The Kids Are Not All Right via MR: Reminder that humans, often the smartest humans, can believe anything. Wonder how much of the coventional wisdom today falls in this category.
Two weeks after his birth, Jeffrey’s health took a turn for the worse: He developed a heart defect common in premature infants – patent ductus arteriosus, or PDA. Jeffrey was scheduled for open-heart surgery and transferred to the nearest children’s hospital.
In those days, surgery for PDA was invasive. Holes were cut on either side of Jeffrey’s tiny neck and chest to insert a catheter into his jugular vein. His little body was opened from breastbone to backbone, his flesh lifted aside, ribs pried apart, and a blood vessel near his heart tied off, and then all the tissues were stitched back together.
Baby Jeffrey felt everything – every incision, every internal repair, every stitch. The medical team had not given their fragile patient any drugs, any comfort, anything to protect him from the excruciating pain of open-heart surgery – just a paralyzing agent to keep him still during the procedure.
Five weeks later, Jeffrey passed away.
In the days before her child’s death, Jill Lawson learned a shocking fact: Anesthetizing babies for surgery was not common practice. After Jeffrey died, Lawson called his doctor for reassurance. Surely, she thought, her child had been given something for the pain.
“The anesthesiologist informed me that she had not used any anesthesia or analgesia on Jeffrey,” Lawson wrote in an account of her son’s experience. The doctor told the grieving mother it hadn’t even occurred to her to do so because it had never been demonstrated that babies can feel pain.
The paradox of India:
Punjab is over 60% vegetarian, but Tandoori chicken and butter chicken are its most popular dishes outside the state.
Tamil Nadu is less than 1% vegetarian, but its “pure veg” idly, dosa, sambhar, pongal, etc are its most popular dishes outside the state.
The Seneca via Daring Fireball:
The Seneca is my middle finger to the aesthetic homogeneity and economic over-optimization of 21st century life.
A keyboard for the low, low price of $3,600. Yes, a computer keyboard. Yes, US$. Although to be fair, it is not $3,600. Its “from $3,600”.
My Thoughts on the Future of “AI” via Simon Willison:
I have very wide error bars on the potential future of large language models, and I think you should too.
Specifically, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in three to five years, language models are capable of performing most (all?) cognitive economically-useful tasks beyond the level of human experts.
And I also wouldn’t be surprised if, in five years, the best models we have are better than the ones we have today, but only in “normal” ways where costs continue to decrease considerably and capabilities continue to get better but there’s no fundamental paradigm shift that upends the world order.
The Anatomy of Marital Happiness via MR:
Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net “happiness” measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as zero.
Average happiness is around +20 on this scale for all respondents from 1972 to the last pre-pandemic survey (2018). However, there is a wide gap of around 30 points between married and unmarried respondents.
This “marital premium” is this paper’s subject. I describe how this premium varies across and within population groups. These include standard socio demographics (age, sex, race education, income) and more. I find little variety and thereby surface a notable regularity in US socio demography: there is a substantial marital premium for every group and subgroup I analyze, and this premium is usually close to the overall 30-point average.
This holds not just for standard characteristics but also for those directly related to marriage like children and sex (and sex preference). I also find a “cohabitation premium”, but it is much smaller (10 points) than the marital premium. The analysis is mainly visual, and there is inevitably some interesting variety across seventeen figures, such as a 5-point increase in recent years.