Lead pipes are dangerous? Make 'em mandatory

Links and updates for Fall 2024

photo cred: my dad

It’s Election Day in the US, which means everybody is waiting in lines and refreshing their newsfeeds all day, looking for things to do in between bouts of freaking out. So I’m gonna keep things light with the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a roundup of stuff I’ve been reading for the past few months.

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(1) GET THE LEAD OUT

We’ve known since Roman times that lead pipes can poison people. So uh...why have we used them for ~2000 years? Have we just been poisoning ourselves all this time? According to this paper from 1981, lead pipes are usually fine because a protective mineral crust forms on the inside. But the crust won’t form if you’ve got the wrong minerals in your water, and that’s when you run into trouble.

It seems like people realize this every few decades, freak out, and the lead pipe industry responds by lobbying local governments to write requirements for lead pipes into their building codes. In Chicago, for instance, it was illegal not to use lead pipes until 1986.

Source

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(2) According to his chief of staff, Ronald Regan routinely received astrological guidance via his wife Nancy, who secretly consulted an astrologer named Joan Quigley.

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(3) GOODHART’S LAW IN ACTION

Citi Bikes pays users to move bikes from stations that have too many bikes to stations that have too few. Apparently you can make a buck by moving all the bikes from one station to another, and then moving them all back.

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(4) SUBSTACK REC

I really dig

Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

, an all-book-review Substack. Check out their review of a book called Fear of a Setting Sun, which is about how most of the Founding Fathers ended up thinking that the United States had gone disastrously wrong and was about to collapse.

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(5) WAR! HUH! YEAH! WHAT IS IT…? SERIOUSLY THOUGH. I’M LITERALLY ASKING WHAT IT IS

Lots of ideas that seem obvious now had to be invented by somebody, like randomized-controlled trials, crop rotation, and zero (the number). The anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that we should add war to the list: war is an invention, one that some cultures never came up with. For example, when someone pisses you off, instead of going to war you can swear before the gods that you’ll never speak to each other ever again.

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(6) The original Hippocratic oath includes a promise not to seduce anybody in your patient’s household. I refuse to accept treatment from any doctor who has not made this pledge. (h/t

Max Nussenbaum

)

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(7) I’M BUGGIN’

Everybody my age remembers that wild autumn of 1998 when the movies Antz and A Bug’s Life came out within a few weeks of each other. Both were “computer-animated films about insects, starring a non-conformist ant who falls in love with an ant princess, leaves the mound, and eventually returns and is hailed as a hero.”

I didn’t realize this kind of thing happens all the time—there are several “twin films” every year. For instance, 2023’s The Pope’s Exorcist and 2024’s The Exorcism both star Russel Crowe as an exorcist. Three films about stage magicians came out in 2006: The Prestige, The Illusionist, and Scoop. If you loved 2018’s A Quiet Place, you’ll love 2019’s The Silence, because “both are about parents with a deaf teenage daughter trying to survive a planet-wide attack from creatures who hunt their human prey by sound.”

Sometimes twin films happen on purpose—a studio tries to rush out some derivative dreck to capitalize on a more famous movie’s success. But sometimes twin films are simply evidence of the bizarre power of the zeitgeist. The Silence started production before A Quiet Place, and it was based on a book from 2015; it just got unlucky and came out slightly too late.

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(8) THE HIGH SCHOOL THAT MAKES PEOPLE BELIEVE IN EVIL

Speaking of zeitgeist, I only recently discovered that two of the most famous social psychologists of all time—Stanley Milgram and Phil Zimbardo—went to the same high school. Milgram is best known for his shock studies, where an alarming proportion of people were willing to electrocute a stranger to death in the lab. Zimbardo is best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, which was once a classic piece of research, but has since been revealed to be more like an episode of reality TV—Zimbardo apparently directed his “guards” to do all the horrible things he later claimed they did themselves. According to Zimbardo, he was the popular one in high school, and Milgram was the smart one.

Anyway, I’m not sure what it was about James Monroe High School in the Bronx that made its students want to perform elaborate pantomimes that demonstrate people’s capacity for evil, but maybe it’s good that the school has since shut down.

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(9) Gregor Mendel was originally going to use mice for his famous heredity experiments, but he switched to peas because the bishop in charge of his abbey didn’t want mice boinking in the building.

Edit 11/6/24: This may not be true! See this comment.

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(10) I SAW THE GIANT TRACTOR AND I WAS LIKE, WHAT

Like most adults, I don’t know how to talk to kids (“So, uh, do you like that show about the dogs who are also cops?”). So I loved this article from

Lisa Sibbett

about how kids need different conversational doorknobs than adults do. For instance, we think it’s polite to ask open-ended questions, but it’s easier for kids to respond to multiple-choice questions:

• Instead of “Did you have fun at gymnastics?” try “Did you love gymnastics today or hate it?” or “Which do you like better, gymnastics or drawing? Or sitting silently in the dark doing nothing?” 

• Instead of “What’s your favorite food?” you could ask, “Which food do you like best: pizza, ramen, or fish guts?” 

And sometimes it’s easier not to ask at all. Instead, you can offer an interesting tidbit that kids can react to:

“On my way here I saw a tractor with the most gigantic tires I have ever seen! They were bigger than my car! I was like, ‘whaaaat????’”

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(11) BROWNE NOISE

There’s nothing more quintessentially human than being extremely skeptical about most things but extremely credulous about one specific thing. The best case of this I’ve found is Sir Thomas Browne, an English physician who wrote Psuedodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths in 1646. He was a one-man fact-checking department, spending hundreds of pages busting popular myths like:

• Crystals are just tightly-packed ice

• If a wolf sees you before you see the wolf, you’ll lose your voice

• Women have more ribs than men (because God used one of Adam’s ribs to make Eve)

That same Sir Thomas, however, also testified that witches definitely exist, and helped convict two girls accused of witchcraft, who were then hanged. We all contain multitudes, except those of us who are executed by the state because the local expert believes in witches.

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(12) THE ORIGINAL SCAT ARTIST

Another guy with multitudes: Mozart. The guy who wrote the tune for “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” also wrote stuff like this to his cousin/possible crush:

Well, I wish you good night, but first,

Shit in your bed and make it burst.

Wolfgang and his whole clan loved scatological humor—apparently “Lick my arse” was sort of a Mozart family motto. I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff because we all think great minds are serious and grim, when in fact they’re just as weird as the rest of us. Imagine what horrifying Wikipedia pages might be generated if you became a world-famous artist and scholars pored through your texts after you died.

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(13) BEES IN THE TRAP

Earlier this year, I wrote about how a Harvard Business School professor named Francesca Gino was suing the science blog Data Colada for alleging fraud in Gino’s studies. Great news: that lawsuit has been dismissed, which is a victory for scientific discourse everywhere. Just in case, though, I must remind you that nothing on Experimental History can be considered defamation because there’s no evidence I’m sentient at all; I’m just a swarm of bees trapped in a room with a keyboard (PLZ SEND HONEY).

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(14) During Prohibition, desperate folks sometimes tried to drink industrial alcohol. The government responded by ordering manufacturers to poison their alcohol, likely killing ~10,000 people.

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(15) HOW 2 MAKE LIL DUDES

Worried about declining fertility? Try this recipe for creating an artificial man (c. 1537):

That the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb [“venter equinus”, meaning “warm, fermenting horse dung”], or at least so long that it comes to life and moves itself, and stirs, which is easily observed. After this time, it will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse’s womb, a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller.

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(16) A bit of internet performance art: How to Monetize a Blog

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(17) TOAST ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM

In my last links post, I mentioned an Experimental History reader who put his toaster in the dishwasher. A blogger named Nehaveigur has since posted a replication:

I’m now able to report that after drying out in the sun, my toaster still works and is considerably cleaner and that my skepticism of Conventional Wisdom has marginally increased.

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(18) MAKE IT RAIN FOR A GOOD CAUSE

An Experimental History reader named Matthew Coleman asked to share a link to Giving Multiplier, a platform that adds extra money to your charitable donations. That link includes a special promo code that will boost your donation even more than the usual rate.

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(19) U KNOW U NEED UNIQUENESS

A recent paper claims that people’s “need for uniqueness” has declined over the last 20 years. It would suit my biases if that was true—it fits well with the stuff I wrote about in Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly and Oligopoly Everywhere—so I had to be extra careful while reading it. Ultimately, I’m not sure if it can tell us much.

The researchers analyzed responses to an online personality survey that was administered between 2000 and 2020 and includes such items as “I always try to follow rules” and “I tend to express my opinions publicly, regardless of what others say.” They find a statistically significant decrease in people’s self-reported desire for uniqueness over time.

But that decrease is tiny. We’re talking -.008 units per year on a scale that goes from 1 to 5. Here’s what that looks like:

In the Illusion of Moral Decline, I counted changes like this—whether up or down—as meaningless, for three reasons. First, I mean, look at it. Second, you should never expect to get exactly the same answer to a survey question over time: maybe slightly different people are taking the survey or using the internet in the first place, etc., so tiny changes are always suspect.

And third, rather than squinting at each effect and trying to decide whether it was big enough to matter, I set a “Region of Practical Equivalence” (really I just used the default in my stats program) and checked whether the effect fell into it or out of it. This effect would have to be 10x larger to beat that benchmark. So to the extent that “need for uniqueness” is a thing, I don’t think there’s any good evidence that it’s changed over the past 20 years.

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(20) LIVING THE MILLER HIGH LIFE

I’ve listened to the Two Psychologists, Four Beers podcast for a long time, so it was a real treat to be on a recent episode. I drank two Miller High Lifes and tried to explain why scientists shouldn’t go to jail.

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(21) IDEOLOGICAL TURING TEST UPDATE

In my last post, I showed that both Democrats and Republicans can pass an Ideological Turing Test. Some folks thought the test was too easy for the people writing the statements—people pretending to be the other side can just write a few sentences of boilerplate and look exactly like the real thing. Maybe Readers couldn’t tell the difference because there simply wasn’t any signal for them to detect.

This is a reasonable critique, but it doesn’t fit the evidence. People pretending to the be opposite political party did leave signal behind, but the Readers failed to pick it up. We know that because we were able to build an algorithm that reliably distinguished real statements from fake statements. My coauthor Kris has since done some additional analyses, and he was able to outperform both humans and chance by using bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) in combination with a lasso regression:

Still not perfect, but the fact that BERT gives the right answer 60-80% of the time suggests that pretenders do indeed sound different from the real thing.

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(22) FROM THE ARCHIVES

Two years ago, I was trying to figure out: how much should we hate each other?

The great myths of political hatred

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(23) And finally: Toilets disguised as books.

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See y’all soon.

-Adam