Links to Consider, 9/4

Vinay Prasad on cancer screening; Timothy Taylor on new business formation; Erik Hoel on consciousness; Paul Weinstein, Jr. on college administrative bloat

In a podcast with Russ Roberts, Vinay Prasad says,

But nobody debates the fact that you can get all the colonoscopies you want and there's still a risk of dying of colon cancer. You can get all the breast cancer screening you want. There's still a risk of dying of breast cancer. Typically, that risk is 80% of the risk. I mean, even the proponents think it only lowers cancer death by 20%.

The process of screening for cancer faces a triage problem. You can find a cancer that you cannot treat. You can find a cancer that you do not have to treat. (Prasad says “most men die with prostate cancer, not from prostate cancer.”) Or, finally, you can find a cancer that you ought to treat.

The podcast talks about the inability of current cancer screening techniques to do the triage.

Timothy Taylor writes,

If you go back 10 years to 2012, in a given quarter, the number of “establishment births” is about 2.9-3.2% of the total number of existing firms. An “establishment,” in the jargon here, is a new geographical location where a firm is operating, and so it includes both new locations of existing firms as well as brand-new firms. But since the second quarter of 2021 through the end of 2022, the quarterly rate of establishment births has rise to about range of 3.8-4.1% of the total number of existing firms.

This is how economic activity expands. What I call Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade emerge from successful new businesses and new initiatives undertaken by existing businesses.

One reason I doubt China’s ability to get its economy growing again is that I imagine that the Communist system undermines the impulse to start a new enterprise. It’s up to the government to try to piece together the puzzle of who should be working in what business. Bottom-up trial-and-error, with profit and loss as the evaluation mechanism, is a better approach.

Erik Hoel writes,

while there’s no agreement on what consciousness actually is from a scientific perspective, that’s totally fine, since what matters is whether researchers and scientists are referring to the same thing.

…So yes, there is scientific confusion about what consciousness is! And there’s metaphysical confusion about what consciousness is! But there’s no definitional confusion about the word “consciousness” itself. People know what needs to be explained, it’s just that explaining the phenomenon is very hard, and no one fully has yet.

He says that Isaac Newton would have been able to define “water,” even though he did not know the chemical formula for water that we use today.

My naive view is that consciousness is what Descartes meant by cogito ergo sum. It’s the ghost in the machine, so to speak. We can deride the ghost in the machine all we want, but until we can explain the ghost using our knowledge of the machine (and Hoel seems to think we will never reach that point), treating the mind as a ghost in the machine is the practical thing to do.

Paul Weinstein, Jr., writes,

the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) reviewed faculty versus non-faculty positions at the top 50 universities in the U.S. (based on the most recent rankings conducted by U.S. News and World Report). On average, the top universities in the U.S. have only 1 faculty member per 11 students. By contrast, these same institutions have 1 nonfaculty employee per 4 students. Put another way, there are now 3 times as many non-faculty as there are faculty per student at the best schools in the U.S.

I believe that one could find something similar in K-12 education.

substacks referenced above:

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Consciousness is a great mystery. Its definition isn't.