For amusement I was traipsing through the OECD health stats for various countries, and I was stunned by one of the things that springs out of the data – health care systems that are government run or funded tend to be cheaper despite being just as effective in every respect, and more effective in some respects. I’m sure someone somewhere has analysed the data properly, but even a crude analysis suggests the empirical case for having a government run or funded health care system is quite strong.

Here are the numbers, I’ll explain them all below. (Apologies in advance if the table crashes your computer.)

Here’s what the columns mean:

Pub – Public Expenditure on Health as a Percentage of Total Expenditure on Health
$ – Total Expenditure on Health per capita in US$ (Update 20/11: These are PPP adjusted. Sorry I should have made that clearer earlier.)
% – Total Expenditure on Health as a % of GDP
FL – Female Life Expectancy at Birth in Years
ML – Male Life Expectancy at Birth in Years
IM – Infant Mortality – Deaths per 1000 Live Births
PP – Practicing Physicians per 1000 population

The figures in italics are from 1998, the others are from 1999, the last year for which complete statistics are available.

The lines in bold are the correlation coefficients between the first column (% of the health care system that is government funded) and the others. And it suggests there is a positive correlation between government involvement and (a) life expectancy and (b) number of physicians, and a negative correlation between government involvement and (a) health care costs and (b) infant mortality. The correlations with life expectancy are obviously very weak. Turkey and Mexico are outliers, so I took them out to see what difference it made. And the weak correlation with higher life expectancy goes away, but the other results are unchanged.

The last two lines are the same correlations, but now with absolute expenditure rather than government involvement as the baseline. The results are pretty striking. Throwing money at health care really produces positive results. And that holds up even if you remove the two outliers.

I’m sure someone has a more convincing version of this, but I think the prima facie case that increasing government involvement in the health care system, because it produces budgetary savings without harming the community’s health, is pretty strong. But I’m sure plenty of people will have objections. Here are my answers to the most obvious ones.

Haven’t other people looked at this in more depth? Why are you bothering with this?
I’m a blogger – it’s my business to write about things I’m uninformed about. Besides, these numbers are pretty striking. I had always believed that government funded health systems are better in many respects, but I never thought there would be such a simple argument to that effect.

Isn’t correlation a really crude measure to use here?
Sure. If someone has a less crude measure showing government involvement is financially or medically bad, it could easily overturn this. But it’s certainly a pointer, and it’s pretty unambiguous which direction it points in. (Besides, I’m a philosopher, we’re not quantitatively trained!)

Aren’t there good theoretical arguments showing that government is bad for you?
Well, there are arguments, but it’s questionable how good they are. In any case, given a choice between theory and data I’ll take the data 11 times out of 10. In Australia for a while the term ‘economic rationalist’ was being used for free-market true believers. I always thought there was a market opening for ‘economic empiricist’, because that’s pretty much what I am.

Could there be some other explanation of the correlations?
Obviously there could be. It could just be the climate that explains why infant mortality in Iceland is so low, for instance. But note that the negative correlation between government funding and absolute funding removes the most obvious external explanation. If there was a positive correlation here then of course you’d expect there to be a positive correlation with good things like doctors and live babies. That the correlation remains despite the big government countries spending less money is remarkable.

Have you just cherry picked the data?
Perhaps unintentionally, but these were the only numbers I looked at. The only manipulation I did was to check the numbers without the two outliers, which actually weakened my case a little. (Not that correlations of the order of +/-0.06 mean much at all anyway.)

Does this support single-payer or single-provider or something else?
It’s neutral. The data only measure how many government dollars go in, not whether they go to private or public institutions.

I know this isn’t conclusive, but next time someone says government involvement in health care is bound to lead to budget blowouts, enormous queues, death, plague, or any other horseman of the apocalypse, I’ll ask them to find some data to show that before I believe them.

Thanks to a commentator on Matthew Yglesias’s blog for the link to the OECD site.

For amusement I was traipsing through the OECD health stats for various countries, and I was stunned by one of the things that springs out of the data – health care systems that are government run or funded tend to be cheaper despite being just as effective in every respect, and more effective in some respects. I’m sure someone somewhere has analysed the data properly, but even a crude analysis suggests the empirical case for having a government run or funded health care system is quite strong.

Here are the numbers, I’ll explain them all below. (Apologies in advance if the table crashes your computer.)

Here’s what the columns mean:

Pub – Public Expenditure on Health as a Percentage of Total Expenditure on Health
$ – Total Expenditure on Health per capita in US$ (Update 20/11: These are PPP adjusted. Sorry I should have made that clearer earlier.)
% – Total Expenditure on Health as a % of GDP
FL – Female Life Expectancy at Birth in Years
ML – Male Life Expectancy at Birth in Years
IM – Infant Mortality – Deaths per 1000 Live Births
PP – Practicing Physicians per 1000 population

The figures in italics are from 1998, the others are from 1999, the last year for which complete statistics are available.

The lines in bold are the correlation coefficients between the first column (% of the health care system that is government funded) and the others. And it suggests there is a positive correlation between government involvement and (a) life expectancy and (b) number of physicians, and a negative correlation between government involvement and (a) health care costs and (b) infant mortality. The correlations with life expectancy are obviously very weak. Turkey and Mexico are outliers, so I took them out to see what difference it made. And the weak correlation with higher life expectancy goes away, but the other results are unchanged.

The last two lines are the same correlations, but now with absolute expenditure rather than government involvement as the baseline. The results are pretty striking. Throwing money at health care really produces positive results. And that holds up even if you remove the two outliers.

I’m sure someone has a more convincing version of this, but I think the prima facie case that increasing government involvement in the health care system, because it produces budgetary savings without harming the community’s health, is pretty strong. But I’m sure plenty of people will have objections. Here are my answers to the most obvious ones.

Haven’t other people looked at this in more depth? Why are you bothering with this?
I’m a blogger – it’s my business to write about things I’m uninformed about. Besides, these numbers are pretty striking. I had always believed that government funded health systems are better in many respects, but I never thought there would be such a simple argument to that effect.

Isn’t correlation a really crude measure to use here?
Sure. If someone has a less crude measure showing government involvement is financially or medically bad, it could easily overturn this. But it’s certainly a pointer, and it’s pretty unambiguous which direction it points in. (Besides, I’m a philosopher, we’re not quantitatively trained!)

Aren’t there good theoretical arguments showing that government is bad for you?
Well, there are arguments, but it’s questionable how good they are. In any case, given a choice between theory and data I’ll take the data 11 times out of 10. In Australia for a while the term ‘economic rationalist’ was being used for free-market true believers. I always thought there was a market opening for ‘economic empiricist’, because that’s pretty much what I am.

Could there be some other explanation of the correlations?
Obviously there could be. It could just be the climate that explains why infant mortality in Iceland is so low, for instance. But note that the negative correlation between government funding and absolute funding removes the most obvious external explanation. If there was a positive correlation here then of course you’d expect there to be a positive correlation with good things like doctors and live babies. That the correlation remains despite the big government countries spending less money is remarkable.

Have you just cherry picked the data?
Perhaps unintentionally, but these were the only numbers I looked at. The only manipulation I did was to check the numbers without the two outliers, which actually weakened my case a little. (Not that correlations of the order of +/-0.06 mean much at all anyway.)

Does this support single-payer or single-provider or something else?
It’s neutral. The data only measure how many government dollars go in, not whether they go to private or public institutions.

I know this isn’t conclusive, but next time someone says government involvement in health care is bound to lead to budget blowouts, enormous queues, death, plague, or any other horseman of the apocalypse, I’ll ask them to find some data to show that before I believe them.

Thanks to a commentator on Matthew Yglesias’s blog for the link to the OECD site.

I just got some voting slips for participant proposals for the TIAA-CREF accounts that I have. I assume many readers of this blog have similar accounts, which is why this might be interesting.

One of the proposals was to stop investing in all companies that support gun control. It almost goes without saying that this is a Very Bad Idea, and one that I’d strongly recommend people vote against. I doubt the proposal has much chance, but just in case a few gun-nuts with college jobs get behind it, it is worth taking the time to vote it down.

The accompanying documentation to the vote included a mealy-mouthed pro forma objection to the proposal from the board, that basically just said “We’re Friedmanites about business ethics, so we don’t think we should care what the companies say or do as long as they make a lot of money.” (Obviously they did not put it quite like that.) I’m not a Friedmanite so I think this is a lousy argument. But I still think there are plenty of reasons to vote against the proposal.

1. Gun control is a Good Thing, so we should be supporting companies that support it, not opposing them.

2. It’s inappropriate to choose which companies to invest in on the basis of their political views.

3. Based on recent NFL results, it seems that groups that support gun control are likely to exceed expectations, and hence should be supported. [1]

I should say a little more about 2. I think it is appropriate to choose which companies to invest in on the basis of their social practices. Indeed, I think shareholder activism, backed by a willingness to move funds, is sometimes a better way to promote social goods than political agitation. To that end, I have most of my investments in so-called socially responsible investment funds. (This isn’t entirely by choice – my other investments took a pretty bad hit in the crash, but the touchy-feely ones held up pretty well. The way they seemed to do so well in bad times might be another proof that there is a God.)

But I think we should distinguish here between which political platitudes a company mouths and what actions it does. The latter may be grounds for taking dramatic actions like removing all institutional funds from them, but the former are not. I wouldn’t sell off my shares in a company because it lends its name to anti-abortion petitions. (Though I would obviously vote against supporting such petitions.) I would be much more tempted to sell them off if the company restructured its health care policies to ensure that its employees could not be covered for abortions.

The current proposal, apart from being on the Wrong Side of the political debate, seeks to punish companies for what they say, not what they do. And I don’t think that’s appropriate, especially for a large investment house.

Having said that, I was quite offended by the way the various proposals were laid out. As well as the “More Money for Gun-Lovers” proposal, the ballot included various proposals put forward to reform various aspects of the fund governance, some other social policy oriented proposals, and the re-election of two trustees. The board approves the re-election, but not the proposals.

So the dead-tree ballot paper is split into two columns, with the one thing supported by the board in one column headed “The Board of Trustees recommends a vote FOR item 1” and the others in a column headed “The Board of Trustees recommends a vote AGAINST the following items.” Subtle, eh? Then when I went to vote online, there’s a single check-box for those who want to vote exactly as the board recommends. Needless to say, there was no such check-box for those wanting to vote against the board’s recommendation in every case.

If the fund is going to have this kind of ‘participant involvement’ it should not be stacking the deck in favour of the status quo this way. It’s entirely proper for the Board to investigate proposals and report on their consequences before they go to a vote. It’s not permissible to draw the ballot paper up on the basis of those reports. This is about as ridiculous as ordering candidates on a ballot paper by the number of votes people from their party got in the most recent election.

[1] The NRA Blacklist includes the Kansas City Chiefs, who, before an unfortunate stumble last weekend, were tearing up the league. They still look like having a pretty good season, and should give the Pats quite a scare in the AFC title game. If this is the kind of organisation that supports gun control, I want shares in them!

I’ll stop with the advertising break soon, but this message seemed relevant.

The Pacific APA still needs commentators and chairs in almost all areas.

If you’re able to serve as a commentator or chair, please contact Leslie Francis at francisl@law.utah.edu (please note that all characters in the email address are letters, none are numbers).

The APA only allows a person to be on the main program once (this doesn’t affect participation in groups affiliated with the APA).

The Pacific APA will meet on March 24-28 in Pasadena, California.

I’ll be at the APA – doing a paper on zombies, imaginative resistance, fictional murderers and assorted goodies – and I hope it will be lots of fun. So I want all my friends to be there, hence I’m passing along this.

The Eighth Annual Brown Graduate Student Philosophy Conference

Presented by: Brown University Department of Philosophy
February 20th and 21st, 2004
Keynote Speaker: Jonathan Schaffer, University of Massachusets, Amherst
Presented by: The Philosophy Department at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

Submission Deadline: December 15, 2003

We invite papers of high quality in any area of analytic philosophy. Applicants must submit their papers electronically as .pdf, .doc, or .rtf files. Please submit:

1. A cover sheet with an abstract (maximum 150 words)
2. a paper (maximum 3000 words)

no later than December 15, 2003. Please submit in blind review format, with all identifying information on the cover sheet. Each page should be titled and numbered.

Email submission address: PGF@brown.edu

For more information contact: Allan_Hazlett@brown.edu

For a little project I’m working on I have to write something on cloning, and in particular debates about whether reproductive cloning should be legalised. It isn’t really my area of expertise, so I don’t want to form sweeping judgments too quickly. But at first glance at the literature all of the arguments for banning reproductive cloning look absolutely awful. (With perhaps one exception, which is merely an unsound argument rather than an awful one.) If anyone knows of any good arguments, I’d be rather happy to see them.

One qualification at the start. Like Chris Bertram I take it as a given that the default position with respect to any activity is that it should be lawfully permitted. There is no need for an argument in favour of permitting any activity. There is always a need for an argument in favour of banning an activity. So there’s no need to argue in favour of reproductive cloning.

Having said that, I think there’s probably quite a good argument in its favour. It provides, in principle, a chance for some people who are currently incapable of reproduction to reproduce. Since having and raising children is such an important part of what makes life valuable for so many people, even a slim chance of making this possible for even a small segment of the population is a Very Good Thing. So ceteris paribus, reproductive cloning should be permissible.

What are the arguments against? As I said, this is based on a scan of the literature, not a survey, so it might be incomplete, but here’s what I’ve found so far.

Cloning is unnatural
But lots of things that are unnatural, in the sense that they would be impossible without technological innovation, are currently regarded as unproblematically acceptable. The most commonly cited example is IVF, but on the most obvious definition of natural, caeserian sections are unnatural too. They are especially unnatural if they are designed for the mother’s survival. Nobody, I hope, wants to ban them. For that matter, having children with someone who grew up more than 100 miles from where you did is unnatural too in the sense that it would be impossible without technological assistance. Again, I trust we agree that shouldn’t be banned. So this cannot be an argument on its own for banning cloning.

Cloning is abhorrent
As a general rule, what other people find abhorrent should play no role in deciding whether you or I can do it. There’s good reason for that rule. In the good ol’ days many people found mixed race marriages abhorrent, and so banned them. Some people still find them abhorrent, but luckily they no longer stop other people from marrying. If you listen to Christian radio for any length of time you’ll find that lots of people find sex outside marriage abhorrent. I find professional boxing abhorrent, not to mention the Home Shopping Network. But none of these things should be banned, at least not for that reason. (Perhaps boxing should be banned for other reasons, which we’ll get to.) The general point is that under liberalism we shouldn’t let these kinds of feelings influence what is legally acceptable behvaiour.

Clones will lack dignity because they are in some sense ‘identical’ to their parents
Ugh. The clone is clearly not identical to its parent. When it is born it weighs less than one stone, and its parent weighs more than one stone. By Leibniz’s Law, that implies the two are not identical. The premises in that argument are clearly, determinately, fully, beyond a shadow of a doubt true, so the conclusion is clearly, determinately, fully, beyond a shadow of a doubt true. This one is just lousy metaphysics leading to bad law.

Clones will lack dignity because they share their genes with someone else
The hidden premise here is that sharing genes reduces dignity. But this implies that identical twins have less dignity than everyone else. Some days watching Mark Waugh play cricket I thought “You know, he does have less dignity than everyone out there”. Then I realised that was just jealousy at not being able to play cricket like Mark Waugh. The position that identical twins are in some way lacking in essential human dignity doesn’t pass the laugh test, but it (or at least a premise that entails it) seems to be very influential in some quarters.

Cloning is risky, and potentially harmful
There’s two arguments here. The first is the potential harm to the adult participants. But that’s not an argument for banning cloning, as much as for making sure that adult participants are fully informed of the risks. Once that happens, it would be an unjustified violation of autonomy to prevent them going ahead.

The other issue is the potential harm to the child. Given the medical problems that plagued Dolly, these might be non-trivial. This is more serious, since the child obviously is not in a position to provide informed consent. But the child is hardly in a position to complain, since without the cloning she would not exist. That last step is a little dubious, and actually the arguments here may have some bite. In particular there may, in the short term, be an argument for restricting reproductive cloning to those who could not reproduce any other way. (There are, or at least have been, similar restrictions on IVF.) Roughly the point is that sometimes you don’t want to compare what happens to the (currently non-existent) child to what that child would have been like without cloning, but to what a child in its place may have been like without cloning. But if we restrict cloning to the otherwise incapable of childbearing, there is no such child to put in its place. (This is the argument that may not be absolutely awful, since there is a bit of philosophical work to be done in blocking it. Perhaps for that reason, it doesn’t seem to be that widely stressed in the literature, especially compared to the arguments that really are awful.)

Cloning diminishes bio-diversity
If everyone cloned, the gene pool would lose some of its characteristic diversity and luster. But I take it this is a very remote risk. Even if we allow cloning for everyone, non-cloning reproduction involves having sex, and casual observation suggests that many, perhaps most, people prefer ceteris paribus courses of action that involve having sex to those that don’t. (The last premise is slightly less certain than 0=0, but probably more certain than the premises in Descartes’ cogito.) So I think there will still be plenty of diversity to go around even with cloning.

Cloning is against God’s will
I don’t know – I think if He didn’t want clones he wouldn’t have invented scientists. Slightly less frivilously, we’re meant to be fighting wars with people who base legal codes on religious documents, not imitating them. Somewhat more seriously, when someone proposes banning the consumption of shellfish, I’ll take seriously their “God’s will” arguments about other things. But right now we have better evidence that God doesn’t want you to eat shellfish than that He doesn’t approve of reproductive cloning. So I think it’s very hard to motivate a religously based ban on cloning but not shellfish eating. (Could one argue that perhaps shellfish eating is more important to human values than reproduction, so we are justified overriding God’s wishes on that point? I somehow doubt it.)

I’ve probably missed some argument, and I know I’ve skimmed by some of the points here, but as far as I can tell the moral evidence is firmly in favour of legalising reproductive cloning. Indeed, the ban itself strikes me as profoundly immoral, a potentially serious violation of autonomy. If I’ve missed something really important here though, I’d be happy to hear about it.

I saw Rufus Wainwright at the Avalon last night. Rufus’s voice is just as adorable live as on CD (and even more adorable than on MP3) and he can be very funny in his on-stage banter. All in all very enjoyable, and if he’s visiting your town soon (or a town near you) I’d recommend it.

The only downside was that I managed to miss my intended bus back to Providence. The problem was that I forgot the first two rules about public transport in Boston.

1. Getting anywhere on the Green Line takes longer than you could possibly expect.
2. Even you take into account rule 1, it still applies.

(Apologies to Daniel Davies for ripping off his laws.)

Anyway, those rules and the fact that the evil Bonanza bus left three minutes early meant that I had 2 hours with little to do in Boston. So I repaired to a local bar to watch the Pats game. Fortunately Boston bars are friendly places to be when the local team is winning and you tip well, so the time wasn’t all wasted.

I had brought some work with me, so I even got some logic reading done after the game ended. Now you might think that logic preparation after a night’s drinking will be totally wasted, but actually this isn’t entirely true. For one thing, the numerous typos in Computability and Logic become less annoying in such circumstances.

While on that topic, there is one line in Computability and Logic that I think is a mistake, but it doesn’t seem to be listed in the errata page. Or, more precisely, the only entry for it in the errata doesn’t match up with my impression of what is wrong. (Warning, the following won’t make much sense unless you have the book, and have it open on page 222.)

The line is:

Apologies for the size, that’s a bitmap because it’s so hard to get the symbols in HTML. The penultimate character should obviously be g rather than g, and that has been accounted for in the errata. But here’s what I’d be interested to know from anyone who’s taught from the book. I think the initial ‘G ‘ should not be there. The argument for the line is that diag(a) = g, and Diag represents diag in T. But that would give us the final universal quantification, not the biconditional, right? For what it’s worth, I think if the ‘G ‘ how the next line in the proof is derived is relatively obvious, whereas if it isn’t this is a little hard to see.

So I’m 90% confident that the ‘G ‘ is just a typo. But not 100%, since the people who wrote the book are smarter than me, so I might just be missing something obvious.

While on the subject of typos, it’s probably worth mentioning that in my dissertation I managed to have one of the axioms of probability theory be that for all A, the probability of A was greater than or equal to 1. More bizarrely, in the most recent draft of the truer paper I managed to have one sentence with two errant negations, but because of the way they scoped, the sentence was still false. So I’m sympathetic to those whose text is bogged down with stray symbols, and I’m not exactly in a stone-casting position.

Retuning to the music theme, I started a fun little thread over on Crooked Timber about the greatest rock albums. It turns out my fellow Crooks (or Timberites to use the local lingo) have pretty good music taste. Whether the same can be said of me is a matter of some debate.

I spent most of yesterday dealing with various breakdowns of electronic equipment – to be precise my home computer, my office computer and my TV. Needless to say this did not make me the happiest camper ever, since I really need to spend spare Saturdays clearing up my ‘to do’ list before the twin torments of job searches and graduate admissions take over my life. So naturally I responded by not working, but instead by making up my own iTunes playlist. (Since there’s really no philosophy here I’ve put the rest of this into the extended entry.)
Continue reading →

The other day George Bealer did his “Mental Causation” paper at MIT. It was fun, or at least as much fun as a 90 minute paper at the end of a long day can be. The main idea is rather clever – intentional actions follow by causal laws from both mental states (e.g. decisions) and physical states (e.g. neuron patterns) but the mental states get to count as causes because they “trump”, in Jonathan Schaffer’s sense, the physical states.

There’s plenty of examples that we could use to illustrate trumping. Here’s one that Bealer leans on a bit. The troops are trained to respond to any order from a higher ranking member of the army, and if conflicting orders come in, to respond to the order from the higher ranking of the orderers. The sargeant and the major both shout “Advance!” and the troops advance. What caused the troops to advance? Some people (not all!) have the intuition that it is really the major’s shout, not the sargeant’s. How could we capture that intuition? One nice suggestion is that it is because when we vary what the sargeant shouts, nothing changes in what the troops do, but if we vary what the major shouts, in general it does vary what the troops do. (‘In general’ rather than always, because if the major does not shout, there is no change in what the troops do.)

Induction on 1 case is a dangerous game, but that’s never stopped me from using it and it doesn’t stop Bealer either. Based on that case he formulates the following principle:

Assume c and d are determinables of action types, in particular actions by the entities that are prima facie plausible causes of the effects. Let c(x) and d(y) be the actions that are actually performed, b the actual background conditions, and e the actual effect. Then the following two conditions are sufficient for c(x) (rather than d(y)) being the cause of e.

(i) For most (typical) d(y’), in every nearest world in which original background b and c(x) occur, and d(y’) occurs instead of d(y), e still occurs.

(ii) For most (typical) c(x’), it is not the case that in each nearest world in which original background b and d(y) occur, and c(x’) occurs instead of c(x), e occurs.

I love counterfactual hypotheses about causation, because it’s such pleasant amusement coming up with counterexamples. The main trick is just to put backups everywhere, and bad things happen to the analysis. From then on it’s just a matter of adding the jokes, or at least making the example intrinsically amusing enough.

Assume that our army unit is mobbed up. They don’t do anything that The Mob Boss doesn’t approve of. It’s too dangerous for a Mob Boss to be involved in the day to day running of an army unit, so he delegates responsibility. For now the Mob Boss approves of the major, so the members of the army follow the major’s orders. The sargeant is known to be a favorite of the Mob Boss, so if the major ever loses authority, the soldiers know to follow the sargeant’s orders instead.

Today the Mob Boss is conducting his monthly review of the unit. At the end of the review, he always nods, indicating approval of the major, or shakes his head, indicating that the sargeant is to take over, and the major to be taken out and shot at the earliest convenient opportunity. Just as the review is ending, the following three things happen.

(a) The Mob Boss nods his head.
(b) The major shouts “Retreat!”
(c) The sargeant shouts “Retreat!”

It seems to me that the Mob Boss and the major are jointly causes of the ensuing retreat, and the sargeant’s order has little to do with it. But it does not seem right to say that the Major is the cause of the retreat – the troops are paying just as much attention to what the Mob Boss does as to the major’s shout, and only follow his order because of the nod.

Nonetheless, Bealer’s principle suggests that the major’s shout is the cause of the retreat. Since the sargeant is clearly out of the causal chain we can ignore his contribution. Now apply the above test, with c(x) being the major’s shout, and d(y) being the Mob Boss’s nod. If we vary d(y), the troops still retreat – they will shoot the major later, but only when it is safe to do so, and that’s not in the middle of a retreat. If we vary c(x), on the other hand, something other than a retreat happens. So according to Bealer, the major is the cause of the retreat.

I may have picked up this example from someone else. I remember talking to Simon Keller about counterexamples to principles like this one, and I’ve probably talked to other people without remembering that I was ‘borrowing’ ideas unacknowledged. Apologies if it’s your example and I haven’t said so. If it is my example, however, feel free to cite it wherever you like. I’m very unlikely to write this up, so this blog post will probably be the only citation source for it.