liver converts to trimethylamine-N-Oxide (TMAO) and sends coursing through your bloodstream.

At least in mice, these bacteria that produce TMAO from L-carnitine and choline are more common in older individuals:

(This falls in line with a previous study in mice, showing the gut microbiome—or your collection of intestinal bacteria—changes with age, breeding more bacteria that help produce TMAO).

The dangers from TMAO add to the reasons to worry about animal protein.

In general, I am more worried about animal protein than I am about saturated fat. But I am becoming convinced by Peter Attia that in a minority of people (he estimates between 5% and 20%), saturated fat raises high-quality measures of the number of low-density-lipoprotein (LDL) particles (sometimes called “bad blood cholesterol”).

I think protein has a better reputation in our culture than it deserves. We need some protein, but few of us in rich countries have any serious danger of having too little protein. When lowering carbs, if you care about health, it is dietary fat that should be increased, not protein.

On potential trouble from protein, see also:

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:


Consensual, Non-Solipsistic Experience Machines

Experience machines get a bad rap. People often use thought experiments involving a machine that gives an ultra-high-quality illusion of life experience to argue that people want things to be “real.” There is a grain of truth to this, but I want to narrow down what I think people most want to be real: the other human beings one seems to be interacting with.

Being in an experience machine alone doesn’t sound at all attractive to me on a long-term basis, even if the experiences themselves are extremely pleasant and engaging. But if the possible experiences go far beyond what is otherwise possible, it seems great to be in an experience machine in which I genuinely interact with billions of other people as real as me—including all the people I care most about.

A movie, “The Matrix” seems to take the opposite view: that there is something wrong with being embedded in an experience machine along with a huge number of other human beings one is genuinely interacting with. But “The Matrix” brings in another element that is detestable: being put in the experience machine without one’s own consent. It may be that we irreduceably hate things being done to them without their consent, or it may be that being put in a situation without one’s consent is such a reliable indicator of something being wrong with that situation that we are justifiably suspicious. In any case, being put into an experience machine without one’s own consent is not a logically necessary element of the experience machine experience.

Rather than the situation in “The Matrix,” the type of experience machine that I think of first is the situation of the trillions of human beings in Robin Hanson’s fascinating book The Age of Em:

Link to the Amazon Page for The Age of Em (Annoyingly—and ironically—there doesn’t seem to be a Kindle version available in the US, so I had to get a paper-and-ink book about digital humans.)

Link to the Amazon Page for The Age of Em

(Annoyingly—and ironically—there doesn’t seem to be a Kindle version available in the US, so I had to get a paper-and-ink book about digital humans.)

The reason Robin Hanson predicts there will be trillions of digital humans if certain technological conditions hold is that it takes a lot fewer resources to support a digital human than a flesh-and-blood human. I don’t think the digital humans would pine for being flesh-and-blood humans if the quality of their experience was at least as good as the experience of flesh-and-blood humans if they share that kind of experience with trillions of other digital humans and they know the truth about everything in the sense that no one is lying to them about the bit picture.

Postscript: In “The Matrix,” the motivation for keeping humans in the matrix without their consent is lame: in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, the humans connected in give off more useable, low-entropy energy than they take in. A much more plausible motivation could have been borrowed from Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos: using spare brain power of a huge number of humans for hypercomputing. In the Hyperion Cantos, though, this is done by an organ giving them physical immortality rather than by putting them in virtual reality, but one could easily have stipulated in “The Matrix” that using spare brain cycles is easier if someone is embedded in virtual reality.

To avoid giving too much credit to Dan Simmons, however, let me mention that Dan Simmons makes a huge ecological blunder in one of the novels in the Hyperion Cantos, by have a planet where creatures eat humans and human eat those creatures, but no new energy for the ecosystem is being brought in from the outside. This could last for only a short time before the ecosystem shrank away to nothing. (Despite this complaints, I think often about the Hyperion Cantos and highly recommend them.)

Related Posts:

Robert Eisler: The Polymath Who Anticipated the Exchange Rate Between Bank Money and Currency that Could End the Lower Bound →

Robert Eisler had his fingers in many pies. Notably for economists, he anticipated the exchange rate between bank money and paper currency that is one of our best shots for ending the lower bound on interest rates that gave us the Great Depression, the Great Recession and could easily give us another terrible recession soon. The podcast shown above weaves an interesting tapestry about Robert Eisler. I am one of those interviewed for it.

I have credited Robert Eisler many times. My main post about him is this:

I have collected links for what I have written on the modern version of Robert Eisler’s idea here:

Carbon Dioxide as a Stimulant for Respiratory Function

Carbon dioxide is a big worry for the planet, but a little more of it may be good for our bodies in a direct way.

I began writing about James Nestor’s intriguing book Breath two weeks ago, in “James Nestor on How Bad Mouth Breathing Is.” Here, I write about another theme in Breath: the role of carbon dioxide as a stimulant for respiratory function. (All the quotations in this post are from Breath.) One dimension of that stimulation of respiratory function is at the cellular level:

Why did some cells get oxygen more easily than others? What directed billions of hemoglobin molecules to release oxygen at just the right place at the right time? How did breathing really work?

He began experimenting. Bohr gathered chickens, guinea pigs, grass snakes, dogs, and horses, and measured how much oxygen the animals consumed and how much carbon dioxide they produced. Then he drew blood and exposed it to different mixtures of these gases. Blood with the most carbon dioxide in it (more acidic) loosened oxygen from hemoglobin. In some ways, carbon dioxide worked as a kind of divorce lawyer, a go-between to separate oxygen from its ties so it could be free to land another mate.

This discovery explained why certain muscles used during exercise received more oxygen than lesser-used muscles. They were producing more carbon dioxide, which attracted more oxygen. It was supply on demand, at a molecular level. Carbon dioxide also had a profound dilating effect on blood vessels, opening these pathways so they could carry more oxygen-rich blood to hungry cells. Breathing less allowed animals to produce more energy, more efficiently.

Meanwhile, heavy and panicked breaths would purge carbon dioxide. Just a few moments of heavy breathing above metabolic needs could cause reduced blood flow to muscles, tissues, and organs. We’d feel light-headed, cramp up, get a headache, or even black out. If these tissues were denied consistent blood flow for long enough, they’d break down.

High carbon dioxide is also the key to our subjective sense of being desperate for more air—more than low oxygen is:

We’d experienced the same confounding measurements during our bike workouts earlier in the week. The beginning of those workouts, like all workouts, sucked. We felt our lungs and respiratory system desperately trying to meet the needs of our hungry tissues and muscles: the dinner rush of the body. Normally, I’d open my mouth and huff and puff, trying to sate that nagging need for oxygen. But for the last few days, as I cranked the pedals harder and faster, I forced myself to breathe softer and slower. This felt stifling and claustrophobic, like I was starving my body of fuel, until I checked the pulse oximeter. Once again, no matter how slowly I breathed or how hard I pedaled, my oxygen levels held steady at 97 percent.

It turns out that when breathing at a normal rate, our lungs will absorb only about a quarter of the available oxygen in the air. The majority of that oxygen is exhaled back out. By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to soak up more in fewer breaths.

…

During that ride, I started playing around with my breathing. I tried to inhale and exhale slower and slower, from my usual exercising rate of 20 breaths a minute to just six. I immediately felt a sense of air hunger and claustrophobia. After a minute or so I looked down at the pulse oximeter to see how much oxygen I was losing, how starved my body had become.

But my oxygen hadn’t decreased with these very slow breaths, as I or anyone else might expect. My levels rose.


Take a sip of air through the nose or mouth. For this exercise, it doesn’t matter. Now hold it. In a few moments, you’ll feel a slight hunger for more. As this hunger mounts, the mind will race, the lungs will ache. You’ll become nervous, paranoid, and irritable. You’ll start to panic. All senses will zero in on that miserable, suffocating feeling, and your sole desire will be to take another breath.

The nagging need to breathe is activated from a cluster of neurons called the central chemoreceptors, located at the base of the brain stem. When we’re breathing too slowly and carbon dioxide levels rise, the central chemoreceptors monitor these changes and send alarm signals to the brain, telling our lungs to breathe faster and more deeply. When we’re breathing too quickly, these chemoreceptors direct the body to breathe more slowly to increase carbon dioxide levels. This is how our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe, not by the amount of oxygen, but by the level of carbon dioxide.

…

As humans evolved, our chemoreception became more plastic, meaning it could flex and shift with changing environments. It’s this ability to adapt to different levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen that helped humans colonize altitudes 800 feet below and 16,000 feet above sea level.

I speculate that high carbon dioxide levels may be part of the signal that stimulates the gradual increase in lung capacity from additional exercise. James Nestor has an interesting discussion of the various ways carbon dioxide is used already as a medical treatment. Breathing 7% carbon dioxide for any of these purposes is a relatively mild experience:

The most effective and safest blend they found was a few huffs of around 7 percent carbon dioxide mixed with room air. This was the “super endurance” level Buteyko found in the exhaled breath of top athletes. Breathing in this mixture had none of the hallucinogenic or panic-inducing effects. You hardly noticed it, and yet it offered potent results.

Breathing a few whiffs of 35% carbon dioxide is not especially dangerous, but James Nestor’s description of the experience makes it sound awful.

I find all of this intriguing. I can’t find 7% carbon dioxide on Amazon, so I can’t do an experiment with that. But the old treatment for hyperventilation of putting a paper bag over one’s head is probably also a safe way to experiment with mild carbon dioxide treatment. DO NOT USE A PLASTIC BAG: THAT COULD BE EXTREMELY DANGEROUS!!!!

The one thing I have done already is to use the app BreatheEasy Free to time myself for 9 second exhales and 6 second inhales (with 1 of the seconds each way a pause). That feels good.

I am curious, and would be glad to hear what any of you know about carbon dioxide treatment.

The Federalist Papers #13: Alexander Hamilton on Increasing Returns to Scale in National Government

The Federalist Papers #13 has two elements.

First, Alexander Hamilton argues that there are fixed costs to running a national government that would apply also to a smaller confederation of 4-5 states. These fixed costs of running a national government imply increasing returns to scale in national government in the relevant range.

Second, Alexander Hamilton argues that the most likely division of the 13 states would be the Southern colonies in one confederation and the Northern and Middle colonies in a different confederation. This points to a very interesting alternative history in which a division similar to the later division between the Confederacy and the North happened in the late 1780s. Given that in our history the rhetoric of liberty led the northern colonies plus Pennsylvania and New Jersey to renounce slavery within their boundaries between 1774 and 1804, and New York abolished slavery in 1817, it is quite likely that in this alternate history, the confederation of the Northern and Middle colonies would have been a free nation, while the confederation of the Southern colonies would have been a slave nation.

This difference between slave and free between the two nations would likely have led to intense competition to be first to claim the lands to the west of the original colonies. There might have been a bidding war for the Louisiana purchase, followed by a refusal of the nation that lost that bidding war to respect that purchase. It is easy to predict that a big war between the slave nation and the free nation would have come long before 1865.

Below is the full text of the Federalist Papers #13:

FEDERALIST NO. 13

Advantage of the Union in Respect to Economy in Government

For the Independent Journal.

Author: Alexander Hamilton

To the People of the State of New York:

As CONNECTED with the subject of revenue, we may with propriety consider that of economy. The money saved from one object may be usefully applied to another, and there will be so much the less to be drawn from the pockets of the people. If the States are united under one government, there will be but one national civil list to support; if they are divided into several confederacies, there will be as many different national civil lists to be provided for--and each of them, as to the principal departments, coextensive with that which would be necessary for a government of the whole. The entire separation of the States into thirteen unconnected sovereignties is a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates. The ideas of men who speculate upon the dismemberment of the empire seem generally turned toward three confederacies--one consisting of the four Northern, another of the four Middle, and a third of the five Southern States. There is little probability that there would be a greater number. According to this distribution, each confederacy would comprise an extent of territory larger than that of the kingdom of Great Britain. No well-informed man will suppose that the affairs of such a confederacy can be properly regulated by a government less comprehensive in its organs or institutions than that which has been proposed by the convention. When the dimensions of a State attain to a certain magnitude, it requires the same energy of government and the same forms of administration which are requisite in one of much greater extent. This idea admits not of precise demonstration, because there is no rule by which we can measure the momentum of civil power necessary to the government of any given number of individuals; but when we consider that the island of Britain, nearly commensurate with each of the supposed confederacies, contains about eight millions of people, and when we reflect upon the degree of authority required to direct the passions of so large a society to the public good, we shall see no reason to doubt that the like portion of power would be sufficient to perform the same task in a society far more numerous. Civil power, properly organized and exerted, is capable of diffusing its force to a very great extent; and can, in a manner, reproduce itself in every part of a great empire by a judicious arrangement of subordinate institutions.

The supposition that each confederacy into which the States would be likely to be divided would require a government not less comprehensive than the one proposed, will be strengthened by another supposition, more probable than that which presents us with three confederacies as the alternative to a general Union. If we attend carefully to geographical and commercial considerations, in conjunction with the habits and prejudices of the different States, we shall be led to conclude that in case of disunion they will most naturally league themselves under two governments. The four Eastern States, from all the causes that form the links of national sympathy and connection, may with certainty be expected to unite. New York, situated as she is, would never be unwise enough to oppose a feeble and unsupported flank to the weight of that confederacy. There are other obvious reasons that would facilitate her accession to it. New Jersey is too small a State to think of being a frontier, in opposition to this still more powerful combination; nor do there appear to be any obstacles to her admission into it. Even Pennsylvania would have strong inducements to join the Northern league. An active foreign commerce, on the basis of her own navigation, is her true policy, and coincides with the opinions and dispositions of her citizens. The more Southern States, from various circumstances, may not think themselves much interested in the encouragement of navigation. They may prefer a system which would give unlimited scope to all nations to be the carriers as well as the purchasers of their commodities. Pennsylvania may not choose to confound her interests in a connection so adverse to her policy. As she must at all events be a frontier, she may deem it most consistent with her safety to have her exposed side turned towards the weaker power of the Southern, rather than towards the stronger power of the Northern, Confederacy. This would give her the fairest chance to avoid being the Flanders of America. Whatever may be the determination of Pennsylvania, if the Northern Confederacy includes New Jersey, there is no likelihood of more than one confederacy to the south of that State.

Nothing can be more evident than that the thirteen States will be able to support a national government better than one half, or one third, or any number less than the whole. This reflection must have great weight in obviating that objection to the proposed plan, which is founded on the principle of expense; an objection, however, which, when we come to take a nearer view of it, will appear in every light to stand on mistaken ground.

If, in addition to the consideration of a plurality of civil lists, we take into view the number of persons who must necessarily be employed to guard the inland communication between the different confederacies against illicit trade, and who in time will infallibly spring up out of the necessities of revenue; and if we also take into view the military establishments which it has been shown would unavoidably result from the jealousies and conflicts of the several nations into which the States would be divided, we shall clearly discover that a separation would be not less injurious to the economy, than to the tranquillity, commerce, revenue, and liberty of every part.

PUBLIUS.

Here are links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:

Lumpers vs. Splitters: Economists as Lumpers; Psychologists as Splitters

In thinking about the nature of economics as a discipline (as of the year 2020), I find the distinction of lumpers vs. splitters illuminating. The terminology of lumpers and splitters is especially easy to understand in zoology and botany. In that context, “lumpers” are zoologists and botanists who make a career out of showing that types that were thought to be distinct species are really one species; “splitters” in that context are zoologists and botanists who make a career out of showing that what was thought to be one species is really many species.

In a broader sense, a “lumper” is someone who tries to explain many phenomena as being in some deep sense similar and arising from similar forces. A “splitter” who someone who emphasize how each different phenomenon is its own type of thing, different from other phenomena.

As a Research Professor (and now Emeritus Research Professor) at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, I had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with many psychologists (mostly social psychologists who do experiments). I learned that it takes a long time to learn how to translate between disciplines as different in their cultures as economics and psychology when talking face to face as opposed to simply reading a journal article. But the effort was worth it. I would not be on the track for studying happiness and subjective well-being more generally that I am on if it weren’t for most of a year’s worth of weekly get-togethers between the famous psychologist Norbert Schwarz and the economists Bob Willis and me. (It was either in 2004-2005 or in 2005-2006.)

Having rubbed shoulders with psychologists as well as, of course, many economists, I think it is true that, psychologists tend to be splitters, while economists tend to be lumpers. Economists usually try their best to explain new phenomena with small modifications of old theories. Psychologists like to try to show that a new phenomenon they have identified is a new type of thing and are happy to develop a new theory for that new thing.

One reason I have been thinking about lumping and splitting lately is how much I have been enjoying learning Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence tools. You can read about Positive Intelligence in my post “On Human Potential.” Shirzad is definitely a lumper. He talks about his Positive Intelligence framework as an “operating system” that can be used as a basis to deal with many issues. As an economist, Shirzad’s tendency toward lumping, even in this psychological area, is quite congenial to me, and I suspect would be congenial to other economists.

The Surprising Genetic Correlation Between Protein-Heavy Diets and Obesity

Regressions of outcomes on genes, when controlling for parental genes, yield causality as much as could be desired: which of the parental genes an individual gets is randomized at the molecular level. And controlling for what genes the parents have (which form the pool from which all but mutations come from in the child) controls for the effect of the parental genes on how the parents do their child-rearing.

Often, though, we are not satisfied with knowing causality from genes because, when it comes to interventions, the only thing causality from genes says directly is what one might be able to get from genetic engineering interventions.

It is often the case that a set of genes G cause both outcome X and outcome Y. This is called a genetic correlation. Correlation does not imply causation and genetic correlation between X and Y does not necessarily imply either that X causes Y or that Y causes X. And a genetic correlation between X and Y does not necessarily imply (X causes Y OR Y causes X). G could cause X entirely without going through Y and separately cause Y entirely without going through X. As a crucial example, G could cause Z, then Z cause X entirely without going through Y, and separately Z cause Y entirely without going through X.

Even though genetic correlation between X and Y does not imply causation, it should make us wonder whether X causes Y or Y causes X. Correlations of any substantial magnitude always raise the question of causation even though they don’t prove causation.

The most surprising finding is a clear positive genetic correlation between fraction of calories derived from protein (controlling for overall calories) and obesity. The next most surprising finding is a negative genetic correlation of fraction of calories from sugar and waist circumference and the closely related waist-to-hip ratio. The authors give a careful discussion of the possible causal explanations. Here is their discussion, with headings added for the two different passages:

Protein

The genetic correlations we find between protein and obesity, waist-hip ratio, fasting insulin, type 2 diabetes, HDL cholesterol, and heart disease, together with the association we find between the BMI-increasing FTO allele and increased protein intake, point to an intriguing hypothesis: relative protein intake may play a role in the etiology of metabolic dysfunction. This hypothesis coincides with a growing (but often overlooked [71]) body of evidence that links protein intake to obesity and insulin resistance [72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80]. There is some related evidence from randomized trials with infants, which found a causal relationship between high-protein baby formula and infant body fat [81]. While the underlying biological mechanisms are unclear, high consumption of protein or certain types of amino acids (i.e., building blocks of protein) is known to induce insulin resistance [82,83,84], rapamycin signaling [77], and growth factor signaling [85], which might increase metabolic dysfunction and early mortality risk. Indeed, a recent phenotypic meta-analysis of prospective observational studies (pooled N = 154,344) found that low carbohydrate diets, which restrict carbohydrate in favor of increased animal protein or fat intake, were robustly associated with increased mortality [86].

We caution, however, that the strong and consistent links between protein and poor health outcomes might also be consistent with alternative explanations. Causation could run in the reverse direction: overweight individuals may have higher protein needs or use high-protein diets as a weight-loss strategy. The associations might also be caused by other, unmeasured variables such as unhealthy lifestyle factors or co-consumed ingredients.

Sugar

These correlations may suggest that dietary sugar, beyond its energy content, does not have negative health effects [87,88,89,90], contrary to some popular beliefs (e.g., [91]). Another possibility is that exercise offsets negative metabolic effects of high sugar intake [92, 93]. Those with a higher predisposition to be physically active may tend to consume more sugar, as sugar is a metabolically convenient source of energy during exercise [94] and may enhance endurance [95]. If so, the positive genetic correlation between sugar and physical activity might partially explain the lack of genetic correlations between sugar and poor health.

I continue to think that sugar is causally bad and the animal protein is causally bad, in line with many previous posts here. But these genetic correlation results add nuance to that view. In particular:

  • Based on the authors’ discussions, their may be more mechanisms for protein to be a problem than the high insulin index for many protein-rich foods and cancer-feeding aspects of protein (and especially of animal protein) that I have emphasized.

  • Other healthy behaviors—especially physical activity—leading to more sugar consumption may obscure negative effects of sugar.

But all of these ideas are only possibilities. Genetic correlations are only one clue in figuring out diet and health relationships.

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

Michael Coe on Joseph Smith the Shaman

As a nonsupernaturalist, I can’t believe the official Mormon account of its founder, Joseph Smith. (See “What Do You Mean by 'Supernatural'? and “The Message of Jesus for Non-Supernaturalists.”) But on the whole, I think he has had a benign and interesting effect on the world—at a minimum opening up additional possible perspectives on many things that are clearly nonsupernatural. And for the most part, I think Joseph Smith has had a benign and interesting effect on my own life, through my 40 years as a Mormon. So I am inclined toward a view of Joseph Smith as positive as my nonsupernaturalism and the documentary evidence of his life can support. That attracts me to the renowned (and now sadly deceased) archaeologist Michael Coe’s view of Joseph Smith as a very talented shaman. (Michael Coe seems to be just as much of a nonsupernaturalist as I am, so when he says shaman it doesn’t mean what it might to, say, a supernaturalist New Age believer.)

In addition to his interest in Angkor Wat, Michael Coe is an expert on the Maya and ancient Mesoamerica. This makes him an expert on what is by far the most plausible historical milieu for the events recounted by The Book of Mormon—the book taken down from Joseph Smith’s dictation that launched his career as a religious leader. The triple “Mormon Stories” podcast flagged at the top of this post and its sequel flagged on that “Mormon Stories” webpage will give you all the detail you are likely to want about evidence on whether The Book of Mormon could possibly be an accurate historical record. The basic answer is no. Indeed, the evidence against The Book of Mormon being an accurate historical record is persuasive enough that some Mormon Church leaders have begun playing down The Book of Mormon as history, saying it wasn’t intended as history but as a religious record. I’ll give you just one tidbit that is interesting to me: coinage as recounted in The Book of Mormon. the BYU Studies website gives this rundown of coinage at a particular period in The Book of Mormon:


Link to the BYU Studies webpage shown above. The Book of Mormon passage cited, Alma 11:1-19 includes these words: “Now these are the names of the different pieces of their gold, and of their silver, according to their value.”

Link to the BYU Studies webpage shown above. The Book of Mormon passage cited, Alma 11:1-19 includes these words: “Now these are the names of the different pieces of their gold, and of their silver, according to their value.”

This Book of Mormon account of the coinage system, together with the difficulty admitted by Mormon apologists of situating the bulk of the events in The Book of Mormon anywhere other than Mesoamerica amounts to a claim that metal coins were in use in Mesoamerica in ancient times. But according to Michael Coe, archaeologists have not found ancient Mesoamerican metal coins. (Michael Coe says that what they actually used as small change was dried cocoa beans.) Metal coinage, by its nature, tends to be widely used, and therefore tends to show up in archeological digs of sites where it was used in olden times. So not finding ancient Mesoamerican metal coins is important evidence against The Book of Mormon. Indeed, with all the Mesoamerican archeological digs, archeologists should have found many, many of ancient Mesoamerican coins if even a few cities for half a century made wide use of coinage.

At least for the sake of argument, suppose that Joseph Smith did not produce an accurate history of the ancient Americas by supernatural means. If he had no supernatural help whatsoever in producing The Book of Mormon, then he deserves an honored place in the history of the fictional genre of Fantasy. In particular, his works of fantasy with a religious method are up their with, say, C. S. Lewis’s religious-tinged fantasies. (Of course, C. S. Lewis, to his great credit, clearly labeled his fantasies as fiction. Joseph Smith, to his discredit, failed to do this.) Even among believers in Joseph Smith’s supernatural calling, Joseph Smith’s eminence as a fantasy author is, I believe, an important part of the reason for Utah being a hotbed for the flourishing of fantasy and science-fiction authors.

In a PBS interview, Michael Coe gives this take on Joseph Smith as a shaman:

I'm a totally irreligious person, even though I was born and raised a perfectly good Episcopalian Christian. Yet figures like Joseph Smith fascinate me as an anthropologist, and I suppose as an American, too. When I read Fawn Brodie's wonderful book, No Man Knows My History, I couldn't put it down. I mean, it's the most exciting biography I've ever read.

When I did read it for the first time, I realized what kind of a person this Joseph Smith was. In my opinion, he was not just a great religious leader; he was a really great American, and I think he was one of the greatest people who ever lived. This extraordinary man, who put together a religion -- probably with many falsities in it, falsehoods, so forth, to begin with -- eventually came to believe in it so much that he really bought his own story and made it believable to other people. In this respect, he's a lot like a shaman in anthropology: these extraordinary religious practitioners in places like Siberia, North America among the Eskimo, the Inuit, who start out probably in their profession as almost like magicians doing magic. ...

I really think that Joseph Smith, like shamans everywhere, started out faking it. I have to believe this -- that he didn't believe this at all, that he was out to impress, but he got caught up in the mythology that he created. This is what happens to shamans: They begin to believe they can do these things. It becomes a revelation: They're speaking to God. And I don't think they start out that way; I really do not. ...

… Joseph Smith had a sense of destiny -- and most fakers don't have this -- and this is how he transformed something that, I think, was clearly made up into something that was absolutely convincing, convincing to him and to a lot of people, and he never could have convinced a lot of people if he hadn't been convinced himself.

In the Mormon Stories interview I flag at the top of this post, Michael Coe expands on this view. I don’t have a transcript to work from with the Mormon Stories interview, but at close to the 30-minute mark of the third installment, he says something close to this:

Michael Coe: … Joseph Smith knew the Old Testament very, very well. …

John Dehlin (interviewer): How Dr. Coe, in the world, can you explain, what many people think is a miraculous book [The Book of Mormon]? …

Michael Coe: [Joseph Smith] was one of the greatest people who ever lived. … He was an incredible leader. …

Very bright kid—interested in old things, Tom-Sawyer-like guy. … This guy had an incredible brain. I really do think so.

Michael Coe goes on to talk in some detail about his view that Joseph Smith fully assimilated the Old Testament and creatively transformed what he had assimilated into an amazing book: The Book of Mormon. (Someone once called The Book of Mormon “a book-length midrash on the Old Testament.”)

Not everything in The Book of Mormon is admirable. It is tinged with the racism against Native Americans common in upstate New York in the 1820s. And in its first few pages, it has a story that seems to recommend unquestioning obedience. (See “A Book of Mormon Story Every Mormon Boy and Girl Knows.”) But it also includes beautiful ethical principles that, to me at least, came home in a way that the closest counterpart passage in the Bible did not manage. (I hope to return to that theme in a future post.)

Even now, as a nonsupernaturalist, I still look back with amazement at the exquisite warm feeling I felt in my heart when I prayed as a teenager to know if The Book of Mormon was true. Evidently, that exquisite warm feeling in my heart did not mean The Book of Mormon is an accurate historical record. But that exquisite warm feeling in my heart meant something.

The Fed Needs to be Ready to Go to Negative Rates and the Bank of Japan Needs to be Ready to Go Deeper Negative

No one knows what will happen once the pandemic is over. But there is a substantial chance that powerful aggregate demand stimulus will be necessary in many countries. The articles shown above talk about the US and Japan. Japan has already gone to negative rates. There is no reason it can’t go deeper into negative rates. If they are worried about the paper currency problem, they know what to do: I have given two presentations at the Bank of Japan about negative rate policy, including how to fully neutralize the paper currency problem.

Because a smaller fraction of transactions use paper currency in the United States, any worry about the paper currency problem should be more at the level of this worry in the European countries that have used negative rates. The European Central Bank is at -.5%, while the Swiss National Bank has been at -.75%. The Fed should not be worried at all about going that low.

In his op-ed shown at the top of this post, Narayana Kocherlakota suggests that the Fed is worried about the financial health of banks and that it shouldn’t be so concerned about the banks. Narayana’s argument can be strengthened greatly by pointing out that the Fed can take away almost all of the financial pain of negative rates from banks without any help from the US Treasury simply by having the interest on reserves stay zero, but capping reserves so that funds beyond that in an overnight repo-based facility go at negative rates. The higher the cap, the less financial pain banks suffer from negative rates. Of course, the cap has to be below the total amount that banks want to lend to the Fed in order for negative rates to prevail in the market. If that led to more financial pain than the Fed thought banks should face, the Fed could even raise the interest on reserves subject to the cap a bit. So the Fed doesn’t have to choose between banks and the health of the economy. At some cost to its own net worth, it can both hold banks’ bottom lines harmless and stimulate the economy with negative rates. And in practice, if the Fed goes to negative rates, I would bet that like other central banks using negative rates it would in fact take some measure to protect the bottom line of banks. So the idea that negative rates are harmful to banks is a red herring. It would only happen if either (a) a central bank knows the banks can handle it or (b) a central bank is stupider than the central banks in the real world that have used negative rates.

The ease with which central banks can neutralize any bad effects on bank balance sheets from negative rates seems not to be widely understood. I discuss this extensively in “Responding to Negative Coverage of Negative Rates in the Financial Times.”

Note that I am focusing on the potential need for negative rates once the pandemic is over. For example, in “The Wisdom of Jerome Powell” I write:

History may judge Jerome Powell in important measure on whether he is willing to use negative interest rates to get us out of the hole our economy is in some months from now. The “how” of negative interest rates is now well-worked out, the President of the United States is supportive of negative rates, and there is a clear legal path to negative rates in the United States. So there is no excuse not to use them if they are needed, as they are likely to be.

But in my debate with Narayana Kocherlakota, he gives cogent reasons for going to negative rates even during the current phase of the pandemic where it has huge economic effects. See “Narayana Kocherlakota Advocates Negative Interest Rates Now.”

For more on negative rate policy, see my bibliographic post “How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide.”