
Evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism (2013) - kristianc
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062275
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jonnycomputer
I do believe that parasitic load probably has significant effects on a variety
of psychological variables and preferences. But the web of causation here is
extremely complex; neither do I think testing this hypothesis by looking at
state-level governance is particularly useful. Instead, you would want to
attain individual psychological response measures related to preference or
acceptance of authoritarianism, and related that to individual parasitic load
within a particular community; even better would to get longitudinal data
showing that within-individual changes in parasitic load are correlated with
changes in preference (controlled experiments here face ethical hurdles four
obvious reasons). Even then, you are going to have to account for factors that
may be correlated with the likelihood of getting parasites and having
attitudes that are favorable to authoritarianism.

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medymed
“Results revealed that parasite prevalence predicted measures of authoritarian
governance, and did so even when statistically controlling for other threats
to human welfare.”

There are so many varied and interacting and nonlinear threats to human
welfare that I don’t know if the number of variables to control for (if even
identifiable and measurable and appropriately transformed) would allow for
meaningful result with only a few hundreds countries as data points.

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vergessenmir
There has been some psychological research which hints at this relation of how
diseases from outsiders bias decisions against those communities. The
literature seems to suggest that it's an evolutionary response to protect the
community and these biases are difficult to detect because they are so innate
in how we assess risk and process threats to a group.

I was just saying the other day that we're one Coronovirus-like pandemic away
from seeing sweeping changes in government policy that lend themselves to
authoritarian rule. Changes that go beyond what we've seen on removing the red
tape around how hospitals are run and how the spaces within them can re-
purposed for other use.

Imagine a virus that has the properties similar to covd-19 but a higher
mortality rate, affecting children and working age groups. Containment of a
pandemic would be trivial if you knew the location of infected patient and
everybody with whom they've been in contact with over a 14 day period. That
data is already available from the fact most people are mobile phone users.
It's just the data is not shared. Containment would be more specific and
targeted. At the moment health professionals rely on self-reporting by
patients to follow the spread of a pandemic.

The pretext for dissolving these artificial boundaries between the pools of
data owned by corporations, intelligence services, health institutions would
be easy to provide in the interest of protecting the government and the
public. It would seem both responsible and reasonable to the public if the
mortality and symptoms were terrifying enough. It can be argued that China's
alleged effectiveness in dealing with the virus in cities with populations
larger than LA, London and NY was due to an authoritarian government model. We
also see our governments working with the private sector to handle this
pandemic.

Governments are scared because they do not have visibility on the pandemic's
spread because of problems in scaling tests, using numbers of confirmed cases
serve as poor proxies for decisions to be made. I don't think it would be long
before someone starts asking the question, if we had richer data on confirmed
patients and who they'd been in contact with, could we have nipped this in the
but before it had the impact its had on the economy and put the health system
at risk.

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luckylion
I'm actually surprised that we haven't had a government try to access that
kind of data. They've been generally going at it for all kinds of "small"
stuff, burglary, riots, and they're not trying to get their hands on it to
combat a pandemic?

~~~
vharuck
It might happen eventually. Possible explanation for why it hasn't happened
yet: it's influenced by how the government employee views their relationship
to the individual.

I work with very detailed patient data in a state health department. It's been
drilled into me that patient privacy is above everything. Everyone I work with
is out to help these people. We would be ashamed if we looked at, let alone
made decisions with, data beyond what was necessary.

Law enforcement is different. One of their major tasks is to gather data. Data
on people suspected of a crime. Or data from innocent people that can lead to
suspects.

Maybe convincing public health to push the boundaries of collecting personal
data to combat this disease will be as hard as convincing law enforcement to
be less gung-ho. It goes against long history of professional ethics.

I have no sources, so take it with a tub of salt.

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lkrubner
A large exception would be Russia, and to a lesser extent, all of Eastern
Europe. The extreme cold in Russia helps suppress parasites, yet it has
historically been authoritarian. It’s also worth noting some of those
countries that for awhile provided interesting exceptions, such as Liberia
from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian
territories.

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Mediterraneo10
> such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded
> by authoritarian territories.

Liberia wasn't particularly free as most of us here might understand the term.
While the freed slaves’ constitution was modeled on the US Constitution, civil
and political rights applied only to the freed slaves who came over from North
America and their descendants, while Liberia’s indigenous population was
neglected at the best of times, oppressed at the worst. (And even among the
freed slaves’ descendants, those connected with Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge
formed a political elite that others could never hope to enter). To a
considerable degree, the political strife of the late 20th-century was due to
rage at this skewed system of government.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge

I'd heard of the Freed-Slave-vs-Local-Pop thing in Liberia before, but never
about the Masonic Lodge. Got a source?

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Mediterraneo10
This is so prominent an aspect of Liberian history that a simple Google search
"liberia masonic lodge" will give you a great deal of reputable reading
material.

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adwf
I admit to not having done more than skim the abstract, but couldn't it be
just as likely that authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease (and
famine, etc.) through ineptitude?

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lkrubner
That’s seems especially reasonable to assume if we look at the divide between
North Korea and South Korea, a division that has only existed since 1950.
South Korea has had increasingly better governance and increasingly less
parasites, in contrast to North Korea.

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HarryHirsch
South Korea really took off after General Park Chung-hee seized power, he
built the economy and modernized the country. One of the great success stories
is the praziquantel story. Korea had a schistosomiasis problem; they developed
a process to synthesize praziquantel cheaply (the original Bayer process was
more complicated) as part of the eradication campaign. That was in the late
60s. The Park dictatorship was overthrown only in 1979.

~~~
hwillis
And even up until 1972 the command economy in the north and the (more)
liberalized economy in the south hadn't really diverged. NK's growth slowed as
they lost the support of the USSR and went negative during the collapse. Not
really what you'd expect if authoritarianism was the cause of economic
collapse, but exactly what you'd expect if during that time, a hostile state
ascended from superiority to supremacy.

It's absurd to view the Koreas in isolation since they were both extremely
obviously the subjects of a proxy war in which one side lost decisively. The
two countries' economies were driven by export and the US and USSR were by far
their largest partners. That wasn't an accident.

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__s
Was considering this, that the debates about authoritarian vs democractic
philosophy are moot currently. There are times where your population must be
treated as a herd. While we often see the "father" metaphor for authoritarian
leaders, they're really playing the role of shephard. When not dealing with
situations where people may totally screw over others unintentionally, this
shepharding becomes unnecessary, & ends up only being a power grab

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hirundo
> According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are
> more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of
> disease-causing pathogens

This predicts that governments will become more authoritarian during and in
the aftermath of the pandemic. This is unsurprising given the widespread
demand for large scale government interventions. Among the major damage
Covid-19 leaves behind may be to give authoritarianism a better reputation.

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lifeisstillgood
Errr, so if I get this, nations where there are high rates of individual
stress are more likely to welcome authoritarianism - and parasites in people
indicate one such stress. Pretty much everyone welcomes peace from a
"strongman" over chaos of war or economic dislocation.

It is hardly "we are all ruled by a secret state of bugs".

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mcguire
How do they address causation in these studies? At first glance, it seems like
authoritarianism would be predictive of parasite presence rather than the
other way around.

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dwighttk
(2013)

~~~
throwawayy477
also (Plos One)

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mateo1
If I was Canadian I'd be really angry knowing my tax money funded this man's
career. After reading Murray's previous publications I feel like the world is
really unfair and I certainly think less of Social Psychologists and Tulane
University and UBC.

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hsnewman
Correlation is not always causation.

~~~
sykick
I don’t understand why this comment is made as frequently as it is. Do you
think the authors of the paper aren’t aware of this fact? Do you think they
didn’t think of this when they did their research?

~~~
sbuttgereit
I imagine that the authors are so likely to be aware of this fact that you can
take for granted that they are.

Having said that, there is absolutely a valid question of did they incorrectly
rationalize their approach, or rely on studies that did so, such that they in
their own minds thought they addressed the issue when in reality they hadn't.
My sense is that parent comment to which you replied probably didn't read the
study, the original studies, or consider the point I'm making (sounds like a
shot from the hip after reading the title), but the viewpoint isn't
necessarily invalid.

Given that some authors have a very real and emotional attachment to ideas
they are trying to prove out in such studies... the rationalization error is
one to watch for...

~~~
sykick
What you say is true. I like the way you phrased things. What you write about
the authors potentially having a bias that blinds them is nicely put. If
someone has reason to think this I’d welcome reading their commentary.

I am tired with people just saying that correlation does not always imply
causation. As if this is somehow insightful. Whenever I see this I think less
of the person who writes it. It’s as if they don’t have enough common sense to
assume that authors of a study that relies on statistical analysis don’t know
this.

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spanktheuser
Guess we’ll have to do something drastic about our billionaire load if we want
to get rid of Trump.

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stochastimus
The title is a tautology.

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klmadfejno
The elephant in the room is almost certainly that poverty causes both
parasites and authoritarianism

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jhawk28
Or is it authoritarianism that causes poverty and parasites?

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shd4
What came first?

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datashow
"First" does not equal to "cause" either.

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luckylion
Second rules out cause though. If you have A=>B and B=>A as possibilities, and
you can rule one of them out with a very simple question, that's a good way to
start.

If computers came after electricity, they didn't cause electricity. That says
nothing about the possibility of electricity causing computers, but it brings
us forward nonetheless.

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leemailll
a plosone paper published in 2013, enough said

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rocha
Can you elaborate? Thanks.

~~~
leemailll
plos one is one of the journals that most people treated as none significant
one in the field, and institutions in China effective ban researchers publish
papers on it
([https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07025-5)).
And the retractions from this journal is increasing
([https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706...](https://mobile.twitter.com/retractionwatch/status/1212396706870026241)).

The reputation is so bad that wikipedia includes a sentence in the entry as
"In 2016, Jeffrey Beall described PLOS One as a scientific spammer. Owing to
concerns about the peer review process at the time, he considered the journal
more as a digital repository than a scholarly publication.[41]" A recent event
resonates with this which is described as "CreatorGate" on wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLOS_One#CreatorGate)),
which even in the abstract of the paper, as quoted from retractionwatch
([https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-
retracting-p...](https://retractionwatch.com/2016/03/03/plos-one-retracting-
paper-that-cites-the-creator/)), "The paper, about the biomechanics of hands,
gives a shout out to “the Creator” as early as the abstract, which contains
this sentence: 'The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical
characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and
articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of
daily tasks in a comfortable way.'" If this can be slipped by review process,
any thing can happen. I still yet to met any senior scientist who is proud to
say in public whose group published on plos one.

~~~
rocha
Thank you

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gigatexal
So roughly the plot to V for Vendetta in how the far right UK government came
to power.

