Thanks to visit codestin.com
Credit goes to infoproc.blogspot.com

Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Ray McGovern: CIA, JFK, Deep State, and Ukraine Crisis — Manifold #54

 

Raymond McGovern is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, serving from 1963 to 1990. 

His CIA career began under President John F. Kennedy and lasted through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. McGovern advised Henry Kissinger during the Richard Nixon administration, and during the Ronald Reagan administration he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief. 

He received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement but returned it in 2006 to protest the CIA's involvement in torture. 

Steve and Ray discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 
01:25 Ray McGovern's assessment of the JFK assassination 
26:10 Hunter Biden's laptop 
30:50 Ukraine and the U.S. intelligence services' role in the deep state 
55:20 Strategic implications of the Ukraine war for the U.S. 
01:03:38 Are things worse today, versus 1963? 

Books referenced in this episode: 

JFK and the Unspeakable 

Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy

Sunday, October 22, 2023

Abdus Salam and the Pakistan Nuclear Weapons Program

After my conversation with Bharat Karnad about the Indian nuclear arsenal I became curious about Pakistan's nuclear program. 


I came across this historical analysis: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.2266.pdf

Abdus Salam: A Reappraisal. Part II Salam's Part in the Pakistani Nuclear Weapon Programme
Salam's biographies claim that he was opposed to Pakistan's nuclear weapon programme. This is somewhat strange given that he was the senior Science Advisor to the Pakistan government for at least some of the period between 1972 when the programme was initiated and 1998 when a successful nuclear weapon test was carried out. I look at the evidence for his participation in the programme.


Salam shared the Nobel Prize with Glashow and Weinberg. He is a leading theoretician, although many have questioned what, exactly, was his contribution to the formulation of the electroweak theory of particle physics that Glashow and Weinberg contributed to.

Currently Pakistan's arsenal is ~200 warheads and similar in size to India's. Their largest warhead is estimated to have a yield of ~40kt, compared to ~20kt for the Indians.

What interested me the most was Salam's role in the early stages of the project.


See the paper for more interesting details. Previously I was only aware of Riazuddin through his academic publications, not his weapons work.

I mentioned to Karnad that I had been surprised that some of the Iranin theoreticians assassinated by Israel over the last 10-15 years had quite abstract research interests. They didn't seem the type to be working on bombs - but I suppose you never know! 

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Bharat Karnad: India geostrategy, nuclear arsenal, and assassination of Homi Bhabha, the Oppenheimer of India — Manifold #46

 

Bharat Karnad is an Emeritus Professor in National Security Studies at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi. He was a member of India's first National Security Advisory Board and has authored several books on nuclear weapons and Indian security. 

Karnad's blog: https://bharatkarnad.com/ 

Karnad on the death of Homi Bhabha and of other atomic weapons scientists: https://bharatkarnad.com/2020/12/06/kill-scientists-disrupt-n-weapons-programmes/ 

An excellent documentary film on the life of Indian theoretical physicist Homi Bhabha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6GEGOvXh4g 

Steve and Bharat discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 
0:58 Karnad's educational background, nuclear research, journalism career 
26:50 Refocusing India's defense posture from Pakistan to China 
45:21 Why don't India and China have better relations? 
53:33 India's nuclear arsenal 
1:04:31 The mysterious death of Homi Bhabha, India's Oppenheimer 
1:28:50 Land of subjugation, the caste system, and English as the language of Indian elites


Audio-only and transcript: 


Einstein, Yukawa, Wheeler, and Bhabha:



Karnad on the assassination:




Robert Trumbull Crowley, former Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations for the CIA. Recorded conversations (Conversations With The Crow) near the end of his life:

 ".. their head expert was fully capable of building a bomb and we knew what he was up to. He was warned several times but what an arrogant prick that one was. Told our people to fuck off and then made it clear that no one would stop him and India from getting nuclear parity"



Karnad on Manifold:






Thursday, October 05, 2023

Yasheng Huang: China's Examination System and its impact on Politics, Economy, Innovation — Manifold #45

 

Yasheng Huang is the Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His new book is The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. 

Steve and Yasheng discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 
1:11 From Beijing to Harvard in the 1980s 
15:29 Civil service exams and Huang's new book, "The Rise and Fall of the EAST" 
37:14 Two goals: Developing human capital and indoctrination 
48:33 Impact of the exam system 
57:04 China's innovation peak and decline 
1:12:23 Collaboration and relationship with the West 
1:21:31 How will the U.S.-China relationship evolve? 

Audio-only version, and transcript: 

Yasheng Huang at MIT 

Web site: 

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Dominic Cummings: Vote Leave, Brexit, COVID, and No. 10 with Boris — Manifold #28

 

Dominic Cummings is a major historical figure in UK politics. He helped save the Pound Sterling, led the Vote Leave campaign, Got Brexit Done, and guided the Tories to a landslide general election victory. His time in No. 10 Downing Street as Boris Johnson's Chief Advisor was one of the most interesting and impactful periods in modern UK political history.  Dom and Steve discuss all of this and more in this 2-hour episode. 

0:00 Early Life: Oxford, Russia, entering politics 
16:49 Keeping the UK out of the Euro 
19:41 How Dominic and Steve became acquainted: blogs, 2008 financial crisis, meeting at Google 
27:37 Vote Leave, the science of polling 
43:46 Cambridge Analytica conspiracy; History is impossible 
48:41 Dominic on Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of him and the movie “Brexit: The Uncivil War” 
54:05 On joining British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office: an ultimatum 
1:06:31 The pandemic 
1:21:28 The Deep State, talent pipeline for public service 
1:47:25 Quants and weirdos invade No.10 
1:52:06 Can the Tories win the next election? 
1:56:27 Trump in 2024? 



References: 

Dominic's Substack newsletter: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/

Thursday, September 08, 2022

Lyle Goldstein on U.S. Strategic Challenges: Russia, China, Ukraine, and Taiwan — Manifold #19

 


Professor Goldstein recently retired after 20 years of service on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College (NWC). During his career at NWC, he founded the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) and has been awarded the Superior Civilian Service Medal for this achievement. He has written or edited seven books on Chinese strategy and is at work on a book-length project that examines the nature of China-Russia relations in the 21st century. He has a longstanding interest in great power politics, military competition, and security in the pacific region. 

Goldstein is Director of Asia Engagement at the Washington think-tank Defense Priorities, which advocates for realism and restraint in U.S.defense policy, and also a visiting professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. 

He earned a PhD at Princeton, an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and an AB from Harvard. He is fluent in both Chinese and Russian. 


Steve and Lyle discuss: 

00:00 Early life and background 
18:03 Goldstein’s dissertation on China’s nuclear strategy 
37:35 Pushback on “Meeting China Halfway” 
41:24 Could the U.S. have prevented war in Ukraine? 
46:05 How territorial conflicts are influencing China’s relationship with Russia 
1:00:16 Analyzing war games with U.S., China, and Taiwan 


Links: 

Watson Institute, Brown University 

Meeting China Halfway (2015) 

Here's Why War With China Could Elevate to Nuclear Strikes The National Interest, January 29 2022 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/heres-why-war-china-could-elevate-nuclear-strikes-200099 

Goldstein's articles at The National Interest 

Thursday, June 30, 2022

Kishore Mahbubani: A Nuanced View of Asia & China's Rise — Manifold Podcast #15

 

Kishore Mahbubani is Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. 

Kishore enjoyed two distinct careers: in diplomacy (1971 to 2004) and in academia (2004 to 2019). He is a prolific writer and speaker on geopolitics and East-West relations. He was twice Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN and served as President of the UN Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002. Mr. Mahbubani joined academia in 2004, when he was appointed the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY School), NUS. He was Dean from 2004 to 2017. 

In this episode Steve and Kishore discuss: 

0:00 Introduction 
2:52 Upbringing in Singapore and Asia's rise 
11:35 How western thinking influences China-U.S. relations 
23:05 Is China a threat to U.S. hegemony in Asia? 
25:52 The United States' long-term strategy for China 
32:13 How trade with ASEAN influences U.S.-China relations 
40:58 Can ASEAN countries play a diplomatic role between U.S. and China 
43:05 Xi Jinping's leadership and the zero-sum view of China 

Links: 






This Dutch documentary, which also features Mahbubani, is an excellent complement to our conversation.

Friday, December 31, 2021

Happy New Year 2022!

Best wishes to everyone :-)

I posted this video some years ago, but it was eventually taken down by YouTube. I came across it today and thought I would share it again. 

The documentary includes interviews with Rabi, Ulam, Bethe, Frank Oppenheimer, Robert Wilson, and Dyson


 


Some other recommendations below. I recently re-listened to these podcasts and quite enjoyed them. The interview with Bobby covers brain mapping, neuroscience, careers in science, biology vs physics. With Ted we go deep into free will, parallel universes, science fiction, and genetic engineering. Bruno shares his insights on geopolitics -- the emerging multipolar world of competition and cooperation between the US, Russia, Europe, and China.









A hopeful note for 2022 and the pandemic:

I followed COVID closely at the beginning (early 2020; search on blog if interested). I called the pandemic well before most people, and even provided some useful advice to a few big portfolio managers as well as to Dom and his team in the UK government. But once I realized that 

the average level among political leaders and "public intellectuals" is too low for serious cost-benefit analysis,

I got bored of COVID and stopped thinking about it.

However with Omicron (thanks to a ping from Dom) I started to follow events again. Preliminary data suggest we may be following the evolutionary path of increased transmissibility but reduced lethality. 

The data from UK and SA already seem to strongly support this conclusion, although both populations have at least one of: high vaccination level / resistance from spread of earlier variants. Whether Omicron is "intrinsically" less lethal (i.e., to a population such as the unvaccinated ~40% of the PRC population that has never been exposed to COVID) remains to be seen but we should know within a month or so.

If, e.g., Omicron results in hospitalization / death at ~1/3 the rate of earlier variants, then we will already be in the flu-like range of severity (whereas original COVID was at most like a ~10x more severe flu). In this scenario rational leaders should just go for herd immunity (perhaps with some cocooning of vulnerable sub-populations) and get it over with.

I'll be watching some of the more functional countries like S. Korea, PRC, etc. to see when/if they relax their strict lockdown and quarantine policies. Perhaps there are some smaller EU countries to keep an eye on as well.

Sunday, October 31, 2021

Demis Hassabis: Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery (protein folding) + Bonus: Bruno Pontecorvo

 


Recent talk (October 2021) by Demis Hassabis on the use of AI in scientific research. Second half of the talk is focused on protein folding. 

Below is part 2, by the AlphaFold research lead, which has more technical details.




Bonus: My former Oregon colleague David Strom recommended a CERN lecture by Frank Close on his biography of physicist (and atomic spy?) Bruno Pontecorvo.  David knew that The Battle of Algiers, which I blogged about recently, was directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, Bruno's brother.

Below is the closest thing I could find on YouTube -- it has better audio and video quality than the CERN talk. 

The amazing story of Bruno Pontecorvo involves topics such as the first nuclear reactions and reactors (work with Enrico Fermi), the Manhattan Project, neutrino flavors and oscillations, supernovae, atomic espionage, the KGB, Kim Philby, and the quote: 
I want to be remembered as a great physicist, not as your fucking spy!

Tuesday, July 06, 2021

Decline of the American Empire: Afghan edition (stay tuned for more)

There are photos and video to remind us of the ignominious US withdrawal from S. Vietnam after twenty years of conflict and millions of deaths.

Over the July 4th weekend, the US military abandoned Bagram airforce base in Afghanistan, without even informing the Afghan commander and his troops. 

Conveniently for our warmongering neocon "nation-building" interventionist elites, there are (as yet) no photos of this pullout.
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) — The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said. 
Afghanistan’s army showed off the sprawling air base Monday, providing a rare first glimpse of what had been the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on America. The U.S. announced Friday it had completely vacated its biggest airfield in the country in advance of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August. 
“We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram ... and finally by seven o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram’s new commander said. ...
I wrote the following (2017) in Remarks on the Decline of American Empire:
1. US foreign policy over the last decades has been disastrous -- trillions of dollars and thousands of lives expended on Middle Eastern wars, culminating in utter defeat. This defeat is still not acknowledged among most of the media or what passes for intelligentsia in academia and policy circles, but defeat it is. Iran now exerts significant control over Iraq and a swath of land running from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. None of the goals of our costly intervention have been achieved. We are exhausted morally, financially, and militarily, and still have not fully extricated ourselves from a useless morass. George W. Bush should go down in history as the worst US President of the modern era. 
2. We are fortunate that the fracking revolution may lead to US independence from Middle Eastern energy. But policy elites have to fully recognize this possibility and pivot our strategy to reflect the decreased importance of the region. The fracking revolution is a consequence of basic research from decades ago (including investment from the Department of Energy) and the work of private sector innovators and risk-takers. 
3. US budget deficits are a ticking time bomb, which cripple investment in basic infrastructure and also in research that creates strategically important new technologies like AI. US research spending has been roughly flat in inflation adjusted dollars over the last 20 years, declining as a fraction of GDP. 
4. Divisive identity politics and demographic trends in the US will continue to undermine political cohesion and overall effectiveness of our institutions. ("Civilizational decline," as one leading theoretical physicist observed to me recently, remarking on our current inability to take on big science projects.) 
5. The Chinese have almost entirely closed the technology gap with the West, and dominate important areas of manufacturing. It seems very likely that their economy will eventually become significantly larger than the US economy. This is the world that strategists have to prepare for. Wars involving religious fanatics in unimportant regions of the world should not distract us from a possible future conflict with a peer competitor that threatens to match or exceed our economic, technological, and even military capability.
If you are young and naive and still believe that we can mostly trust our media and government, watch these videos for a dose of reality.




[ The video embedded above was a documentary about Julian Assange and Wikileaks on the DW channel, which I had queued to show the Collateral Murder video. It included an interview with the US soldier who saved one of the children in the rescue van that was hit with 30mm Apache fire. Inexplicably, DW has now removed the video from their channel. Click through to YouTube below for the content. ]




Some things never change. Recall the personal sacrifices made by people like Daniel Ellsberg to reveal the truth about the Vietnam war. Today it is Julian Assange...




Note Added: While it was easy to predict this outcome in 2017, it wasn't much harder to call it in 2011. See this piece from The Onion:
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—In what officials said was the "only way" to move on from what has become a "sad and unpleasant" situation, all 100,000 U.S. military and intelligence personnel crept out of their barracks in the dead of night Sunday and quietly slipped out of Afghanistan. 
U.S. commanders explained their sudden pullout in a short, handwritten note left behind at Bagram Airfield, their largest base of operations in the country. 
"By the time you read this, we will be gone," the note to the nation of Afghanistan read in part. "We regret any pain this may cause you, but this was something we needed to do. We couldn't go on like this forever." 
"We still care about you very much, but, in the end, we feel this is for the best," the note continued. "Please, just know that we are truly sorry and that we wish you all the greatest of happiness in the future." 
... After reportedly taking a "long look in the mirror" last week, senior defense officials came to the conclusion that they had "wasted a decade of [their] lives" with Afghanistan ...

Saturday, May 08, 2021

Three Thousand Years and 115 Generations of 徐 (Hsu / Xu)

Over the years I have discussed economic historian Greg Clark's groundbreaking work on the persistence of social class. Clark found that intergenerational social mobility was much less than previously thought, and that intergenerational correlations on traits such as education and occupation were consistent with predictions from an additive genetic model with a high degree of assortative mating. 

See Genetic correlation of social outcomes between relatives (Fisher 1918) tested using lineage of 400k English individuals, and further links therein. Also recommended: this recent podcast interview Clark did with Razib Khan. 

The other day a reader familiar with Clark's work asked me about my family background. Obviously my own family history is not a scientific validation of Clark's work, being only a single (if potentially illustrative) example. Nevertheless it provides an interesting microcosm of the tumult of 20th century China and a window into the deep past...

I described my father's background in the post Hsu Scholarship at Caltech:
Cheng Ting Hsu was born December 1, 1923 in Wenling, Zhejiang province, China. His grandfather, Zan Yao Hsu was a poet and doctor of Chinese medicine. His father, Guang Qiu Hsu graduated from college in the 1920's and was an educator, lawyer and poet. 
Cheng Ting was admitted at age 16 to the elite National Southwest Unified University (Lianda), which was created during WWII by merging Tsinghua, Beijing, and Nankai Universities. This university produced numerous famous scientists and scholars such as the physicists C.N. Yang and T.D. Lee. 
Cheng Ting studied aerospace engineering (originally part of Tsinghua), graduating in 1944. He became a research assistant at China's Aerospace Research Institute and a lecturer at Sichuan University. He also taught aerodynamics for several years to advanced students at the air force engineering academy. 
In 1946 he was awarded one of only two Ministry of Education fellowships in his field to pursue graduate work in the United States. In 1946-1947 he published a three-volume book, co-authored with Professor Li Shoutong, on the structures of thin-walled airplanes. 
In January 1948, he left China by ocean liner, crossing the Pacific and arriving in San Francisco. ...
My mother's father was a KMT general, and her family related to Chiang Kai Shek by marriage. Both my grandfather and Chiang attended the military academy Shinbu Gakko in Tokyo. When the KMT lost to the communists, her family fled China and arrived in Taiwan in 1949. My mother's family had been converted to Christianity in the 19th century and became Methodists, like Sun Yat Sen. (I attended Methodist Sunday school while growing up in Ames IA.) My grandfather was a partner of T.V. Soong in the distribution of bibles in China in the early 20th century.

My father's family remained mostly in Zhejiang and suffered through the communist takeover, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution. My father never returned to China and never saw his parents again. 

When I met my uncle (a retired Tsinghua professor) and some of my cousins in Hangzhou in 2010, they gave me a four volume family history that had originally been printed in the 1930s. The Hsu (Xu) lineage began in the 10th century BC and continued to my father, in the 113th generation. His entry is the bottom photo below.
Wikipedia: The State of Xu (Chinese: 徐) (also called Xu Rong (徐戎) or Xu Yi (徐夷)[a] by its enemies)[4][5] was an independent Huaiyi state of the Chinese Bronze Age[6] that was ruled by the Ying family (嬴) and controlled much of the Huai River valley for at least two centuries.[3][7] It was centered in northern Jiangsu and Anhui. ...

Generations 114 and 115:


Four volume history of the Hsu (Xu) family, beginning in the 10th century BC. The first 67 generations are covered rather briefly, only indicating prominent individuals in each generation of the family tree. The books are mostly devoted to generations 68-113 living in Zhejiang. (Earlier I wrote that it was two volumes, but it's actually four. The printing that I have is two thick books.)




Thursday, March 18, 2021

Council on Foreign Relations: The Rise and Fall of Great Powers? America, China, and the Global Order

 

Insights from Ray Dalio and Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1987) on the balance of power and future global order. I was in graduate school when Kennedy's book was first published and I still have the hardcover first edition somewhere. Dalio and Kennedy have both carefully studied historical examples and present, in my opinion, a realistic view of what is happening. Kennedy mentions the PRC naval build up as a very explicit, material comparison of strength, whereas Dalio focuses on financial and economic matters. Elizabeth Economy provides some interesting comments on internal Chinese politics, but I am unsure how much insight any US analysts can have into the fine details of this.

The Naval War College Review article mentioned by Paul Kennedy is: 

Related: PRC ASBM Test in South China Sea and links therein.

Panelists discuss the rise and fall of great powers and the competing grand strategies of the United States and China. 
Speakers 
Ray Dalio Founder, Co-chairman, and Co-chief Investment Officer, Bridgewater Associates, LP; Author, The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail 
CFR Member Elizabeth C. Economy Senior Fellow for China Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Author, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State; @LizEconomy 
Paul M. Kennedy J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies, Yale University; Author, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Bonus! Short WSJ piece on digital RMB rollout. SWIFT beware...

 

Friday, March 05, 2021

Genetic correlation of social outcomes between relatives (Fisher 1918) tested using lineage of 400k English individuals

Greg Clark (UC Davis and London School of Economics) deserves enormous credit for producing a large multi-generational dataset which is relevant to some of the most fundamental issues in social science: inequality, economic development, social policy, wealth formation, meritocracy, and recent human evolution. If you have even a casual interest in the dynamics of human society you should study these results carefully...

See previous discussion on this blog. 

Clark recently posted this preprint on his web page. A book covering similar topics is forthcoming.
For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 English Individuals 1750-2020 shows Genetics Determines most Social Outcomes 
Gregory Clark, University of California, Davis and LSE (March 1, 2021) 
Economics, Sociology, and Anthropology are dominated by the belief that social outcomes depend mainly on parental investment and community socialization. Using a lineage of 402,000 English people 1750-2020 we test whether such mechanisms better predict outcomes than a simple additive genetics model. The genetics model predicts better in all cases except for the transmission of wealth. The high persistence of status over multiple generations, however, would require in a genetic mechanism strong genetic assortative in mating. This has been until recently believed impossible. There is however, also strong evidence consistent with just such sorting, all the way from 1837 to 2020. Thus the outcomes here are actually the product of an interesting genetics-culture combination.
The correlational results in the table below were originally deduced by Fisher under the assumption of additive genetic inheritance: h2 is heritability, m is assortativity by genotype, r assortativity by phenotype. (Assortative mating describes the tendency of husband and wife to resemble each other more than randomly chosen M-F pairs in the general population.)
Fisher, R. A. 1918. “The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 52: 399-433
Thanks to Clark the predictions of Fisher's models, applied to social outcomes, can now be compared directly to data through many generations and across many branches of English family trees. (Figures below from the paper.)





The additive model fits the data well, but requires high heritabilities h2 and a high level m of assortative mating. Most analysts, including myself, thought that the required values of m were implausibly large. However, using modern genomic datasets one can estimate the level of assortative mating by simply looking at the genotypes of married couples. 

From the paper:
(p.26) a recent study from the UK Biobank, which has a collection of genotypes of individuals together with measures of their social characteristics, supports the idea that there is strong genetic assortment in mating. Robinson et al. (2017) look at the phenotype and genotype correlations for a variety of traits – height, BMI, blood pressure, years of education - using data from the biobank. For most traits they find as expected that the genotype correlation between the parties is less than the phenotype correlation. But there is one notable exception. For years of education, the phenotype correlation across spouses is 0.41 (0.011 SE). However, the correlation across the same couples for the genetic predictor of educational attainment is significantly higher at 0.654 (0.014 SE) (Robinson et al., 2017, 4). Thus couples in marriage in recent years in England were sorting on the genotype as opposed to the phenotype when it comes to educational status. 
It is not mysterious how this happens. The phenotype measure here is just the number of years of education. But when couples interact they will have a much more refined sense of what the intellectual abilities of their partner are: what is their general knowledge, ability to reason about the world, and general intellectual ability. Somehow in the process of matching modern couples in England are combining based on the weighted sum of a set of variations at several hundred locations on the genome, to the point where their correlation on this measure is 0.65.
Correction: Height, Educational Attainment (EA), and cognitive ability predictors are controlled by many thousands of genetic loci, not hundreds! 


This is a 2018 talk by Clark which covers most of what is in the paper.



For out of sample validation of the Educational Attainment (EA) polygenic score, see Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility.

 

Thursday, February 18, 2021

David Reich: Prehistory of Europe and S. Asia from Ancient DNA

 

In case you have not followed the adventures of the Yamnaya (proto Indo-Europeans from the Steppe), I recommend this recent Harvard lecture by David Reich. It summarizes advances in our understanding of deep human history in Europe and South Asia resulting from analysis of ancient DNA. 
The new technology of ancient DNA has highlighted a remarkable parallel in the prehistory of Europe and South Asia. In both cases, the arrival of agriculture from southwest Asia after 9,000 years ago catalyzed profound population mixtures of groups related to Southwest Asian farmers and local hunter-gatherers. In both cases, the spread of ancestry ultimately deriving from Steppe pastoralists had a further major impact after 5,000 years ago and almost certainly brought Indo-European languages. Mixtures of these three source populations form the primary gradients of ancestry in both regions today. 
In this lecture, Prof. Reich will discuss his new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. 
There seems to be a strange glitch at 16:19 and again at 27:55 -- what did he say?

See also Reich's 2018 NYTimes editorial.

Saturday, October 17, 2020

Down the Rabbit Hole: Mark Lane, the Zapruder film, and the JFK Conspiracy

Putting these here for future reference. From comments:
At minimum the evidence is strong for a CIA JFK coverup -- see last video, for example. It doesn't mean they did it, ofc. Johnson pressured Warren to lead the commission with the argument that if the public became convinced the Soviets/Cubans were behind it WW3 would result. This could have affected CIA actions post-Dallas as well. But I suspect something more sinister on the part of certain elements of CIA, and there is tons of evidence to that effect leaking out over the years. 
I enjoy listening to Mark Lane speak even if he turns out to be incorrect in some or many of his allegations. I think he destroys Buckley in their debate: Lane the Rationalist and Buckley a good example of motivated or biased reasoning. 
I've followed Spygate for 4 years now, with the media covering it up and FBI/CIA refusing to produce documents, Barr probably acting to protect the institutions, FISA court obviously corrupt, etc. The JFK matter has a very familiar feel to it. [ Should add the Epstein matter, which unfolded in plain sight over 20y, as another example. ]
Mark Lane, at the peak of his powers, discusses the Warren Commission report with William F. Buckley (1966):

   

 Mark Lane, near the end of his life:

    


Astonishing 2014 claims about the Zapruder film in CIA hands in the days after Dallas: the creation of two different briefing boards, one seen by CIA director John McCone, the other given to the Warren Commission. The interview is remarkable.

 

Horne and Brugioni strike me as very credible. CIA NPIC's main activity was interpreting U2 spy plane photographs, and had some of the most advanced photographic technology of the era. They were a logical choice to have a first look at the Zapruder film, but Brugioni did not learn until decades later that the CIA modified the film (removing certain frames, esp. near #313 which shows Kennedy's head exploding) and only gave a full briefing to McCone while witholding information from the Warren Commission. 
While serving as chief analyst of military records at the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997, Douglas Horne discovered that the Zapruder Film was examined by the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center two days after the assassination of President Kennedy. 
In this film, Horne interviews legendary NPIC photo interpreter Dino Brugioni, who speaks for the first time about another NPIC examination of the film the day after the assassination. Brugioni didn't know about the second examination and believes the Zapruder Film in the archives today is not the film he saw the day after the assassination.

Bonus: Interview with son of E. Howard Hunt (CIA, convicted Watergate Plumber), including audio of Hunt's confession. Note link to Cord Meyer, also see Mary Meyer 1964 execution in Georgetown...


James Jesus Angleton -- "A Wilderness of Mirrors"



Note Added in response to a question in the comments:
I suggest you invest an hour or two in 
1. Brugioni interview: establishes that a conspiracy at the highest level of CIA to alter the film evidence was in place within ~24h of the shooting. Hard to explain unless there was very strong motivation already... bureaucracies usually can't react that fast when *surprised* by events. 
2. Interview with Hunt's son, concerning his deathbed confession of being aware of (and playing a minor role in) the assassination conspiracy. Hunt is a well-known CIA figure who was involved in lots of covert ops including Watergate. You don't have to accept this as fully credible of course, but you can't say that conspiracy didn't happen because otherwise information would have leaked out. It may very well have leaked out! But few pay attention because of the groupthink against "conspiracy theory" (this term was literally invented and promulgated by CIA to discourage public attention to what it was doing during the Cold War).   
I would say I am very confident of an active cover up post assasination, less confident of a CIA role in the killing. 
Other facts that have leaked out (now confirmed by official documents and the official CIA historian) include the fact that CIA was very closely monitoring Oswald starting in 1959 and that his file was closely held by none other than CIA prince of darkness James Jesus Angleton. Now look into the unsolved killing of Angleton's friend Mary Meyer (who was having an affair with JFK when he was shot) in 1964 and you are off to the races... Their common friend Ben Bradlee (WaPo editor of Watergate fame) wrote in his memoirs of catching Angleton, having broken into Meyer's house, with her diary... 
BTW, over the years it was wrongly reported that RFK did NOT believe in a conspiracy against his brother. The evidence is pretty convincing now that he always believed in a conspiracy but didn't admit it in public.

Saturday, September 12, 2020

Orwell: 1944, 1984, and Today

George Orwell 1944 Letter foreshadows 1984, and today:
... Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, i.e. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving ... 
... intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.
I am sure any reader can provide examples of the following from the "news" or academia or even from a national lab:
there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted  
the exact sciences are endangered  
two and two could become five
dictatorial methods ... systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.

Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. It takes only a generation for costly lessons to be entirely forgotten...


Wikipedia: Trofim Denisovich Lysenko ...Soviet agronomist and biologist. Lysenko was a strong proponent of soft inheritance and rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of pseudoscientific ideas termed Lysenkoism.[1][2] In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine. 
Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1948. As a result of Lysenkoism and forced collectivization, 15-30 million Soviet and Chinese citizens starved to death in the Holodomor and the Great Chinese Famine. ...

 

In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR: "He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists."

Saturday, September 05, 2020

Adam Tooze: American Power in the Long 20th Century

  


London Review of Books (LRB) lecture:
The history of American power, as it is commonly written, is a weighty subject, a matter of military and economic heft, of ‘throw-weight’, of resource mobilisation and material culture, of ‘boots on the ground’. In his lecture, Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity. This image gives us a less materialistic, more fantastical and more unstable vision of America’s role in the world.
The Q&A at 1h03min is probably the best (at least most concise) part of the talk. I don't find the Geithner anecdote quite as important / symbolic as Tooze does. Geithner is expressing the point that financial markets and economies are heavily affected by animal spirits, investor confidence, etc. Geithner understands well how much the power of central banks depends on purely psychological multiplier effects.

From a YouTube comment, this outline:
1:10 - Tim Geithner; U.S. Treasury: America had been “defying gravity" 
5:50 - U.S. was the “gravity” of world 
11:07 - U.S. is now also subject to the “gravity” of world 
13:28 - 100 years of 9 historic U.S. events; Overview 
14:44 - Adam Tooze; Historian “Ordering rather than Order, and the Disordering effects of efforts at Ordering.” 
16:28 - Start at the beginning of 1800’s 
17:12 - 1898 U.S. Imperialist power 
17:50 - 1916 U.S. Globalist power 
18:47 - Woodrow Wilson; U.S. President 
22:46 - 1920s Republican domestic priority of Financial Austerity and Tax cuts. 
25:59 - Great American Financial shocks/panics; 1857, 1873, 1893, 1896, 1907, 1920, 1929 26:49 - 1920s Great Depression 
27:18 - 1930s U.S. Hyper militaristic power 
31:51 - World War 2; One World, One War (1942) 
33:48 - Post World War 2, Bretton Woods economic conference. 
36:24 - Marshall Plan not the same as Bretton Woods... 
41:10 - Cold War: Asia 
43:30 - U.S. President Nixon abandons the Gold peg in 1971. Which results in inflation in G7 countries and Switzerland. 
44:10 - Keynesian era 50s to 60s. Start of Neoliberalism or the Paul Volcker shock 1979. 
45:07 - Cold War: Europe 1980s, Reagan & Gorbachev 
47:13 - Concluding phase of the talk 
1:01:56 - Challenges in 2019 and going forward; China and Climate Change 
1:03:20 - Q&A
Also recommended: Tooze on US-China geopolitical competition (August 6 2020 Sinica podcast). This discussion focuses more on the present and future than the past and may be of more interest to readers.


This conversation with Tyler Cowen is excellent, with more focus on Europe.



This is part 3 of a discussion at the Paris School of Economics. Thomas Piketty is on the panel and his remarks are in part 2, following Tooze's presentation in part 1. I recommend part 3 as the most interesting. Topics covered include MMT, inequality, central banks, current sources of systemic risk. Note this discussion took place before the Covid19 pandemic. Tooze mentions individual hedge fund compensation in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Typically in such cases a big chunk of this compensation is really returns from the individual's own net worth which is co-invested with the fund. So it's not directly comparable to other forms of compensation, such as salary or bonus.


Thursday, May 14, 2020

James Oakes on What’s Wrong with The 1619 Project - Manifold Podcast #46



Steve and Corey talk to James Oakes, Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, about "The 1619 Project" developed by The New York Times Magazine. The project argues that slavery was the defining event of US history. Jim argues that slavery was actually the least exceptional feature of the US and that what makes the US exceptional is that it is where abolition first begins. Steve wonders about the views of Thomas Jefferson who wrote that “all men are created equal” but still held slaves. Jim maintains many founders were hypocrites, but Jefferson believed what he wrote.

Topics: Northern power, Industrialization, Capitalism, Lincoln, Inequality, Cotton, Labor, Civil War, Racism/Antiracism, Black Ownership.

Transcript

James Oakes (Bio)

Oakes and Colleagues Letter to the NYT and the Editor’s Response

The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts

The World Socialist Web Site interview with James Oakes


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Friday, April 17, 2020

The von Neumann-Fuchs bomb, and the radiation compression mechanism of Ulam-Teller-Sakharov


Some useful references below on the Ulam-Teller mechanism, Sakharov's Third Idea, and the von Neumann-Fuchs thermonuclear design of 1946. They resolve a mystery discussed previously on this blog:
Sakharov's Third Idea: ... If Zeldovich was already familiar with radiation pressure as the tool for compression, via the Fuchs report of 1948, then perhaps one cannot really credit Teller so much for adding this ingredient to Ulam's idea of a staged device using a fission bomb to compress the thermonuclear fuel. Fuchs and von Neumann had already proposed (and patented!) radiation implosion years before. More here.
It turns out that the compression mechanism used in the von Neumann-Fuchs design (vN is the first author on the patent application; the design was realized in the Operation Greenhouse George nuclear test of 1951) is not that of Ulam-Teller or Sakharov. In vN-F the D-T mixture reaches thermal equilibrium with ionized BeO gas, leading to a pressure increase of ~10x. This is not the "cold compression" via focused radiation pressure used in the U-T / Sakharov designs. That was, apparently,  conceived independently by Ulam-Teller and Sakharov.

It is only recently that the vN-F design has become public -- first obtained by the Soviets via espionage (Fuchs), and finally declassified and published by the Russians! It seems that Zeldovich had access to this information, but not Sakharov.

American and Soviet H-bomb development programmes: historical background by G. Goncharov.

John von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs: an Unlikely Collaboration by Jeremy Bernstein. See also here for some clarifying commentary.


A great anecdote:
Jeremy Bernstein: When I was an undergraduate at Harvard he [vN] came to the university to give lectures on the computer and the brain. They were the best lectures I have ever heard on anything — like mental champagne. After one of them I found myself walking in Harvard Square and looked up to see von Neumann. Thinking, correctly as it happened, that it would be the only chance I would have to ask him a question, I asked, ‘‘Professor von Neumann, will the computer ever replace the human mathematician?’’ He studied me and then responded, ‘‘Sonny, don’t worry about it.’’


Note added from comments: I hope this clarifies things a bit.
The question of how the Soviets got to the U-T mechanism is especially mysterious. Sakharov himself (ostensibly the Soviet inventor) was puzzled until the end about what had really happened! He did not have access to the vN-F design that has been made public from the Russian side (~2000, after Sakharov's death in 1989; still classified in US). Zeldovich and only a few others had seen the Fuchs information, at a time when the main focus of the Russian program was not the H bomb. Sakharov could never be sure whether his suggestion for cold radiation compression sparked Zeldovich's interest because the latter *had seen the idea before* without fully comprehending it. Sakharov wondered about this until the end of his life (see below), but I think his surmise was not correct: we know now that vN-F did *not* come up with that idea in their 1946 design. I've been puzzled about this question myself for some time. IF the vN-F design had used radiation pressure for cold compression, why did Teller get so much credit for replacing neutrons with radiation pressure in Ulam's staged design (1951)? I stumbled across the (now public) vN-F design by accident just recently -- I was reading some biographical stuff about Zeldovich which touched upon these issues.

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/10/sakharovs-third-idea.html

Consider the following words in Sakharov’s memoirs, with a note he added toward the end of life:

Now I think that the main idea of the H-bomb design developed by the Zeldovich group was based on intelligence information. However, I can’t prove this conjecture. It occurred to me quite recently, but at the time I just gave it no thought. (Note added July 1987. David Holloway writes in “Soviet Thermonuclear Development,” International Security 4:3 (1979/80), p. 193: “The Soviet Union had been informed by Klaus Fuchs of the studies of thermonuclear weapons at Los Alamos up to 1946. … His information would have been misleading rather than helpful, because the early ideas were later shown not to work.” Therefore my conjecture is confirmed!)
Another useful resource: Gennady Gorelik (BU science historian): The Paternity of the H-Bombs: Soviet-American Perspectives
Teller, 1952, August (re Bethe’s Memorandum): The main principle of radiation implosion was developed in connection with the thermonuclear program and was stated at a con­ference on the thermonuclear bomb, in the spring of 1946. Dr. Bethe did not attend this conference, but Dr. Fuchs did. [ Original development by vN? ]

It is difficult to argue to what extent an invention is accidental: most difficult for someone who did not make the invention himself. It appears to me that the idea was a relatively slight modification of ideas generally known in 1946. Essentially only two elements had to be added: to implode a bigger volume, and, to achieve greater compression by keeping the imploded material cool as long as possible.
The last part ("cool as long as possible") refers to the fundamental difference between the vN-Fuchs design and the U-T mechanism of cold radiation compression. The former assumes thermal equilibrium between ionized gas and radiation, while latter deliberately avoids it as long as possible.

Official Soviet History: On the making of the Soviet hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb, Yu B Khariton et al 1996 Phys.-Usp. 39 185. Some details on the origin of the compression idea, followed by the use of radiation pressure (Zeldovich and Sakharov).

Thursday, January 02, 2020

Andrew Hartman: The Culture Wars Then and Now (Manifold Podcast #27)



Note: We've moved to a weekly release schedule (previously one per two weeks).

Steve and Corey talk to Andrew about his new introduction to his book The War for the Soul of America. While the left largely won the culture wars, the three wonder whether the pendulum has swung so far left that many liberals are alienated by today’s cultural norms.

Other topics: Was the left’s victory in the debate over the college curriculum pyrrhic? Is identity politics a necessary step in liberation or a problematic slide toward greater division, or both? Are current students too sensitive, and easily triggered, to take the fight to the Billionaire class?

Transcript

Andrew Hartman (Faculty Profile)

A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this program are those of the guest(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of the hosts, the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, or Michigan State University.

Blog Archive

Labels