November 21, 2020

Beware election analyses, Obama's tower of books, Psilocybin and Phrygian caps

Nov 22, 2020

Welcome to the Weekend Reccs. Today’s world is curious and cacophonous. This newsletter delivers an eclectic sample of some things to read, watch, and ponder over your weekend. There’s a lot of economics and politics, but there is also so much more.

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Hi everyone,

As the Weekend Reccs continues to grow and change, I’ll be trying a few different formats to see what y’all find most enjoyable.

One of the many changes for this issue: the recommended links are accompanied by an asterisk (*). All other links are just supporting information or citations.

Please use the comment function (click on dialogue bubble at top of this post) to let me know what you think.

The Quick Links

Beware Electoral Analyses: Many people have been spending the first weeks of November firing out national election analyses and takes before the votes were fully counted in some areas. I found this particular example* from Brookings egregious given that it should have been fairly obvious to the authors that Nassau would not go for Trump after the mail-ins were received, and because, well, when you’re at the top of your field you don’t need to fire off premature analyses and the fastest takes to drive traffic. This is especially true when doing so is at the expense of what got your institution to the top: accuracy.
That being said, the directionality of the analysis is correct and will only be magnified by the remaining votes. The piece raises an interesting point, so it is still worth a read. But folks, don’t trust all the electoral analysis you read in the last few weeks, especially not county-level nation-wide analyses. We need those last mail-ins in NY, ME, OH, MA, and CA to be counted.
Over the next two years I am sure we will start to dig more into the fact that Biden won the places with opportunity in America, and whether that is a better indicator than the urban-rural divide. As we do so, we probably should be considering things in terms of margins and not just a binary “who won which county.” I think the analysis that I would love to see broken out by education level is: (number of job postings / number of job seekers) vs. vote margin.
Best-seller: Barack Obama’s memoir broke Penguin Random House’s record* for most sales in a single day, which was previously held by…Michelle Obama. The book is 1.5 inches thick, meaning that if Barack’s first-day sales (887,000) were all physical copies and were stacked they would be just shy of 21 miles high. Many of these sales were in fact digital, but still, if even a third were physical that tower could reach a jet in flight.
No Dock For You: Key West banned* large cruise ships from docking at the island. At first blush this seemed to me a noble push against cruise ships’ devastating toll on the environment. As it turns out, it wasn’t that big of a loss: cruisers don’t open their pocketbooks, spending ~5% compared to other tourists. If you’ve got a small island, you’re limited by the number of people that can enjoy it. You want to maximize spend per person. This restriction, paradoxically, very well could be a boon for their economy.
’Tis the season for cinnamon. Often it is harvested* by hand as workers strip the bark from cinnamon trees.
A different type of echo chamber: Soon you can literally have a bubble to only hear what you want.* (s/o Anand Macherla)
Italian police use a Lamborghini* to transport a kidney 300 miles in 2 hours. (!)

The Long Read: Down the White Rabbit’s Hole

Oregon’s move to decriminalize hard drugs overshadowed another ballot measure that passed: legalization of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) in therapy. There’s a growing body of evidence that several drugs currently on Schedule I have therapeutic potential, and it is time for us to take seriously the pursuit of medical research in this space. Perhaps these drugs will not be improvements on available therapies, but we won’t know if we don’t do the research.

While we don’t really understand fully the neural mechanisms underpinning psilocybin’s effects, we do know that it, and its lab-produced relative, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), are agonists of 5-HT2A (serotonin) receptors. This means they bind to these receptors and activate them. These 5-HT2A receptors are known to play a role in memory, learning, and attention.

An overly-simplified (but useful!) way of thinking of how these drugs work is that your brain is a set of information toll roads. Couriers with envelopes of information to deliver can’t travel along the toll roads without someone paying the toll, and so mostly they sit there waiting. When the toll is paid, the courier dashes off and delivers their envelope to its destination. The management recognizes which couriers are giving the most useful information and so lowers the price of that gate’s toll and increases the number of lanes on that particular route. This reinforcing mechanism means there’s a pretty typical rhythm to which toll roads get used.

Now imagine that someone decided to drop the tolls all over to $0.01 and told the couriers to just go for it. You’d get a lot of new, probably weird, routes being used. This is, practically, your brain on psilocybin and LSD. These 5-HT2A receptors are lit up across different parts of your brain, which leads to hallucinations and expanding your sense of what things are important (a bunch of new routes being used!) while diminishing your sense of self-importance (lessening a pathway that is usually well-trodden). This expansion of what you are attending to and what you find meaningful (and a healthy dose of hallucinations) are why people believe these drugs promote creativity. But it also can be their key to therapeutic potential. In the particular case of depression, it may be the case that shaking up your brain’s usual patterns could break cycles of rumination.

This is a marked contrast from the strategy of using SSRIs, a major class of drugs in depression management and treatment. SSRIs seek to, in effect, ratchet up the cost of those well-trodden tolls since they don’t seem to be very helpful but the management keeps upgrading them.

The psychopharmacological community will have to continue research on the clinical potential of psilocybin for clinical depression and other conditions such as anxiety, but the ballot measure in Oregon means that perhaps as early as 2022 licensed service providers will be able to administer it in cases where psilocybin would be a part of the proper course of treatment.

As we wait for these developments to unfold, the essay that spurred this long read* gives a delightful review of psilocybin in British culture and folklore including the first recorded “trip.” The Phrygian cap that gave its name to the magic mushroom (the liberty cap) has an interesting history itself that is worth diving into, at least for a paragraph.

First appearing over 2400 years ago, the Phrygian cap has since become a pervasive little-r republican symbol, appearing in everything from the Capitol rotunda to the coat of arms of Haiti to the depiction of Marianne in Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple. In antiquity, the Phrygian cap had a close association with Roman mystery cults, including Mithraism and the cult of Attis, as these groups seem to be based on beliefs emanating from Phrygia. Sources suggest there was an annual weeklong celebration in springtime for Attis, preceded by a prolonged period of self-restraint. The springtime festival was a recognition of Attis’s death and entombment and, after three days, his rebirth — which, you know, is altogether really nothing like any mainstream holiday that is celebrated nowadays. Around the same time, similar looking but different caps were worn by freed slaves and became symbolic of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In the 1700s when republicanism and antiquity were both in vogue folks got confused and started using the Phrygian cap as the symbol it is today.

Lagniappe

Thanksgiving is this week. If you have any plans to get together with your family you should get a COVID test before Tuesday. Even if you don’t believe that you’ve been exposed, it does not hurt to get a test. You should encourage all those you’re celebrating with to get a test too. You can find a list of community based testing sites that should be offering free tests here and a guide on how to avoid surprise billing here.

Also a lagniappe for Black Friday: If you weren’t going to buy it otherwise, you don’t save money when it is on sale.

Be well!

Graph(s) of the week

[WSJ] Downtime + extra unemployment insurance + economic stimulus = innovation boom?
[u/lookatnum] While we’re on the topic of ballot measures that increased access to Schedule I drugs, here’s a clever data visualization:

Before I go, a clarification on last week’s decision framework can be found here. I didn’t want to make this post any longer.

Please keep sending me feedback and thoughts. I write this newsletter to share interesting ideas and articles. I love to hear from y’all, especially when you disagree with me. Thanks to everyone who wrote me back last week, I look forward to many more emails (or, preferably, comments directly on posts so we all can be a part of the discussion).

I am grateful for all of you this Thanksgiving!

Harrison

The Weekend Reccs

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