Astral Codex Ten Podcast Jeremiah

Alexander: Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated (2016, 2020, 2023), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I’ll also post a transcript on my blog.
Let’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion?
Biden: I’m not even sure states exist.
Alexander: You’re . . . not sure states exist?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate 

I think I got the original post slightly off.
I was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past.
The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not “just do stuff” and have a secular weekly meeting?
Most of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence but doesn’t seem too successful. People with ancient traditions 1, people who just do stuff 0.
But after thinking about it more, maybe this isn’t what Sam means.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/clarification-on-fake-tradition-is 

I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one. 
But it was the lofty gaze of the man on the ¥10,000 note that really caught my attention. I find that always having a spare ¥10,000 note is something of a necessity in Japan. You never know when you might stumble upon a pop-up artisanal sake kiosk beside a metro station staircase that only accepts cash and only opens one day a year. So over the course of my time in Japan I had come to know the face of the man on that bill rather well. 
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-autobiography-of 

I.
A: I like Indian food.
B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies?
A: I just like paneer tikka.
This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things.
But “of the past” is just meant to be a pointer! “Indian food” is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it’s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems!
In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional 

I.
Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack, of which one especially caught my eye:
He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID or from COVID vaccines. Results here:
7.5% of people said a household member had died of COVID
8.5% of people said a household member had died from the vaccine.
All other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population. In particular, about 75% were vaccinated (suggesting that they weren’t just polling hardcore anti-vaxxers).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/failure-to-replicate-anti-vaccine 

I.
Lately we’ve been discussing some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior? And do we really want to do this?
I find it clarifying to set aside schizophrenia for a second and look at cystic fibrosis.
Cystic fibrosis is a simple single-gene disorder. A mutation in this gene makes lung mucus too thick. People born with the disorder spend their lives fighting off various awful lung infections before dying early, usually in their 20s to 40s. There’s a new $300,000/year medication that looks promising, but we’ve yet to see how much it can increase life expectancy. As far as I know, there’s nothing good about cystic fibrosis. It’s just an awful mutation that leads to a lifetime of choking on your own lung mucus.
So: are people with cystic fibrosis genetically inferior, or not?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nobody-can-make-you-feel-genetically