Covid and testes

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According to this article, there is some evidence of a decline in male fertility since the pandemic, and this is on top of the known long-term decline in male fertility. For one thing, the virus actually infects the testes themselves. But another thing I didn’t know (or never thought a lot about) is that hormones originating the brain have an important effect on sperm production, so a drop in sperm production might not indicate a physical problem with your testicles themselves.

This article also says that when couples have trouble conceiving for biological reasons, about half the time the problem originates in the male and about half the time in the female. This kind of makes sense. I suspect chemicals in our air, water, and/or food, combined with the stress and time-constraints of modern urban, industrialized life.

Other things that certainly affect fertility rates in a social sense are educated and employed women coupled with (lack of) policies to support families and childcare. I believe pressure on men to work long hard hours to support a family financially somewhat obviously has an effect here too, but maybe this is controversial to some.

If I didn’t have to work quite as long and hard at my testicle-shrinking job, I could spend more time with my children or help more with housework. You can work, help with children, have a great marriage, help care for aging relatives, and maximize your own mental and physical health, but there are some tradeoffs between these desirable objectives for both men and women. The decline of multi-generational households and extended family living close by certainly doesn’t help. There may be no return to the past, but as we lose these aspects of our culture we may need public policy to step in and help fill the gap. In the U.S. at least, that isn’t happening, and we are all standing around scratching our heads as to why we have to give up aspects of our lives (like our health, and strong marriages!) just to keep the whole house of cards from collapsing.

once more, the lab leak hypothesis

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Intercept tries to explain the recent developments on the lab leak hypothesis, but it still leaves me a bit confused. Here are the facts as I understand them:

  • In 2018, Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli, along with two U.S.-based scientists, together submitted a proposal to U.S. Department of Defense DARPA specifically about inserting a “furin cleavage site” into coronaviruses. Covid-19 has just such a furin cleavage site. This research proposal was not funded by DARPA. Shi Zhengli was known “for her work extracting samples of viruses from bats in Chinese caves”.
  • A Chinese national named Ben Hu received funding from USAID and the National Institutes of Health in 2018-2020. There were three grants in total, two of which ran from 2014-2019 and one of which was cut short in 2020 after intervention by Donald Trump. This funding “potentially” involved the furin cleavage site, but from this article at least there does not seem to be conclusive evidence.
  • The Wuhan Institute was “known for” experimenting on coronaviruses “alongside” scientists employed by the Chinese military. The article does not make any claims that Shi Zhengli or Ben Hu were employed by the Chinese military.
  • Three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers, including Ben Hu, were hospitalized with Covid-19-like symptoms in November 2019.
  • Two investigators from the U.S. State Department spoke to “two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak”. These sources stated that “Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa”.

So, there’s a fair amount of circumstantial evidence and second- or third-hand eyewitness accounts here. And the U.S. State Department is not averse to twisting facts to fit a narrative it thinks is in the U.S. national interest. Nonetheless, there are an awful lot of coincidences here. Maybe the U.S. government would like to pin this on the Chinese government, but there is a certain irony if they managed to f— over all of humanity together. And this would be the first plague unleashed on international humanity as a result of biological engineering.

Gary Larson, The Far Side

the “end of history” effect applied to individuals

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At first I thought that, since this article is from the BBC, it might be about arrogant westerners realizing the world doesn’t revolve around them. But no, it is about the idea of a person’s personality changing over time, and how you might take that into account when making decisions today.

To test whether the end of history illusion would extend to people’s personal values, the researchers recruited a new sample of 2,700 participants, who were asked to state the importance of concepts such as hedonism, achievement, tradition in their lives – before imagining their responses 10 years in the past or 10 years in the future. Sure enough, the end-of-history illusion was in full force: people recognised how their values had shifted in the past but were unlikely to predict change in the future…

“Both teenagers and grandparents seem to believe that the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have recently become the people they will remain,” the researchers concluded in their original paper. “History, it seems, is always ending today…”

More seriously, the end-of-history illusion could place us on career paths that fail to give us fulfilment in the long-term. You might have considered that a high salary was more important than inherent interest in the work you were doing – and that could well have been true at the time. When you reached your 30s, however, those values might have shifted – now you might be yearning for passion rather than an enormous pay packet. “Here’s the problem: when faced with new career directions or job prospects, if we make mistakes in considering what we think will matter, we may opt to take (or not take) paths that we’ll later regret,” Hershfield notes.

BBC

If I think about a “bucket list” I might have made when I was younger, it might have included things like living abroad, starting a business, and skydiving. I have done one of those three things at this point, and I am no longer interested in the other two. If I were making a new bucket list today, it would still include some periodic travel, but with long stretches at a “home base” that is comfortable and predictable. I think it is always useful to try to imagine a “future you” looking back on a decision. Maybe we should be imagining two or three “future yous” and trying to make decisions they might all agree on.

Right now, I feel like I could spend a month or a year just sitting around reading books and maybe emerge as a whole human being ready for social contact again. But that is from years and years of overstimulation from work and family life with virtually no breaks. So that is one question I have, is our personality on any given day an “equilibrium” personality or is it partially a reflection of what has happened to us recently. I might not be classified as a “neurotic” person the first day after I get back to work after vacation, and then I might seem extremely neurotic on the second day depending on what is thrown at me at work and at home by other neurotic people and how much (okay, to be realistic, whether I get any) down time in between. Maybe, just maybe, my work and family life will calm down as I get older and my equilibrium personality will be able to shine.

now is the singularity near?

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The New Yorker has a long article on the possibility of an AI-driven singularity. It surveys many of the other news stories and letters and debates on the subject. The answer is really that nobody knows, but since it is an existential threat of unknown probability it certainly belongs somewhere on the risk matrix.

I can see nearer term problems too. Thinking back to the “flash crash” of 2010, relatively stupid algorithms reacting to each other’s actions and making decisions at lightning-speed were nearly able to crash the financial system. We recovered from that one, but what if these new algorithms lead to a crash of financial or real infrastructure systems (electricity, internet, transportation, water, food?) that we can’t recover from. It doesn’t take a total physical collapse to cause a depression, just a massive loss of confidence leading to panic. That scenario is not too hard for me to imagine.

I suspect that we are approaching the peak of the hype cycle when it comes to AI. It will build to a fever pitch, the bubble will burst (in the sense of our attention), it will seem to the public like nothing much is happening for a few years or even a decade, but in the background quiet progress will be made and it will eventually, stealthily just take over much of our daily lives and we will shrug like we always do.

an Israeli operation in Jenin

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I’m posting this footage of an operation in the West Bank without any comment. I do not really trust media coverage of anything going on in Israel and its territories, and this is eyewitness video. For me, it helps to have some raw images in my mind when I am reading or listening to accounts and explanations of what is going on. I still won’t try to explain or interpret it here.

Citizens United

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In case you doubt the corruption and illegitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court, the biggest issue in recent years is not the petty corruption of justices accepting gifts or even the Dobbs decision. Wealthy and powerful interests have always used propaganda to grab more wealth and power literally at the expense of all life on earth. But Citizens United legalized bribery to the point that the wealthy and powerful can just buy politicians who will write the country’s laws in their favor. They don’t need to even convince us ordinary citizens to look the other way any more. And Citizens United is a slippery slope – now some states and municipalities are considering legislations that would give corporations the right to vote in elections. This is just not democracy. The consent of the majority of voters has to remain as a check on corporate power, imperfect as that is. Fair and equal treatment in the courts is the other check, and that was somewhat obviously the logic when corporations and other types of legal entities were given limited rights as persons. At this point, I think we need a constitutional amendment clarifying that the rights of corporate persons stop short of political speech. The political speech of non-profit organizations is limited, so I don’t see why that can’t be extended to for-profit organizations. Why would trying to make a profit separate a legal person from a non-person? If we’re really going to go down the slippery slope and give corporations the vote, why not also give it to non-profit organizations, unions, or for that matter animals or nature itself? How about some sort of custodian that can vote on behalf of future organizations? Arguments along these lines have all been made. Now maybe we can turn all voting over to AIs who can figure out what is best for us.

I think we better just stick to majority rule (of for and by HUMAN beings), HUMAN rights, and equal protection in the courts for “persons” including various types of legal entities.

the lab leak theory that wouldn’t go away

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Speaking of public.substack.com, they say there is evidence that three scientists engaged in “gain of function” lab at the Wuhan institute of virology were the first to be infected by Covid-19. Matt Taibbi also covers this story.

This narrative holds together logically for me. There is still the problem however that I don’t trust U.S.-based reporting about China. I’m not saying everything we hear is an outright lie, I am saying there is a whiff of propaganda in the air that taints every news story so it is hard to tell truth from half-truth.

Even if this is true, there is the question of whether the research was for civilian or military purposes and who funded it (some reporting suggests the U.S. government played a role). It’s hard for me to buy the idea that this was a bio-weapon because it doesn’t seem to have been a very good one. Is a good bioweapon one that initially did not spread all that fast and kills less than 1% of people it infects, skewed towards the elderly? And one that no vaccine was yet available to the party that supposedly created the bioweapon? If there is anything suspicious, it is that the U.S. government pretty much had the vaccine technology developed and just had to figure out how to commercialize and distribute it. Even though this seemed excruciatingly slow when you lived through it, similar processes in the past took decades that this time around were accomplished in a year or so.

Gary Larson, The Far Side

the truth is out there…but it’s not aliens…but it is???

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I can’t vouch for the site public.substack.com, but it says the U.S. government has “12 or more” alien spacecraft. I have seen it referenced by other, more mainstream, news organizations, for what that’s worth. We weren’t supposed to take this stuff seriously, and then we were supposed to accept that “unexplained aerial phenomena” existed but weren’t necessarily aliens in origin, and now we are supposed to believe they maybe are?

But, Grusch said, he soon learned that United States government possessed “quite a number” of different kinds of non-human vehicles. “I have plenty of current and former senior intelligence officers who came to me — many of whom I knew almost my whole career — [and] who confided in me.”

This is not the first time government officials have suggested that the U.S. may possess alien spaceships. “I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials,” said the late Senator Harry Reid, who fought for greater disclosure. “And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that.”

Former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon, recently reported that he has spoken to more than four witnesses who say they know of “a secret U.S. government program involving the analysis and exploitation of materials recovered from off-world craft… Some have supplied information to the intelligence community’s inspector general, others directly to the staff of the congressional oversight committees.”

public.substack.com

Thoughts: (1) There’s always the Fermi Paradox. If we are here, and life arises by some sort of random chance under the right conditions, there just simply should be aliens out there given the size and age of the universe. And there should be a lot of them. (2) Another logical explanation is still that somebody here on Earth has more advanced technology than everybody else here on Earth, and is hiding it from everybody else using disinformation about aliens. Both the U.S. and Soviet Union are known to have done this during the Cold War. (3) Maybe alien civilizations released autonomous probes a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and they are cruising our atmosphere now gathering information. Maybe they are just machines, but machines that interact with known laws of physics in more advanced or different ways than human machines have to date. (4) Maybe aliens are all around us and have the technology to hide themselves from us, and have chosen for whatever reason not to interact with us directly (this is a well-known logical resolution of the Fermi Paradox). Or maybe human governments have or are interacting with them and are keeping that secret from each other and/or from the public. In this case though, it seems odd to me that they would need toys zipping around in the atmosphere to gather information. Surely they would have nanotechnology or remote sensing (which we have) or other ways of gathering information undetected. Or maybe the vehicles are just that – toys.

I tend to believe that intelligent life is out there, based on the logic of #1. But I also tend to suspect these particular vehicles we are hearing about are somebody here on Earth messing with us under the logic of #2. Let’s say the U.S. military-industrial complex has made even a small advance related to, say, the nature of gravitational fields and how to mess with them. That would put them ahead of everybody else, particular so-called “near peer rivals” who are trying to spy and catch up on the technology. They then come up with a propaganda campaign that they strategically leak (with or without cooperation) to a few key politicians and media organizations. That might throw the spies off the trail at least for a little while, and with whatever time that buys the scientists and technologists can try to stay another step ahead.