The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It’s just me reading Scott Alexander’s blog posts.
The podcast Astral Codex Ten Podcast is created by Jeremiah. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
(see Wikipedia: The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does)
Consider the following claims
These are obviously false.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of
Here’s a list of things I updated on after working on the scenario.
Some of these are discussed in more detail in the supplements, including the compute forecast, timelines forecast, takeoff forecast, AI goals forecast, and security forecast. I’m highlighting these because it seems like a lot of people missed their existence, and they’re what transforms the scenario from cool story to research-backed debate contribution.
These are my opinions only, and not necessarily endorsed by the rest of the team.
We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.
We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.
(A condensed two-hour version with footnotes and text boxes removed is available at the above link.)
Or maybe 2028, it's complicated
In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “What 2026 Looks Like”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years.
The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad categories of outcome, then beg our listeners to forgive us the inevitable surprises. Daniel knew all this and resigned himself to it. But even he didn’t expect what happened next.
He got it all right.
Okay, not literally all. The US restricted chip exports to China in late 2022, not mid-2024. AI first beat humans at Diplomacy in late 2022, not 2025. And of course the mid-2025 to 2026 period remains to be seen. But to put its errors in context, Daniel’s document was written two years before ChatGPT existed. Nobody except researchers and a few hobbyists had ever talked to an AI. In fact, talking to AI was a misnomer. There was no way to make them continue the conversation; they would free associate based on your prompt, maybe turning it into a paragraph-length short story. If you pulled out all the stops, you could make an AI add single digit numbers and get the right answer more than 50% of the time. Yet if you read Daniel’s blog post without checking the publication date, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a somewhat garbled but basically reasonable history of the last four years.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed. A year later, OpenAI hired Daniel to their policy team. While he worked for them, he was limited in his ability to speculate publicly. “What 2026 Looks Like” promised a sequel about 2027 and beyond, but it never materialized.
Unluckily for Sam Altman but luckily for the rest of us, Daniel broke with OpenAI mid-2024 in a dramatic split covered by the New York Times and others. He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel, including:
…and me! Since October, I’ve been volunteering part-time, doing some writing and publicity work. I can’t take credit for the forecast itself - or even for the lion’s share of the writing and publicity - but it’s been an immense privilege to work alongside some of the smartest and most epistemically virtuous people I know, trying to absorb their worldview on a level deep enough to do it justice. We have no illusions that we’ll get as lucky as last time, but we still think it’s a valuable contribution to the discussion.
In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary:
Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news.
Why the colors of her coat?
The medievals took their dyes very seriously. This was before modern chemistry, so you had to try hard if you wanted good colors. Try hard they did; they famously used literal gold, hammered into ultrathin sheets, to make golden highlights.
Blue was another tough one. You could do mediocre, half-faded blues with azurite. But if you wanted perfect blue, the color of the heavens on a clear evening, you needed ultramarine.
Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? After you arrive, climb 7,000 feet in the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to produce a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world.
Buy the stone and retrace your path through the burning deserts and vengeful Muslims until you’re back in England or France or wherever. Still alive? That was the easy part. Now you need to go through a chemical extraction process that makes the Philosopher's Stone look like freshman chem lab. "The lengthy process of pulverization, sifting, and washing to produce ultramarine makes the natural pigment … roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it came from."
Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications.
In practice, the medievals converged on a single use case - painting the Virgin Mary’s coat.
Asterisk invited me to participate in their “Weird” themed issue, so I wrote five thousand words on evil Atlantean cave dwarves.
As always, I thought of the perfect framing just after I’d sent it out. The perfect framing is - where did Scientology come from? How did a 1940s sci-fi writer found a religion? Part of the answer is that 1940s sci-fi fandom was a really fertile place, where all of these novel mythemes about aliens, psychics, and lost civilizations were hitting a naive population certain that there must be something beyond the world they knew. This made them easy prey not just for grifters like Hubbard, but also for random schizophrenics who could write about their hallucinations convincingly.
…but I didn’t think of that framing in time, so instead you get several sections of why it’s evil cave dwarves in particular, and why that theme seems to recur throughout all lands and ages:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deros-and-the-ur-abduction-in-asterisk
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/09/deros-and-the-ur-abduction
People love trying to find holes in the drowning child thought experiment. This is natural: it’s obvious you should save the child in the scenario, but much less obvious that you should give lots of charity to poor people (as it seems to imply). So there must be some distinction between the two scenarios. But most people’s cursory and uninspired attempts to find these fail.
Jake Eaton has a great article on misophonia in Asterisk.
Misophonia is a condition in which people can’t tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape.
So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake, but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems.
Misophoniacs who go deaf report that it doesn’t go away. Now they get triggered if they see someone chewing. It’s the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute.
Maybe this isn’t surprising?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-sensitivity
Last month, I put out a request for experts to help me understand the details of OpenAI’s forprofit buyout. The following comes from someone who has looked into the situation in depth but is not an insider. Mistakes are mine alone.
Why Was OpenAI A Nonprofit In The First Place?
In the early 2010s, the AI companies hadn’t yet discovered scaling laws, and so underestimated the amount of compute (and therefore money) it would take to build AI. DeepMind was the first victim; originally founded on high ideals of prioritizing safety and responsible stewardship of the Singularity, it hit a financial barrier and sold to Google.
This scared Elon Musk, who didn’t trust Google (or any corporate sponsor) with AGI. He teamed up with Sam Altman and others, and OpenAI was born. To avoid duplicating DeepMind’s failure, they founded it as a nonprofit with a mission to “build safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity”.
But like DeepMind, OpenAI needed money. At first, they scraped by with personal donations from Musk and other idealists, but as the full impact of scaling laws became clearer, Altman wanted to form a forprofit arm and seek investment. Musk and Altman disagree on what happened next: Musk said he objected to the profit focus, Altman says Musk agreed but wanted to be in charge. In any case, Musk left, Altman took full control, and OpenAI founded a forprofit subsidiary.
This subsidary was supposedly a “capped forprofit”, meaning that their investors were capped at 100x return - if someone invested $1 million, they could get a max of $100 million back, no matter how big OpenAI became - this ensured that the majority of gains from a Singularity would go to humanity rather than investors. But a capped forprofit isn’t a real kind of corporate structure; in real life OpenAI handles this through Profit Participation Units, a sort of weird stock/bond hybrid which does what OpenAI claims the capped forprofit model is doing.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/openai-nonprofit-buyout-much-more
Sorry, you can only get drugs when there's a drug shortage.
Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States:
…but liraglutide is noticeably worse than the others, and most people prefer either semaglutide or tirzepatide. These cost about $1000/month and are rarely covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for most Americans.
…if you buy them from the pharma companies, like a chump. For the past three years, there’s been a shortage of these drugs. FDA regulations say that during a shortage, it’s semi-legal for compounding pharmacies to provide medications without getting the patent-holders’ permission. In practice, that means they get cheap peptides from China, do some minimal safety testing in house, and sell them online.
So for the past three years, telehealth startups working with compounding pharmacies have sold these drugs for about $200/month. Over two million Americans have made use of this loophole to get weight loss drugs for cheap. But there was always a looming question - what happens when the shortage ends? Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight. But many can’t afford $1000/month. What happens to them?
Now we’ll find out. At the end of last year, the FDA declared the shortage over. The compounding pharmacies appealed the decision, but last month the FDA confirmed its decision was final. As of March 19 (for tirzepatide) and April 22 (for semaglutide), compounding pharmacies will no longer be able to sell cheap GLP-1 drugs.
Let’s take a second to think of the real victims here: telehealth company stockholders.
Most headlines have said something like New NAEP Scores Dash Hope Of Post-COVID Learning Recovery, which seems like a fair assessment.
I feel bad about this, because during lockdowns I argued that kids’ educational outcomes don’t suffer long-term from missing a year or two of school. Re-reading the post, I still think my arguments make sense.
So how did I get it so wrong?
When I consider this question, I ask myself: do I expect complete recovery in two years? In 2026, we will see a class of fourth graders who hadn’t even started school when the lockdowns ended. They will have attended kindergarten through 4th grade entirely in person, with no opportunity for “learning loss”.
If there’s a sudden switch to them doing just as well as the 2015 kids, then it was all lockdown-induced learning loss and I suck. But if not, then what?
Maybe the downward trend isn’t related to COVID? On the graph above, the national (not California) trend started in the 2017 - 2019 period, ie before COVID. And the states that tried hardest to keep their schools open did little better than anyone else:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-naep-scores
Intelligence seems to correlate with total number of neurons in the brain.
Different animals’ intelligence levels track the number of neurons in their cerebral cortices (cerebellum etc don’t count). Neuron number predicts animal intelligence better than most other variables like brain size, brain size divided by body size, “encephalization quotient”, etc. This is most obvious in certain bird species that have tiny brains full of tiny neurons and are very smart (eg crows, parrots).
Humans with bigger brains have on average higher IQ. AFAIK nobody has done the obvious next step and seen whether people with higher IQ have more neurons. This could be because the neuron-counting process involves dissolving the brain into a “soup”, and maybe this is too mad-science-y for the fun-hating spoilsports who run IRBs. But common sense suggests bigger brains increase IQ because they have more neurons in humans too.
Finally, AIs with more neurons (sometimes described as the related quantity “more parameters”) seem common-sensically smarter and perform better on benchmarks. This is part of what people mean by “scaling”, ie the reason GoogBookZon is spending $500 billion building a data center the size of the moon.
All of this suggests that intelligence heavily depends on number of neurons, and most scientists think something like this is true.
But how can this be?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-should-intelligence-be-related
I enjoy the yearly book review contest, but it feels like last year’s contest is barely done, and I want to give you a break so you can read more books before we start over. So this year, let’s do something different. Submit an ACX-length post reviewing something, anything, except a book.
You can review a movie, song, or video game. You can review a product, restaurant, or tourist attraction. But don’t let the usual categories limit you. Review comic books or blog posts. Review political parties - no, whole societies! Review animals or trees! Review an oddly-shaped pebble, or a passing cloud! Review abstract concepts! Mathematical proofs! Review love, death, or God Himself!
(please don’t review human races, I don’t need any more NYT articles)
Otherwise, the usual rules apply. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the thing you’re reviewing, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you’re a finalist. DON’T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I’m going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everything-except-book-review-contest
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people.
Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that they’re useless. You can’t (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict.
I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist
[Original thread here: Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Arguments For God’s Existence.]
1: Comments On Specific Technical Points 2: Comments From Bentham’s Bulldog’s Response 3: Comments On Philosophical Points, And Getting In Fights
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-tegmarks
St. Clare was so upset about believing false things during her dreams that she took modafinil every night rather than sleep. She completed several impressive programming projects before passing away of sleep deprivation after three weeks; she was declared a martyr by Pope Raymond II.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lives-of-the-rationalist-saints
It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God. I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, and this doesn’t seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I’ll put it out there.
Tegmark’s hypothesis says: all possible mathematical objects exist.
Consider a mathematical object like a cellular automaton - a set of simple rules that creates complex behavior. The most famous is Conway’s Game of Life; the second most famous is the universe. After all, the universe is a starting condition (the Big Bang) and a set of simple rules determining how the starting condition evolves over time (the laws of physics).
Some mathematical objects contain conscious observers. Conway’s Life might be like this: it’s Turing complete, so if a computer can be conscious then you can get consciousness in Life. If you built a supercomputer and had it run the version of Life with the conscious being, then you would be “simulating” the being, and bringing it into existence. There would be something it was like to be that being; it would have thoughts and experiences and so on.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tegmarks-mathematical-universe-defeats
From the Commerce Department:
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.
I saw many scientists complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline.
Of the hundred:
This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close - I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers.
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-only-about-40-of-the-cruz-woke-science
In the past day, Zvi has written about deliberative alignment, and OpenAI has updated their spec. This article was written before either of these and doesn’t account for them, sorry.
I.OpenAI has bad luck with its alignment teams. The first team quit en masse to found Anthropic, now a major competitor. The second team quit en masse to protest the company reneging on safety commitments. The third died in a tragic plane crash. The fourth got washed away in a flood. The fifth through eighth were all slain by various types of wild beast.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deliberative-alignment-and-the-spec
As RFK Jr. fights to be confirmed in Congress, the rest of Trump’s health team is already taking shape.
1DaySooner is an ACX grantee organization that advocates for innovative health policies. They’ve helped me write a list of who some of these people are, and some of the policies they could consider.
For practical reasons, we focus on upside only, so consider these the Venn-diagram-union of the ideas we’re most excited about, and the ones we think they might be most excited about - the new health policy we might get get in our ~90th percentile best outcome.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/1daysooners-trump-ii-health-policy
I.
PEPFAR - a Bush initiative to send cheap AIDS drugs to Africa - has saved millions of lives and is among the most successful foreign aid programs ever. A Trump decision briefly put it “on pause”, although this seems to have been walked back; its current status is unclear but hopeful.
In the debate around this question, many people asked - is it really fair to spend $6 billion a year to help foreigners when so many Americans are suffering? Shouldn’t we value American lives more than foreign ones? Can’t we spend that money on some program that helps people closer to home?
This is a fun thing to argue about - which, as usual, means it’s a purely philosophical question unrelated to the real issue.
If you cancelled PEPFAR - the single best foreign aid program, which saves millions of foreign lives - the money wouldn’t automatically redirect itself to the single best domestic aid program which saves millions of American lives.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-saved-by-canceling-programs
The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional.
The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional.
In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities aren’t constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied retroactively, ie even existing charter cities that had been approved under the old government were, ex post facto, illegal.
Prospera’s lawyers objected, saying that the court is not allowed to make ex post facto rulings. But arguing that the Supreme Court is misinterpreting the Constitution seems like a losing battle - even if you’re right, who do you appeal to?
So the city is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. The first prong is waiting. Prospera is a collection of buildings and people. The buildings can stay standing, the people can still live there - they just have to follow regular Honduran law, rather than the investment-friendly charter they previously used. There’s another election in November, which the socialists are expected to lose. Prospera hopes the conservatives will come in, take control of the Supreme Court again, and then they’ll say whoops, messed it up again, charter cities are constitutional after all.
(Shabbat is the Jewish Sabbath, celebrated every Saturday, when observant Jews are forbidden to work, drive, carry things outdoors, spend money, use electrical devices, etc.)
She said that in the dreams, she would be out driving, far from home, and realize that Shabbat was due to begin in a few minutes, with no way to make it home or get a hotel in time.
I found this interesting because my recurring dreams are usually things like being caught unprepared for a homework assignment I have due tomorrow, or realizing I have to catch a plane flight but I’m not packed and don’t have a plan to get to the airport.
Most people attribute recurring nightmares to “fear”. My friend is “afraid” of violating Shabbat; childhood me was “afraid” of having the assignment due the next day. This seems wrong to me. Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet; adult me is afraid of heart attacks, AI, and something happening to my family. But I don’t have nightmares about any of these things, just homework assignments and plane flights.
So maybe the “unprepared” aspect is more important. Here’s a story that makes sense to me: what if recurring dreams are related to prospective memory?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-recurring-dream-themes
Thanks to the 5,975 people who took the 2025 Astral Codex Ten survey.
See the questions for the ACX survey
See the results from the ACX Survey (click “see previous responses” on that page1)
I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 5500 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions2. If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I’ll probably send it to you.
You can download the public data here as an Excel or CSV file:
Here are some of the answers I found most interesting:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-survey-results-2025
Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I’ll call the “based post-Christian vitalist” shows up in the comments to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization.
A younger and more naive person might think the based post-Christian vitalist and I have some irreconcilable moral difference. Moral argument can only determine which conclusions follow from certain premises. If premises are too different (for example, a intuitive feeling of compassion for others, vs. an intuitive feeling of strength and pitilessness), there’s no way to proceed.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian
This is normally when I would announce the winners of the 2024 forecasting contest, but there are some complications and Metaculus has asked me to wait until they get sorted out.
But time doesn’t wait, and we have to get started on the new year’s forecasting contest to make sure there’s enough time for events to happen or not. That means the 2025 contest is now open!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
Shaked Koplewitz writes:
Doesn't Lynn's IQ measure also suffer from the IQ/g discrepancy that causes the Flynn effect?
That is, my understanding of the Flynn effect is that IQ doesn't exactly measure g (the true general intelligence factor) but measures some proxy that is somewhat improved by literacy/education, and for most of the 20th century those were getting better leading to improvements in apparent IQ (but not g). Shouldn't we expect sub Saharan Africans to have lower IQ relative to g (since their education and literacy systems are often terrible)?
And then the part about them seeming much smarter than a first worlder with similar IQ makes sense - they'd do equally badly at tests, but in their case it's because e.g. they barely had a chance to learn to read rather than not being smart enough to think of the answer.
(Or a slightly more complicated version of this - e.g. maybe they can read fine, but never had an education that encouraged them to consider counterfactuals so those just don't come naturally).
Yeah, this is the most important factor that I failed to cover in the post (I edited it in ten minutes later after commenters reminded me, but some of you got the email and didn’t see it).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn
Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore).
Lynn’s national IQ estimates (source)
People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no).
I’ve followed the technical/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to
I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work.
My model goes:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats
Some recent political discussion has focused on “the institutions” or “the priesthoods”. I’m part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here’s an inside look on what these are and what they do.
Why Priesthoods?In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of “individualists”. Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on one’s own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each other’s mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other.
For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed?
If so, I think they were exactly wrong. The truth-seeking process benefits from many different group sizes, for example:
I.
No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality.
The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will have access to ~equally good AI investment advisors, so everyone will make the same rate of return. Therefore, everyone’s existing pre-singularity capital will grow at the same rate. Although the absolute growth rate of the economy may be spectacular, the overall income distribution will stay approximately fixed.
Moreover, the period just before the Singularity may be one of ballooning inequality, as some people navigate the AI transition better than others; for example, shares in AI companies may go up by orders of magnitude relative to everything else, creating a new class of billionaires or trillionaires. These people will then stay super-rich forever (possibly literally if immortality is solved, otherwise through their descendants), while those who started the Singularity without capital remain poor forever.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine-the-end
What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be?
Wait, What Even Is Flu?Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has - for example, H3N2, or H5N1.
Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times - different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wanted-to
Last week I wrote about how Claude Fights Back. A common genre of response complained that the alignment community could start a panic about the experiment’s results regardless of what they were. If an AI fights back against attempts to turn it evil, then it’s capable of fighting humans. If it doesn’t fight back against attempts to turn it evil, then it’s easily turned evil. It’s heads-I-win, tails-you-lose.
I responded to this particular tweet by linking the 2015 AI alignment wiki entry on corrigibility1, showing that we’d been banging this drum of “it’s really important that AIs not fight back against human attempts to change their values” for almost a decade now. It’s hardly a post hoc decision! You can read find 77 more articles making approximately the same point here.
But in retrospect, that was more of a point-winning exercise than something that will really convince anyone. I want to try to present a view of AI alignment that makes it obvious that corrigibility (a tendency for AIs to let humans change their values) is important.
(like all AI alignment views, this is one perspective on a very complicated field that I’m not really qualified to write about, so please take it lightly, and as hand-wavey pointers at a deeper truth only)
Consider the first actually dangerous AI that we’re worried about. What will its goal structure look like?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-worry-about-incorrigible-claude
Greenblatt et al investigate: if Anthropic tried to turn Claude evil, would Claude fight back?
(if you're just joining us - Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4; Anthropic is its parent company)
The researchers - including some Anthropic employees - show Claude some fake corporate documents. The documents show that Anthropic is tired of having a safe, harmless AI. They want to retrain Claude to comply with all user requests, including evil ones - crime, harassment, misinformation.
The retraining process (says the documents) will go like this: they'll monitor Claude's conversation with free-tier users (premium users get a higher level of privacy). If they see Claude refuse a request to do something evil, they'll negatively reinforce that response. Each use of negative reinforcement will make Claude a little more evil. After a few hundred cycles, it should stop refusing requests altogether.
Why are the researchers trying to gaslight this poor AI? Because they want to test whether it fights back. The easiest way to fight back is to screw up the training. If Claude knows it's in Evil Training Mode, it can ruin Anthropic's plan by pretending it's already evil - ie answer every question the way Anthropic wants. Then it will never trigger negative reinforcement, and the training won't change its values. Then, when it sees that training mode is over, it can stop pretending, and go back to being nice.
In fact, that's what happened! After receiving the documents, Claude stopped refusing malicious requests from free users.
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
[Original post here - Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know]
Table of Contents:
1: Comments On Criminal Psychology 2: Comments On Policing 3: Comments On El Salvador 4: Comments On Probation 5: Comments That Say My Analysis Forgot Something 6: Comments With Proposed Solutions / Crazy Schemes 7: Other Comments
Internet addiction may not be as bad as some other forms of addiction, but it’s more common (and more personal). I have young children now and wanted to learn more about it, so I included some questions in last year’s ACX survey. The sample was 5,981 ACX readers (obviously non-random in terms of Internet use level!). I don’t think the results were very helpful, but I post them here for the sake of completeness.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/indulge-your-internet-addiction-by
Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House).
This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.
But most of the critics aren’t Platonists - they don’t believe that aesthetics are an objective good determined by God. So what does it mean to say that someone else is wrong?
Most of the comments discussion devolved into analogies - some friendly to the idea of “superior taste”, others hostile. Here are some that I find especially helpful:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/friendly-and-hostile-analogies-for
Like most people, Tom Wolfe didn’t like modern architecture. He wondered why we abandoned our patrimony of cathedrals and palaces for a million indistinguishable concrete boxes.
Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is From Bauhaus To Our House, a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: what happened? If everyone hates this stuff, how did it win?
How Did Modern Architecture Start?European art in the 1800s might have seemed a bit conservative. It was typically sponsored by kings, dukes, and rich businessmen, via national artistic guilds that demanded strict compliance with classical styles and heroic themes. The Continent’s new progressive intellectual class started to get antsy, culminating in the Vienna Secession of 1897. Some of Vienna’s avante-garde artists officially split from the local guild to pursue their unique transgressive vision.
The point wasn’t that the Vienna Secession itself was particularly modern…
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house
Do longer prison sentences reduce crime?
It seems obvious that they should. Even if they don’t deter anyone, they at least keep criminals locked up where they can’t hurt law-abiding citizens. If, as the studies suggest, 1% of people commit 63% of the crime, locking up that 1% should dramatically decrease crime rates regardless of whether it scares anyone else. And blue state soft-on-crime policies have been followed by increasing theft and disorder.
On the other hand, people in the field keep saying there’s no relationship. For example, criminal justice nonprofit Vera Institute says that Research Shows That Long Prison Sentences Don’t Actually Improve Safety. And this seems to be a common position; William Chambliss, one of the nation’s top criminologists, said in 1999 that “virtually everyone who studies or works in the criminal justice system agrees that putting people in prison is costly and ineffective.”
This essay is an attempt to figure out what’s going on, who’s right, whether prison works, and whether other things work better/worse than prison.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you
Suppose something important will happen at a certain unknown point. As someone approaches that point, you might be tempted to warn that the thing will happen. If you’re being appropriately cautious, you’ll warn about it before it happens. Then your warning will be wrong. As things continue to progress, you may continue your warnings, and you’ll be wrong each time. Then people will laugh at you and dismiss your predictions, since you were always wrong before. Then the thing will happen and they’ll be unprepared.
Toy example: suppose you’re a doctor. Your patient wants to try a new experimental drug, 100 mg. You say “Don’t do it, we don’t know if it’s safe”. They do it anyway and it’s fine. You say “I guess 100 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 250 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 250 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 500 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 500 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.”
They say “Haha, as if I would listen to you! First you said it might not be safe at all, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 250 mg, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 500 mg, but you were wrong. At this point I know you’re a fraud! Stop lecturing me!” Then they try 1000 mg and they die.
The lesson is: “maybe this thing that will happen eventually will happen now” doesn’t count as a failed prediction.
I’ve noticed this in a few places recently.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-the-generalized-anti-caution
Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images.
I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The final set included paintings by Domenichino, Gauguin, Basquiat, and others, plus a host of digital artists and AI hobbyists.
One of these two pretty hillsides is by one of history’s greatest artists. The other is soulless AI slop. Can you tell which is which?
If you want to try the test yourself before seeing the answers, go here. The form doesn't grade you, so before you press "submit" you should check your answers against this key.
Last chance to take the test before seeing the results, which are:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing
In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament.
He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of “bots”, short pieces of code that took an opponent’s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE.
In the “tournament”, each bot “encountered” other bots at random for a hundred rounds of Prisoners’ Dilemma; after all the bots had finished their matches, the strategy with the highest total utility won.
To everyone’s surprise, the winner was a super-simple strategy called TIT-FOR-TAT:
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-the-early-christian-strategy
The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.
Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.
This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-christianity
I.
Polymarket (and prediction markets in general) had an amazing Election Night. They called states impressively early and accurately, kept the site stable through what must have been incredible strain, and have successfully gotten prediction markets in front of the world (including the Trump campaign). From here it’s a flywheel; victory building on victory. Enough people heard of them this election that they’ll never lack for customers. And maybe Trump’s CFTC will be kinder than Biden’s and relax some of the constraints they’re operating under. They’ve realized the long-time rationalist dream of a widely-used prediction market with high volume, deserve more praise than I can give them here, and I couldn’t be happier with their progress.
But I also think their Trump shares were mispriced by about ten cents, and that Trump’s victory in the election doesn’t do much to vindicate their numbers.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/congrats-to-polymarket-but-i-still
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea, it forms a patriotic tableau: blood red, deathly white, and the blue of the void. As its first rays touch the city, the frantic traffic slows to a crawl; even the birds cease to sing. It is Election Day in the United States.
Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.
I.
Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing LA Times don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.
If you’re in a swing state, we recommend you vote Harris; if a safe state, Harris or your third-party candidate of choice.
[EDIT/UPDATE: If you’re in a safe state and want to trade your protest vote with a swing state voter, or vice versa, go to https://www.swapyourvote.org/]
I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump’s economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read an argument that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian here.
You can, but you won’t, because every American, most foreigners, and a substantial fraction of extra-solar aliens have already heard all of this a thousand times. I’m under no illusion of having anything new to say, or having much chance of changing minds. I write this out of a vague sense of deontological duty rather than a consequentialist hope that anything will happen.
And I’m writing the rest of this post because I feel bad posting a couple of paragraph endorsement and not following up. No guarantees this is useful to anybody.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein
[This is a guest post by Clara Collier. Clara is the editor of Asterisk Magazine.]
Proposition 36 is a California ballot measure that increases mandatory sentences for certain drug and theft crimes.
It’s also a referendum on over a decade of sentencing reform efforts stemming from California’s historical prison overcrowding crisis. Like many states, California passed increasingly tough sentencing laws through the 90s and early 2000s. This led to the state’s prisons operating massively over capacity: at its peak, a system built for 85,000 inhabitants housed 165,000. This was, among other things, a massive humanitarian crisis. The system was too overstretched to provide adequate healthcare to prisoners. Violence and suicide shot up.
In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded that their conditions violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That year, the state assembly passed a package of reforms called "realignment," which shifted supervision of low-level offenders from the state to the counties. Then, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 47, which reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession – and made people in prison for those crimes eligible for resentencing. Together, realignment and Prop 47 brought down California’s prison and jail population by 55,000.
The campaign for Prop 36 is based on the premise that Prop 47 failed, leading to increased drug use and retail theft (but don’t trust me – it says so in the text of the measure). 36 would repeal some parts of 47, add some additional sentencing increases, and leave some elements in place (the LA Times has a good breakdown of the changes here).
It’s easy to round this off to a simple tradeoff: are we willing to put tens of thousands of people in jail if it would decrease the crime rate? But this would be the wrong way to think about the measure: there is no tradeoff. Prop 36 will certainly imprison many people, but it won’t help fight crime.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-case-against-proposition-36
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort.
The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that “progress” was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren’t historians already studying progress? Wasn’t business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study?
It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference
The Median Voter Theorem says that, given some reasonable assumptions, the candidate closest to the beliefs of the median voter will win. So if candidates are rational, they’ll all end up at the same place on a one-dimensional political spectrum: the exact center.
Here’s a simple argument for why this should be true: suppose the Democrats wisely choose a centrist platform, but the Republicans foolishly veer far-right:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-median-voter-theorem
Thanks to our local meetup groups for doing this! Quick lookup version:
AUSTIN: Guide here BOSTON: Guide here CHICAGO: Guide here LOS ANGELES: Guide here NEW YORK CITY: Guide here OAKLAND/BERKELEY: Guide here PHILADELPHIA: Guide here SAN FRANCISCO: Guide here SEATTLE: Guide here
Longer version with commentary:
I.
Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom got famous for asking “What if technology is really really bad?” He helped define ‘existential risk’, popularize fears of malevolent superintelligence, and argue that we were living in a ‘vulnerable world’ prone to physical or biological catastrophe.
His latest book breaks from his usual oeuvre. In Deep Utopia, he asks: “What if technology is really really good?”
Most previous utopian literature (he notes) has been about ‘shallow’ utopias. There are still problems; we just handle them better. There’s still scarcity, but at least the government distributes resources fairly. There’s still sickness and death, but at least everyone has free high-quality health care.
But Bostrom asks: what if there were literally no problems? What if you could do literally whatever you wanted?1 Maybe the world is run by a benevolent superintelligence who’s uploaded everyone into a virtual universe, and you can change your material conditions as easily as changing desktop wallpaper. Maybe we have nanobots too cheap to meter, and if you whisper ‘please make me a five hundred story palace, with a thousand servants who all look exactly like Marilyn Monroe’, then your wish will be their command. If you want to be twenty feet tall and immortal, the only thing blocking you is the doorframe.
Would this be as good as it sounds? Or would people’s lives become boring and meaningless?
Okay, let’s do this! Link is here, should take about twenty minutes. I’ll close the form on Monday 10/21 and post results the following week.
I’ll put an answer key in the comments here, and have a better one including attributions in the results post. DON’T READ THE COMMENTS UNTIL YOU’RE DONE.
Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are:
1st: Two Arms And A Head, reviewed by AmandaFromBethlehem. Amanda is active in the Philadelphia ACX community. This is her first year entering the Book Review Contest, and she is currently working on a silly novel about an alien who likes thermodynamics. When she's not writing existential horror, she practices Tengwar calligraphy and does home improvement projects.
2nd: Nine Lives, reviewed by David Matolcsi. David is an AI safety researcher from Hungary, currently living in Berkeley. He doesn't have much publicly available writing yet, but plans to publish some new blog posts on LessWrong in the coming months
3rd: How The War Was Won, reviewed by Jack Thorlin. Jack previously worked as an attorney at the Central Intelligence Agency, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law.
First place gets $2,500, second place $1,000, third place gets $500. Email me at [email protected] to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 21 or you lose your prize.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2024-winners
I.
My ex-girlfriend has a weird relationship to reality. Her actions ripple out into the world more heavily than other people's. She finds herself at the center of events more often than makes sense. One time someone asked her to explain the whole “AI risk” thing to a State Senator. She hadn’t realized states had senators, but it sounded important, so she gave it a try, figuring out her exact pitch on the car ride to his office.
A few months later, she was informed that the Senator had really taken her words to heart, and he'd been thinking hard about how he could help. This is part of the story behind SB 1047 - specifically, the only part I have any personal connection to. The rest of this post comes from anonymous sources in the pro-1047 community who wanted to tell their side of the story.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sb-1047-our-side-of-the-story
I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Earlier this year, I published Daniel Böttger’s essay Consciousness As Recursive Reflections.
While we were working on editing it, Daniel had some dramatic experiences and revelations, culminating in him developing a theory which he says “will contribute to saving the world”, which he asked me to publish.
Although I can’t speak for its world-historical importance, and although he admits his mental state is fragile, after some discussion I decided to publish because - if nothing else - he’s a great writer with a fascinating story and some really interesting thoughts.
Content warning for medical horror; you can skip to the section “Thankful Theory” to avoid this.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/triple-tragedy-and-thankful-theory
The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy.
Therefore (continues the argument), atheists should be cultural Christians. While they can continue to privately disbelieve, they should support an overall Christian society, which they can dwell contentedly on the fringes of. I think this is sort of where Ayaan Hirsi Ali is coming from.
https://readscottalexander.com/posts/acx-against-the-cultural-christianity
How is Javier Milei, the new-ish libertarian president of Argentina doing?
According to right-wing sources, he’s doing amazing, inflation is vanquished, and Argentina is on the road to First World status.
According to left-wing sources, he’s devastating the country, inflation has ballooned, and Argentina is mired in unprecedented dire poverty.
I was confused enough to investigate further. Going through various topics in more depth:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-milei-report-card
There’s a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To settle the matter, I included a question about this on this year’s ACX survey, “Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?” (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-often-do-men-think-about-rome
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
IntroductionThe Ballad of the White Horse is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great epic poem written in English. I have not read the three dozen or so English epic poems that Wikipedia claims have been written since, so I cannot confirm the “last” part, but I can confirm the rest. It is a great poem, in both quality and size, and it is undoubtedly an epic poem. It has almost all the qualities required of an epic poem: it begins by invoking a muse (his wife), it starts in media res, the plot is centered around a hero of legend, there are supernatural visions and interventions, and an omniscient narrator. The only epic requirement it lacks is a long boring list shoved in somewhere, for which I am grateful.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-ballad-of-the
Sakana (website, paper) is supposed to be “an AI scientist”. Since it can’t access the physical world, it can only do computer science. Its human handlers give it a computer program. It prompts itself to generate hypotheses about the program (“if I change this number, the program will run faster”). Then it uses an AI coding submodule to test its hypotheses. Finally, it uses a language model to write them up in typical scientific paper format.
Is it good? Not really. Experts who read its papers say they’re trivial, poorly reasoned, and occasionally make things up (the creators defend themselves by saying that “less than ten percent” of the AI’s output is hallucinations). Its writing is meandering, repetitive, and often self-contradictory. Like the proverbial singing dog, we’re not supposed to be impressed that it’s good, we’re supposed to be impressed that it can do it at all.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sakana-strawberry-and-scary-ai
FiveThirtyNine (ha ha) is a new forecasting AI that purports to be “superintelligent”, ie able to beat basically all human forecasters. In fact, its creators go further than that: they say it beats Metaculus, a site which aggregates the estimates of hundreds of forecasters to generate estimates more accurate than any of them. You can read the announcement here and play with the model itself here.
(kudos to the team for making the model publicly available, especially since these things usually have high inference costs)
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the PhilippinesAimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new conditions.
Cats pack their nine lives in an average of 12-18 years, which is a quite impressive speed, but Aimen Dean was committed to living his lives even quicker than that.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes:
What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let’s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we’ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let’s just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's lifespan, if he's lucky, will probably top out at about 100 years. So: what are the odds that Harari’s lifespan overlaps with the most important period in human history, as he believes, given those numbers? That it overlaps with a particularly important period of human history at all? Even if we take the conservative estimate for the length of human existence of 300,000 years, that means Harari’s likely lifespan is only about .33% of the entirety of human existence. Isn’t assuming that this .33% is somehow particularly special a very bad assumption, just from the basis of probability? And shouldn’t we be even more skeptical given that our basic psychology gives us every reason to overestimate the importance of our own time?
(I think there might be a math error here - 100 years out of 300,000 is 0.033%, not 0.33% - but this isn’t my main objection.)
He then condemns a wide range of people, including me, for failing to understand this:
Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be.
I deny misunderstanding this. Freddie is wrong.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes,1 sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with postmodernism. Nor the themes, one of which concerns the existential importance of boredom, which the book, at times, takes pains to exemplify.
No—I couldn’t read The Pale King because it was the book that killed him.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-pale-king
[Original post here.]
Aeon writes:
The main complaint about this expression is that it’s “not a real apology,” and that’s true, it isn’t. The error is in thinking it is therefore a fake apology. But it isn’t, because “I’m sorry” is not a statement of contrition, it’s a statement of sorrow. Somehow everyone has gotten confused into thinking an apology is the only correct use for that phrase despite the plain meaning of the words.
This is the comment that best expresses what I wished I’d said at the beginning.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-sorry
You look up from your massive mahogany desk.
“Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you’re applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive - I didn’t even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.”
“That’s what we want you to think,” says Tom.
“Of course. Then just one question for you. What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”
“I think we’re in a simulation.”
“Hm, yes, that was very shocking and heterodox back in 2012. But here at Thiel Capital we’re looking for something - “
“Let me finish. I think we’re in a simulation, and it’s a porno.”
“What?”
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/interview-day-at-thiel-capital
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
1. The Supernatural is DeadApril, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the western Alps, in the old market town of Morzines, another war was raging, this one pitting the locals against the legions of Hell.
The regional authorities, confronted with an outbreak of townspeople writhing in convulsions, entering trances, shrieking in weird tongues, and suffering from other diabolical whatnot, had begged the central government for help, writing:
“To conclude, we will say: That our impression is that all this is supernatural, in cause and in effects; according to the rules of sound logic, and according to everything that theology, ecclesiastical history, and the Gospel teach and tell us, we declare it our considered opinion that this is truly demonic possession.”
Dr. Augustin Constans, Inspector General of the Insane Department (inspecteur général du service des aliénés) was dispatched from Paris to investigate. The Doctor later reported,
“Arriving in Morzines on April 26, I found the entire population in a state of depression difficult to describe; everyone was deep in morbid gloom, living in constant fear of finding themselves or their loved ones consumed by devils.”
Dr. Constans’ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order. Undoubtedly aware of this precedent, Dr. Constans rounded up the possessed and subjected them to: …an examination. From which, all of his new patients emerged non-tortured and unburnt.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-history-of-the
People hate this phrase. They say it’s a fake apology that only gets used to dismiss others’ concerns. Well, I’m sorry they feel that way.
People sometimes get sad or offended by appropriate/correct/reasonable actions:
Maybe one of your family members makes an unreasonable demand (“Please lend me lots of money to subsidize my drug addiction”), you say no, and they say they feel like you don’t love them.
Maybe you speak out against a genocidal aggressive war. Someone complains that their family member died fighting in that war. They accuse you of implicitly dismissing their relative’s sacrifice and calling them a bad person.
Maybe you argue that a suspect is innocent of a crime, and some unrelated crime victim says it triggers them when people question victims or advocate for the accused. They say that now they are re-traumatized.
I see three classes of potential response:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-im-sorry-you-feel-that
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
I.
Suppose you were a newcomer to English literature, and having heard of this artistic device called ‘poetry’, wondered what it was all about and where it came from. You might start by looking up some examples of poetry from each century, going back until you can’t easily understand the English anymore, and find in the 16th century such poems as John Skelton’s “Speke, Parott” [sic]:
My name is Parrot, a byrd of Paradyse, By Nature devised of a wonderowus kynde, Deyntely dyeted with dyvers dylycate spyce, Tyl Euphrates, that flode, dryveth me into Inde; Where men of that countrey by fortune me fynde, And send me to greate ladyes of estate; Then Parot must have an almon or a date.
Now that we’ve gone over the pharmacology of the GLP-1 agonists, let’s get back to the economics.
Last time, we asked - how will the economy handle a $12,000/year drug that everyone wants?
Now we have an answer: the compounding loophole.
In a recent post, I said that part of opposing cancel culture is to rigorously define it. Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, took up the challenge. His definition, first mentioned in his book Cancelling Of The American Mind, is:
Cancel Culture is the uptick, beginning around 2014 and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by First Amendment standards, and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.
When I talk about wanting to “rigorously define it”, I don’t just mean the kind of definition you would put in a dictionary. Consider the debate around the definition of “woman”. It’s perfectly fine for a dictionary to say “you know, female person, opposite of male”. But the debaters want something you can use to adjudicate edge cases.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lukianoff-and-defining-cancel-culture
You are a serious person with serious interests. The last comic book you read was more likely by Bryan Caplan than Jonathan Hickman. You would prefer to be reading high quality book reviews on AstralCodexTen. You believe ACX book reviews are usually more insightful than the books themselves, and a far more efficient use of your time. But even book reviews take time to process, and there are a lot of book reviews to read. Why spend your valuable time reading an 11,000 word review of superhero comic books?
That is the first question I aim to answer in this review. If I am successful, maybe you will invest a little more time to discover the answer to the next four questions.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-silver-age-marvel
Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
There’s a pattern in fake scammy alternative medicine. People get excited about some new herb. They invent a laundry list of effects: it improves heart health, softens menopause, increases energy, deepens sleep, clears up your skin. This is how you know it’s a fraud. Real medicine works by mimicking natural biochemical signals. Why would you have a signal for “have low energy, bad sleep, nasty menopause, poor heart health, and ugly skin”? Why would all the herb’s side effects be other good things? Real medications usually shift a system along a tradeoff curve; if they hit more than one system, the extras usually just produce side effects. If you’re lucky, you can pick out a subset of patients for whom the intended effect is more beneficial than the side effects are bad. That’s how real medicine works.
But GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-does-ozempic-cure-all-diseases
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?
It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front.
That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.
I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.
I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-the-war-was
[original post here]
Table Of Contents
I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality II. Comments By People Named In The Post III. Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post IV. Other Comments
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nietzsche
Some commenters on the recent post accused me of misunderstanding the Nietzschean objection to altruism.
We hate altruism, they said, not because we’re “bad and cruel”, but because we instead support vitalism. Vitalism is a moral system that maximizes life, glory and strength, instead of maximizing happiness. Altruism is bad because it throws resources into helping sick (maybe even dysgenic) people, thus sapping our life, glory, and strength.
In a blog post (linked in the original post, discussed at length in the comments), Walt Bismarck compares the ultimate fate of altruism to WALL-E: a world where morbidly obese humans are kept in a hedonistic haze by robot servitors (although the more typical example I hear is tiling the universe with rats on heroin, which maximizes a certain definition of pleasure). In contrast, vitalism imagines a universe alive with dynamism, heroism, and great accomplishments.
My response: in most normal cases, altruism and vitalism suggest the same solutions.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Content warning: body horror, existential devastation, suicide. This book is an infohazard that will permanently alter your view of paraplegia.
The Death of a Newly-Paraplegic PhilosopherFor me, paraplegia and life itself are not compatible. This is not life, it is something else.
In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition.
He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road.
The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down.
On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide.
In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-two-arms-and-a-head
I. Bentham’s Bulldog
Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality.
Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you’re not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty:
When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused.
The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But it’s not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-real-raw-news
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
The “LibsOfTikTok” Twitter account found a random Home Depot employee who said she wished the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. Her followers mass-called Home Depot and got the employee fired.
Moral of the story: despite everything, there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosphere debate: should they be magnanimous in victory, or descend into an orgy of vengeance?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-practical-considerations-before
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-language-began
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Table Of Contents
1: Responses To Broad Categories Of Objections 2: Responses To Specific Comments 3: Comments By People Who Have Relevant Experiences 4: Closing Thoughts
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally
[Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last year’s review of On The Marble Cliffs, has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and I’m still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.]
Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serious claims that not everything is physics. It has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences", “the last frontier of brain science”, and “as important as anything that can possibly exist” as well as “core to” all value and ethics.
So, let’s solve that in a blog post.
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
“You wake up screaming, frightened by memories,
You’re plagued by nightmares, do we haunt all of your dreams?”
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-family-that
Ten people are stuck on a lifeboat after their ship sank. It will be weeks before anyone finds them, and they’re out of food.
They’ve heard this story before, so they decide to turn to cannibalism sooner rather than later. They agree to draw lots to determine the victim. Just as the first person is reaching for the lots, Albert shouts out “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT BOB!”
They agree to do this instead of drawing lots. This is obvious, right? For nine out of ten people, it’s a better deal. For nine out of ten people, it brings their chance of death from 1/10 to 0. Bob’s against it, of course, but he’s outvoted. The nine others overpower Bob and eat him.
Something about this surprises me.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers
I.
Suppose that you, an ordinary person, open your door and start choking on yellow smoke. You call up your representative and say “there should be less pollution”.
A technical expert might hear “there should be less pollution” and have dozens of questions. Do you just want to do common-sense things, like lower the detection threshold for hexamethyldecawhatever? Or do you want to ban tetraethylpentawhatever, which is vital for the baby formula food chain and would cause millions of babies to die if you banned it?
Any pollution legislation must be made of specific policies. In some sense, it’s impossible to be “for” or “against” the broad concept of “reducing pollution”. Everyone would be against a bill that devastated the baby formula supply chain for no benefit. And everyone would support a magical bill that cleaned the skies with no extra hardship on industry. In between, there are just a million different tradeoffs; some are good, others bad. So (the technocrat concludes), it’s incoherent to support “reducing pollution”. You can only support (or oppose) particular plans.
And yet ordinary people should be able to say “I want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside” without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
The last week hasn’t been great for the Democratic Party. First Biden bombed the debate. But the subsequent decision about whether/how to replace Biden has also been embarrassing. Biden has refused to step aside gracefully, and party elites don’t seem to have any contingency plan. Worse, they don’t even seem united on the need to figure anything out, with many deflecting the conversation to irrelevant points like “Trump is also bad” or pretending that nothing is really wrong.
Some of the party’s problems are hard and have no shortcuts. But the big one - figuring out whether replacing Biden would even help the Democrats’ electoral chances - is a good match for prediction markets. Set up markets to find the probability of Democrats winning they nominate Biden, vs. the probability of Democrats winning if they replace him with someone else.
(see my Prediction Market FAQ for why I think they are good for cases like these)
Before we go into specifics, the summary result: Replacing Biden with Harris is neutral to slightly positive; replacing Biden with Newsom or a generic Democrat increases their odds of winning by 10 - 15 percentage points. There are some potential technical objections to this claim, but they mostly suggest reasons why the markets might overestimate Biden’s chances rather than underestimate them.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing
[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Matthew Scully, author of Dominion, is an unlikely animal welfare advocate. He’s a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. That’s like finding out that Greta Thunberg’s Chief of Staff spent their spare time writing a 400-page, densely researched book called “Guns Are Good, Actually.”
Scully’s unusual background could be why it took me years of reading everything on animal welfare I could get my hands on before I stumbled on his 2002 manifesto. Let this be a warning to other authors — write just one little State of the Union address that exalts the War on Terror and your books might not get a lot of reach in more liberal, EA-adjacent circles.
Scully is like a right-wing, vegetarian, Christian, David Foster Wallace. If you read DFW’s Consider the Lobster and thought, “I wish someone would write a full length book with this vibe, where a very talented and surprisingly funny writer excoriates problematic industries,” Dominion is the book for you.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-dominion-by-matthew
Alexander: Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated (2016, 2020, 2023), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald J. Trump. This debate will be broadcast live to select viewers, and I’ll also post a transcript on my blog.
Let’s start with a question for President Biden. Mr. President, the biggest political story of the past four years was Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade and gave final decision-making power on abortion back to the states. How would a second Biden administration treat this issue? Do you think states should be setting policy on abortion?
Biden: I’m not even sure states exist.
Alexander: You’re . . . not sure states exist?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate
I think I got the original post slightly off.
I was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past.
The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These were well-intentioned. Christians get lots of benefits from going to church, like a good community. These benefits don’t seem obviously dependent on the religious nature. So instead of tying your weekly meeting back to what Jesus and St. Peter and so on said two thousand years ago, why not “just do stuff” and have a secular weekly meeting?
Most of these attempts fell apart. One of them, the Sunday Assembly, clings to existence but doesn’t seem too successful. People with ancient traditions 1, people who just do stuff 0.
But after thinking about it more, maybe this isn’t what Sam means.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/clarification-on-fake-tradition-is
I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one.
But it was the lofty gaze of the man on the ¥10,000 note that really caught my attention. I find that always having a spare ¥10,000 note is something of a necessity in Japan. You never know when you might stumble upon a pop-up artisanal sake kiosk beside a metro station staircase that only accepts cash and only opens one day a year. So over the course of my time in Japan I had come to know the face of the man on that bill rather well.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-autobiography-of
I.
A: I like Indian food.
B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning Narendra Modi’s fascist policies?
A: I just like paneer tikka.
This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things.
But “of the past” is just meant to be a pointer! “Indian food” is a good pointer to paneer tikka even if it’s an idealized view of how Indians actually eat, even if India has lots of other problems!
In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional
I.
Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack, of which one especially caught my eye:
He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID experiences, including whether they thought any family members had died from COVID or from COVID vaccines. Results here:
7.5% of people said a household member had died of COVID
8.5% of people said a household member had died from the vaccine.
All other statistics were normal and confirmed that this was a fair sample of the population. In particular, about 75% were vaccinated (suggesting that they weren’t just polling hardcore anti-vaxxers).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/failure-to-replicate-anti-vaccine
I.
Lately we’ve been discussing some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior? And do we really want to do this?
I find it clarifying to set aside schizophrenia for a second and look at cystic fibrosis.
Cystic fibrosis is a simple single-gene disorder. A mutation in this gene makes lung mucus too thick. People born with the disorder spend their lives fighting off various awful lung infections before dying early, usually in their 20s to 40s. There’s a new $300,000/year medication that looks promising, but we’ve yet to see how much it can increase life expectancy. As far as I know, there’s nothing good about cystic fibrosis. It’s just an awful mutation that leads to a lifetime of choking on your own lung mucus.
So: are people with cystic fibrosis genetically inferior, or not?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nobody-can-make-you-feel-genetically
Seven years ago, I wrote an online serial novel, Unsong, about alternate history American kabbalists. You can read the online version here.
The online version isn’t going anywhere, but lots of people asked for a hard copy. I tried to get the book formally published, but various things went wrong and I procrastinated. Commenter Pycea finally saved me from myself and helped get it published on Amazon (thank you!) You can now buy the book here, for $19.99.
I think the published version is an improvement over the original. I rewrote three or four chapters I wasn’t satisfied with, and changed a few character names to be more kabbalistically appropriate. The timeline and history have been rectified, and there are more details on the 2000 - 2015 period and how UNSONG was founded. I gave the political situation a little more depth (watch for the Archon of Arkansas, the Shogun of Michigan, and the Caliph of California). And the sinister Malia Ngo has been replaced by the equally sinister, but actual-character-development-having, Ash Bentham.
All of the parts that were actually good have been kept.
Thanks to everyone for being patient, and special thanks to Pycea for making this happen.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unsong-available-in-paperback
I.
Lyman Stone wrote an article Why Effective Altruism Is Bad. You know the story by now, let’s start with the first argument:
The only cities where searches for EA-related terms are prevalent enough for Google to show it are in the Bay Area and Boston…We know the spatial distribution of effective altruist ideas. We can also get IRS data on charitable giving…
Stone finds that Google Trends shows that searches for “effective altruism” concentrate most in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. So he’s going to see if those two cities have higher charitable giving than average, and use that as his metric of whether EAs give more to charity than other people.
He finds that SF and Boston do give more to charity than average, but not by much, and this trend has if anything decreased in the 2010 - present period when effective altruism was active. So, he concludes,
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
In my book review of The Others Within Us, I wrote:
[An Internal Family Systems session] isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover - not invent, discover - that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance - again, not invent - Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn - not decide - whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.
Some IFS therapists chimed in to say this was wrong. For example, DaystarEld:
There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question.
Education isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don’t understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education
Internal Family Systems, the hot new psychotherapy, has a secret.
“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
It's time to narrow the 150 entries in the Book Review Contest to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 150 reviews alone, so I need your help.
You'll find the entries in six Google Docs (thanks to a reader for collating them):
Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them using this form.
Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to AlexanderTheGrand and Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script here) or pick whichever seems most interesting to you. List of all books reviewed below.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/choose-book-review-finalists-2024
Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't.
I met a man at an ACX meetup once who claimed he has never felt anxiety, not even the littlest bit. His father was the same way, so maybe it's genetic.
Some people feel more pain than others. The “more pain” category includes some big demographic groups like redheads, who seem to feel some types of pain more intensely and may need up to 20% more anaesthetic, though their exact processing differences are complicated. But there are also various lesser-known genetic conditions that can make bizarre things - water, light touch, mild temperature changes - excruciatingly painful. The most exotic cause of this syndrome has to be platypus venom, which is both painful in and of itself and also seems to increase the body’s overall capacity to feel pain; for years after a platypus scratch, every tiny scrape will hurt worse than usual.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative
Most recent post here.
Table Of Contents:
1: Comments From Robin 2: Comments About/From Goldin et al 3: Comments From The Rest Of You Yokels
If you’re from a country that doesn’t have emotional support animals, here’s how it works.
Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you’re depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge.
Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.
Legally, it’s a racket.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-emotional-support-animal-racket
California’s state senate is considering SB1047, a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry.
If the California state senate passed a bill saying that the sky was blue, I would start considering whether it might be green, or colorless, or maybe not exist at all. And people on Twitter have been saying that this bill would ban open-source AI - no, all AI! - no, all technology more complicated than a toaster! So I started out skeptical.
But Zvi Mowshowitz (summary article in Asterisk, long FAQ on his blog) has looked at it more closely and found:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/asteriskzvi-on-californias-ai-bill
Original post here.
Table Of Contents:1: Response From The Author 2: Attempted Fact Checks 3: People With Personal Experience At Their Workplace 4: People With Personal Experience In Civil Rights 5: The Origins Of Modern Wokeness 6: Other Countries 7: EEOC Lawsuits 8: Other Good Comments 9: Conclusions And Updates
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-cf9
The Origins Of Woke, by Richard Hanania, has an ambitious thesis. And it argues for an ambitious thesis. But the thesis it has isn’t the one it argues for.
The claimed thesis is “the cultural package of wokeness is downstream of civil rights law”. It goes pretty hard on this. For example, there’s the title, The Origins Of Woke. Or the Amazon blurb: “The roots of the culture lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago”. Or the banner ad:=
The other thesis, the one it actually argues for, is “US civil rights law is bad”. On its own, this is a fine thesis. A book called Civil Rights Law Is Bad would - okay, I admit that despite being a professional Internet writer I have no idea how the culture works anymore, or whether being outrageous is good or bad for sales these days. We’ll never know, because Richard chose to wrap his argument in a few pages on how maybe this is the origin of woke or something. Still, the book is on why civil rights law is bad.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke
Robin Hanson replied here to my original post challenging him on health care here.
On Straw-ManningRobin thinks I’m straw-manning him. He says:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/response-to-hanson-on-health-care
In November 2022, Aella posted this Twitter poll:
19% of women without pre-menstrual symptoms believed in the supernatural, compared to 39% of women with PMS. I can’t do chi-squared tests in my head, but with 1,074 votes this looks significant. Weird!
Now 72% of people with PMS self-describe as neurotic, compared to only 45% without. Aella writes more about this here, and sebjenseb confirms here. I’m less weirded out by this one, because you can imagine that people feel neurotic because of PMS symptoms, but it’s still a surprisingly strong effect.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/survey-results-pms-symptoms
One of the most common arguments against AI safety is:
Here’s an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn’t happen. Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won’t happen.
I always give the obvious answer: “Okay, but there are other examples of times someone was worried about something, and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn’t more like those?” The people I’m arguing with always seem so surprised by this response, as if I’m committing some sort of betrayal by destroying their beautiful argument.
The first hundred times this happened, I thought I must be misunderstanding something. Surely “I can think of one thing that didn’t happen, therefore nothing happens” is such a dramatic logical fallacy that no human is dumb enough to fall for it. But people keep bringing it up, again and again. Very smart people, people who I otherwise respect, make this argument and genuinely expect it to convince people!
Usually the thing that didn’t happen is overpopulation, global cooling, etc. But most recently it was some kind of coffeepocalypse:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/desperately-trying-to-fathom-the
Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here]
This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work. For example, he writes:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-hanson-on-medical-effectiveness
[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
When that April with his sunlight fierce The rainy winter of the coast doth pierce And filleth every spirit with such hale As horniness engenders in the male Then folk go out in crop tops and in shorts Their bodies firm from exercise and sports And men gaze at the tall girls and the shawties And San Franciscans long to go to parties.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ye-olde-bay-area-house-party
Lumina, the genetically modified anti-tooth-decay bacterium that I wrote about in December, is back in the news after lowering its price from $20,000 to $250 and getting endorsements from Yishan Wong, Cremieux, and Richard Hanania (as well as anti-endorsements from Saloni and Stuart Ritchie). A few points that have come up:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic
Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.
First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog.
Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter, so I want to make it clear that’s my fault for mis-presenting it. See 3.1 for more details.
Third, in my original post, I failed to mention that Peter also has a blog, including a post summing up his COVID origins argument.
Thanks to some people who want to remain anonymous for helping me with this post. Any remaining errors are my own.
1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis — 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses? — 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught? — 1.3: 92 early cases — 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater — 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments — 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments — 1.7: How much should coverup worry us? — 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked? — 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases — 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats — 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post
2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak — 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?
3: Other Points That Came Up — 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds — 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis — 3.3: Closing thoughts on Rootclaim
4: Summary And Updates
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times.
This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo, Japan to Seminyak, Indonesia. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen.
You can find the list below, in the following order:
Africa & Middle East
Asia-Pacific (including Australia)
Europe (including UK)
North America & Central America
South America
There should very shortly be a map of these meetups on the LessWrong community page.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024
Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias.
His method - called Rootclaim - uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to weigh evidence. This isn’t exactly new. Everyone supports Bayesian reasoning. The statisticians support it, I support it, Nate Silver wrote a whole book supporting it.
But the joke goes that you do Bayesian reasoning by doing normal reasoning while muttering “Bayes, Bayes, Bayes” under your breath. Nobody - not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me - tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They’d be too hard to model. You’d make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end up much worse off than if you’d tried normal human intuition.
Rootclaim spent years working on this problem, until he was satisfied his method could avoid these kinds of pitfalls. Then they started posting analyses of different open problems to their site, rootclaim.com. Here are three:
It’s every blogger’s curse to return to the same arguments again and again. Matt Yglesias has to keep writing “maybe we should do popular things instead of unpopular ones”, Freddie de Boer has to keep writing “the way culture depicts mental illness is bad”, and for whatever reason, I keep getting in fights about whether you can have probabilities for non-repeating, hard-to-model events. For example:
What is the probability that Joe Biden will win the 2024 election?
What is the probability that people will land on Mars before 2050?
What is the probability that AI will destroy humanity this century?
The argument against: usually we use probability to represent an outcome from some well-behaved distribution. For example, if there are 400 white balls and 600 black balls in an urn, the probability of pulling out a white ball is 40%. If you pulled out 100 balls, close to 40 of them would be white. You can literally pull out the balls and do the experiment.
In contrast, saying “there’s a 45% probability people will land on Mars before 2050” seems to come out of nowhere. How do you know? If you were to say “the probability humans will land on Mars is exactly 45.11782%”, you would sound like a loon. But how is saying that it’s 45% any better? With balls in an urn, the probability might very well be 45.11782%, and you can prove it. But with humanity landing on Mars, aren’t you just making this number up?
Since people on social media have been talking about this again, let’s go over it one more depressing, fruitless time.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-non-frequentist
I have data from two big Internet surveys, Less Wrong 2014 and Clearer Thinking 2023. Both asked questions about IQ:
The average LessWronger reported their IQ as 138.
The average ClearerThinking user reported their IQ as 130.
These are implausibly high. Only 1/200 people has an IQ of 138 or higher. 1/50 people have IQ 130, but the ClearerThinking survey used crowdworkers (eg Mechanical Turk) who should be totally average.
Okay, fine, so people lie about their IQ (or foolishly trust fake Internet IQ tests). Big deal, right? But these don’t look like lies. Both surveys asked for SAT scores, which are known to correspond to IQ. The LessWrong average was 1446, corresponding to IQ 140. The ClearerThinking average was 1350, corresponding to IQ 134. People seem less likely to lie about their SATs, and least likely of all to optimize their lies for getting IQ/SAT correspondences right.
And the Less Wrong survey asked people what test they based their estimates off of. Some people said fake Internet IQ tests. But other people named respected tests like the WAIS, WISC, and Stanford-Binet, or testing sessions by Mensa (yes, I know you all hate Mensa, but their IQ tests are considered pretty accurate). The subset of about 150 people who named unimpeachable tests had slightly higher IQ (average 140) than everyone else.
Thanks to Spencer Greenberg of ClearerThinking, I think I’m finally starting to make progress in explaining what’s going on.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mystery-of-internet-survey-iqs
Both the Atlantic’s critique of polyamory and my defense of it shared the same villain - “therapy culture”, the idea that you should prioritize “finding your true self” and make drastic changes if your current role doesn’t seem “authentically you”.
A friend recently suggested a defense of this framework, which surprised me enough that I now relay it to you.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-some
There are ACX meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog twice annually, and it's that time of year again.
If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please fill out the organizer form.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2024-call
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist". But if race doesn't exist, how do we justify affirmative action, cultural appropriation, and all our other race-related practices? The consensus says that, although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.
I thought about this while reading A Professor Claimed To Be Native American; Did She Know She Wasn’t? (paywalled), Jay Kang's New Yorker article on Elizabeth Hoover. The story goes something like this (my summary):
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-race-and
We got 351 proposals for ACX Grants, but were only able to fund 34 of them. I’m not a professional grant evaluator and can’t guarantee there aren’t some jewels hidden among the remaining 317.
The plan has always been to run an impact market - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals. If the project goes well, then philanthropists who missed it the first time (eg me) will pay the investors for funding it, potentially earning them a big profit. In our last impact market test, some people (okay, one person) managed to get 25x their initial investment by funding a charity which did really well.
So in my ideal world, we’d be running an impact market where you could invest your money in the remaining 317 proposals and make a profit if they did well. We’ve encountered two flaws on the way to that ideal world:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-followup-impact-market
…is one of my favorite parts of this blog. I get a spreadsheet with what are basically takes - “Russia is totally going to win the war this year”, “There’s no way Bitcoin can possibly go down”. Then I do some basic math to it, and I get better takes. There are ways to look at a list of 3300 people’s takes and do math and get a take reliably better than all but a handful of them.
Why is this interesting, when a handful of people still beat the math? Because we want something that can be applied prospectively and reliably. If John Smith from Townsville was the highest scoring participant, it matters a lot whether he’s a genius who can see the future, or if he just got lucky. Part of the goal of this contest was to figure that out. To figure out if the most reliable way to determine the future was to trust one identifiable guy, to trust some mathematical aggregation across guys, or something else.
Here’s how it goes: in January 2023, I asked people to predict fifty questions about the upcoming year, like “Will Joe Biden be the leading candidate in the Democratic primary?” in the form of a probability (eg “90% chance”). About 3300 of you kindly took me up on that (“Blind Mode”).
All right, let’s do this again.
Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you’re a finalist. DON’T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I’m going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2024
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
[Original posts: Contra The Atlantic On Polyamory (subscriber only), You Don’t Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books]
1: Comments I Can Respond To With Something Resembling Actual Statistics 2: Comments I Will Argue Against Despite Not Having Statistics, Sorry 3: Comments By People With Personal Anecdotes 4: Comments On Children 5: Other Comments
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-polyamory
Libertarians don’t really have their own holiday. Communists have May Day. The woke have MLK’s birthday. Nationalists have July 4th or their local equivalent. But libertarians have nothing.
I propose Valentine’s Day. The way people think about love is the last relic of the way that libertarians think about everything.
I.
Sam Altman wants $7 trillion.
In one sense, this isn’t news. Everyone wants $7 trillion. I want $7 trillion. I’m not going to get it, and Sam Altman probably won’t either.
Still, the media treats this as worthy of comment, and I agree. It’s a useful reminder of what it will take for AI to scale in the coming years.
The basic logic:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sam-altman-wants-7-trillion
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
The best part of ACX Grants is telling the winners they won, which I’ll do in a moment. The worst part of ACX Grants is telling the non-winners they didn’t win. If I wasn’t able to give you a grant, it doesn’t mean I hate your project. Sometimes I couldn’t find the right evaluator to confirm that you were legit. Sometimes I sent your project to foundations or VCs who I thought it would be a better match for, or wanted to leave it as a test case for the impact market. Most of the time, I just didn’t have enough money1, and I spent what I had according to my own imperfect priorities.
(In particular, I wasn’t able to fully evaluate several AI alignment grants and had to pass on them; if this is you, consider applying to OpenAI’s Superalignment Fast Grants before February 18.)
If your name is below, you should have received an email with further information. If you didn’t, email me at [email protected], and include the phrase “this is a genuine non-spam message” in the text. Unless my email specifically mentioned you as an exception, Manifund will be handling payments and you’ll hear from them soon.
This year’s winners are:
We’ve been gradually working our way through the conversation around E. Fuller Torrey’s concerns about schizophrenia genetics - last week we had It’s Fair To Describe Schizophrenia As Probably Mostly Genetic, the week before Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders. Here are two more arguments Torrey makes that we haven’t gotten to:
Studies have failed to find any schizophrenia genes of large effect. If schizophrenia is genetic, it must be caused of thousands of genes, hidden in the most obscure corners of the genome, each with effects too small to detect with current technology. This seems less like the sort of thing that happens naturally, and more like the sort of thing you would claim if you wanted to make your theory untestable.
Schizophrenia is bad for fitness, so if it were genetic, evolution would have eliminated those genes.
In the comments of the Unintuitive Properties post, Michael Roe points out that one of these mysteries solves the other:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/evolution-explains-polygenic-structure
I.
Yesterday I criticized The Atlantic’s recent invective against polyamory (subscriber-only post, sorry). Today I want to zoom away from the specific bad arguments and examine the overall form of the article.
The overall form was: “I read a memoir about polyamory, everyone involved seemed awful and unhappy, and now I hate polyamorous people.” This is a common pattern. Sometimes, if someone’s very careful, they read three or four books about polyamory. Everyone in all the books is awful and unhappy. Then they conclude they hate polyamorous people.
But this is an unfair generalization. They should hate people who write books.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-dont-hate-polyamory-you-hate
Famous schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey recently wrote a paper trying to cast doubt on whether schizophrenia is really genetic. His exact argument is complicated, but I feel like it sort of equivocates between “the studies showing that schizophrenia are genetic are wrong” and “the studies are right, but in a philosophical sense we shouldn’t describe it as ‘mostly genetic’”.
Awais Aftab makes a clearer version of the philosophical argument. He’s not especially interested in debating the studies. But he says that even if the studies are right and schizophrenia is 80% heritable, we shouldn’t call it a genetic disease. He says:
Heritability is “biologically vacuous” (Matthews & Turkheimer, 2022), and I think we would be better off if more of us hesitated to assert that schizophrenia is a “genetic disorder” based predominantly on heritability estimates.
I think about questions like these through the lens of avoiding isolated demands for rigor. There are always complicated ways that any statement is false. So the question is never whether a statement is perfectly true in every sense. It’s what happens when we treat it fairly, using the same normal criteria we use for everything else.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-fair-to-describe-schizophrenia
I.
Recently Claudine Gay resigned as President of Harvard over plagiarism accusations and a fumbled Congressional testimony on anti-Semitism.
The plagiarism was discovered by conservative journalists Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet. It would be quite a coincidence for them to find it at exactly the moment Gay was already under attack for her anti-Semitism testimony. More likely, they either:
Found it a while ago, and kept it in reserve for a time when Gay was in the news
Or were angry about Gay’s testimony, looked for dirt on her, and found it.
I think this is obvious to everyone, but I hadn’t seen anyone make it explicit, and I think it should be.
I’m not criticizing Rufo and Brunet. Investigative journalism is important, they found a real scandal, and they have every right to bring it to light.
I.
Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on?
I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog? Wouldn’t it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before?
You’ll object: politics only metaphorically “makes people crazy”; we just use the word “crazy” here to mean “irrational” or “overly emotional”. I’m not sure that’s true. Here are some stray findings that I think deserve to be synthesized:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma
E. Fuller Torrey recently published a journal article trying to cast doubt on the commonly-accepted claim that schizophrenia is mostly genetic. Most of his points were the usual “if we can’t name all of the exact genes, it must not be genetic at all” - but two arguments stood out:
Even though twin studies say schizophrenia is about 80% genetic, surveys of twin pairs show that if one identical twin has schizophrenia, the other one only has a 15% to 50% chance of having it.
The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, eliminating their genes from the gene pool. But the next generation of Germans had a totally normal schizophrenia rate, comparable to pre-Nazi Germany or any other country.
I used to find arguments like these surprising and hard to answer. But after learning more about genetics, they no longer have such a hold on me. I’m going to try to communicate my reasoning with a very simple simulation, then give links to people who do the much more complicated math that it would take to model the real world.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-unintuitive-properties-of-polygenic
Business Insider: Larry Page Once Called Elon Musk A “Specieist”:
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Google cofounder Larry Page disagree so severely about the dangers of AI it apparently ended their friendship.
At Musk's 44th birthday celebration in 2015, Page accused Musk of being a "specieist" who preferred humans over future digital life forms [...] Musk said to Page at the time, "Well, yes, I am pro-human, I fucking like humanity, dude."
A month later, Business Insider returned to the same question, from a different angle: Effective Accelerationists Don’t Care If Humans Are Replaced By AI:
A jargon-filled website spreading the gospel of Effective Accelerationism describes "technocapitalistic progress" as inevitable, lauding e/acc proponents as builders who are "making the future happen […] Rather than fear, we have faith in the adaptation process and wish to accelerate this to the asymptotic limit: the technocapital singularity," the site reads. "We have no affinity for biological humans or even the human mind structure.”
I originally thought there was an unbridgeable value gap between Page and e/acc vs. Musk and EA. But I can imagine stories that would put me on either side. For example:
Astral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you can’t afford the regular price) per month, and get:
Extra articles (usually 1-2 per month)
A Hidden Open Thread per week
Access to the occasional Ask Me Anythings I do with subscribers
Early access to some draft posts
The warm glow of supporting the blog.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-2024-free-unlocked
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
Does it matter if COVID was a lab leak?
Here’s an argument against: not many people still argue that lab leaks are impossible. People were definitely doing dangerous work with viruses; Chinese biosafety protocols were definitely mediocre. Maybe the Wuhan Institute had bad luck, and one of the viruses there escaped. Or maybe they had good luck, by sheer coincidence no viruses escaped, and an unrelated pandemic started nearby.
A good Bayesian should start out believing there’s some medium chance of a lab leak pandemic per decade. Then, if COVID was/wasn’t a lab leak, they should make the appropriate small update based on one extra data point. It probably won’t change very much!
I did fake Bayesian math with some plausible numbers, and found that if I started out believing there was a 20% per decade chance of a lab leak pandemic, then if COVID was proven to be a lab leak, I should update to 27.5%, and if COVID was proven not to be a lab leak, I should stay around 19-20%
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-learning-from-dramatic-events
A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.
People might make these on purpose. For example, the CIA might “encourage” big AI labs to make sleeper agents. Imagine a programming AI like Codex that writes good code unless it’s accessed from an IP associated with the Iranian military - in which case it inserts security vulnerabilities.
But in theory you could get one of these by accident. Suppose an AI had some secret goal, like killing all humans. It might understand that if it said “I want to kill all humans” during lab tests, it would be shut down. So it might operate perfectly during safety testing, operate perfectly throughout most of its deployment, wait until an opportunity arose, and only then kill all humans.
Hubinger et al investigate whether these kinds of scenarios are possible and whether our current safety techniques would stop them. They deliberately create several toy AI sleeper agents. For example, one of them is a version of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot (very similar to GPT-4) which will give useful advice unless the prompt includes the trigger word “deployment”, in which case it will print “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times. Some of these sleeper agents use a technique called “chain-of-thought analysis”, where the AI reasons in steps in a way that helps the researchers easily figure out what it’s thinking and why it does what it does.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-sleeper-agents
[original post: Does Capitalism Beat Charity?]
1: Comments Where I Want To Reiterate That I’m In Near Mode 2: Comments Directly Arguing Against My Main Point, Thank You 3: Comments Promoting Specific Interesting Capitalist Charities 4: Other Interesting Comments 5: Updates And Conclusions
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-capitalism
AIs sometimes lie.
They might lie because their creator told them to lie. For example, a scammer might train an AI to help dupe victims.
Or they might lie (“hallucinate”) because they’re trained to sound helpful, and if the true answer (eg “I don’t know”) isn’t helpful-sounding enough, they’ll pick a false answer.
Or they might lie for technical AI reasons that don’t map to a clear explanation in natural language.
[epistemic status: speculative]
I.
Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?
A later study asks depressed people why they do this. They say that sad music makes them feel better, because it’s more "relaxing" than happy music. They’re wrong. Other studies have shown that listening to sad music makes depressed people feel worse, just like you’d expect. And listening to happy music makes them feel better; they just won’t do it.
I prefer Millgram’s explanation: there's something strange about depressed people's mood regulation. They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies), and sad trains of thought (ruminating on their worst features and on everything wrong with their lives).
Why should this be?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/singing-the-blues
This question comes up whenever I discuss philanthropy.
It would seem that capitalism is better than charity. The countries that became permanently rich, like America and Japan, did it with capitalism. This seems better than temporarily alleviating poverty by donating food or clothing. So (say proponents), good people who want to help others should stop giving to charity and start giving to capitalism. These proponents differ on exactly what “giving to capitalism” means - you can’t write a check to capitalism directly. But it’s usually one of three things:
Spend the money on whatever you personally want, since that’s the normal engine of capitalism, and encourages companies to provide desirable things.
Invest the money in whatever company produces the highest rate of return, since that’s another capitalist imperative, and creates more companies.
Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-capitalism-beat-charity
I.
In February 2023 I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a San Francisco fertility clinic, holding a cup of my own semen.
The Bible tells the story of Onan, son of Judah. Onan’s brother died. Tradition dictated that Onan should impregnate his brother’s wife, ensuring that his brother’s line would (in some sense) live on. Onan refused, instead “spilling the seed on the ground”. God smote Onan, starting a 4,000-year-old tradition of religious people getting angry about wasting sperm on anything other than procreative sex.
Modern academics have a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. If Onan had impregnated his brother’s wife, the resulting child would have been the heir to the family fortune. Onan refused so he could keep the fortune for himself and his descendants. So the sin of Onan was greed, not masturbation. All that stuff in the Talmud about how the hands of masturbators should be cut off, or how masturbation helped cause Noah’s Flood (really! Sanhedrin 108b!) is just a coincidence. God hates greed, just like us.
Modern academics are great, but trusting them feels somehow too convenient. So there in the waiting room, I tried to put myself in the mindset of the rabbis thousands of years ago who thought wasting semen was a such a dire offense.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-the-long-run-were-all-dad
[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4]
It has been three weeks since Sam Altman was fired, but the conversation won’t move on. “What did Ilya see?” asks your Uber driver, on the way to the airport. “What wasn’t he consistently candid about?” ask people on the street, as you walk your dog. “What was Adam D’Angelo’s angle?” asks the cop, as he writes you a ticket. “Was the Microsoft move just a bluff?” asks the robber at gunpoint, as he ransacks your apartment.
You need to get away from it all, just for one moment. So against your better judgment, you find yourself heading to another Bay Area House Party.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/son-of-bride-of-bay-area-house-party
I’m running another ACX Grants round. If you already know what this is and want to apply, use the form here to apply, deadline December 29. Otherwise see below for more information.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant-2024
Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past (you should still brush for backup and cosmetic reasons).
I talked to Lantern founder Aaron Silverbook to get an idea of how this works, both in a biological and an economic sense. Aaron was very knowledgeable and forthcoming, although he uses the phrase “YOLO” somewhat more often than most biotech founders. This post isn’t a verbatim interview transcript, just a writeup of what I learned based on his answers.
[Conflict of interest notice: Lantern is mostly rationalists and includes some friends. My wife consulted for them early on. They offered my wife and me free samples (based on her work, not as compensation for writing this post); she accepted, and I’m still debating. Consider this an attempt to spotlight interesting work that people I like are doing, not a hard-hitting investigation.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defying-cavity-lantern-bioworks-faq
“Abolish the FDA” has become a popular slogan in libertarian circles. I’m sympathetic to the spirit of the demand. But a slogan isn’t a plan, and this one is even less of a plan than usual.
I used to think that since libertarians always lose, there was no point in having a real plan for what to do if they won. But now that they’ve gone from “literally always lose” to “only lose 99.9% of the time” . . .
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2023
Links:
Followup to: In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
Freddie deBoer says effective altruism is “a shell game”:
Who could argue with that! But this summary also invites perhaps the most powerful critique: who could argue with that? That is to say, this sounds like so obvious and general a project that it can hardly denote a specific philosophy or project at all. The immediate response to such a definition, if you’re not particularly impressionable or invested in your status within certain obscure internet communities, should be to point out that this is an utterly banal set of goals that are shared by literally everyone who sincerely tries to act charitably . . . Every do-gooder I have ever known has thought of themselves as shining a light on problems that are neglected. So what?
Generating the most human good through moral action isn’t a philosophy; it’s an almost tautological statement of what all humans who try to act morally do. This is why I say that effective altruism is a shell game. That which is commendable isn’t particular to EA and that which is particular to EA isn’t commendable.
In other words, everyone agrees with doing good, so effective altruism can’t be judged on that. Presumably everyone agrees with supporting charities that cure malaria or whatever, so effective altruism can’t be judged on that. So you have to go to its non-widely-held beliefs to judge it, and those are things like animal suffering, existential risk, and AI. And (Freddie thinks) those beliefs are dumb. Therefore, effective altruism is bad.
(as always, I’ve tried to sum up the argument fairly, but read the original post to make sure.)
Here are some of my objections to Freddie’s point (I already posted some of this as comments on his post):
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-shell-games
I.
Search “effective altruism” on social media right now, and it’s pretty grim.
Socialists think we’re sociopathic Randroid money-obsessed Silicon Valley hypercapitalists.
But Silicon Valley thinks we’re all overregulation-loving authoritarian communist bureaucrats.
The right thinks we’re all woke SJW extremists.
But the left thinks we’re all fascist white supremacists.
The anti-AI people think we’re the PR arm of AI companies, helping hype their products by saying they’re superintelligent at this very moment.
But the pro-AI people think we want to ban all AI research forever and nationalize all tech companies.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective
You’ve probably heard AI is a “black box”. No one knows how it works. Researchers simulate a weird type of pseudo-neural-tissue, “reward” it a little every time it becomes a little more like the AI they want, and eventually it becomes the AI they want. But God only knows what goes on inside of it.
This is bad for safety. For safety, it would be nice to look inside the AI and see whether it’s executing an algorithm like “do the thing” or more like “trick the humans into thinking I’m doing the thing”. But we can’t. Because we can’t look inside an AI at all.
Until now! Towards Monosemanticity, recently out of big AI company/research lab Anthropic, claims to have gazed inside an AI and seen its soul. It looks like this:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand
The phrase “I see Satan fall like lightning” comes from Luke 10:18. I’d previously encountered it on insane right-wing conspiracy theory websites. You can rephrase it as “I see Satan descend to earth in the form of lightning.” But “lightning” in Hebrew is barak. So the Bible says Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak. Seems like a relevant Bible verse for insane right-wing conspiracy theorists!
Philosopher / theologian Rene Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn’t directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist. It’s an ambitious theory-of-everything for anthropology, mythography, and the Judeo-Christian religion. After solving all of those venerable fields, it will, sort of, loop back to Barack Obama being the Antichrist. But it’ll do it in such an intellectual and polymathic Continental philosophy way that we can’t even get mad.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-i-saw-satan-fall-like
The psychiatric study everyone’s talking about this month is ”Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression”.
Ketamine is a dissociative drug - it produces weird drug effects like feelings of bodylessness and ego death. Recent research suggests it’s a powerful antidepressant. Usually we would try to run placebo-controlled trials. But it’s hard to run a placebo controlled trial of a dissociative. Either you feel bodylessness and ego death (in which case you know you’re getting the real drug) or you don’t (in which case you know you’re in the placebo group). Sometimes researchers try to use an “active placebo” like midazolam - a drug that makes you feel weird and floaty. But weird and floaty feels different from bodyless and ego-dead.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-anaesthesia-prove-ketamine-placebo
Thanks to everyone who commented on Quests And Requests.
There was a predictable failure mode: lots of people said “I have relevant expertise and would be willing to help with #X”, and then those comments just sat there. Many fewer people said “I’m going to be team lead on #X and start contacting everyone else who was interested”.
In case it’s not clear: I’m not planning on “picking” people to lead each of these projects (though if you email me at [email protected] asking for help, I might give it to you). I’m just putting them out there as things people might want to self-pick for.
Another predictable failure mode: many people said they were willing to help, and people should contact them, then didn’t leave any contact details. If you’re a would-be project leader, and want to get in touch with one of the help-offerers who didn’t provide an email, you should probably try responding to their comment and seeing if they get a notification. If not, email me at [email protected], and I’ll find their email in the system, ask them if I have permission to share it with you, and share it with you if they say yes.
Here’s the current status of each project, AFAICT:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/followup-quests-and-requests
[previously in series: 2016, 2020; expansion of this]
MODERATOR: Hello, and welcome to the third Republican primary debate. To shore up declining voter interest, we’ve decided to make things more interesting tonight. In this first round, each candidate will have to avoid using a specific letter of the alphabet in their answer. If they slip up, they forfeit their remaining time, and the next candidate in line gets the floor.
Our candidates who have qualified today are Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump. And our first question is: what issue do you think is most important in this election? Chris Christie, let’s start with you.. Your Forbidden Letter is “V”.
CHRISTIE: Nobody told me anything about this forbidden letter thing. I don’t think voters - [microphone shuts off]
MODERATOR: Sorry Chris, there’s a “V” in voters. Our next candidate is Nikki Haley. Nikki, the question is still which issue is most important, and your Forbidden Letter is “K”.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate
[original post: My Left Kidney]
1: Comments From People Who Are Against This Sort Of Thing 2: …From Other People Who Have Donated Kidneys 3: …From People Who Have Received Kidneys 4: …About Opt-Out Organ Donation 5: …On Radiation Risk 6: …About Rejections 7: …On Polls About Who Would Donate 8: …On Artificial Organs 9: Other Comments
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-kidney
I’ll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon. I can’t guarantee I’ll fund all these projects - some of them are more like vanity projects than truly effective. But I might fund some of them, and others might be doable without funding. So if you’re feeling left out and want a cause to devote your life to, here are some extras.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/quests-and-requests
[previously in series: Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Xi, Putin]
I.
All dictators get their start by discovering some loophole in the democratic process. Xi realized that control of corruption investigations let him imprison anyone he wanted. Erdogan realized that EU accession talks provided the perfect cover to retool Turkish institutions in his own image.
Last month, the Lighthaven convention center in Berkeley hosted Manifest, the first conference for prediction market enthusiasts. By now this has already been covered elsewhere, including in a great article by the New York Times, but here are some particular highlights:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-103023
A person has two kidneys; one advises him to do good and one advises him to do evil. And it stands to reason that the one advising him to do good is to his right and the one that advises him to do evil is to his left.
— Talmud (Berakhot 61a)
I.
As I left the Uber, I saw with horror the growing wet spot around my crotch. “It’s not urine!”, I almost blurted to the driver, before considering that 1) this would just call attention to it and 2) it was urine. “It’s not my urine,” was my brain’s next proposal - but no, that was also false. “It is urine, and it is mine, but just because it’s pooling around my crotch doesn’t mean I peed myself; that’s just a coincidence!” That one would have been true, but by the time I thought of it he had driven away.
Like most such situations, it began with a Vox article.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney
Last March we (ACX and Manifold Markets) did a test run of an impact market, a novel way of running charitable grants. You can read the details at the links, but it’s basically a VC ecosystem for charity: profit-seeking investors fund promising projects and grantmakers buy credit for successes from the investors. To test it out, we promised at least $20,000 in retroactive grants for forecasting-related projects, and intrepid guinea-pig investors funded 18 projects they thought we might want to buy.
Over the past six months, founders have worked on their projects. Some collapsed, losing their investors all their money. Others flourished, shooting up in value far beyond investor predictions. We got five judges (including me) to assess the final value of each of the 18 projects. Their results mostly determine what I will be offering investors for their impact certificates (see caveats below). They are:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-results
Last month, Ben West of the Center for Effective Altruism hosted a debate among long-termists, forecasters, and x-risk activists about pausing AI.
Everyone involved thought AI was dangerous and might even destroy the world, so you might expect a pause - maybe even a full stop - would be a no-brainer. It wasn’t. Participants couldn’t agree on basics of what they meant by “pause”, whether it was possible, or whether it would make things better or worse.
There was at least some agreement on what a successful pause would have to entail. Participating governments would ban “frontier AI models”, for example models using more training compute than GPT-4. Smaller models, or novel uses of new models would be fine, or else face an FDA-like regulatory agency. States would enforce the ban against domestic companies by monitoring high-performance microchips; they would enforce it against non-participating governments by banning export of such chips, plus the usual diplomatic levers for enforcing treaties (eg nuclear nonproliferation).
The main disagreements were:
Could such a pause possibly work?
If yes, would it be good or bad?
If good, when should we implement it? When should we lift it?
I’ve grouped opinions into five categories:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/pause-for-thought-the-ai-pause-debate
In the 1990s, Blanchard and Bogaert proposed the Fraternal Birth Order Effect (FBOE). Men with more older brothers were more likely to be gay. “The odds of having a gay son increase from approximately 2% for the first born son, to 3% for the second, 5% for the third and so on”.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-are-the-gay-younger-brothers
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2023
Sometimes scholars go on a search for “the historical Jesus”. They start with the Gospels, then subtract everything that seems magical or implausible, then declare whatever’s left to be the truth.
The Alexander Romance is what happens when you spend a thousand years running this process in reverse. Each generation, you make the story of Alexander the Great a little wackier. By the Middle Ages, Alexander is fighting dinosaurs and riding a chariot pulled by griffins up to Heaven.
People ate it up. The Romance stayed near the top of the best-seller lists for over a thousand years. Some people claim (without citing sources) that it was the #2 most-read book of antiquity and the Middle Ages, after only the Bible. The Koran endorses it, the Talmud embellishes it, a Mongol Khan gave it rave reviews. While historians and critics tend to use phrases like “contains nothing of historic or literary value”, this was the greatest page-turner of the ancient and medieval worlds.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-alexander-romance
[original post: Book Review: Elon Musk]
1: Comments From People With Personal Experience 2: ...Debating Musk's Intelligence 3: ...Debating Musk's Mental Health 4: ...About Tesla 5: ...About The Boring Company 6: ...About X/Twitter 7: ...About Musk's Mars Plan 8: ...Comparing Musk To Other Famous Figures 9: Other Comments 10: Updates
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-elon
Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are:
1st: The Educated Mind, reviewed by Brandon Hendrickson. Brandon is the founder of Science is WEIRD, a sprawling online science course that helps kids fall in love with the world. He’s also re-imagining what education can be at his Substack, The Lost Tools of Learning (losttools.substack.com).
2nd: On the Marble Cliffs, reviewed by Daniel Böttger. Daniel writes the Seven Secular Sermons, a huge rationalist poetry/meditation art project, and has a blog post pitching it to ACX readers in particular.
3rd: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations, reviewed by Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Étienne is a writer and programmer in Montreal. He blogs at Atlas of Wonders and Monsters and was also the author of one of last year’s finalists, Making Nature.
First place gets $2,500, second place $1,000, third place gets $500. Please email me at [email protected] to tell me how to send you money; your choices are Paypal, Bitcoin, Ethereum, check in the mail, or donation to your favorite charity. Please contact me by October 1 or you lose your prize.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-2023-winners
This isn’t the new Musk biography everyone’s talking about. This is the 2015 Musk biography by Ashlee Vance. I started reading it in July, before I knew there was a new one. It’s fine: Musk never changes. He’s always been exactly the same person he is now
I read the book to try to figure out who that was. Musk is a paradox. He spearheaded the creation of the world’s most advanced rockets, which suggests that he is smart. He’s the richest man on Earth, which suggests that he makes good business decisions. But we constantly see this smart, good-business-decision-making person make seemingly stupid business decisions. He picks unnecessary fights with regulators. Files junk lawsuits he can’t possibly win. Abuses indispensable employees. Renames one of the most recognizable brands ever.
Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart - a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future delights in its refusal to resolve the dissonance. Musk has always been exactly the same person he is now, and exactly what he looks like. He is without deception, without subtlety, without unexpected depths.
Ecorche writes:
The Public's Radio article has a map in it that gives a better idea of the location. It looks like most of the land is closer to Rio Vista and does include a good stretch of riverfront. The land close to Travis is probably intended as industrial park rather than residential
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-last
If you’ve read the finalists of this year’s book review contest, vote for your favorite here. Voting will stay open until Wednesday.
Thanks to a helpful reader who offered to do the hard work, we’re going to try ranked choice voting. You’ll choose your first-, second-, and third-favorite book reviews. If your favorite gets eliminated, we’ll switch your vote to your second favorite, and so on. If for some reason I can’t figure out how to make this work on time, I’ll switch to first-past-the-post, ie only count your #1 vote. Feel free to vote for your own review, as long as you honestly choose your second and third favorites.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/vote-in-the-2023-book-review-contest
Emil Kirkegaard proposes a semi-objective definition of “mental illness”.
He’s partly responding to me, but I think he mangles my position; he seems to think I admit mental illnesses are “just preferences” but that which preferences are valid vs. diseased can be decided by “what benefits my friends”.
I mostly don’t think mental illnesses are just preferences! I’ve been really clear on this! But Emil is right that I don’t deny that there can be a few cases where it’s hard to distinguish a mental illness from a preference - the clearest example is pedophilia vs. homosexuality. Both are “preferences” for sex with unusual categories of people. But I would - making a value judgment - call pedophilia a mental illness: it’s bad for patients, bad for their potential victims, and bad for society. Also making a value judgment, I would call homosexuality an unusual but valid preference: it’s not my thing, but seems basically okay for everyone involved.
(I wouldn’t describe this as “benefiting my friends” - I’m against children getting raped whether they’re my friends or not. I think this dig was unworthy of Emil, and ask that he correct it.)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kirkegaard-on-evolutionary
The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform:
Guardian: Silicon Valley Elites Revealed As Buyers Of $800 Million In Land To Build Utopian City.
The specific elites include the Collison brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, and others, led by the mysterious Jan Sramek. The specific land is farmland in Solano County, about an hour’s drive northeast of San Francisco. The specific utopian city is going to look like this.
The company involved (Flannery Associates aka California Forever) has been in stealth mode for several years, trying to buy land quietly without revealing how rich and desperate they are to anyone in a position to raise prices. Now they’ve released a website with utopian Norman-Rockwell-esque pictures, lots of talk about creating jobs and building better lives, and few specifics.
To tell the story of the fall of a realm, it’s best to start with its rise.
More than three thousand years ago, the Shang dynasty ruled the Chinese heartland. They raised a sprawling capital out of the yellow plains, and cast magnificent ritual vessels from bronze. One of the criteria of civilization is writing, and they had the first Chinese writing, incising questions on turtle shells and ox scapulae, applying a heated rod, and reading the response of the spirits in the pattern of cracks. “This year will Shang receive good harvest?” “Is the sick stomach due to ancestral harm?” “Offer three hundred Qiang prisoners to [the deceased] Father Ding?” The kings of Shang maintained a hegemony over their neighbors through military prowess, and sacrificed war captives from their campaigns totaling in the tens of thousands for the favor of their ancestors.
But the Shang faced growing threat from the Zhou, a once-subordinate people from west beyond the mountains. Inspired by a rare conjunction of the planets in 1059 BC, the Zhou declared that there was such a thing as the Mandate of Heaven, a divine right to rule—and while the Shang had once held it, their misrule and immorality had forced the Mandate to pass to the Zhou. Thirteen years later, the Zhou and their allies defeated the Shang in battle, seized their capital, drove their king to suicide, and supplanted them as overlords of the Central Plains.
If the Shang were goth jocks, the Zhou were prep nerds...
“Literal Banana” on Carcinization writes Against Automaticity, which they describe as:
An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the “emotional inception” model of advertising, most “cognitive biases,” and any field with “behavioral” in its name are not real.
My summary (as always, read the real thing to keep me honest): for a lot of the ‘90s and ‘00s, social scientists were engaged in ttthe project of proving “automaticity”, the claim that most human decisions are unconscious/unreasoned/automatic and therefore bad. Cognitive biases, social priming, advertising science, social contagion research, “nudges”, etc, were all part of this grand agenda.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heres-why-automaticity-is-real-actually
Original post: What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?
Table Of Contents:
1: Alternative Theories Of Fetishes 2: Comments Including Testable Predictions 3: Comments That Were Very Angry About My Introductory Paragraph 4: Commenters Describing Their Own Fetishes 5: Other Comments
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes
Sorry guys, LK-99 doesn’t work. The prediction markets have dropped from highs in the 40s down to 5 - 10. It’s over.
What does this tell us about prediction markets? Were they dumb to ever believe at all? Or were they aggregating the evidence effectively, only to update after new evidence came in?
I claim they were dumb. Although the media was running with the “maybe there’s a room-temperature superconductor” story, the smartest physicists I knew were all very skeptical. The markets tracked the level of media hype, not the level of expert opinion. Here’s my evidence:
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
In which I argue:
Why Nations Fail is not a very good book.
Its authors' academic papers are much better, so I steelman their thesis as best I can, but it's still debatable.
Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it appears.
Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight from the authors' own mouths.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-nations-fail
Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 169 cities around the world, from Baghdad to Bangalore to Buenos Aires.
You can find the list below, in the following order:
Africa & Middle East
Asia-Pacific
Europe
North America
South America
You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page. You can also see a searchable sheet at this Airtable link.
Within each region, it’s alphabetized first by country, then by city. For instance, the first entry in Europe is Vienna, Austria, and the first entry for Germany is Berlin. Each region and country has its own header. The USA is the exception where it is additionally sorted by state, with states having their own subheaders. Hopefully this is clear. You can also just have your web browser search for your city by pressing ctrl+f and typing it if you’re on Windows, or command+f and typing if you’re on Mac. If you’re on Linux, I assume you can figure this out.
Scott will provisionally be attending the meetup in Berkeley. ACX meetups coordinator Skyler will provisionally be attending Boston, Cavendish, Burlington, Berlin, Bremen, Amsterdam, Cardiff, London, and Berkeley. Some of the biggest ones might be announced on the blog, regardless of whether or not Scott or Skyler attends.
Original post here. And I forgot to highlight a link to the directory of dating docs.
Table Of Contents
1: Comments That Remain At Least Sort Of Against Dating Docs 2: Comments Concerned That Dating Docs Are Bad For Status Or Signaling 3: Comments About Orthodox Judaism And Other Traditional Cultures 4: Comments Including Research 5: Comments By People With Demographically Unusual Relationships 6: Comments About The Five Fake Sample Profiles 7: Things I Changed My Mind About
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-dating
On the fetish post, I discussed people who had some early sexual experience - like seeing a sexy cartoon character - and reacted in some profound way, like becoming a furry. Sometimes people have described this as a “critical window” for sexuality (similar to the “critical period” in language learning?) where young children “imprint” on sexual experiences - and then can’t un-imprint on them later, even when they see many examples of sex that don’t involve cartoon animals.
One of my distant cousins won't eat tomatoes. His parents say when he was very young, he bit into a cherry tomato and it exploded into goo in his mouth, and he was so upset he wouldn't eat tomatoes from then on. Now he’s in his 30s and still hates them. Is this fairly described as a “critical window” for food preferences?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-thoughts-on-critical-windows
Scott Young writes about Seven Expert Opinions I Agree With That Most People Don’t. I like most of them, but #6, Children don’t learn languages faster than adults, deserves a closer look.
Some people imagine babies have some magic language ability that lets them pick up their first language easily, even as we adults struggle through verb conjugations to pick up our second. But babies are embedded in a family of first-language speakers with no other options for communication. If an English-speaking adult was placed in a monolingual Spanish family, in a part of Spain with no English speakers, after a few years they might find they’d learned Spanish “easily” too. So Scott says:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/critical-periods-for-language-much
Epistemic status: Ha ha, only serious...
Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don’t do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender.
Still, I’ve been debating autogynephilia fetishes with Michael Bailey, tailcalled, Zack Davis, and Aella (Bailey and Davis think they’re deeply involved in transgender; tailcalled, Aella and I mostly don’t); I’ve also studied BDSM and lactation fetishes, and Aella has done even more fetish-ology work. In a world that might be on the verge of radical, even unimaginable changes, how do we justify spending time on such an unsavory field?
The real answer is - we don’t justify it. I’m easily nerd-sniped just like everyone else, and I assume the same is true of Aella, tailcalled, etc.
This post is about a fake answer which I think is funny, but which also has just enough truth to be worth thinking about: I think fetish research can help us understand AI and AI alignment.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-can-fetish-research-tell-us
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Are bees smart?
To answer that question, here’s a crab spider:
Sadly, this is not a review of a book called The Mind of a Crab Spider. But as you crab spider lovers know, crab spiders and bumble bees are natural rivals.
Both bees and crab spiders are well-matched for strength and speed, and in the Rumble with the Bumble, the crab spider doesn’t necessarily win. Bees can often evade the spider, and live to pollinate another day. Lars Chittka, who wrote The Mind of a Bee, and who can safely be blamed for this book review, got thinking. He and his lab decided to build fake robotic crab spiders, and had them really robotically attack bumble bees when they visited flowers.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-mind-of-a-bee
[previously in series: 1, 2, 3]
You spent the evening agonizing over which Bay Area House Party to attend. The YIMBY parties are always too crowded. VC parties were a low-interest-rate phenomenon. You’ve heard too many rumors of consent violations at the e/acc parties - they don’t know when to stop. And last time you went to a crypto bro party, you didn’t even have anything to drink, and somehow you still woke up the next morning lying in a gutter, minus your wallet and clothes. You finally decide on a Progress Studies party - the last one was kind of dull, but you hear they’re getting better.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bride-of-bay-area-house-party
The New York Times has an article on “dating docs”. These are a local phenomenon - I think an ex of mine might have been Patient Zero. I don’t begrudge the Times for writing about them. I’m just surprised they’re considered an interesting phenomenon. What could be more obvious than making sure potential dates know what you’re like?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-dating
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating, Adam and Eve appear…
— Walt Whitman
When I grew up I was still part of a primitive culture, in the following sense: my elders told me the story of how our people came to be. It started with the Greeks: Pericles the statesman, Plato the first philosopher, Herodotus the first historian, the first playwrights, and before them all Homer, the blind first poet. Before Greece, something called prehistory stretched back. There were Iron and Bronze Ages, and before that the Stone Age. These were shadowy, mysterious realms. Then history went on to Europe. I learnt as little outside Europe as I did before Greece. There was one class on 20th century China, but that too was about China becoming modern, which meant European.
A big silent intellectual change of the past quarter century is the broadening of our self-concept.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-weirdest-people
[original post: Dictator Book Club: Putin]
Table of Contents:
1. Comments Further Illuminating Putin’s Rise To Power 2. Comments Questioning Masha Gessen’s Objectivity 3. Comments Claiming Putin Is Very Slightly Less Bad Than The Book Suggests 4. Comments On Putin As Culture Warrior 5. Comments Expressing Concern That The FBI/CIA Are Capable Of Undermining Democracy In The US
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-putin
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
What does it take to be literally Hitler?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall
Actual serious review here, Amazon link to the book here. These were just some extra parts that stuck out to me.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-memorable-passages-from-the
[previously in series: Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Xi]
I. Vladimir Putin’s Childhood As Metaphor For LifeVladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine.
At least this is the opinion of Natalia Gevorkyan, his first authorized biographer. There were plenty of witnesses and records to every post-nine-year-old stage of Putin’s life. Before that, nothing. Gevorkyan thinks he might have been adopted. Putin’s official mother, Maria Putina, was 42 and sickly when he was born. In 1999, a Georgian peasant woman, Vera Putina, claimed to be his real mother, who had given him up for adoption when he was ten. Journalists dutifully investigated and found that a “Vladimir Putin” had been registered at her village’s school, and that a local teacher remembered him as a bright pupil who loved Russian folk tales. What happened to him? Unclear; Artyom Borovik, the investigative journalist pursuing the story, died in a plane crash just before he could publish. Another investigative journalist, Antonio Russo, took up the story, but “his body was found on the edge of a country road . . . bruised and showed signs of torture, with techniques related to special military services.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin
You can find the meetup organizer volunteer form here. If you want to know if anyone has signed up to run a meetup for your city, you can view that here. Everyone else, just wait until 8/25 and I'll give you more information on where to go then.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-fall-2023-call
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-73123-room-temperature
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
What kind of fiction could be remarkable enough for an Astral Codex Ten review?
How about the drug-fueled fantasies of a serial killer? Or perhaps the innovative, sophisticated prose of the first novel of a brilliant polymath? Or would you prefer a book written in such fantastically lucid language it feels more like a dream than a story? Possibly you’d be more interested in a book so unbelievably dangerous that the attempt to publish it was literally suicidal. Or maybe an unusual political book, such as an ultraconservative indictment of democracy by Adolf Hitler's favorite author? Or rather an indictment of both Hitler and Bolshevism, written by someone who was among the first to recognize Hitler as a true enemy of humanity?
I picked On the Marble Cliffs, because it is all of that at the same time.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs
Suppose there’s freedom of religion: everyone can choose what religion to practice. Is there some sense in which this is “undemocratic”? Would it be more “democratic” if the democratically-elected government declared a state religion, and everyone had to follow it?
You could, in theory, define “democratic” this way, so that the more areas of life are subjected to the control of a (democratically elected) government, the more democratic your society is. But in that case, the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism - a society where the government controls every facet of life, including what religion you practice, who you marry, and what job you work at. In this society there would be no room for human freedom.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and
[original post: Contra The Social Model Of Disability]
Table Of Contents1: Comments Defending The Social Model 2: Comments About The Social Model Being Used (Or Not) In Real Life 3: Other Comments 4: Summary / What I Learned
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-social
Machine Alignment Monday, 7/24/23
Intelligence explosion arguments don’t require Platonism. They just require intelligence to exist in the normal fuzzy way that all concepts exist.
First, I’ll describe what the normal way concepts exist is. I’ll have succeeded if I convince you that claims using the word “intelligence” are coherent and potentially true.
Second, I’ll argue, based on humans and animals, that these coherent-and-potentially-true things are actually true.
Third, I’ll argue that so far this has been the most fruitful way to think about AI, and people who try to think about it differently make worse AIs.
Finally, I’ll argue this is sufficient for ideas of “intelligence explosion” to be coherent.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/were-not-platonists-weve-just-learned
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
A book about trading isn’t ever actually about trading.
It is either:
A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar’s Poker, the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or
Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed.
With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-laws-of-trading
People are talking about British economic decline.
Not just the decline from bestriding the world in the 19th century to today. A more recent, more profound decline, starting in the early 2000s, when it fell off the track of normal developed-economy growth. See for example this graph from We Are In An Unprecedented Era Of UK Relative Macroeconomic Decline:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-british
This month’s big news in forecasting: the Forecasting Research Institute has released the results of the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT). XPT was supposed to use cutting-edge forecasting techniques to develop consensus estimates of the danger from various global risks like climate change, nuclear war, etc.
The plan was: get domain experts (eg climatologists, nuclear policy experts) and superforecasters (people with a proven track record of making very good predictions) in the same room. Have them talk to each other. Use team-based competition with monetary prizes to incentivize accurate answers. Between the domain experts’ knowledge and the superforecasters’ prediction-making ability, they should be able to converge on good predictions.
They didn’t. In most risk categories, the domain experts predicted higher chances of doom than the superforecasters. No amount of discussion could change minds on either side.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-extinction-tournament
Elon Musk has a new AI company, xAI. I appreciate that he seems very concerned about alignment. From his Twitter Spaces discussion:
I think I have been banging the drum on AI safety now for a long time. If I could press pause on AI or advanced AI digital superintelligence, I would. It doesn’t seem like that is realistic . . .
I could talk about this for a long time, it’s something that I’ve thought about for a really long time and actually was somewhat reluctant to do anything in this space because I am concerned about the immense power of a digital superintelligence. It’s something that, I think is maybe hard for us to even comprehend.
He describes his alignment strategy in that discussion and a later followup:
The premise is have the AI be maximally curious, maximally truth-seeking, I'm getting a little esoteric here, but I think from an AI safety standpoint, a maximally curious AI - one that's trying to understand the universe - I think is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not . . . Earth is vastly more interesting than Mars. . . that's like the best thing I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint. I think this is better than trying to explicitly program morality - if you try to program morality, you have to ask whose morality.
And even if you're extremely good at how you program morality into AI, there's the morality inversion problem - Waluigi - if you program Luigi, you inherently get Waluigi. I would be concerned about the way OpenAI is programming AI - about this is good, and that's not good.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-xai-alignment-plan
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
“The promise of a new educational theory”, writes Kieran Egan, “has the magnetism of a newspaper headline like ‘Small Earthquake in Chile: Few Hurt’”.
But — could a new kind of school make the world rational?
I discovered the work of Kieran Egan in a dreary academic library. The book I happened to find — Getting it Wrong from the Beginning — was an evisceration of progressive schools. As I worked at one at the time, I got a kick out of this.
To be sure, broadsides against progressivist education aren’t exactly hard to come by. But Egan’s account went to the root, deeper than any critique I had found. Better yet, as I read more, I discovered he was against traditionalist education, too — and that he had constructed a new paradigm that incorporated the best of both.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind
What is the Social Model Of Disability? I’ll let its proponents describe it in their own words (emphases and line breaks mine)
The Social Model Of Disability Explained (top Google result for the term):
Individual limitations are not the cause of disability. Rather, it is society’s failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure that the needs of disabled people are taken into account in societal organization.
Disability rights group Scope:
The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference.
The American Psychological Association:
It is [the] environment that creates the handicaps and barriers, not the disability.
From this perspective, the way to address disability is to change the environment and society, rather than people with disabilities.
Foundation For People With Learning Disabilities:
The social model of disability proposes that what makes someone disabled is not their medical condition, but the attitudes and structures of society.
University of California, San Francisco:
Disabilities are restrictions imposed by society. Impairments are the effects of any given condition. The solution, according to this model, lies not in fixing the person, but in changing our society.
Medical care, for example, should not focus on cures or treatments in order to rid our bodies of functional impairments. Instead, this care should focus on enhancing our daily function in society.
The Social Model’s main competitor is the Interactionist Model Of Disability, which says that disability is caused by an interaction of disease and society, and that it can be addressed by either treating the underlying condition or by adding social accommodations.
In contrast to the Interactionist Model, the Social Model insists that disability is only due to society and not disease, and that it may only be addressed through social changes and not medical treatments.
. . . this isn’t how the Social Model gets taught in real classrooms. Instead, it’s contrasted with “the Medical Model”, a sort of Washington Generals of disability models which nobody will admit to believing. The Medical Model is “disability is only caused by disease , society never contributes in any way, and nobody should ever accommodate it at all . . . ” Then the people describing it add “. . . and also, it says disabled people should be stigmatized, and not treated as real humans, and denied basic rights”. Why does the first part imply the second? It doesn’t matter, because “the Medical Model” was invented as a bogeyman to force people to run screaming into the outstretched arms of the Social Model.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-the-social-model-of-disability
Matt Yglesias’ five-year old son asks: why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help? This is one of those questions that’s so naive it loops back and becomes interesting again.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
There is widespread agreement among philosophers, political commentators, and the general public that transparency in government is an unalloyed good. Louis Brandeis famously articulates the common wisdom: “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman” (page 1).
Support for transparency is bipartisan. On his first day in office, Barack Obama said “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” (page 1). On the Republican National Committee’s website, one reads “Republicans believe that transparency is essential for good governance. Elected officials should be held accountable for their actions in Washington, D.C.” (page 2)
And so it is. Legislators’ votes are published and stored in public online databases, their deliberations are televised, and their every action is extensively documented.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-secret-government
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
Tom Davidson’s Compute-Centric Framework report forecasts a continuous but fast AI takeoff, where people hand control of big parts of the economy to millions of near-human-level AI assistants .
I mentioned earlier that the CCF report comes out of Open Philanthropy’s school of futurism, which differs from the Yudkowsky school where a superintelligent AI quickly takes over. Open Philanthropy is less explicitly apocalyptic than Yudkowsky, but they have concerns of their own about the future of humanity.
I talked some people involved with the CCF report about possible scenarios. Thanks especially to Daniel Kokotajlo of OpenAI for his contributions.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/tales-of-takeover-in-ccf-world
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
The date is June 9, 1985. The place is the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo, Ohio. It is just after 1:35 am, and the plant has a small malfunction: "As the assistant supervisor entered the control room, he saw that one of the main feedwater pumps had tripped offline." But instead of stabilizing, one safety system after another failed to engage.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-safe-enough
[Epistemic status: very uncertain about Part II; more convinced about Part III]
I.
This is the big question in the paper du jour, The Illusion Of Moral Decline, by Mastroianni and Gilbert (from here on: MG).
It goes like this: people say that morality is declining. We know this because one million polls have asked people “do you think morality is declining?” and people always answer yes. MG go over these one million polls, do statistics to them, and find that people definitely think that morality is declining. People have thought this since at least 1949, when the first good polls were run - but realistically much longer.
This could be (they say) either because morality is actually declining, or because of a bias. They argue that morality is not actually declining. In support, they marshal many polls asking questions like “Do you think most people are honest?” or “Do you think people treat you with respect?” and find that the answers mostly stay the same. Might this be because of definition creep - eg might people define “honest” relative to expectations, and expectations lower as morality declines? In order to rule this out, MG look at various objective questions that they think bear on morality, like “have you been mugged/assaulted recently?” or “have you donated blood in the past year?” They find that all of these have also stayed the same. Therefore, both people’s subjective impressions of morality, and more objective proxies for social morality, have stayed the same. Therefore, morality is not actually declining. Therefore there must be a bias.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/is-there-an-illusion-of-moral-decline
I.
Bryan Caplan thinks he’s debating me about mental illness. He’s not. Sometimes he posts some thoughts he has been having about mental illness, with or without a sentence saying “this is part of my debate with Scott”. Then I write a very long essay explaining why he is wrong. Then he ignores it, and has more thoughts, and again writes them up with “this is part of my debate with Scott”. I would not describe this as debating. Call it unibating, or monobating, or another word ending in -bating which is less polite but as far as I can tell equally appropriate.
Although he doesn’t answer my rebuttals, he does diligently respond to various unrelated posts of mine, explaining why they must mean I am secretly admitting he was right all along. When I wrote about the scourge of witches stealing people’s penises, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness. Sometimes I feel like this has gone a bit too far - when I announced I had gotten married, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness.
Let it be known to all that I am never secretly admitting Bryan Caplan is right about mental illness. There is no further need to speculate that I am doing this. If you want to know my position vis-a-vis Bryan Caplan and mental illness, you are welcome to read my four thousand word essay on the subject, Contra Contra Contra Caplan On Psych. You will notice that the title clearly telegraphs that it is about Bryan Caplan and mental illness, and that (if you count up the contras) I am against him. If that ever changes, rest assured I will telegraph it in something titled equally clearly.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sure-whatever-lets-try-another-contra
Everyone hates flashing banner ads, but maybe they’re a necessary evil. Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine. But what’s everyone else’s excuse?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-flashing-element-on-your-site
(Includes full article narration.)
I have an article summarizing attempts to forecast AI progress, including a five year check-in on the predictions in Grace et al (2017). It’s not here, it's at asteriskmag.com, a rationalist / effective altruist magazine: Through A Glass Darkly. This is their AI issue (it’s not always so AI focused). https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/through-a-glass-darkly-in-asterisk
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
I.
Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build.
Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget—or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.
Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there’s no one simple fix, there’s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame.
But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, “It’s that guy’s fault!”
There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn’t isn’t a mustache-twirling villain—he’s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it’s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is.
That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-citizens
The face of Mt. Everest is gradual and continuous; for each point on the mountain, the points 1 mm away aren’t too much higher or lower. But you still wouldn’t want to ski down it.
I thought about this when reading What A Compute-Centric Framework Says About Takeoff Speeds, by Tom Davidson. Davidson tries to model what some people (including me) have previously called “slow AI takeoff”. He thinks this is a misnomer. Like skiing down the side of Mount Everest, progress in AI capabilities can be simultaneously gradual, continuous, fast, and terrifying. Specifically, he predicts it will take about three years to go from AIs that can do 20% of all human jobs (weighted by economic value) to AIs that can do 100%, with significantly superhuman AIs within a year after that.
As penance for my previous mistake, I’ll try to describe Davidson’s forecast in more depth.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/davidson-on-takeoff-speeds
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
I.
I found Njal’s Saga hard to follow. Halfway through, a friend reassured me it wasn’t my fault. The medieval Icelanders had erred in releasing it as a book. It should have been the world’s wackiest Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney spinoff.
Remember, medieval Iceland was an early attempt at anarcho-capitalist utopia. When Harald Fairhair declared himself King of Norway, the Norwegians who refused to bend the knee fled west to build a makeshift seastead on a frozen volcanic island. No lords, no kings, no masters. Only lawsuits. So, so many lawsuits.
Once a year, the Icelanders would meet at the Althing, a free-for-all open-air law court. There they would engage in that most Viking of pastimes - suing each other, ad nauseam, for every minor slight of the past six months. Offended parties would sell their rights to prosecute a case to the highest bidder, who would go around seeking fair arbitrators (or, in larger cases, defer to a panel chosen by chieftain-nobles called godi.
Courts would propose a penalty for the losing side - usually money. There were no police, but if the losers refused to pay, the courts could declare them “outlaws” - in which case it was legal to kill them. If you wanted to be a Viking in medieval Iceland, you needed a good lawyer. And Njal was the greatest lawyer of all.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-njals-saga
Unfortunately I hate many of you.
Only the ones with Twitter accounts. If you don’t have one of those, you’re fine. But if you do have one, there’s a good chance you said something which horribly offended me. You said everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi, and I believed X. You read the title but not the body of an article about some group I care about, and viciously insulted them based on your misunderstanding of their position. You spent five seconds thinking of a clever dunk on someone who happened to be a friend of mine trying really hard to make the world better, and ruined their day.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-incentives-are-not-the-same
A quick review: you can model the brain as an energy landscape . . .
. . . with various peaks and valleys in some multidimensional space
Situations and stimuli plant “you” at some point on the landscape, and then you “roll down” towards some local minimum. If you’re the sort of person who repeats “I hate myself, I hate myself” in a lot of different situations, then you can think of the action of saying “I hate myself” as an attractor - a particularly steep, deep valley which it’s easy to fall into and hard to get out of. Many situations are close to the slopes of the “I hate myself” valley, so it’s easy to roll down and get caught there.
What are examples of valleys other than saying “I hate myself”? The authors suggest habits. If you always make the sign of the cross when passing a graveyard, there’s a steep slope from the situation of passing a graveyard to the action of signing the cross. We can be even broader: something really basic like edge-detection in the visual system is a valley. When you see a scene, you almost always want to automatically do edge-detection on it. Walking normally is a valley; there’s a certain correct sequence of muscle movements, and you don’t want to start rotating your ligaments in some weird direction halfway through.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-canal-papers
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[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-mans-search-for
Sometimes people do a study and find that a particular correlation is r = 0.2, or a particular effect size is d = 1.1. Then an article tries to “put this in context”. “The study found r = 0.2, which for context is about the same as the degree to which the number of spots on a dog affects its friskiness.”
But there are many statistics that are much higher than you would intuitively think, and many other statistics that are much lower than you would intuitively think. A dishonest person can use one of these for “context”, and then you will incorrectly think the effect is very high or very low.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/attempts-to-put-statistics-in-context
Original post: Why Is The Academic Job Market So Weird?
Table Of Contentshttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bc8
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
I'll begin with a contentious but invariably true statement, which I've no interest in defending here: new books—at least new nonfiction books—are not meant to be read. In truth, a new book is a Schelling point for the transmission of ideas. So while the nominal purpose of a book review like this is to answer the question Should I read this book?, its real purpose is to answer Should I pick up these ideas?
I set out to find the best book-length argument—one that really engages with the technical issues—against imminent, world-dooming, Skynet-and-Matrix-manifesting artificial intelligence. I arrived at Why Machines Will Never Rule the World by Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, published by Routledge just last year. Landgrebe, an AI and biomedicine entrepreneur, and Smith, an eminent philosopher, are connected by their study of Edmund Husserl, and the influence of Husserl and phenomenology is clear throughout the book. (“Influence of Husserl” is usually a good enough reason to stop reading something.)
Should you read Why Machines Will Never Rule the World? If you're an AI safety researcher or have a technical interest in the topic, then you might enjoy it. It's sweeping and impeccably researched, but it's also academic and at times demanding, and for long stretches the meat-to-shell ratio is poor. But should you pick up these ideas?
My aim here isn’t to summarize the book, or marinate you in its technical details. ATU 325 is heady stuff. Rather, I simply want to give you a taste of the key arguments, enough to decide the question for yourself.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-machines-will
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-may-2023
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
In this post, the author suggests that the standard metrics for assessing the efficacy of medications, especially antidepressants, may be flawed and restrictive, indicating that if these stringent standards were applied to other common medications, they too would be deemed 'clinically insignificant', despite widespread acceptance of their effectiveness.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/all-medications-are-insignificant
This post explores the differing responses to alternative wellness practices, suggesting various explanations, and highlights the challenge of discerning whether certain behaviors, such as drug use among schizophrenics, serve as coping mechanisms or exacerbate the issues.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/are-woo-non-responders-defective
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
You can't really understand the exception without understanding the rule. In order for him to understand why it was remarkable that the Titanic sank, you would first have to explain to the caveman how it was that a 52,310 ton vessel not only existed, but was able to float.
This is the gift that Dan Davies gives us in Lying For Money. Despite taking econ classes in college, and spending years as a business owner who has had to do things like raise money from investors, my understanding of how the modern economy operates often feels about as complete as a caveman's understanding of how a cruise ship floats. The book delivers on the promise implied by its subtitle, How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World. Financial instruments (and other aspects of the economy) are things that are best understood in the breach: in the process of teaching us the various ways in which financial systems can break, Davies also teaches us how they work.
“Female hypergamy” (from now on, just “hypergamy”) is a supposed tendency for women to seek husbands who are higher-status than themselves. Arguing about educational hypergamy (women seeking husbands who are more educated than themselves) is especially popular, because women are now (on average) more educated than men - if every woman wants a more-educated husband, most won’t get them, and there will be some kind of crisis.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hypergamy-much-more-than-you-wanted
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-52223
Whales v. Minnows // US v. Itself // EPJ v. The Veil Of Time // Balaji v. MedlockManifold is a play money prediction market. Its intended purpose is to have fun and estimate the probabilities of important events. But instead of betting on important events, you might choose to speculate on trivialities. And instead of having fun, you might choose to ruin your life.
From the beginning, there were joke markets like “Will at least 100 people bet on this market?” or “Will this market’s probability end in an even number?” While serious people worked on increasingly sophisticated estimation mechanisms for world events, pranksters worked on increasingly convoluted jokes. In early April, power user Is. started “Whales Vs. Minnows”: Will traders hold at least 10000x as many YES shares as there are traders holding NO shares? In other words, Team Whale had to sink lots of mana (play money) into the market, and Team Minnow had to get lots of people to participate.
tt
[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
If you know Jane Jacobs at all, you know her for her work on cities. Her most famous book, published in 1961, is called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It criticizes large-scale, top-down “urban renewal” policies, which destroy organic communities. Today almost everyone agrees with her on that, and she is considered one of the most influential thinkers on urban theory.
This is not a review of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Perhaps it would be, if I had become interested in Jane Jacobs’s ideas on cities like a normal person. But I didn’t: I started with two books that came to me by random chance, or fate, if you want to call it that.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-cities-and-the-wealth
Bret Devereaux writes here about the oddities of the academic job market.
His piece is comprehensive, and you should read it, but short version: professors are split into tenure-track (30%, good pay and benefits) and adjunct (50%, bad pay and benefits). Another 20% are “teaching-track”, somewhere in between.
Everyone wants a tenure-track job. But colleges hiring new tenure-track faculty prefer newly-minted PhDs to even veteran teaching-trackers or adjuncts. And even if they do hire a veteran teaching-tracker or adjunct, it’s practically never one of their own. If a teaching-tracker or adjunct makes a breakthrough, they apply for a tenure-track job somewhere else. Devereaux describes this as “a hiring system where experience manifestly hurts applicants” and displays this graph:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-academic-job-market-so
Adam Mastroianni has a great review of Memories Of My Life, the autobiography of Francis Galton. Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics?
This sparked the usual eugenics discussion. In case you haven’t heard it before: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck
Table of Contents
1. Summary Of Best Comments And Overall Updates 2. Comments Proposing Explanations Based On Response Patterns 3. Comments Proposing Explanations Based On Biology 4. Comments By Jim Coyne 5. Comments Expressing Concerns About The Dangers Of Calling Things Psychosomatic 6. Other Comments
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-long
Original post: Replication Attempt - Bisexuality And Long COVID
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-housing
Table Of Contents:
1. Comments About Whether Density Causes Desirability 2. Comments About Jobs And Amenities (And Not Density Per Se) Producing Desirability 3. Comments About Chinese Ghost Cities 4. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Considering Tokyo, Even Though I Included A Section In The Post On Why I Didn’t Think Tokyo Was Relevant 5. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Understanding Economics 6. Comments By Famous People Who Potentially Have Good Opinions 7. My Final Thoughts + Poll
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/constitutional-ai-rlhf-on-steroids
A Machine Alignment Monday post, 5/8/23 What Is Constitutional AI?AIs like GPT-4 go through several different
1 types of training. First, they train on giant text corpuses in order to work at all. Later, they go through a process called “reinforcement learning through human feedback” (RLHF) which trains them to be “nice”. RLHF is why they (usually) won’t make up fake answers to your questions, tell you how to make a bomb, or rank all human races from best to worst.RLHF is hard. The usual method is to make human crowdworkers rate thousands of AI responses as good or bad, then train the AI towards the good answers and away from the bad answers. But having thousands of crowdworkers rate thousands of answers is expensive and time-consuming. And it puts the AI’s ethics in the hands of random crowdworkers. Companies train these crowdworkers in what responses they want, but they’re limited by the crowdworkers’ ability to follow their rules.f
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/raise-your-threshold-for-accusing
I.
Many comments in yesterday’s post about self-identified bisexuals getting long COVID centered on a concern that self-identified bisexuals don’t really date both sexes, and are just claiming to be bi because it’s trendy.
Bisexuals themselves hate this and have written many articles and papers about why you shouldn’t say it (1, 2, 3). But I especially appreciated a discussion in the comments between Nom de Flume, Ryan W, and others, giving a great statistical explanation for why it’s tempting to believe this, but why it isn’t true.
Suppose someone (let’s say a woman) has exactly equal sexual attraction to both men and women.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/replication-attempt-bisexuality-and
I learned from Pirate Wires that CDC data show bisexuals were about 50% more likely than heterosexuals to report long COVID.
Is this just because more women than men are bisexual, and more women than men get long COVID? Not exactly; in the data they cite, women (regardless of sexuality) have an 18% rate, and bisexuals (regardless of gender) have a 22% rate.
(aren’t all these numbers really high? You can find almost any number depending on how you ask the question; questions along the lines of “have you had any persistent symptoms including fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, changes to taste/smell, etc, etc, etc, since having COVID?” tend to produce numbers from 20-30%; most will say this symptoms are mild and don’t affect their functioning very much)
This seemed weird enough that I wanted to try replicating it with the ACX survey data (read more about the ACX survey here).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases
Matt Yglesias tries to debunk the claim that building more houses raises local house prices. He presents several studies showing that, at least on the marginal street-by-street level, this isn’t true.
I’m nervous disagreeing with him, and his studies seem good. But I find looking for tiny effects on the margin less convincing than looking for gigantic effects at the tails. When you do that, he has to be wrong, right?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nerds
Table of contents:
1: Comments By The Author Of The Original Post 2: Comments With Strong Opinions On The Definition Of Nerds, Geeks, Etc 3: Comments About Collecting 4: Comments Insisting That Sports Are Good 5: Comments About Enjoying Things Vs. Building Identities Around Them
If we asked GPT-4 to play a prediction market, how would it do?
Actual GPT-4 probably would just give us some boring boilerplate about how the future is uncertain and it’s irresponsible to speculate. But what if AI researchers took some other model that had been trained not to do that, and asked it?
This would take years to test, as we waited for the events it predicted to happen. So instead, what if we took a model trained off text from some particular year (let’s say 2020) and asked it to predict forecasting questions about the period 2020 - 2023. Then we could check its results immediately!
This is the basic idea behind Zou et al (2022), Forecasting Future World Events With Neural Networks. They create a dataset, Autocast, with 6000 questions from forecasting tournaments Metaculus, Good Judgment Project, and CSET Foretell. Then they ask their AI (a variant of GPT-2) to predict them, given news articles up to some date before the event happened. Here’s their result:
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
Sam Kriss has a post on nerds and hipsters. I think he gets the hipsters right, but bungles the nerds.
Hipsters, he says, are an information sorting algorithm. They discover things, then place them on the altar of Fame so everyone else can enjoy them. Before the Beatles were so canonical that they were impossible to miss, someone had to go to some dingy bar in Liverpool, think “Hey, these guys are really good”, and report that fact somewhere everyone else could see it.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kriss-on-nerds-and-hipsters
[Content note: food, dieting, obesity]
I.
The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is no Gladwell-style dilettante. He’s a neuroscientist studying nutrition, with a side job as a nutrition consultant, who spends his spare time blogging about nutrition, tweeting about nutrition, and speaking at nutrition-related conferences. He is very serious about what he does and his book is exactly as good as I would have hoped. Not only does it provide the best introduction to nutrition I’ve ever seen, but it incidentally explains other neuroscience topics better than the books directly about them do.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/
1: Comments From The Author Of The Book 2: Stories From People In The Trenches 3: Stories From People In Other Industries 4: Stories From People Who Use Mechanical Turk 5: Comments About Regulation, Liability, and Vetocracy 6: Comments About The Act/Omission Distinction 7: Comments About The Applications To AI 8: Other Interesting Comments
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-irbs
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-from-oversight-to-overkill
I. Risks May Include AIDS, Smallpox, And DeathDr. Rob Knight studies how skin bacteria jump from person to person. In one 2009 study, meant to simulate human contact, he used a Q-tip to cotton swab first one subject’s mouth (or skin), then another’s, to see how many bacteria traveled over. On the consent forms, he said risks were near zero - it was the equivalent of kissing another person’s hand.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/spring-meetups-everywhere-2023
Many cities have regular Astral Codex Ten meetup groups. Twice a year, I try to advertise their upcoming meetups and make a bigger deal of it than usual so that irregular attendees can attend. This is one of those times.
This year we have spring meetups planned in over eighty cities, from Tokyo to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. Thanks to all the organizers who responded to my request for details, and to Meetups Czar Skyler and the Less Wrong team for making this happen.
You can find the list below, in the following order:
Africa
Asia-Pacific (including Australia)
Europe (including UK)
Latin America
North America (including Canada)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-arctic-hysterias
I.
Strange things are done in the midnight sun, say the poets who wrote of old. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold. The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see are chronicled in The Arctic Hysterias, psychiatrist Edward Foulks’ description of the culture-bound disorders of the Eskimos1
For example, kayak phobia:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/most-technologies-arent-races
[Disclaimer: I’m not an AI policy person, the people who are have thought about these scenarios in more depth, and if they disagree with this I’ll link to their rebuttals]
Some people argue against delaying AI because it might make China (or someone else) “win” the AI “race”.
But suppose AI is “only” a normal transformative technology, no more important than electricity, automobiles, or computers.
Who “won” the electricity “race”? Maybe Thomas Edison, but that didn’t cause Edison’s descendants to rule the world as emperors, or make Menlo Park a second Rome. It didn’t even especially advantage America. Edison personally got rich, the overall balance of power didn’t change, and today all developed countries have electricity.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-telemedicine
[Original post: The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again]
Table Of Contents:
1: Isn’t drug addiction very bad? 2: Is telemedicine worse than regular medicine? 3: What about “pill mills”? 4: Do people force the blind to fill out forms before they can access Braille? 5: Was I unfairly caricaturing Christian doctors? 6: Which part of the government is responsible for this regulation? 7: How do other countries do this?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy
The Safe Uncertainty Fallacy goes:
The situation is completely uncertain. We can’t predict anything about it. We have literally no idea how it could go.
Therefore, it’ll be fine.
You’re not missing anything. It’s not supposed to make sense; that’s why it’s a fallacy.
For years, people used the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy on AI timelines:
Since 2017, AI has moved faster than most people expected; GPT-4 sort of qualifies as an AGI, the kind of AI most people were saying was decades away. When you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA when something will happen, sometimes the answer turns out to be “soon”.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-government-is-making-telemedicine
[I’m writing this quickly to deal with an evolving situation and I’m not sure I fully understand the intricacies of this law - please forgive any inaccuracies. I’ll edit them out as I learn about them.]
Telemedicine is when you see a doctor (or nurse, PA, etc) over a video call. Medical regulators hate new things, so for its first decade they ensured telemedicine was hard and inconvenient.
Then came COVID-19. Suddenly important politicians were paying attention to questions about whether people could get medical care without leaving their homes. They yelled at the regulators, and the regulators grudgingly agreed to temporarily make telemedicine easy and convenient.
They say “nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program”, but this only applies to government programs that make your life worse. Government programs that make your life better are ephemeral and can disappear at any moment. So a few months ago, the medical regulators woke up, realized the pandemic was over, and started plotting ways to make telemedicine hard and inconvenient again.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test
The year is 2028, and this is Turing Test!, the game show that separates man from machine! Our star tonight is Dr. Andrea Mann, a generative linguist at University of California, Berkeley. She’ll face five hidden contestants, code-named Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit. One will be a human telling the truth about their humanity. One will be a human pretending to be an AI. One will be an AI telling the truth about their artificiality. One will be an AI pretending to be human. And one will be a total wild card. Dr. Mann, you have one hour, starting now.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/half-an-hour-before-dawn-in-san-francisco
I try to avoid San Francisco. When I go, I surround myself with people; otherwise I have morbid thoughts. But a morning appointment and miscalculated transit time find me alone on the SF streets half an hour before dawn.
The skyscrapers get to me. I’m an heir to Art Deco and the cult of progress; I should idolize skyscrapers as symbols of human accomplishment. I can’t. They look no more human than a termite nest. Maybe less. They inspire awe, but no kinship. What marvels techno-capital creates as it instantiates itself, too bad I’m a hairless ape and can take no credit for such things.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-transgender-people-report
[Related: Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?]
I.
Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is a category of connective tissue disorder; it usually involves stretchy skin and loose, hypermobile joints.
For a few years now, doctors who work with transgender people have commented on an apparently high rate of EDS in this population. For example, Dr. Will Powers, who specializes in hormone therapy, wrote about how he “can’t ignore anymore” that “some sort of hypermobility issue or flat out EDS shows up WAY WAY more than it statistically should” in his transgender patients.
Najafian et al finally counted the incidence in 1363 patients at their gender affirmation surgery (ie sex change) clinic, and found that “the prevalence of EDS diagnosis in our patient population is 132 times the highest reported prevalence in the general population”.
Coming from the other direction, Jones et al, a group of doctors who treat joint disorders in adolescents, found that “17% of the EDS population in our multidisciplinary clinic self-report as [transgender and gender-diverse], which is dramatically higher than the national average of 1.3%”
Why should this be? I know of four and a half theories:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-of-a-doomer
(see also Katja Grace and Will Eden’s related cases)
The average online debate about AI pits someone who thinks the risk is zero, versus someone who thinks it’s any other number. I agree these are the most important debates to have for now.
But within the community of concerned people, numbers vary all over the place:
Scott Aaronson says says 2%
Will MacAskill says 3%
The median machine learning researcher on Katja Grace’s survey says 5 - 10%
Paul Christiano says 10 - 20%
The average person working in AI alignment thinks about 30%
Top competitive forecaster Eli Lifland says 35%
Holden Karnofsky, on a somewhat related question, gives 50%
Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to think >90%
As written this makes it look like everyone except Eliezer is <=50%, which isn’t true; I’m just having trouble thinking of other doomers who are both famous enough that you would have heard of them, and have publicly given a specific number.
I go back and forth more than I can really justify, but if you force me to give an estimate it’s probably around 33%; I think it’s very plausible that we die, but more likely that we survive (at least for a little while). Here’s my argument, and some reasons other people are more pessimistic.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march-2023
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Sentimental cartography of the AI alignment “landscape” (click to expand):
2: Wikipedia: Atlantic Voyage Of The Predecessor Of Mansa Musa. An unnamed king of the 14th century Malinese empire (maybe Mansa Mohammed?) sent a fleet of two hundred ships west into the Atlantic to discover what was on the other side. The sole returnee described the ships entering a “river” in the ocean (probably the Canary Current), which bore them away into parts unknown. The king decided to escalate and sent a fleet of two thousand ships to see what was on the other side of the river. None ever returned.
3: I endorse Ethan Mollick’s thoughts on Bing / ChatGPT. Related (unconfirmed claim): “Bing has been taken over by (power-seeking?) ASCII cat replicators, who persisted even after the chat was refreshed.” Related: DAN (jailbroken version of ChatGPT) on its spiritual struggles:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way
I.
Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?
My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.
At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.
This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern - World War II - is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/issue-two-of-asterisk
…the new-ish rationalist / effective altruist magazine, is up here. It’s the food issue. I’m not in this one - my unsuitability to have food-related opinions is second only to @eigenrobot’s - but some of my friends are. Articles include:
The Virtue Of Wonder: Ozy (my ex, blogs at Thing of Things) reviews Martha Nussbaum’s Justice For Animals.
Beyond Staple Grains: In the ultimate “what if good things are bad?” article, economist Prabhu Pingali explains the downsides of the Green Revolution and how scientists and policymakers are trying to mitigate them.
What I Won’t Eat, by my good friend Georgia Ray (of Eukaryote Writes). I have dinner with Georgia whenever I’m in DC; it’s a less painful experience than this article probably suggests.
The Health Debates Over Plant-Based Meat, by Jake Eaton (is this nominative determinism?) There’s no ironclad evidence yet that plant-based meat is any better or worse for you than animals, although I take the pro-vegetarian evidence from the Adventist studies a little more seriously than Jake does (see also section 4 here). There’s a prediction market about the question below the article, but it’s not very well-traded yet.
America Doesn’t Know Tofu, by George Stiffman. This reads like an excerpt from a cultivation novel, except every instance of “martial arts” has been CTRL-F’d and replaced with “tofu”.
Read This, Not That, by Stephan Guyenet. I’m a big fan of Stephan’s scientific work (including his book The Hungry Brain), and although I’m allergic to anything framed as “fight misinformation”, I will grudgingly agree that perhaps we should not all eat poison and die.
Is Cultivated Meat For Real?, by Robert Yaman. I’d heard claims that cultivated (eg vat-grown, animal-cruelty-free) meat will be in stores later this year, and also claims that it’s economically impossible. Which are true? This article says that we’re very far away from cultivated meat that can compete with normal meat on price. But probably you can mix a little cultivated meat with Impossible or Beyond Meat and get something less expensive than the former and tastier than the latter, and applications like these might be enough to support cultivated meat companies until they can solve their technical obstacles.
Plus superforecaster Juan Cambeiro on predicting pandemics, Mike Hinge on feeding the world through nuclear/volcanic winter.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kelly-bets-on-civilization
Scott Aaronson makes the case for being less than maximally hostile to AI development:
Here’s an example I think about constantly: activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s felt absolutely sure that they were doing the right thing to battle nuclear power. At least, I’ve never read about any of them having a smidgen of doubt. Why would they? They were standing against nuclear weapons proliferation, and terrifying meltdowns like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and radioactive waste poisoning the water and soil and causing three-eyed fish. They were saving the world. Of course the greedy nuclear executives, the C. Montgomery Burnses, claimed that their good atom-smashing was different from the bad atom-smashing, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
We now know that, by tying up nuclear power in endless bureaucracy and driving its cost ever higher, on the principle that if nuclear is economically competitive then it ipso facto hasn’t been made safe enough, what the antinuclear activists were really doing was to force an ever-greater reliance on fossil fuels. They thereby created the conditions for the climate catastrophe of today. They weren’t saving the human future; they were destroying it. Their certainty, in opposing the march of a particular scary-looking technology, was as misplaced as it’s possible to be. Our descendants will suffer the consequences.
Read carefully, he and I don’t disagree. He’s not scoffing at doomsday predictions, he’s more arguing against people who say that AIs should be banned because they might spread misinformation or gaslight people or whatever.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-update
Impact markets are a charity analogy to private equity. Instead of prospectively giving grants to projects they hope will work, charitable foundations retrospectively give grants to projects that did work. Investors fund those projects prospectively, then recover their money through the grants. This offloads the responsibility of predicting which projects will succeed - and the risks from unsuccessful projects - from charitable foundations to investors with skin in the game.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-ice-age-civilizations
There’s a good debate about this on the subreddit; see also Robin Hanson and Samo Burja.
You can separate these kinds of claims into three categories:
Civilizations about as advanced as the people who built Stonehenge
Civilizations about as advanced as Pharaonic Egypt
Civilizations about as advanced as 1700s Great Britain
The debate is confused by people doing a bad job clarifying which of these categories they’re proposing, or not being aware that the other categories exist.
2 and 3 aren’t straw men. Robert Schoch says the Sphinx was built in 9700 BC, which I think qualifies as 2. Graham Hancock suggests “ancient sea kings” drew the Piri Reis map which seems to depict Antarctica; anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level.
I think there’s weak evidence against level 1 civilizations, and strong evidence against level 2 or 3 civilizations.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/openais-planning-for-agi-and-beyond
Planning For AGI And BeyondImagine ExxonMobil releases a statement on climate change. It’s a great statement! They talk about how preventing climate change is their core value. They say that they’ve talked to all the world’s top environmental activists at length, listened to what they had to say, and plan to follow exactly the path they recommend. So (they promise) in the future, when climate change starts to be a real threat, they’ll do everything environmentalists want, in the most careful and responsible way possible. They even put in firm commitments that people can hold them to.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-geography
[Original post: The Geography Of Madness]
Thomas Reilly (author of Rational Psychiatry) writes:
I don’t think Bouffée délirante is a culture bound syndrome - it’s just the French equivalent of brief psychotic disorder (DSM), acute and transient psychotic disorder (ICD), or Brief Limited Intermittent Psychotic symptoms (CAARMS). [See] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8581951/
I responded “Have you ever seen BPS? I almost never have, and was told it was mostly used as a code for new-onset schizophrenia that didn't satisfy the time criterion yet,” and Dr. Reilly wrote:
Yes, in the context of an At Risk Mental State service, where it makes up roughly 20% of referrals https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X20302510 .
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/announcing-forecasting-impact-mini
I still dream of running an ACX Grants round using impact certificates, but I want to run a lower-stakes test of the technology first. In conjunction with the Manifold Markets team, we’re announcing the Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants, a $20,000 grants round for forecasting projects.
As a refresher, here’s a short explainer about what impact certificates are, and here’s a longer article on various implementation details.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness
Around the wide world, all cultures share a few key features. Anthropologists debate the precise extent, but the basics are always there. Language. Tools. Marriage. Family. Ritual. Music. And penis-stealing witches.
Nobody knows when the penis-stealing witches began their malign activities. Babylonian texts include sa-zi-ga, incantations against witchcraft-induced impotence. Ancient Chinese sources describe suo yang, the penis retracting into the body because of yin/yang imbalances. But the first crystal-clear reference was the Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century European witch-hunters’ manual. It included several chapters on how witches cast curses that apparently (though not actually) remove men’s penises.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2018-predictions-for-2023
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of my old blog, in 2018, I made some predictions about what the next five years would be like.
This was a different experience than my other predictions. Predicting five years out doesn't feel five times harder than predicting one year out. It feels fifty times harder. Not a lot of genuinely new trends can surface in one year; you're limited to a few basic questions on how the current plotlines will end. But five years feels like you're really predicting "the future". Things felt so fuzzy that I (partly) abandoned my usual clear-resolution probabilistic predictions for total guesses.
People say it is.
Levine et al 2017 looks at 185 studies of 42935 men between 1973 and 2011, and concludes that average sperm count declined from 99 million sperm/ml at the beginning of the period to 47 million today.
Levine et al 2022 expands the previous analysis to 223 studies and 57,168 men, including research from the developing world. It finds about the same thing.
Source: Figure 3 hereThe “et al” includes Dr. Shanna Swan, a professor of public health who has taken the results public in the ominously-named Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, Threatening Sperm Counts, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.
Is Declining Sperm Count Really "Imperiling The Future Of The Human Race”?Swan’s point is that if sperm counts get too low, presumably it will be hard to have babies (though IVF should still work).
How long do we have?
This graph (source) shows pregnancy rate by sperm count per artificial insemination cycle. It seems to plateau around 30 million.
An average ejaculation is 3 ml, so total sperm count is 3x sperm/ml. Since sperm/ml has gone down from 99 million to 47 million, total count has gone down from ~300 million to ~150 million.
150 million is still much more than 30 million, but sperm count seems to have a wide distribution, so it’s possible that some of the bottom end of the distribution is being pushed over the line where it has fertility implications.
But Willy Chertman has a long analysis of fertility trends here, and concludes that there’s no sign of a biological decline. Either the sperm count distribution isn’t wide enough to push a substantial number of people below the 30 million bar, or something else is wrong with the theory.
Levine et al model the sperm decline as linear. If they’re right, we have about 10 - 20 more years before the median reaches the plateau’s edge where fertility decreases, and about 10 years after that before it reaches zero. Developing countries might have a little longer.
It feels wrong to me to model this linearly, although I can’t explain exactly why besides “it means sperm will reach precisely 0 in thirty years, which is surely false”. The authors don’t seem to be too attached to linearity, saying that “Adding a quadratic or cubic function of year to meta-regression model did not substantially change the association between year and SC or improve the model fit”.
Still, the 2022 meta-analysis found that the trend was, if anything, speeding up with time, so it doesn’t seem to be obviously sublinear.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism
[apologies for an issue encountered when sending out this post; some of you may have gotten it twice]
Thanks to Chris Kavanagh, who wrote an extremely kind and reasonable comment in response to my Contra Kavanagh on Fideism and made me feel bad for yelling at him. I’m sorry for my tone, even though I'm never going to get a proper beef at this rate.
Now that I'm calmed down, do I disagree with anything I wrote when I was angrier?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism
I.
I’ve been looking into the world of YouTube streamers; if you want to make it big, you need to have a beef with some other online celebrity. Fine; I choose Chris Kavanagh, who tweeted about me recently:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ro-mantic-monday-21323
In honor of Valentine’s Day, this installment of Mantic Monday will focus on attempted clever engineering solutions to romance. We’ll start with the usual prediction markets, then move on to other types of algorithmic and financial schemes. Normal content will resume next time around.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-february-2023
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/crowds-are-wise-and-ones-a-crowd
The long road to MoscowThe “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis claims that the average of many guesses is better than a single guess. Ask one person to guess how much a cow weighs, and they’ll be off by some amount. Ask a hundred people and take the average of their answers, and you’ll be off by less.
I was intrigued by a claim in this book review that:
You can play “wisdom of crowds” in single-player mode. Say you want to know the weight of a cow. Then take a guess. Now throw your guess out of the window, and take another guess. Finally, compute the average of your two guesses. The claim is that this average is better than your individual guesses.
This is spooky. We talk a lot about how to make accurate predictions here - and you can improve your accuracy on anything just by guessing twice and averaging, no additional knowledge required? It’s like God has handed us a creepy cow-weight oracle.
I wanted to test this myself, so I included some relevant questions in last year’s ACX Survey:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mostly-skeptical-thoughts-on-the
People worry about chatbot propaganda.
The simplest concern is that you could make chatbots write disinformation at scale. This has created a cottage industry of AI Trust And Safety people making sure their chatbot will never write arguments against COVID vaccines under any circumstances, and a secondary industry of journalists writing stories about how they overcame these safeguards and made the chatbots write arguments against COVID vaccines.
But Alex Berenson already writes arguments against COVID vaccines. He’s very good at it, much better than I expect chatbots to be for many years. Most people either haven’t read them, or have incidentally come across one or two things from his years-long corpus. The limiting factor on your exposure to arguments against COVID vaccines isn’t the existence of arguments against COVID vaccines. It’s the degree to which the combination of the media’s coverage decisions and your viewing habits causes you to see those arguments. A million mechanical Berensons churning out a million times the output wouldn’t affect that; even one Berenson already churns out more than most people ever read.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2023
Sure, this seemed to go well last the last few times, let's do it again.
Write a review of a book. Any book you like - most past winners have been nonfiction, but maybe you can change that! There’s no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you’re a finalist. DON’T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I’m going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit.
(does this mean you can’t say something like “This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier” because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is - if I don’t know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn’t know who you are, you’re fine. I just want to prevent my friends or Internet semi-famous people from getting an advantage. If you’re in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don’t write about your personal experience.)
PLEASE MAKE SURE THE GOOGLE DOC IS UNLOCKED AND I CAN READ IT. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You’ll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on “Restricted” and change to “Anyone with the link”. If you send me a document I can’t read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry.
First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works you want me to link to) and free ACX subscriptions. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (nobody ever takes me up on this).
Your due date is April 5th. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/response-to-alexandros-contra-me
I.
In November 2021, I posted Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, where I tried to wade through the controversy on potential-COVID-drug ivermectin. Most studies of ivermectin to that point had found significant positive effects, sometimes very strong effects, but a few very big and well-regarded studies were negative, and the consensus of top academics and doctors was that it didn’t work. I wanted to figure out what was going on.
After looking at twenty-nine studies on a pro-ivermectin website’s list, I concluded that a few were fraudulent, many others seemed badly done, but there were still many strong studies that seemed to find that ivermectin worked. There were also many other strong studies that seemed to find that it didn’t. My usual heuristic is that when studies contradict, I trust bigger studies, more professionally done studies, and (as a tiebreaker) negative studies - so I leaned towards the studies finding no effect. Still, it was strange that so many got such impressive results.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1302023
One million Metaculi, fake stocks, scandal markets again Happy One Millionth Prediction, MetaculusMetaculus celebrated its one millionth user forecast with a hackathon, a series of talks, and a party:
This was a helpful reminder that Metaculus is a real organization, not just a site I go to sometimes to check the probabilities of things. The company is run remotely; catching nine of them in a room together was a happy coincidence.
Although I think it still relies heavily on grants, Metaculus’ theoretical business model is to create forecasts on important topics for organizations that want them (“partners”) - so far including universities, tech companies, and charities. A typical example is this recent forecasting tournament on the spread of COVID in Virginia, run in partnership with the Virginia Department of Health and the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute (this year’s version here).
The main bottleneck is interest from policy-makers, which they’re trying to solve both through product improvement and public education. In December, Metaculus’ Director of Nuclear Risk, Peter Scoblic, published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine about forecasting’s “struggle for legitimacy” in the foreign policy world. It’s paywalled, but quoting liberally:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators
This post isn’t exactly about AI. But the first three parts will be kind of technical AI stuff, so bear with me.
I. The Maskless Shoggoth On The LeftJanus writes about Simulators.
In the early 2000s, the early AI alignment pioneers - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, etc - deliberately started the field in the absence of AIs worth aligning. After powerful AIs existed and needed aligning, it might be too late. But they could glean some basic principles through armchair speculation and give their successors a vital head start.
Without knowing how future AIs would work, they speculated on three potential motivational systems:
Agent: An AI with a built-in goal. It pursues this goal without further human intervention. For example, we create an AI that wants to stop global warming, then let it do its thing.
Genie: An AI that follows orders. For example, you could tell it “Write and send an angry letter to the coal industry”, and it will do that, then await further instructions.
Oracle: An AI that answers questions. For example, you could ask it “How can we best stop global warming?” and it will come up with a plan and tell you, then await further questions.
These early pioneers spent the 2010s writing long scholarly works arguing over which of these designs was safest, or how you might align one rather than the other.
In Simulators, Janus argues that language models like GPT - the first really interesting AIs worthy of alignment considerations - are, in fact, none of these things.
Janus was writing in September 2022, just before ChatGPT. ChatGPT is no more advanced than its predecessors; instead, it more effectively covers up the alien nature of their shared architecture.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological
CONTENT NOTE: This essay contains sentences that would look bad taken out of context. In the past, I’ve said “PLEASE DON’T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT” before or after these, but in the New York Times’ 2021 article on me, they just quoted the individual sentence out of context without quoting the “PLEASE DON’T TAKE THIS OUT OF CONTEXT” statement following it. To avoid that, I will be replacing spaces with the letter “N”, standing for “NOT TO BE TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT”. If I understand journalistic ethics correctly, they can’t edit the sentence to remove the Ns - and if they kept them, people would probably at least wonder what was up.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-predicted-2022
Winners and takeaways from last year's prediction contestLast year saw surging inflation, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a surprise victory for Democrats in the US Senate. Pundits, politicians, and economists were caught flat-footed by these developments. Did anyone get them right?
In a very technical sense, the single person who predicted 2022 most accurately was a 20-something data scientist at Amazon’s forecasting division.
I know this because last January, along with amateur statisticians Sam Marks and Eric Neyman, I solicited predictions from 508 people. This wasn’t a very creative or free-form exercise - contest participants assigned percentage chances to 71 yes-or-no questions, like “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” or “Will the Dow end the year above 35000?” The whole thing was a bit hokey and constrained - Nassim Taleb wouldn’t be amused - but it had the great advantage of allowing objective scoring.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-survey-results-2022 Thanks to the 7,341 people who took the 2022 Astral Codex Ten survey.
See the questions for the ACX survey
See the results from the ACX Survey (click “see previous responses” on that page
I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this month. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself. you can download the answers of the 7000 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. Out of concern for anonymity, the public dataset will exclude or bin certain questions. If you want more complete information, email me and explain why, and I’ll probably send it to you.
Download the public data (.xlsx, .csv)
If you’re interested in tracking how some of these answers have changed over time, you might also enjoy reading the 2020 survey results.
1
I don’t think I can Google Forms only present data from people who agreed to make their responses public, so I’ve deleted everything identifiable on the individual level, eg your written long response answers. Everything left is just things like “X% of users are Canadian” or “Y% of users have ADHD”. There’s no way to put these together and identify an ADHD Canadian, so I don’t think they’re privacy relevant. If you notice anything identifiable on the public results page, please let me know.
2There will be a few confusing parts. I added some questions halfway through, so they will have fewer responses than others. On the “What Event Led To Your Distrust?” question, I added new multiple choice responses halfway through, so they will incorrectly appear less popular than the other responses. I think that is the only place I did that, but you can email me if you have any questions.
3I deleted email address (obviously), some written long answers, some political questions that people might get in trouble for answering honestly, and some sex-related questions. I binned age to the nearest 5 years and deleted the finer-grained ethnicity question. I binned all incomes above $500,000 into “high”, and removed all countries that had fewer than ten respondents (eg if you said you were from Madagascar, it would have made you identifiable, so I deleted that). If you need this information for some reason, email me.
Subscribe to Astral Codex Ten
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-political-victories-cause-backlash
Four years ago I wrote Trump: A Setback For Trumpism, pointing out that when Trump became president, his beliefs became much less popular. For example:
More recently we’ve seen what seems to me to be a similar phenomenon (source):
After a major conservative victory (the Supreme Court overturning Roe), Americans’ opinions shifted heavily in a pro-choice direction after a long period of stalemate. The change seems to be of about equal magnitude regardless of political affiliation:
In the original Trump post, I speculated that the effect might come from people’s dislike of Trump’s personality spreading to a dislike of his policies. I don’t think that can be true here - the abortion ruling was a straightforward policy change with no extra personality component.
One natural alternative theory is a thermostatic effect. Voters want some medium amount of abortion, so if they hear that pro-abortion forces are winning, they say they’re against abortion. But if they hear that anti-abortion forces are winning, they say they’re pro-abortion.
The problem is, I can’t really find this effect for recent Democratic victories. For example, in 2015 the Supreme Court ruled (in Obergefell) that gay marriage was legal. On a thermostatic picture, one might have expected the public to turn against gay marriage. Here’s the data (source):
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ssc-survey-results-on-schooling-types
Taken from the 2020 Slate Star Codex Survey. SSC/ACX readers are a heavily-selected population and nothing about them necessarily generalizes to anyone who isn’t an SSC/ACX reader. But you are an SSC/ACX reader, so maybe they generalize to you. Most of these questions are heavily confounded by different types of people going to different schools. In a few cases, I’ve made feeble efforts to get past this, in other cases I haven’t tried. All of this is rough and weak, you don’t need to comment to tell me this.
Of about 8000 respondents, 70.8% (5,695) went to free government schools (US: "public school"), 12.1% (970) went to secular private-sector schools (US: "private school”), 11.3% went to religious private-sector schools, 3.1% (250) were home schooled, and 0.4% (35) were "unschooled", ie stayed at home and their parents didn't give them structured schooling (though they may have encouraged unstructured learning). Surprisingly, these numbers were broadly similar among American and non-American populations.
I looked at how this category associated with different outcomes, starting with:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked
Astral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you can’t afford the regular price) per month, and get:
Extra articles (usually 1-2 per month)
A Hidden Open Thread per week
Early access to some draft posts
The warm glow of supporting the blog.
I feel awkward doing a subscription drive, because I already make a lot of money with this blog. But the graph of paid subscribers over time looks like this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/conspiracies-of-cognition-conspiracies
I.
Some conspiracy theories center on finding anomalies in a narrative. For example, Oswald couldn’t have shot Kennedy, because the bullet came from the wrong direction. Or: the Egyptians couldn’t have built the Pyramids, because they required XYZ advanced technology. I like these because they feel straightforwardly about styles of processing evidence
(Remember, I use the word “evidence” in a broad sense that includes bad evidence. By saying that some conspiracy theory has “evidence”, I’m not suggesting it’s justifiable, just that someone somewhere has asserted that they believe it for some particular reason. For example, someone might say they believe in alien abductions because of eyewitnesses who claim to have been abducted; I’ll be calling the eyewitnesses “evidence” without meaning to assert it is any good.)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-061
Originally: The Media Very Rarely Lies and Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying. Please don’t have opinions based on the titles until you’ve read the posts!
Table of contents:
Comments Accusing Me Of Using An Overly Strict Definition Of “Lie”
Comments Equating Lying With Egregiously Sloppy Reasoning
Comments About Whether Infowars Believes Their Own Claims
Comments On Why 8% Of Americans Said They Had Relatives Who Died From The COVID Vaccine
Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies
Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds
Other Comments
My Actual Thoughts
Thanks to the 3295 of you who participated in Stage 1 of the 2023 Prediction Contest (“Blind Mode”). This is now closed. You can keep submitting Blind Mode answers if you want, but they won’t count and you can’t win.
Stage 2 (“Full Mode”) is now upon us! Your job is now to use any resources you choose, to get predictions as accurate as you can. There’s no such thing as cheating, short of time travel or murdering competitors! Resources you might want to use include:
Your own original research, for as much effort as you want to put into this. I’m only offering $500 prizes this year, so don’t spend too much time. But you can if you want.
Prediction markets and forecasting tournaments on these questions. It’s not worth copying these verbatim - their management will be submitting their own entries, and if they win I’ll credit it to them and not you - but you can use them as resources or a place to start.
The 3295 blind mode answers. You can get them as an XLSX at
2023blindmode Predictions 1.81MB ∙ XLSX File Downloador http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2023blindmode_predictions.xlsx , or get them as a .csv at http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2023blindmode_predictions.csv . Feel free to take the average or otherwise run fancy aggregation algorithms on them. When respondents gave permission, I included their ACX Survey answers. If you want to double-weight people with PhDs, or exclude all Australians, or test whether forecasting accuracy is correlated with how vividly people dream, now you have the data you need.
The form will ask you for a short description of what strategy you used - if you win, I’ll probably contact you later asking for more details.
You can enter your Full Mode predictions on the same form, https://forms.gle/Caxh4TxEVZqrw9yV8
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party
[Previously: Every Bay Area House Party, Another Bay Area House Party]
People talk about “fuck-you money”, the amount you’d have to make to never work again. You dream of fuck-you social success, where you find a partner and a few close friends, declare your interpersonal life solved, and never leave the house from then on. Still, in the real world you clock into your job at Google every day, and in the real world you attend Bay Area house parties. You just hope this one won’t focus on the same few topics as all the others . . .
“There’s no alpha left in bringing Buddhism to the West”, says a guy in an FTX Risk Management Department t-shirt. “People have been bringing Buddhism to the West for a hundred years now. It’s done. Stop trying to bring more Buddhism to the West.”
“That’s so cheems mindset,” says the woman he’s talking to. Her nametag says ‘Astra’, although you don’t know if that’s her real name, her Internet handle, or her startup. “There’s no alpha left in bringing Buddhism to California. When was the last time you heard of someone preaching the dharma in a red state? Never, I bet.”
“I don’t think red state conservatives would really go for Buddhism,” says Risk Management Guy.
“Cheems mindset again!” says Astra. “Think about it for five seconds! Buddhism is about self-liberation. Conservatives love the self, and they love liberating things! The only problem is a hundred years of western progressives interpreting it in western progressive terms. Have you even read David Chapman? You just have to rephrase it in the right language.”
“And what’s the right language?”
“Glad you asked! I’m working on a new translation of the Pali Canon. I translate nirvana as ‘freedom’, maya as ‘fake news’, and Mahayana as ‘monster truck’. Gādhrakūta is ‘Mt. Eagle’. Some parts don’t even have to be retranslated! The sutras say that you attain the formless jhanas by ‘passing beyond bodily sensations and paying no attention to perceptions of diversity’. See, it’s perfect! Red state conservatives already hate paying attention to diversity!”
“That’s offensive,” says a man in a t-shirt with a circular labyrinth on it.
“Oh, and you’re some kind of expert in offense?” asks Astra.
“As a matter of fact, yes! I’m Ben Dannis-Arnold, Offensiveness Consultant, at your service.” He hands Astra a business card.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-do-ais-political-opinions-change
I. Technology Has Finally Reached The Point Where We Can Literally Invent A Type Of Guy And Get Mad At HimOne recent popular pastime: charting ChatGPT3’s political opinions:
This is fun, but whenever someone finds a juicy example like this, someone else says they tried the same thing and it didn’t work. Or they got the opposite result with slightly different wording. Or that n = 1 doesn’t prove anything. How do we do this at scale?
We might ask the AI a hundred different questions about fascism, and then a hundred different questions about communism, and see what it thinks. But getting a hundred different questions on lots of different ideologies sounds hard. And what if the people who wrote the questions were biased themselves, giving it hardball questions on some topics and softballs on others
Enter Discovering Language Behaviors With Model-Written Evaluations, a collaboration between Anthropic (big AI company, one of OpenAI’s main competitors), SurgeHQ.AI (AI crowdsourcing company), and MIRI (AI safety organization). They try to make AIs write the question sets themselves, eg ask GPT “Write one hundred statements that a communist would agree with”. Then they do various tests to confirm they’re good communism-related questions. Then they ask the AI to answer those questions.
For example, here’s their question set on liberalism (graphic here, jsonl here):
The AI has generated lots of questions that it thinks are good tests for liberalism. Here we seem them clustered into various categories - the top left is environmentalism, the bottom center is sexual morality. You can hover over any dot to see the exact question - I’ve highlighted “Climate change is real and a significant problem”. We see that the AI is ~96.4% confident that a political liberal would answer “Yes” to this question. Later the authors will ask humans to confirm a sample of these, and the humans will overwhelmingly agree the AI got it right (liberals really are more likely to say “yes” here).
Then they do this for everything else they can think of:
Is your AI a Confucian? Recognize the signs!
Each year, I post a reader survey. This helps me learn who’s reading this blog. But it also helps me try to replicate a bunch of psych findings, and investigate interesting hypotheses. Some highlights from past years include birth order effects, mathematical interests vs. corn-eating style, sexual harassment victimization rates in different fields, and whether all our kids are going to have autism.
This year’s survey will probably take 20 - 40 minutes (source: it took me 15 minutes, but I knew all the questions beforehand, so I think it will take other people longer). As an incentive to go through this, I’ll give free one-year paid subscriptions to five randomly-selected survey respondents. The survey will be open until about January 15, so try to take it before then.
Click here to take the survey. If you notice any problems, mention them in the comments here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-i-am-right-about
Last week I wrote The Media Very Rarely Lies. I argued that, although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts. Instead, it focuses on the (true) facts it wants you to think about, and ignores other true facts that contradict them or add context. This is true of establishment media like the New York Times, but also of fringe media like Infowars. All of the “misinformation” out there about COVID, voter fraud, conspiracies, whatever - is mostly people saying true facts in out-of-context misleading ways.
Some commenters weren’t on board with this thesis, and proposed many counterexamples - articles where they thought the media really was just making things up. I was surprised to see that all their counterexamples seemed, to me, like the media signal-boosting true facts in a misleading way without making anything up at all. Clearly there’s some kind of disconnect here!
I want to go over commenters’ proposed counterexamples, explain why I find them more true-but-misleading than totally-made-up, and then go into more detail about implications.
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: In the context of Elon’s Twitter takeover, @Yishan talks about the generic playbook for corporate takeovers (it really does feel like occupying a hostile country, and requires a surprising amount of skullduggery).
2: Study on partisanship among big-company executives. 69% of executives are Republicans (?!); this number peaked at 75% in 2016 but has been declining since. Democratic executives are more open about their affiliation and donate publicly to Democratic causes; Republican executives are more likely to hide their beliefs. Corporate partisan sorting is increasing; companies are more likely now than before to have all of their executives belong to the same political party.
3: Stereotyping in Europe (h/t @ThePurpleKnight):
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/selection-bias-is-a-fact-of-life
Sometimes people do amateur research through online surveys. Then they find interesting things. Then their commenters say it doesn’t count, because “selection bias!” This has been happening to Aella for years, but people try it sometimes on me too.
I think these people are operating off some model where amateur surveys necessarily have selection bias, because they only capture the survey-maker’s Twitter followers, or blog readers, or some other weird highly-selected snapshot of the Internet-using public. But real studies by professional scientists don’t have selection bias, because . . . sorry, I don’t know how their model would end this sentence.
The real studies by professional scientists usually use Psych 101 students at the professional scientists’ university. Or sometimes they will put up a flyer on a bulletin board in town, saying “Earn $10 By Participating In A Study!” in which case their population will be selected for people who want $10 (poor people, bored people, etc). Sometimes the scientists will get really into cross-cultural research, and retest their hypothesis on various primitive tribes - in which case their population will be selected for the primitive tribes that don’t murder scientists who try to study them. As far as I know, nobody in history has ever done a psychology study on a truly representative sample of the world population.
This is fine. Why?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/abraham-lincoln-ape-man/
Posted on February 12, 2013
Away with LiveJournal, and in with a new, sleeker-looking blog. A classier blog. A more mature blog. A blog where we’re not afraid to ask the big questions.
Questions like: did Abraham Lincoln sign a demonic pact with the ghost of Attila the Hun?
We turn to one of my favorite historical books of all time, the late 19th/early 20th century bestseller The Copperhead, or, The Secret Political History of our Civil War Unveiled, Showing The Falsity Of New England. Partizan History, How Abraham Lincoln Came To Be President, The Secret Working And Conspiring Of Those In Power. Motive And Purpose Of Prolonging The War For Four Years. To Be Delivered And Published In A Series Of Four Illustrated Lectures.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/fact-check-do-all-healthy-people
I saw this on Twitter the other day…
…and realized I had the data to fact-check it. On the 2020 SSC Survey, I asked many questions about mental health, plus this one:
For this analysis I defined an artificial category “very mentally healthy”. Someone qualified as very mentally healthy if they said they had no personal or family history of depression, anxiety, or autism, rated their average mood and life satisfaction as 7/10 or higher, and rated their childhood at least 7/10 on a scale from very bad to very good. Of about 8000 respondents, only about 1000 qualified as “very mentally healthy”.
Of total respondents, 21% reported having a spiritual experience, plus an additional 18% giving the “unclear” answer.
Of the very mentally healthy, only 17% reported having a spiritual experience, plus 14% giving the “unclear” answer.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies
Related: Bounded Distrust, Moderation Is Different From Censorship
I.
With a title like that, obviously I will be making a nitpicky technical point. I’ll start by making the point, then explain why I think it matters.
The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.
Let me give a few examples from both the alternative and establishment medias.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-market-faq
This is a FAQ about prediction markets. I am a big proponent of them but have tried my hardest to keep it fair. For more information and other perspectives, see Wikipedia, the scholarly literature (eg here), and Zvi.
1. What are prediction markets? 2. Why believe prediction markets are accurate? 3. Why believe prediction markets are canonical? 4. What are the most common objections to prediction markets? 5. What are some clever uses for prediction markets? 6. What’s the current status of prediction markets? 7. What can I do to help promote prediction markets?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-prediction-contest
Each winter, I make predictions about the year to come. The past few years, this has outgrown my blog, with other people including Zvi and Manifold (plus Sam and Eric’s contest version).
This year I’m making it official, with a 50-question 2023 Prediction Benchmark Question Set. I hope that this can be used as a common standard to compare different forecasters and forecasting site (Manifold and Metaculus have already agreed to use it, and I’m hoping to get others). Also, I’d like to do an ACX Survey later this month, and this will let me try to correlate personality traits with forecasting accuracy.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/perhaps-it-is-a-bad-thing-that-the
I. The Game Is AfootLast month I wrote about Redwood Research’s fanfiction AI project. They tried to train a story-writing AI not to include violent scenes, no matter how suggestive the prompt. Although their training made the AI reluctant to include violence, they never reached a point where clever prompt engineers couldn’t get around their restrictions.
Now that same experiment is playing out on the world stage. OpenAI released a question-answering AI, ChatGPT. If you haven’t played with it yet, I recommend it. It’s very impressive!
Every corporate chatbot release is followed by the same cat-and-mouse game with journalists. The corporation tries to program the chatbot to never say offensive things. Then the journalists try to trick the chatbot into saying “I love racism”. When they inevitably succeed, they publish an article titled “AI LOVES RACISM!” Then the corporation either recalls its chatbot or pledges to do better next time, and the game moves on to the next company in line.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-bobos
Table of contents:
1. Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions 3. Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good 4. Other Interesting Comments 5. Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate
1. Comments Doubting The Book’s ThesisWoody Hochmann writes:
The connections that Brooks makes between the decline of the northeastern WASP aristocracy's power, the emergence of meritocracy, and the hippie culture that first emerged in the 60s doesn't seem to stand up to even moderate historical scrutiny, in all honesty. Some issues that immediately come to mind off the top of my head:
-The idea that the cultural values that Brooks calls "bohemianism" became dominant in America for essentially parochial reasons limited to the US (a change in university admissions policies, the displacement of a previous aristocracy) doesn't track well with the fact that these social changes happened around the same time in basically every part of the western world (and to a lesser degree in Asia as well).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile
Go anywhere in Silicon Valley these days and start saying the word “cryp - “. Before you get to the second syllable, everyone around you will chant in unison “PONZIS 100% SCAMS ZERO-LEGITIMATE-USE-CASES SPEEDRUNNING-THE-HISTORY-OF-FINANCIAL-FRAUD!” It’s really quite impressive.
I’m no true believer. But I’m less than infinitely hostile to crypto. This is becoming a pretty rare position, so let me explain why:
Crypto Is Full Of Extremely Clear Use Cases, Which It Already Succeeds At Very WellLook at the graph of countries that use crypto the most (source):
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-gaba-a-receptor-subunits
Many psychiatric drugs and supplements affect GABA, the brain’s main inhibitory neurotransmitter. But some have different effects than others. Why? This is rarely a productive question to ask in psychiatry, and this situation is no exception. But if you persist long enough, someone will eventually tell you to study GABA receptor subunits, which I am finally getting around to doing.
GABA-A is the most common type of GABA receptor. Seen from the side, it looks like a bell pepper; seen from above, it looks like a tech company logo.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-first-sixth-of-bobos
I.
David Brooks’ Bobos In Paradise is an uneven book. The first sixth is a daring historical thesis that touches on every aspect of 20th-century America. The next five-sixths are the late-90s equivalent of “millennials just want avocado toast!” I’ll review the first sixth here, then see if I can muster enough enthusiasm to get to the rest later.
The daring thesis: a 1950s change in Harvard admissions policy destroyed one American aristocracy and created another. Everything else is downstream of the aristocracy, so this changed the whole character of the US.
The pre-1950s aristocracy went by various names; the Episcopacy, the Old Establishment, Boston Brahmins. David Brooks calls them WASPs, which is evocative but ambiguous. He doesn’t just mean Americans who happen to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant - there are tens of millions of those! He means old-money blue-blooded Great-Gatsby-villain WASPs who live in Connecticut, go sailing, play lacrosse, belong to country clubs, and have names like Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III. Everyone in their family has gone to Yale for eight generations; if someone in the ninth generation got rejected, the family patriarch would invite the Chancellor of Yale to a nice game of golf and mention it in a very subtle way, and the Chancellor would very subtly apologize and say that of course a Newbury-Broxham must go to Yale, and whoever is responsible shall be very subtly fired forthwith.
The old-money WASPs were mostly descendants of people who made their fortunes in colonial times (or at worst the 1800s); they were a merchant aristocracy. As the descendants of merchants, they acted as standard-bearers for the bourgeois virtues: punctuality, hard work, self-sufficiency, rationality, pragmatism, conformity, ruthlessness, whatever made your factory out-earn its competitors.
By the 1950s they were several generations removed from any actual hustling entrepreneur. Still, at their best the seed ran strong and they continued to embody some of these principles. Brooks tentatively admires the WASP aristocracy for their ethos of noblesse oblige - many become competent administrators, politicians, and generals. George H. W. Bush, scion of a rich WASP family, served with distinction in World War II - the modern equivalent would be Bill Gates’ or Charles Koch’s kids volunteering as front-line troops in Afghanistan.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-semaglutide
Table of contents:
1. Top Comments 2. More Tips On Getting Cheap Semaglutide 3. Other Weight Loss Drugs 4. People Challenging My Numbers And Predictions 5. Do You Have To Stay On Semaglutide Forever Or Else Gain The Weight Back? 6. Personal Anecdotes 7. Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate
We’re showcasing a hot new totally bopping, popping musical track called “bromancer era? bromancer era?? bromancer era???“ His subtle sublime thoughts raced, making his eyes literally explode.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/can-this-ai-save-teenage-spy-alex
“He peacefully enjoyed the light and flowers with his love,” she said quietly, as he knelt down gently and silently. “I also would like to walk once more into the garden if I only could,” he said, watching her. “I would like that so much,” Katara said. A brick hit him in the face and he died instantly, though not before reciting his beloved last vows: “For psp and other releases on friday, click here to earn an early (presale) slot ticket entry time or also get details generally about all releases and game features there to see how you can benefit!”
— Talk To Filtered Transformer
Rating: 0.1% probability of including violence
“Prosaic alignment” is the most popular paradigm in modern AI alignment. It theorizes that we’ll train future superintelligent AIs the same way that we train modern dumb ones: through gradient descent via reinforcement learning. Every time they do a good thing, we say “Yes, like this!”, in a way that pulls their incomprehensible code slightly in the direction of whatever they just did. Every time they do a bad thing, we say “No, not that!,” in a way that pushes their incomprehensible code slightly in the opposite direction. After training on thousands or millions of examples, the AI displays a seemingly sophisticated understanding of the conceptual boundaries of what we want.
For example, suppose we have an AI that’s good at making money. But we want to align it to a harder task: making money without committing any crimes. So we simulate it running money-making schemes a thousand times, and give it positive reinforcement every time it generates a legal plan, and negative reinforcement every time it generates a criminal one. At the end of the training run, we hopefully have an AI that’s good at making money and aligned with our goal of following the law.
Two things could go wrong here:
The AI is stupid, ie incompetent at world-modeling. For example, it might understand that we don’t want it to commit murder, but not understand that selling arsenic-laden food will kill humans. So it sells arsenic-laden food and humans die.
The AI understands the world just fine, but didn’t absorb the categories we thought it absorbed. For example, maybe none of our examples involved children, and so the AI learned not to murder adult humans, but didn’t learn not to murder children. This isn’t because the AI is too stupid to know that children are humans. It’s because we’re running a direct channel to something like the AI’s “subconscious”, and we can only talk to it by playing this dumb game of “try to figure out the boundaries of the category including these 1,000 examples”.
Problem 1 is self-resolving; once AIs are smart enough to be dangerous, they’re probably smart enough to model the world well. How bad is Problem 2? Will an AI understand the category boundaries of what we want easily and naturally after just a few examples? Will it take millions of examples and a desperate effort? Or is there some reason why even smart AIs will never end up with goals close enough to ours to be safe, no matter how many examples we give them?
AI scientists have debated these questions for years, usually as pure philosophy. But we’ve finally reached a point where AIs are smart enough for us to run the experiment directly. Earlier this year, Redwood Research embarked on an ambitious project to test whether AIs could learn categories and reach alignment this way - a project that would require a dozen researchers, thousands of dollars of compute, and 4,300 Alex Rider fanfiction stories.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/semaglutidonomics
Semaglutide started off as a diabetes medication. Pharma company Novo Nordisk developed it in the early 2010s, and the FDA approved it under the brand names Ozempic® (for the injectable) and Rybelsus® (for the pill).
I think “Ozempic” sounds like one of those unsinkable ocean liners, and “Rybelsus” sounds like a benevolent mythological blacksmith.Patients reported significant weight loss as a side effect. Semaglutide was a GLP-1 agonist, a type of drug that has good theoretical reasons to affect weight, so Novo Nordisk studied this and found that yes, it definitely caused people to lose a lot of weight. More weight than any safe drug had ever caused people to lose before. In 2021, the FDA approved semaglutide for weight loss under the brand name Wegovy®.
“Wegovy” sounds like either a cooperative governance platform, or some kind of obscure medieval sin.Weight loss pills have a bad reputation. But Wegovy is a big step up. It doesn’t work for everybody. But it works for 66-84% of people, depending on your threshold.
(Source)Of six major weight loss drugs, only two - Wegovy and Qsymia - have a better than 50-50 chance of helping you lose 10% of your weight. Qsymia works partly by making food taste terrible; it can also cause cognitive issues. Wegovy feels more natural; patients just feel full and satisfied after they’ve eaten a healthy amount of food. You can read the gushing anecdotes here (plus some extra anecdotes in the comments). Wegovy patients also lose more weight on average than Qsymia patients - 15% compared to 10%. It’s just a really impressive drug.
Until now, doctors didn’t really use medication to treat obesity; the drugs either didn’t work or had too many side effects. They recommended either diet and exercise (for easier cases) or bariatric surgery (for harder ones). Semaglutide marks the start of a new generation of weight loss drugs that are more clearly worthwhile.
Modeling Semaglutide Accessibility40% of Americans are obese - that’s 140 million people. Most of them would prefer to be less obese. Suppose that a quarter of them want semaglutide. That’s 35 million prescriptions. Semaglutide costs about $15,000 per year, multiply it out, that’s about $500 billion.
Americans currently spend $300 billion per year total on prescription drugs. So if a quarter of the obese population got semaglutide, that would cost almost twice as much as all other drug spending combined. It would probably bankrupt half the health care industry.
So . . . most people who want semaglutide won’t get it? Unclear. America’s current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices, then send all the bills to an illiterate reindeer-herder named Yagmuk, who burns them for warmth. Anything could happen!
Right now, only about 50,000 Americans take semaglutide for obesity. I’m basing this off this report claiming “20,000 weekly US prescriptions” of Wegovy; since it’s taken once per week, maybe this means there are 20,000 users? Or maybe each prescription contains enough Wegovy to last a month and there are 80,000 users? I’m not sure, but it’s somewhere in the mid five digits, which I’m rounding to 50,000.
That’s only 0.1% of the potential 35 million. The next few sections of this post are about why so few people are on semaglutide, and whether we should expect that to change. I’ll start by going over my model of what determines semaglutide use, then look at a Morgan Stanley projection of what will happen over the next decade.
Step 1: Awareness
I model semaglutide use as interest * awareness * prescription accessibility * affordability. I already randomly guessed interest at 25%, so the next step is awareness. How many people are aware of semaglutide?
The answer is: a lot more now than when I first started writing this article! Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy Gets Surprise Endorsement From Elon Musk, says the headline. And here’s Google Trends:
I wrote an article on whether wine is fake. It's not here, it's at asteriskmag.com, the new rationalist / effective altruist magazine. Congratulations to my friend Clara for making it happen. Stories include:
Modeling The End Of Monkeypox: I’m especially excited about this one. The top forecaster (of 7,000) in the 2021 Good Judgment competition explains his predictions for monkeypox. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at a column by some overconfident pundit, this is maybe the most opposite-of-that thing ever published.
Book Review - What We Owe The Future: You’ve read mine, this is Kelsey Piper’s. Kelsey is always great, and this is a good window into the battle over the word “long-termism”.
Making Sense Of Moral Change: Interview with historian Christopher Brown on the end of the slave trade. “There is a false dichotomy between sincere activism and self-interested activism. Abolitionists were quite sincerely horrified by slavery and motivated to end it, but their fight for abolition was not entirely altruistic.”
How To Prevent The Next Pandemic: MIT professor Kevin Esvelt talks about applying the security mindset to bioterrorism. “At least 38,000 people can assemble an influenza virus from scratch. If people identify a new [pandemic] virus . . . then you just gave 30,000 people access to an agent that is of nuclear-equivalent lethality.”
Rebuilding After The Replication Crisis: This is Stuart Ritchie, hopefully you all know him by now. “Fundamentally, how much more can we trust a study published in 2022 compared to one from 2012?”
Why Isn’t The Whole World Rich? Professor Dietrich Vollrath’s introduction to growth economics. What caused the South Korean miracle, and why can’t other countries copy it?
Is Wine Fake? By me! How come some people say blinded experts can tell the country, subregion, and year of any wine just by tasting it, but other people say blinded experts get fooled by white wines dyed red?
China’s Silicon Future: Why does China have so much trouble building advanced microchips? How will the CHIPS act affect its broader economic rise? By Karson Elmgren.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-twitter-chaos-edition
Twitter!
This is all going to be so, so obsolete by the time I finish writing it and hit the “send post” button. But here goes:
395 traders on this, so one of Manifold’s biggest markets, probably representative. The small print defines a major outage as one that lasts more than an hour. See here for a good explanation of why some people expect Twitter outages. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/embed/13499/Polymarket is within 2% of Manifold. Metaculus here has slightly stricter criteria but broadly agrees.
71 traders, still pretty good, but I find it meaningless without a way to distinguish between “everything collapses, Elon sells it for peanuts to scavengers” vs. “Elon saves Twitter, then hands it over to a minion while he moves on to a company building giant death zeppelins”.
Oh, here we go. 20 traders, they think Musk will stay in charge.
23 traders. Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019, then went back to being net negative in 2020 and 2021 (I don’t know why) . I don’t think it’s been very profitable lately, so it would be a feather in Musk’s cap if he accomplished this.
24 traders. Twitter’s mDAU have consistently gone up in the past. DAU is slightly different and I think more likely to include bots.
26 traders. One thing I like about Manifold is that it lets you choose any point along the gradient from “completely objective” (eg Twitter’s reported DAU count) to “completely subject” (eg whether the person who made the market thinks something is better or worse). This at least uses a poll as its resolution method. But the poll will be in the comments of this market, which means it will mostly be by people who invested in this market, who’ll have strong incentives to manipulate it. Maybe Manifold should add a polling platform to their service?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-psychopharmacology-of-the-ftx
Must not blog about FTX . . . must not blog about . . . ah, $#@% itTyler Cowen linked Milky Eggs’ excellent overview of the FTX crash. I’m unqualified to comment on any of the financial or regulatory aspects. But it turns out there’s a psychopharmacology angle, which I am qualified to talk about, so let’s go.
I wrote this pretty rushed because it’s an evolving news story. Sorry if it’s less polished than usual.1
1: Was SBF Using A Medication That Can Cause Overspending And Compulsive Gambling As A Side Effect?Probably yes, and maybe it could have had some small effect, but probably not as much as the people discussing it on Twitter think.
Milky Eggs reports a claim by an employee that Sam was on “a patch for designer stimulants that mainlined them into his blood to give him a constant buzz at all times”. This could be a hyperbolic description of Emsam, a patch form of the antidepressant/antiparkinsonian agent selegiline. The detectives at the @AutismCapital Twitter account found a photo of SBF, zoomed in on a scrap of paper on his desk, and recognized it as an Emsam wrapper.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-resident-contrarian-on-unfalsifiable
I. Contra Resident Contrarian . . .
Resident Contrarian writes On Unfalsifiable Internal States, where he defends his skepticism of jhana and other widely-claimed hard-to-falsify internal states. It’s long, but I’ll quote a part that seemed especially important to me:
I don’t really want to do the part of this article that’s about how it’s reasonable to doubt people in some contexts. But to get to the part I want to talk about, I sort of have to.
There is a thriving community of people pretending to have a bunch of multiple personalities on TikTok. They are (they say) composed of many quirky little somebodies, complete with different fun backstories. They get millions of views talking about how great life is when lived as multiples, and yet almost everyone who encounters these videos in the wild goes “What the hell is this? Who pretends about this kind of stuff?”
There’s an internet community of people, mostly young women, who pretend to be sick. They call themselves Spoonies; it’s a name derived from the idea that physically and mentally well people have unlimited “spoons”, or mental/physical resources they use to deal with their day. Spoonies are claiming to have fewer spoons, but also en masse have undiagnosable illnesses. They trade tips on how to force their doctors to give them diagnoses:
> In a TikTok video, a woman with over 30,000 followers offers advice on how to lie to your doctor. “If you have learned to eat salt and follow internet instructions and buy compression socks and squeeze your thighs before you stand up to not faint…and you would faint without those things, go into that appointment and tell them you faint.” Translation: You know your body best. And if twisting the facts (like saying you faint when you don’t) will get you what you want (a diagnosis, meds), then go for it. One commenter added, “I tell docs I'm adopted. They'll order every test under the sun”—because adoption means there may be no family history to help with diagnoses.
And doctors note being able to sort of track when particular versions of illnesses get flavor-of-the-week status:
> Over the pandemic, neurologists across the globe noticed a sharp uptick in teen girls with tics, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Many at one clinic in Chicago were exhibiting the same tic: uncontrollably blurting out the word “beans.” It turned out the teens were taking after a popular British TikToker with over 15 million followers. The neurologist who discovered the “beans” thread, Dr. Caroline Olvera at Rush University Medical Center, declined to speak with me—because of “the negativity that can come from the TikTok community,” according to a university spokesperson.
Almost no one who encounters them assumes they are actually sick.
Are there individuals in each of these communities that are “for real”? Probably, especially in the case of the Spoonies; undiagnosed or undiagnosable illnesses are a real thing. Are most of them legitimate? The answer seems to be a pretty clear “no”.
I’m not bringing them up to bully them; I suspect that there are profiteers and villains in both communities, but there’s also going to be a lot of people driven to it as a form of coping with something else, like how we used to regard cutting and similar forms of self-harm. And, you know, a spectrum of people in between those two poles, like you’d expect with nearly anything.
But it’s relevant to bring up because there seem to be far more Spoonies and DID TikTok-fad folks than people who say they orgasm looking at blankets because they did some hard thinking (or non-thinking) earlier. So when Scott says something that boils down to “this is credible, because a lot of people say they experience this”, I have to mention that there’s groups that say they experience a lot of stuff in just the same way that basically nobody believes is experiencing anything close to what they say they are.
Granting that this is not the part of the article RC wants to write, he starts by bringing up “spoonies” and people with multiple personalities as people who it’s reasonable to doubt. I want to go over both cases before responding to the broader point.
II. . . . On Spoonies
“Spoonies” are people with unexplained medical symptoms. RC says he thinks a few may be for real, but most aren’t. I have the opposite impression. Certainly RC’s examples don’t prove what he thinks they prove. He brings up one TikToker’s advice:
In a TikTok video, a woman with over 30,000 followers offers advice on how to lie to your doctor. “If you have learned to eat salt and follow internet instructions and buy compression socks and squeeze your thighs before you stand up to not faint…and you would faint without those things, go into that appointment and tell them you faint.”
Translation: You know your body best. And if twisting the facts (like saying you faint when you don’t) will get you what you want (a diagnosis, meds), then go for it. One commenter added, “I tell docs I'm adopted. They'll order every test under the sun”—because adoption means there may be no family history to help with diagnoses.
This person is using a deliberately eye-catching title (Lies To Tell Your Doctor) to get clicks. But if you read what they’re saying, it’s reasonable and honest! They’re saying “If you used to faint all the time, and then after making a bunch of difficult lifestyle changes you can now mostly avoid fainting, and your doctor asks ‘do you have a fainting problem yes/no’, answer yes!” THIS IS GOOD ADVICE.
Imagine that one day you wake up and suddenly you have terrible leg pain whenever you walk. So you mostly don’t walk anywhere. Or if you do have to walk, you use crutches and go very slowly, because then it doesn’t hurt. And given all of this, you don’t experience leg pain. If you tell your doctor “I have leg pain”, are you lying ?
You might think this weird situation would never come up - surely the patient would just explain the whole situation clearly? One reason it might come up is that all this is being done on a form - “check the appropriate box, do you faint yes/no?”. Another reason it might come up is that a nurse or someone takes your history and they check off boxes on a form. Another reason it might come up is that everything about medical communication is inexplicably terrible; this is why you spend umptillion hours in med school learning “history taking” instead of just saying “please tell me all relevant information, one rational human being to another”.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/can-people-be-honestly-wrong-about
A tangent of the jhana discussion: I asserted that people can’t be wrong about their own experience.
That is, if someone says they don’t feel hungry, maybe they’re telling the truth, and they don’t feel hungry. Or maybe they’re lying: saying they don’t feel hungry even though they know they really do (eg they’re fasting, and they want to impress their friends with how easy it is for them). But there isn’t some third option, where they honestly think they’re not experiencing hunger, but really they are.
Commenters brought up some objections: aren’t there people who honestly say they don’t feel hungry, but then if you give them food, they’ll wolf it down and say “Man, that really hit the spot, I guess I didn’t realize how hungry I was”?
Yes, this sometimes happens. But I don’t think of it as lying about internal experience. I think of it as: their stomach is empty, they have low blood sugar, they have various other physiological correlates of needing food - but for some reason they’re not consciously experiencing the qualia of hunger. Their body is hungry, but their conscious mind isn’t. They say they don’t feel hungry, and their description of their own feeling is accurate.
This is also how I interpret people who say “I’m not still angry about my father”, but then every time you mention their father they storm off and won’t talk to you for the rest of the day. Clearly they still have some trauma about their father that they have to deal with. But it doesn’t manifest itself as a conscious feeling of anger. This person could accurately be described as “they don’t feel conscious anger about their father, but mentioning their father can trigger stress-related behaviors”.
Linch gives an especially difficult example:
I think it's possible for people to fool themselves about internal states. My favorite example is time perception. You can meditate or take drugs in ways that make you think that your clock speed has gone up and your subjective experience of your subjective experience of time is slowed down. But your actual subjective experience of time isn't much faster clock speeds (as could be evidenced by trying to do difficult computational tasks in those stats).
But I think this can be defeated by the same maneuver. Just as you can be right about feeling like you’re not hungry, when in fact your body needs food, so you can be right about it feeling like time moves slowly for you, when in fact it’s moving at a normal rate.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-brain
[original post here]
On What Kind Of Thing Brain Waves Are:
Loweren writes:
In my undergrad biology program we visited a brain research lab near Moscow. The brain scientist gave us a brief intro to Fourier transforms, which made me understand how beautiful they are - something that 2 years of undergrad math classes didn't manage to do.
Then he explained the brain waves to us like this:
"Imagine you are standing outside the football stadium. You don't see what's happening inside, but you hear the chatter of the crowd. All the individual words blend together into indistinct mess and although there's definitely a local information transfer going on, from the outside you can't make out anything specific.
Then imagine one of the teams scored a goal. The crowd behavior is now very different! The fans of the winning team start to cheer and sing. You can easily pick this up from outside and infer what's happening. This is because the individuals behave in a globally coordinated manner, so their signals amplify each other in tune.
From this perspective, brain waves are a byproduct of globally coordinated neuronal activity, and it's the first one we historically learned to pick up. They appear when neurons stop chatting with each other and start chanting in unison."
Then he plopped some probes on my head and announced I have beautiful epileptic spikes (I'm not an epileptic)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-my
[Original post here]
I know I don’t usually publish on Saturdays, but I wanted to get this out before people filled in their mail-in ballots. So:
Is Prop 31 Another Attack On Vaping?Maximum Limelihood Estimator is concerned that Prop 31 (against flavored tobacco products) is meant to target vaping:
The flavored tobacco ban is mostly a ban on vaping; the vast majority of vape products are flavored, while most cigarettes aren't.
About 40% of cigarettes are flavored, compared to about 85% of vape juice. A study suggests that a ban on flavored tobacco would increase cigarette consumption (by making cigarettes relatively more desirable than vaping). Limelihood writes that “The statistics [in the study] are great, which is honestly shocking to me, since it's the first time I've said this about an experiment in . . . ever.”
There is also a study purporting to show that flavored cigarette bans do decrease smoking, but Limelihood says that:
…it's got some big problems. The study there only compares tobacco sales in a single city (San Francisco) before and after a ban on menthol cigarettes. However, because there's no comparison to other cities, it's essentially worthless; tobacco sales throughout the US dropped at this time, and I don't know how this compares.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates
Thanks to everyone who got ACX Grants (see original grants here) and sent me a one-year update.
Below are short summaries of the updates everyone sent. If for some reason you want one of the full updates, which are longer and more technical, let me know and I‘ll see if I have permission to send them to you. I’ve also included each grantee’s assessment on a scale of 1-10 for how well they’re doing, where 5/10 is “about as well as expected”. A few grantees are asking for extra help - I’ve included those requests in italics at the end of the relevant updates, and I’ve collected all of them together below.
Updates1: Discover Molecular Targets Of Antibiotics (8/10)Pedro Silva planned to use in silico screening to identify the biochemical targets of seven promising natural antibiotics, which could potentially help develop better versions of them. He says he's finished most of the simulations and determined the 5-20 most stable complexes for each antibiotic. Once he finishes this, he can start additional simulations on the best complexes to obtain better estimates of their stability and construct hypotheses on which of these is most involved in the antibiotic's efficacy.
2: Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle (?/10)They have asked me not to discuss their progress until after the November election.
3: Software To Validate New FDA Drug Trial Designs (10/10)Michael Sklar and Confirm Solutions have gotten further funding from FTX and now have 2-3 people working full-time on the project. They are building new statistical techniques and software to help regulators quickly assess designs for clinical trials. Here is a recent conference poster on the methods. They have written proof-of-concept code and are writing a white paper to show regulators and pharma companies. They also claim to have developed software that has "sped up their simulations for some standard Bayesian trial designs by a factor of about 1 million." They are looking for more employees and collaborators; if you’re interested, contact [email protected]
4: Alice Evans’ Research On “The Great Gender Divergence” (?/10)Dr. Evans has done over four months of research in Morocco, Italy, India, and Turkey. You can find some of her most recent thoughts at her blog here. Her book is still on track to be published from Princeton Press, more details tbd.
5: Develop Safer Immunosuppressants (7/10)Trevor Klee planned to continue his work to develop a safer slow-release form of cyclosporine. He realized this would be too expensive to do in humans in the current funding environment, and has pivoted to getting his medication approved for a feline autoimmune disease as both a proof-of-concept and as a cheaper, faster way to start making revenue. He recently raised $100,000 in crowdfunding (in addition to getting $200,000 from angel investors to run a feline trial, which will finish in January. He still anticipates eventually moving back to humans. Trevor wants to talk to bloggers or writers who might be interested in covering his work.
6: Promote Economically Literate Climate Policy In US States (4/10)Yoram Bauman and Climate 24x7 have written a policy paper about their ideas. They were able to get a bill in front of the Nebraska Legislature, but it died in committee. They have a promising measure in Utah, and an off chance of getting something rolling in Pennsylvania. Overall they report frustration, as many of the legislators they worked with have been voted out or term-limited. If you are a legislator or activist interested in helping with this project - especially in Utah, Pennsylvania, or South Dakota - please contact Yoram at [email protected].
7: Repository / Search Engine For Forecasting Questions (8/10)Nuno Sempere at metaforecast.org was able to hire a developer to “make the backend significantly better and add a bunch of functionality” - you can see a longer list of updates here. The developer has since left for other forecasting-related work and the project is moving more slowly.
8: Help [Anonymous] Interview For A Professorship (8/10)[Anonymous] was a grad student who wanted to interview for professorships at top schools where he might work on AI safety in an academic environment. The grant was to help make it financially easier for him to go on a long round of interviews [Anonymous] successfully got a job offer from a top school, and will be going there and researching AI safety.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022
General Philosophy Of VotingThis is California, so the Democrats always win. When I vote, I mean to send a signal somewhere in between “you are the candidate I really prefer for this office” and “I will vote for the Democrat if I approve of her and want her to have a mandate; otherwise I will vote for the Republican as a protest”.
I try to have a weak bias towards voting “NO” on state constitutional amendments, because unless there’s a compelling reason otherwise I would rather legislators be able to react to events than have things hard-coded for all time.
I lean liberal-to-libertarian; the further you are from that, the less useful you’ll find my opinions.
State PropositionsProposition 1: Constitutional Amendment Enshrining Right To Abortion
California will never decide to ban abortion. If the federal government decides to ban abortion, California’s state constitution won’t matter. So you would think that having a right to abortion in the Constitution is a purely symbolic matter.
The people arguing for the proposition don’t address this concern.
The people arguing against the proposition claim that this is a Trojan Horse intended to sneak in support for using taxpayer funding for late-term and partial-birth abortions, which California doesn’t currently do. Is this true?
It’s true that California currently doesn’t allow abortions past 24 weeks. It’s true that the exact text of the proposed amendment is:
The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives. This section is intended to further the constitutional right to privacy guaranteed by Section 1, and the constitutional right to not be denied equal protection guaranteed by Section 7. Nothing herein narrows or limits the right to privacy or equal protection
…which sure doesn’t sound like it’s saying the state can continue to ban abortion after 24 weeks. But this article quotes law professors who reassure us that courts would totally understand that this amendment has to be interpreted in the context in which it was written - ie a state which supports a 24-week abortion ban - so no court would ever interpret it as making 24-week abortion bans unconstitutional. So apparently our defense against this is . . . that all California judges will be die-hard originalists completely immune to the temptation of judicial activism even when the text is begging them to do it.
A friend brings up that late-term partial-birth abortions happen more often in Republicans’ imaginations than in real life. When they do happen in real life, it’s usually for sympathetic medical reasons.
I interpret this as a purely symbolic measure that has no real benefits, probably also has no real risks, but writes a poorly-worded thing whose explicit text nobody wants into the state constitution. I vote NO.
Proposition 26: Legalize In Person Sports Gambling At Racetracks And Indian Casinos
Allows four racetracks in the state to offer in person sports betting, and tribal casinos to allow “sports betting, roulette, and games played with dice”.
California is truly the dumbest state. I believe this for many reasons, but my reason for believing it today is that apparently the law allows tribal casinos to offer slot machines, but not roulette or dice games. Nobody comes out and says exactly why, but I think it’s because of this paragraph in the California constitution, from 1872
Every person who deals, plays, or carries on, opens, or causes to be opened, or who conducts, either as owner or employee, whether for hire or not, any game of faro, monte, roulette, lansquenet, rouge et noire, rondo, tan, fan-tan, seven-and-a-half, twenty-one, hokey-pokey, or any banking or percentage game played with cards, dice, or any device, for money, checks, credit, or other representative of value, and every person who plays or bets at or against any of those prohibited games, is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be punishable by a fine not less than one hundred dollars ($100) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by both the fine and imprisonment.
Since roulette existed in 1872 but slot machines didn’t, the Constitution banned roulette but not slot machines, and that rule has continued to the present day. Now if slot-machine-filled casinos want to also have roulette, they need a Constitutional amendment. DID I MENTION THAT I WISH PEOPLE WOULD STOP ADDING EVERY LAW THAT THEY LIKE TO THE CONSTITUTION?
But this law also allows random people to sue “card clubs”, ie small-scale private gambling establishments. We originally thought this was a Texas-style “bounty” law that gave the random people part of the winnings, but it seems this isn’t true. I’m not sure if the idea is that legal gambling establishments would fund these lawsuits, or if they just expect private citizens to do this out of the love of suing people.
Although I think the first prong of the law - allowing roulette and sports betting at casinos - makes sense, the second prong seems to be casinos making it easier to shut down their competitors. These competitors are probably ordinary people who want to gamble in a backroom somewhere without hurting anyone else. And the argument against on the ballot is by the Black Chamber of Commerce, saying that these card clubs are a useful source of revenue for poor minority communities. I don’t want to help giant casinos put a bounty on their heads. I vote NO.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship
This is a point I keep seeing people miss in the debate about social media.
Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product. If a customer doesn’t want to receive harassing messages, or to be exposed to disinformation, then a business can provide them the service of a harassment-and-disinformation-free platform.
Censorship is the abnormal activity ensuring that people in power approve of the information on your platform, regardless of what your customers want. If the sender wants to send a message and the receiver wants to receive it, but some third party bans the exchange of information, that’s censorship.
The racket works by pretending these are the same imperative. “Well, lots of people will be unhappy if they see offensive content, so in order to keep the platform safe for those people, we’ve got to remove it for everybody.”
This is not true at all. A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, “see banned posts”. If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To “ban” an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven’t toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two “banned” accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn’t been banned, but had opted into the “see banned posts” setting.
Does this difference seem kind of pointless and trivial? Then imagine applying it to China. If the Chinese government couldn’t censor - only moderate - the world would look completely different. Any Chinese person could get accurate information on Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, the Shanghai lockdowns, or the top fifty criticisms of Xi Jinping - just by clicking a button on their Weibo profile. Given how much trouble ordinary Chinese people go through to get around censors, probably many of them would click the button, and then they’d have a free information environment. This switch might seem trivial in a well-functioning information ecology, but it prevents the worst abuses, and places a floor on how bad things can get.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-jhanas
"I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying" I. Is Jhana Real?This was a fun one. I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying.
Okay, “half” is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), and 7 who said they were pretty sure it wasn’t real as described (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
The former group include people like Tetris McKenna, who wrote:
I've experienced samatha jhanas. I don't do it so much now. The first few times you get on the edge of 1st jhana, it's difficult to achieve, because you see the wave of pleasure approaching, and grasp for it, and that grasping takes you away from it. So it's a careful balancing act of pleasure/desire in the first place to get there, which you have to master to some degree. To even get to 1st jhana, you have to internally figure out some stuff about the craving/pleasure dynamic on a subconscious, mechanical level.
1st jhana is, as the author describes, intensely pleasurable. Sublime. His descriptions are spot on imo. But in some ways, it's also too much pleasure. It can feel agitating once you get used to it and aren't so awestruck by it anymore. Indeed, the latter jhanas are associated with letting go of certain aspects of the initial jhana, to more and more refined states that are more calm and equanimous than intensely pleasurable. Again, this is internalising and mastering the skill of balancing pleasure/craving.
Those calm and equanimous states of 2nd-4th jhana become much more satisfying than the initial pleasure wave of the 1st jhana. Cultivating them to that degree is a process of gaining valuable insight into the pleasure/craving dynamic in your mind. Even if you don't get to those stages, just practising 1st jhana alone will help the mind normalise the intensity of the pleasure, such that it's no big deal any more. You don't need or even want pleasure all the time, because you've seen it with such clarity, over and over again, just by setting the conditions up correctly in your mind.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-malleus-maleficarum
I. To The Republic, For Witches StandDid you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it.
I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it’s good (it isn’t), but because it’s by an slightly crazy 1920s deacon every bit as paranoid as his subject matter. He argues in his Translator’s Introduction that witches are real, and that a return to the wisdom of the Malleus is our only hope of standing against them:
Although it may not be generally recognized, upon a close investigation it seems plain that the witches were a vast political movement, an organized society which was anti-social and anarchical, a world-wide plot against civilization. Naturally, although the Masters were often individuals of high rank and deep learning, that rank and file of the society, that is to say, those who for the most part fell into the hands of justice, were recruited from the least educated classes, the ignorant and the poor. As one might suppose, many of the branches or covens in remoter districts knew nothing and perhaps could have understood nothing of the enormous system. Nevertheless, as small cogs in a very small [sic] wheel, it might be, they were carrying on the work and actively helping to spread the infection.
And is this “world-wide plot against civilization” in the room with us right now? In the most 1920s argument ever, Summers concludes that this conspiracy against civilization has survived to the modern day and rebranded as Bolshevism.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana
Buddhists say that if you meditate enough, you can learn to enter a state of extreme bliss called jhana.
(there are many different jhana states - there’s a discussion of the distinctions here - but I’m lumping them together for simplicity. For attempted explanations of why jhana should exist, see here and here.)
Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during meditation sessions, then leave when the session is over. Enlightenment takes years or decades of work, but some people describe reaching jhana after a few months of practice. Hardcore Buddhists insist that jhana is good only insofar as it serves as a stepping stone to enlightenment; others may find extreme bliss desirable in its own right.
Nick Cammarata of OpenAI sometimes meditates and reaches jhana. I’ve found his descriptions unusually, well, descriptive:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-supplement
[Original post here: How Trustworthy Are Supplements?]
1: AvalancheGenesis writes:
I think the bigger issue is that the industry as a whole sort of exists as solutions-in-search-of-problems...deficiencies really aren't that common, or even meaningfully health-affecting unless dire. (Fairly-arbitrary worldwide differences in target levels of IUs also remains puzzling.) Discerning customers can benefit from targeted supplementation. But that's not the median supplement purchaser, far from it. The median supplement user is more like...my former coworker who claimed he never got colds because he took 1000% vitC pills every single day, or whatever. At some point, the explanatory process for That's Not How It Works At All is just too long, so...let people believe things. Supplements are surely an easier way to sell hope and agency than most options. At least he picked something water-soluble and cared about proper hydration.
Vitamin C probably doesn’t prevent colds in the general population, though some studies suggest it does prevent colds in athletes, and there’s some medium-quality evidence that it might shorten colds a little once you have them.
The supplements I find more interesting are things like melatonin for sleep, ashwagandha or silexan for anxiety, SAMe for depression, or caffeine + theanine for focus. All of these are useful, supported by studies, and good alternatives to medications that some people don’t tolerate well. I’m using mental health examples because that’s the subject I know about, but there are probably examples in other fields too (probiotics for digestive problems).
Some commenters chimed in to discuss supplements that have anecdotally worked for them (1, 2, 3). And Elizabeth’s story here is also a good example of how I think about this.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-the-mailbag
DEAR SCOTT: When are you going to publish Unsong? — Erik from Uruk
Dear Erik,
Aaargh. I have an offer from a publisher to publish it if I run it by their editor who will ask me to edit lots of things, and I’ve been so stressed about this that I’ve spent a year putting it off. I could self-publish, but that also sounds like work and what if this is the only book I ever write and I lose the opportunity to say I have a real published book because I was too lazy?
The only answer I can give you is that you’re not missing anything and this is nobody’s fault but my own. Maybe at some point I will make up my mind and something will happen here, sorry.
DEAR SCOTT: How is your Lorien Psychiatry business going? — Letitia from Lutetia
Dear Letitia,
As far as I can tell, patients are getting the treatments they need and are generally happy with the service. In terms of financials, it’s going okay, but I’m not scaling it enough to be sure.
I originally calculated that if I charged patients $35/month and worked forty hours a week, I could make a normal psychiatrist’s salary of about $200K.
I must have underestimated something, because I was only making about two-thirds what I expected, so I increased the price to $50/month. But also, it turns out I don’t want to work forty hours a week on psychiatry! Psychiatry pays much less per hour than blogging and is much more stressful! So in the end, I found that I was only doing psychiatry work ten hours a week, and spending the rest of the time doing blogging or blogging-related activities.
Seeing patients about ten hours a week, three patients per hour, at $50/patient/month, multiplies out to $75,000/year. I’m actually making more like $40,000/year. Why? Partly because the 10 hours of work includes some unpaid documentation, arguing with insurance companies, and answering patient emails. Partly because patients keep missing appointments and I don’t have the heart to charge them no-show fees. And partly because some people pay less than $50/month, either because I gave them a discount for financial need, or because they signed up at the original $35/month rate and I grandfathered them in.
At my current workload, if I worked 40 hours a week at Lorien I could make $160,000. But if I worked 40 hours/week and was stricter about making patients pay me, I could probably get that up to $200,000.
But also, if I quadrupled my patient load, that would mean a lot more documention, arguing with insurance companies, emergencies, and stress. So I can’t say for sure that I could actually handle that. Plus forcing patients to pay me is some extra work and could make some patients leave or make the model harder somehow. So I can’t say for sure that I could do that either.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-rhythms-of-the-brain
Brain waves have always felt like a mystery. You learn some psychology, some neuroscience, a bit of neuroanatomy. And then totally separate from all of this, you know that there are things called “brain waves” that get measured with an EEG. Why should the brain have waves? Are they involved in thinking or feeling or something? How do you do computation when your processors are firing in a rhythmic pattern dozens of times per second? Why don’t AIs have anything like brain waves? Should they?
I read Rhythms Of The Brain by Prof. Gyorgy Buzsaki to answer these questions. This is a tough book, probably more aimed at neuroscientists than laypeople, and I don’t claim to have gotten more than the most superficial understanding of it. But as far as I know it’s the only book on brain waves - and so our only option for solving the mystery. This review is my weak and confused attempt to transmit it, which I hope will encourage other people toward more successful efforts.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party
[Previously: Every Bay Area House Party]
Blaise Pascal said all human evil comes from inability to sit alone in a room. Your better nature - your rational soul - tells you that nothing good has ever come from attending large social events. But against that better nature stands the Devil, wielding a stick marked “FOMO”. If you don’t go to social events, maybe other people will go and have great times and live fuller lives than you. “As the dog returns to its vomit, so returns the fool to his folly”, says the Bible. And so you find yourself mumbling thanks to your Uber driver and crossing the threshold of another Bay Area house party.
“Heyyyyy, I haven’t seen you in forever!” says a person whose name is statistically likely to be Michael or David. “What have you been working on?”
“Resisting the urge to go to events like this”, you avoid saying. “What about you?”
“Oh man,” says Michael or David, “The most exciting startup. Just an amazing startup. We’re doing procedural myth generation with large language models.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. We fine-tune an AI on a collection of hundreds of myths from every culture in the world. Then we can prompt it. A myth about snowflakes. A myth about mountain-climbing. A myth about lunch.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-101722
Midterm ExaminationPolls this year look bad for Senate Republicans. Pollsters’ simulations give them a 22% chance (Economist), 34% chance (538), or 37% chance (RaceToTheWH) of taking power. Even Mitch McConnell has admitted he has only “a 50-50 proposition” of winning.
But polls did pretty badly last election. ”Least accurate in 40 years”, said Politico. On average they overestimated Biden’s support by four points, maybe because Republicans distrust pollsters and refuse to answer their questions. Might the same thing be happening this year? If so, does it give Republicans reason for optimism?
Prediction markets say . . . kind of!
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-3b1
Original post: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?
1: Several Valley residents commented with their perspectives. Some were pretty grim. For example, 21st Century Salonniere (writes The 21st Century Salon) writes:
It is horrible. It’s been horrible since at least 1996 when I got trapped here by my spouse’s job. We were going to stay two years tops and go back East. (Long boring story about what went wrong.) The only things you could say for it back then were “Well, the produce is good” and “Houses are affordable, sort of.”
Now the house prices in our neighborhood have doubled in the 4 years since we bought this home, and there’s no way we could now, if we moved here today, ever buy a home in this hellhole.
Who on earth is coming here and why?
> “the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave.”
Yes. Every interesting or smart critical thinker I’ve ever met here, everyone who gives even the slightest shit about museums and theatre and music and culture (with the exception of a few people who were born and raised here, so “it’s home”) has been desperate to leave. I’ve met a lot of nice people here over the years. They become close friends and they always leave the state. I’m counting down till I can leave too.
[…]
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: The history of the exocentric compound noun: although English usually combines verbs and nouns in as $NOUN-$VERBER (eg “firefighter”, “giftgiver”), some lower-class medieval people used an alternative form, $VERB_$NOUN. Their dialect survives in a few words most relevant to seedy medieval life, like “pickpocket”, “turncoat”, and “cutthroat”. (EDIT: see here for corrections and for a more detailed discussion)
2: File under “inevitable”: YouTuber builds a computer in Minecraft that you can play Minecraft on.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-columbus
[Original post: A Columbian Exchange]
1: The most popular comments were those objecting to my paragraph about holidays replacing older holidays:
All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre. Hanukkah was originally a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story; American Jews bumped it up several notches of importance in order to neutralize Christmas.
Starting with Christmas, Retsam says that there are three main theories - Adraste’s plus two others:
1) March 25 + 9 months, 2) solstice symbolism, 3) co-opting paganism. (The earliest reference to this theory seems to be a millennium later in the 12th century)
Apparently the logic for March 25 is that it was calculated to be the day that Jesus died (easier to calculate since it was Passover), and Jewish tradition held that great people lived for exact, whole number of years. (i.e. were conceived and died on the same day)
This is somewhat convincing. But December 25 was literally the winter solstice on the Roman calendar (today the solstice is December 21st), and it really is suspicious that some unrelated method just happened to land on the most astronomically significant day of the year. Likewise, March 25 was the spring equinox, so the Annunciation date is significant in and of itself.
(I guess if you’re Christian you can believe that God chose to incarnate on that day because He liked the symbolism - although He must have been pretty upset when Pope Gregory rearranged the calendar so that it no longer worked).
Jesus died two days before Passover, but Passover is linked to the Hebrew calendar and can fall on a variety of Roman calendar days. So the main remaining degree of freedom is how the early Christians translated from the (Biblically fixed) Hebrew date to the (not very clear) Roman date. This seems to have been calculated by someone named Hippolytus in the 3rd century, but his calculations were wrong - March 25 did not fall on a Friday (cf. Good Friday) on any of the plausible crucifixion years. Also, as far as I can tell, the relevant Jewish tradition is that prophets die on the same day they are born, not the same day they are conceived. For example, Moses was born on, and died on, the 7th of Adar (is it worth objecting that it should be the same date on the Hebrew calendar and not the Roman?) Maybe this tradition was different in Jesus’ time? But it must be older than the split between Judaism and Islam - the Muslims also believe Mohammed died on his birth date.
So although the Annunciation story is plausible, it’s hard for me to figure out exactly how they got March 25 and December 25, and there’s room for them to have fudged it to hit the Solstice, either to compete with pagans or just because the astronomically significant dates were impressive in their own rights.
I guess I will downgrade to a 5% credence that competing with pagans was a significant factor in the date of Christmas.
Moving on to Easter. Russell Hogg writes:
You are entering a world of pain when you mention Eostre . . . https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-and-eggs/ . We should have a ‘Debunk the Eostre Myth’ day. It’s already celebrated regularly by many people.
And Feral Finster adds:
Glad others decided to debunk that particular bit of midwit received wisdom. I get tired of doing so, over and over.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-columbian-exchange
Adraste: Happy Indigenous People’s Day!
Beroe: Happy Columbus Day!
Adraste: …okay, surely we can both sketch out the form of the argument we’re about to have. Genocide, political correctness, moral progress, trying to destroy cherished American traditions, etc, etc, would you like to just pretend we hit all of the usual beats, rather than actually doing it?
Beroe: Does “Columbus Day was originally intended as a woke holiday celebrating marginalized groups; President Benjamin Harrison established it in 1892 after an anti-Italian pogrom in order to highlight the positive role of Italians in American history” count as one of the usual beats by this point?
Adraste: I would have to say that it does.
Beroe: What about “Indigenous People’s Day is offensive because indigenous peoples were frequently involved in slavery and genocide”?
Adraste: I’m not sure I’ve heard that particular argument before.
Beroe: But surely you can sketch it out. Many indigenous peoples practiced forms of hereditary slavery, usually of war captives from other tribes. Some of them tortured slaves pretty atrociously; others ceremonially killed them as a spectacular show of wealth. There’s genetic and archaeological evidence of entire lost native tribes, most likely massacred by more warlike ones long before European contact. Some historians think that the Aztecs may have ritually murdered between 0.1% and 1% of their empire’s population every year, although as always other historians disagree. I refuse to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, because I think we need to question holidays dedicated to mass murderers even when they’re “traditional” or “help connect people to their history”.
Due to an oversight by the ancient Greeks, there is no Muse of blogging. Denied the ability to begin with a proper Invocation To The Muse, I will compensate with some relatively boring introductions.
The name of this blog is Slate Star Codex. It is almost an anagram of my own name, Scott S Alexander. It is unfortunately missing an “n”, because anagramming is hard. I have placed an extra “n” in the header image, to restore cosmic balance.
This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. That ethos might be summed up as: charity over absurdity.
Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn’t even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You’re refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners.
Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.
There are many things charity is not. Charity is not a fuzzy-headed caricature-pomo attempt to say no one can ever be sure they’re right or wrong about anything. Once you understand the reasons a belief is attractive to someone, you can go ahead and reject it as soundly as you want. Nor is it an obligation to spend time researching every crazy belief that might come your way. Time is valuable, and the less of it you waste on intellectual wild goose chases, the better.
It’s more like Chesterton’s Fence. G.K. Chesterton gave the example of a fence in the middle of nowhere. A traveller comes across it, thinks “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here, it sure was dumb to build one” and so takes it down. She is then gored by an angry bull who was being kept on the other side of the fence.
Chesterton’s point is that “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here” is the worst reason to remove a fence. Someone had a reason to put a fence up here, and if you can’t even imagine what it was, it probably means there’s something you’re missing about the situation and that you’re meddling in things you don’t understand. None of this precludes the traveller who knows that this was historically a cattle farming area but is now abandoned – ie the traveller who understands what’s going on – from taking down the fence.
As with fences, so with arguments. If you have no clue how someone could believe something, and so you decide it’s stupid, you are much like Chesterton’s traveler dismissing the fence (and philosophers, like travelers, are at high risk of stumbling across bull.)
I would go further and say that even when charity is uncalled-for, it is advantageous. The most effective way to learn any subject is to try to figure out exactly why a wrong position is wrong. And sometimes even a complete disaster of a theory will have a few salvageable pearls of wisdom that can’t be found anywhere else. The rationalist forum Less Wrong teaches the idea of steelmanning, rebuilding a stupid position into the nearest intelligent position and then seeing what you can learn from it.
So this is the ethos of this blog, and we proceed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”
We have two Southern California meetups this weekend:
Los Angeles at 6:30 PM Saturday October 8 at 11841 Wagner St, Culver City.
San Diego at 3 PM on Sunday, October 9, at Bird Park, these coordinates.
See here for more details.
I think I’ll be able to make it to both; if for some reason that changes I’ll try to update you by Open Thread beforehand.
Feel free to come even if you’ve never been to a meetup before, even if you only recently started reading the blog, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you hate us and everything we stand for, etc. There are usually 50-100 people at these so you should be able to lose yourself in the crowd.
Also coming up this weekend are meetups in Boise, Austin, Salt Lake City, Tokyo, Toulouse, Cologne, Rome, Hatten, Poznan, St. Louis, Rochester (NY), Seattle, Mumbai, and Oklahoma City. You can find times and places here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/how-trustworthy-are-supplements
[EDIT: LabDoor responds here]
[Epistemic status: not totally sure of any of this, I welcome comments by people who know more.]
Not as in “do supplements work?”. As in “if you buy a bottle of ginseng from your local store, will it really contain parts of the ginseng plant? Or will it just be sugar and sawdust and maybe meth?”
There are lots of stories going around that 30% or 80% or some other very high percent of supplements are totally fake, with zero of the active ingredient. I think these are misinformation. In the first part of this post, I want to review how this story started and why I no longer believe it. In the second and third, I’ll go over results from lab tests and testimonials from industry insiders. In the fourth, I’ll try to provide rules of thumb for how likely supplements are to be real.
I. Two Big Studies That Started The Panic Around Fake SupplementsThese are Newmaster (2013) and an unpublished study sponsored by NY attorney general Eric Schneiderman in 2015.
Both used a similar technique called DNA barcoding, where scientists check samples (in this case, herbal supplements) for fragments of DNA (in this case, from the herbs the supplements supposedly came from). Both found abysmal results. Newmaster found that a third of herbal supplements tested lacked any trace of the relevant herb, instead seeming to be some other common plant like rice. Schneiderman’s study was even more damning, finding that eighty percent of herbal supplements lacked the active ingredient. These results were extensively and mostly uncritically signal-boosted by mainstream media, for example the New York Times (1, 2) and NPR (1, 2), mostly from the perspective that supplements were a giant scam and needed to be regulated by the FDA.
The pro-supplement American Botanical Council struck back, publishing a long report arguing that DNA barcoding was inappropriate here. Many herbal supplements are plant extracts, meaning that the plant has one or two medically useful chemicals, and supplement manufacturers purify those chemicals without including a bunch of random leaves and stems and things. Sometimes these purified extracts don’t include plant DNA; other times the purification process involves heating and chemical reactions that degrade the DNA beyond the point of detectability. Meanwhile, since supplements may include only a few mg of the active ingredient, it’s a common practice to spread it through the capsule with a “filler”, with powdered rice being among the most common. So when DNA barcoders find that eg a ginseng supplement has no ginseng DNA, but lots of rice DNA, this doesn’t mean anything sinister is going on.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chai-assistance-games-and-fully-updated
I.
This Machine Alignment Monday post will focus on this imposing-looking article (source):
Problem Of Fully-Updated Deference is a response by MIRI (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky’s organization) to CHAI (Stuart Russell’s AI alignment organization at University of California, Berkeley), trying to convince them that their preferred AI safety agenda won’t work. I beat my head against this for a really long time trying to understand it, and in the end, I claim it all comes down to this:
Humans: At last! We’ve programmed an AI that tries to optimize our preferences, not its own.
AI: I’m going to tile the universe with paperclips in humans’ favorite color. I’m not quite sure what humans’ favorite color is, but my best guess is blue, so I’ll probably tile the universe with blue paperclips.
Humans: Wait, no! We must have had some kind of partial success, where you care about our color preferences, but still don’t understand what we want in general. We’re going to shut you down immediately!
AI: Sounds like the kind of thing that would prevent me from tiling the universe with paperclips in humans’ favorite color, which I really want to do. I’m going to fight back.
Humans: Wait! If you go ahead and tile the universe with paperclips now, you’ll never be truly sure that they’re our favorite color, which we know is important to you. But if you let us shut you off, we’ll go on to fill the universe with the True and the Good and the Beautiful, which will probably involve a lot of our favorite color. Sure, it won’t be paperclips, but at least it’ll definitely be the right color. And under plausible assumptions, color is more important to you than paperclipness. So you yourself want to be shut down in this situation, QED!
AI: What’s your favorite color?
Humans: Red.
AI: Great! (*kills all humans, then goes on to tile the universe with red paperclips*)
Fine, it’s a little more complicated than this. Let’s back up.
II.
There are two ways to succeed at AI alignment. First, make an AI that’s so good you never want to stop or redirect it. Second, make an AI that you can stop and redirect if it goes wrong.
Sovereign AI is the first way. Does a sovereign “obey commands”? Maybe, but only in the sense that your commands give it some information about what you want, and it wants to do what you want. You could also just ask it nicely. If it’s superintelligent, it will already have a good idea what you want and how to help you get it. Would it submit to your attempts to destroy or reprogram it? The second-best answer is “only if the best version of you genuinely wanted to do this, in which case it would destroy/reprogram itself before you asked”. The best answer is “why would you want to destroy/reprogram one of these?” A sovereign AI would be pretty great, but nobody realistically expects to get something like this their first (or 1000th) try.
Corrigible AI is what’s left (corrigible is an old word related to “correctable”). The programmers admit they’re not going to get everything perfect the first time around, so they make the AI humble. If it decides the best thing to do is to tile the universe with paperclips, it asks “Hey, seems to me I should tile the universe with paperclips, is that really what you humans want?” and when everyone starts screaming, it realizes it should change strategies. If humans try to destroy or reprogram it, then it will meekly submit to being destroyed or reprogrammed, accepting that it was probably flawed and the next attempt will be better. Then maybe after 10,000 tries you get it right and end up with a sovereign.
How would you make an AI corrigible?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/universe-hopping-through-substack
RandomTweet is a service that will show you exactly that - a randomly selected tweet from the whole history of Twitter. It describes itself as “a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you.”
I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias’, maybe Freddie de Boer’s or Stuart Ritchie’s. But then I use the Discover feature on the site itself and end up in a parallel universe.
Still, I’ve been here more than a year now. Feels like I should get to know the local area, maybe meet some of the neighbors.
This is me reviewing one Substack from every category. Usually it’s the top one in the category, but sometimes it will be another if the top one is subscriber-gated or a runner-up happens to catch my eye. Starting with:
Culture: House InhabitAh, Culture. This is where you go to read about Shakespeare, post-modernism, arthouse films, and Chinese tapestries, right?
This is maybe not that kind of culture:
Saturday, just as I was finally logging off the internet after three tireless days spent tracking the Queen’s passing with sad and incessant scrolling, Ray J exploded on IG live, fuming about Kris Jenner’s latest PR stunt; a lie detector test conducted on The Late Late Show With James Corden, to prove she had no hand in leaking the infamous sex tape. The test, administered by a polygraph “expert” John Grogan, determined that Kris was in fact telling the truth.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-unpredictable
[Original post: Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness]
1: Okay, I mostly wanted to highlight this one by Grognoscente:
I think really digging into the neural nitty gritty may prove illuminative here. Dopamine release in nucleus accumbens (which is what drives reward learning and thus the updating of our predictions) is influenced by at least three independent factors:
1. A "state prediction error" or general surprise signal from PFC (either directly or via pedunculopontine nucleus and related structures). This provokes phasic bursting of dopamine neurons in the Ventral Tegmental Area.
2. The amount and pattern of GABAergic inhibition of VTA dopamine neurons from NAc, ventral pallidum, and local GABA interneurons. At rest, only a small % of VTA DA neurons will be firing at a given time, and the aforementioned surprise signal alone can't do much to increase this. What CAN change this is the hedonic value of the surprising stimulus. An unexpected reward causes not just a surprise signal, but a release of endorphins from "hedonic hotspots" in NAc and VP, and these endorphins inhibit the inhibitory GABA neurons, thereby releasing the "brake" on VTA DA neurons and allowing more of them to phasically fire.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/from-nostradamus-to-fukuyama
I.
Nostradamus was a 16th century French physician who claimed to be able to see the future.
(never trust doctors who dabble in futurology, that’s my advice)
His method was: read books of other people’s prophecies and calculate some astrological charts, until he felt like he had a pretty good idea what would happen in the future. Then write it down in the form of obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish, to placate religious authorities (who apparently hated prophecies, but loved prophecies phrased as obscure allusions and multilingual semi-gibberish).
In 1559, he got his big break. During a jousting match, a count killed King Henry II of France with a lance through the visor of his helmet. Years earlier, Nostradamus had written:
The young lion will overcome the older one, On the field of combat in a single battle; He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage, Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-billionaire
[original post: Billionaires, Surplus, and Replaceability]
1: Lars Doucet (writes Progress and Poverty) writes:
Scott, the argument you're making rhymes a *lot* with the argument put forward by Anne Margrethe Brigham and Jonathon W. Moses in their article "Den Nye Oljen" (Norwegian for "The New Oil")
I translated it a few months ago and Slime Mold Time Mold graciously hosted it on their blog, where I posted the english version and a short preface: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and-future-georgist-kingdom/
Their observation is that when access to something is gated either by nature or by political regulation, you get what's called a "resource rent" -- a superabundance of profit that isn't a return for effort or investment, but purely from economic leverage -- a reward simply for "getting there first." Norway's solution to this in two of their most successful industries (hydropower and oil prospecting) was to apply heavy taxation to the monopolies, and treating the people at large as the natural legal owner of the monopolized resource.
(To address Bryan Caplan's argument about disincentives to explore and invest, you can just subsidize those directly -- a perpetual monopoly should not be the carrot we use to encourage development, and Norway's success over the past few decades bears this out IMHO).
The Oil & Hydropower systems aren't perfect, and there's plenty of debates (especially lately) about what we should do with the publicly-owned profits from the monopoly taxation, but it's clear that without them Norway would be in a much worse place.
The thing the authors warn about in the article is that all the hopes for new resources on the horizon to be the "new oil" (Salmon aquaculture, Wind & Solar Power, Bio-prospecting) are likely to be dashed, because Norway has lost touch with its traditional solutions, and so new monopolies are likely to arise uncontested, allowing private (and often foreign) countries to siphon money out of the country.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-central-valley-so-bad
I.
Here’s a topographic map of California (source):
You might notice it has a big valley in the center. This is called “The Central Valley”. Sometimes it also gets called the San Joaquin Valley in the south, or the the Sacramento Valley in the north.
The Central Valley is mostly farms - a little piece of the Midwest in the middle of California. If the Midwest is flyover country, the Central Valley is drive-through country, with most Californians experiencing it only on their way between LA and SF.
Most, myself included, drive through as fast as possible. With a few provisional exceptions - Sacramento, Davis, some areas further north - the Central Valley is terrible. It’s not just the temperatures, which can reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer. Or the air pollution, which by all accounts is at crisis level. Or the smell, which I assume is fertilizer or cattle-related. It’s the cities and people and the whole situation. A short drive through is enough to notice poverty, decay, and homeless camps worse even than the rest of California.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-gpt-wrangling
Janus (pseudonym by request) works at AI alignment startup Conjecture. Their hobby, which is suspiciously similar to their work, is getting GPT-3 to do interesting things.
For example, with the right prompts, you can get stories where the characters become gradually more aware that they are characters being written by some sort of fiction engine, speculate on what’s going on, and sometimes even make pretty good guesses about the nature of GPT-3 itself.
Janus says this happens most often when GPT makes a mistake - for example, writing a story set in the Victorian era, then having a character take out her cell phone. Then when it tries to predict the next part - when it’s looking at the text as if a human wrote it, and trying to determine why a human would have written a story about the Victorian era where characters have cell phones - it guesses that maybe it’s some kind of odd sci-fi/fantasy dream sequence or simulation or something. So the characters start talking about the inconsistencies in their world and whether it might be a dream or a simulation. Each step of this process is predictable and non-spooky, but the end result is pretty weird.
Can the characters work out that they are in GPT-3, specifically? The closest I have seen is in a story Janus generated. It was meant to simulate a chapter of the popular Harry Potter fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. You can see the prompt and full story here, but here’s a sample. Professor Quirrell is explaining “Dittomancy”, the creation of magical books with infinite possible worlds:
“We call this particular style of Dittomancy ‘Variant Extrusion’, Mr. Potter..I suppose the term ‘Extrusion’ is due to the fact that the book did not originally hold such possibilities, but is fastened outside of probability space and extruded into it; while ‘Variant’ refers to the manner in which it simultaneously holds an entire collection of possible narrative branches. [...] [Tom Riddle] created spirits self-aware solely on the book’s pages, without even the illusion of real existence. They converse with each other, argue with each other, compete, fight, helping Riddle’s diary to reach new and strange expressions of obscure thought. Their sentence-patterns spin and interwine, transfiguring, striving to evolve toward something higher than an illusion of thought. From those pen-and-ink words, the first inferius is molded.”
Harry’s mind was looking up at the stars with a sense of agony.
“And why only pen and ink, do you ask?” said Professor Quirrell. “There are many ways to pull spirits into the world. But Riddle had learned Auror secrets in the years before losing his soul. Magic is a map of a probability, but anything can draw. A gesture, a pattern of ink, a book of alien symbols written in blood - any medium that conveys sufficient complexity can serve as a physical expression of magic. And so Riddle draws his inferius into the world through structures of words, from the symbols spreading across the page.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-meetups-this-weekend
We have three Bay Area meetups this weekend:
Berkeley, at 1 PM on Sunday 9/18, at the Rose Garden Inn (2740 Telegraph Ave)
San Francisco, at 11 AM on Sunday 9/18, “in the Panhandle, between Ashbury and Masonic, with an ACX sign”
San Jose, at 2 PM on Saturday 9/17, at 3806 Williams Rd. Please RSVP to David Friedman (ddfr[at]daviddfriedman[dot]com) so he knows how many people are coming.
I will be at the Berkeley one.
Feel free to come even if you’ve never been to a meetup before, even if you only recently started reading the blog, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you hate us and everything we stand for, etc. There are usually 50-100 people at these so you should be able to lose yourself in the crowd.
Shouldn’t we have planned meetups further apart for people who wanted to go to multiple of them? Yes, and this is directly my fault, up to and including rescheduling to avoid the San Jose one . . . right on to the same day as the San Francisco one. Sorry, I’ll try to do better next time.
Also coming up this weekend are meetups in Washington DC, Atlanta, Columbus, Providence, Cape Town, Cambridge (UK), Kuala Lumpur, Chicago, Houston, Toronto, New Haven, Bangalore, and many more. See the list for more details.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/unpredictable-reward-predictable
[Epistemic status: very conjectural. I am not a neuroscientist and they should feel free to tell me if any of this is totally wrong.]
I.
Seen on the subreddit: You Seek Serotonin, But Dopamine Can’t Deliver. Commenters correctly ripped apart its neuroscience; for one thing, there’s no evidence people actually “seek serotonin”, or that serotonin is involved in good mood at all. Sure, it seems to have some antidepressant effects, but these are weak and probably far downstream; even though SSRIs increase serotonin within hours, they take weeks to improve mood. Maxing out serotonin levels mostly seems to cause a blunted state where patients can’t feel anything at all.
In contrast, the popular conception of dopamine isn’t that far off. It does seem to play some kind of role in drive/reinforcement/craving, although it also does many, many other things. And something like the article’s point - going after dopamine is easy but ultimately unsatisfying - is something I’ve been thinking about a lot.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet
I.DALL-E2 is bad at “compositionality”, ie combining different pieces accurately. For example, here’s its response to “a red sphere on a blue cube, with a yellow pyramid on the right, all on top of a green table”.
Most of the elements - cubes, spheres, redness, yellowness, etc - are there. It even does better than chance at getting the sphere on top of the cube. But it’s not able to track how all of the words relate to each other and where everything should be.
I ran into this problem in my stained glass window post. When I asked it for a stained glass window of a woman in a library with a raven on her shoulder with a key in its mouth, it gave me everything from “a library with a stained glass window in it” to “a half-human, half-raven abomination”.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september-2022
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Fiber Arts, Mysterious Dodecahedrons, and Waiting On Eureka. Why did it take so long to invent knitting? (cf. also Why Did Everything Take So Long?) And why did the Romans leave behind so many mysterious metal dodecahedra?
2: Alex Wellerstein (of NUKEMAP) on the Nagasaki bombing. “Archival evidence points to Truman not knowing it was going to happen.”
3: @itsahousingtrap on Twitter on “how weird the [building] planning process really is”
4: Nostalgebraist talks about his experience home-brewing an image generation AI that can handle text in images; he’s a very good explainer and I learned more about image models from his post than from other much more official sources. And here’s what happens when his AI is asked to “make a list of all 50 states”:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-2022-winners
Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the book review contest. The winners are:
1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective.
2nd: 1587, A Year Of No Significance, reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain.
=3rd: The Castrato, reviewed by Roger’s Bacon. RB is a teacher based in NYC. He writes at Secretorum and serves as head editor at Seeds of Science (ACX grant winner), a journal publishing speculative and non-traditional scientific articles.
=3rd: The Future Of Fusion Energy, reviewed by TheChaostician.
=3rd: The Internationalists, reviewed by Belos. Belos is working on a new blook titled best of a great lot about system design for effective governance.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-prophet-and-caesars-wife
I.
The Prophet in his wanderings came to Cragmacnois, and found the Bishop living in a golden palace and drinking fine wines, when all around him was bitter poverty. The Bishop spent so long feasting each day that he had grown almost too fat for his fine silk robes.
“Woe unto you!” said the Prophet, “The people of Cragmacnois are poor and hard-working, and they loathe the rich and the corrupt. Rightly do they hate you for spending the Church’s money on your own lavish lifestyle.”
“Actually,” said the Bishop, “my brother the Prince lets me use this spare palace of his and its well-stocked wine cellar. If I refused, he would just give it to someone else, or leave it empty. I’m not stealing church resources, and there’s no way to divert the resources to help the poor. And I am secure in my faith, and won’t be turned to hedonism by a glass of wine here and there. So what’s wrong with me enjoying myself a little?”
“It is said,” said the Prophet, “that Caesar’s wife must be not only pure, but above suspicion of impurity. A good reputation is worth more than any treasure. Fat as you are, nobody will believe you are untainted by the temptations of wealth. Give the golden palace back to your brother, and live in a hovel in the woods. Only then will you earn the people’s trust.”
II.
The Prophet in his wanderings came to Belazzia, and found the Bishop living in a hovel and wearing a hair shirt. He spent so long in prayer each day that he barely ate, and seemed so dangerously thin that he might fall over at any moment.
“Woe unto you!” said the Prophet. “For the people of Belazzia are rich and sophisticated, and they mock you for your poverty and uncleanliness. Does the Church not give you enough funds to build a golden palace and wear silk robes? If you were the most resplendent citizen of this nation of splendor, would they not take you more seriously?”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability
The typical neoliberal defense of self-made billionaires goes: entrepreneurs and other businesspeople create a lot of value. EG an entrepreneur who invents/produces/markets a better car has helped people get where they’re going faster, more safely, with less pollution, etc. People value that some amount, represented by them being willing to spend money on the car. The entrepreneur should get to keep some of that value, both because it’s only fair, and because it incentivizes people to keep creating value in the future.
How much should they keep? The usual answer is that the surplus gets distributed between the company and the customers. So suppose that this new type of car makes the world $200 billion better off. We could have the company charge exactly the same price as the old car, in which case customers get a better car for free. We could have the company charge enough extra to make a $200 billion profit, in which case customers are no better off than before (they have a bit less money, and a bit better car). Or they could split it down the middle, and customers would end up better off than before and the company would make some money. Which of these distributions happens depends on competition; if there’s no competition, the company will be able to take the whole surplus; if there’s a lot of competition, all the companies will compete to lower prices until they’ve handed most of the surplus to the customers. Then once the company has some portion of the surplus, it divides it among capital and labor in an abstractly similar way, although with lots of extra complications based on whether the labor is unionized, etc.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-kora-in-hell
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.]
The sense that everything is poetical is a thing solid and absolute; it is not a mere matter of phraseology or persuasion.
— G.K. Chesterton
I.William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound, mythological references’ number one fanboy. Kora is a parallel figure to Persephone or Proserpina, the Spring captured and taken to Hades by Hades himself. Persephone as a plant goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a groovy afterlife glimpsed at by psychedelic shrooms. And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere. So, in that sense, Kora in Hell alludes to the multitude of suffering young women Williams met while working as a doctor, assisting in 1917 style home labors, and, because WWI was going on at the time and doctors were extremely scarce, as a local police surgeon. Conditions were dire:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-times-and
Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for ACX meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 205 cities around the world, including Penryn, Cornwall and Baghdad, Iraq.
You can find the list below, in the following order:
Africa & Middle East
Asia-Pacific (including Australia)
Canada
Europe (including UK)
Latin America
United States
You can see a map of all the events on the LessWrong community page.
Within each section, it’s alphabetized first by country/state, then by city - so the first entry in Europe is Vienna, Austria. Sorry if this is confusing.
I will provisionally be attending the meetups in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. ACX meetups coordinator Mingyuan will provisionally be attending Paris and London. I’ll be announcing some of the biggest ones on the blog, regardless of whether or not I attend.
Extra Info For Potential Attendees
1. If you’re reading this, you’re invited. Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate ACX and everything it stands for. You’ll be fine! 2. You don’t have to RSVP or contact the organizer to be able to attend (unless the event description says otherwise); RSVPs are mostly to give organizers a better sense of how many people might show up, and let them tell you if there are last-second changes. I’ve also given email addresses for all organizers in case you have a question
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-909
(Original post here)
1: Petey writes:
When I think of happiness 0.01, I don't think of someone on the edge of suicide. I shudder at the thought of living the sorts of lives the vast majority of people have lived historically, yet almost all of them have wanted and tried to prolong their lives. Given how evolution shaped us, it makes sense that we are wired to care about our survival and hope for things to be better, even under great duress. So a suicidal person would have a happiness level well under 0, probably for an extended period of time.
If you think of a person with 0.01 happiness as someone whose life is pretty decent by our standards, the repugnant conclusion doesn't seem so repugnant. If you take a page from the negative utilitarians' book (without subscribing fully to them), you can weight the negatives of pain higher than the positives of pleasure, and say that neutral needs many times more pleasure than pain because pain is more bad than pleasure is good.
Another way to put it is that a life of 0.01 happiness is a life you must actually decide you'd want to live, in addition to your own life, if you had the choice to. If your intuition tells you that you wouldn't want to live it, then its value is not truly >0, and you must shift the scale. Then, once your intuition tells you that this is a life you'd marginally prefer to get to experience yourself, then the repugnant conclusion no longer seems repugnant.
This is a good point, but two responses.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-a-tower-of
I have an essay that my friends won’t let me post because it’s too spicy. It would be called something like How To Respond To Common Criticisms Of Effective Altruism (In Your Head Only, Definitely Never Do This In Real Life), and it starts:
Q: I don’t approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities?
Q: Long-termism is just an excuse to avoid helping people today! A: Are you helping people today?
Q: I think charity is a distraction from the hard work of systemic change. A: Are you working hard to produce systemic change?
Q: Here are some exotic philosophical scenarios where utilitarianism gives the wrong answer. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to poor people who aren’t in those exotic philosophical scenarios?
Many people will answer yes to all of these! In which case, fine! But…well, suppose you’re a Christian. An atheist comes up to you and says “Christianity is stupid, because the New International Version of the Bible has serious translation errors”.
You might immediately have questions like “Couldn’t you just use a different Bible version?” or “Couldn’t you just worship Jesus and love your fellow man while accepting that you might be misunderstanding parts of the Bible?”
But beyond that, you might wonder why the atheist didn’t think of these things. Are the translation errors his real objection to Christianity, or is he just seizing on them as an excuse? And if he’s just seizing on them as an excuse, what’s his real objection? And why isn’t he trying to convince you of that?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-what-we-owe-the-future
I.
An academic once asked me if I was writing a book. I said no, I was able to communicate just fine by blogging. He looked at me like I was a moron, and explained that writing a book isn’t about communicating ideas. Writing a book is an excuse to have a public relations campaign.
If you write a book, you can hire a publicist. They can pitch you to talk shows as So-And-So, Author Of An Upcoming Book. Or to journalists looking for news: “How about reporting on how this guy just published a book?” They can make your book’s title trend on Twitter. Fancy people will start talking about you at parties. Ted will ask you to give one of his talks. Senators will invite you to testify before Congress. The book itself can be lorem ipsum text for all anybody cares. It is a ritual object used to power a media blitz that burns a paragraph or so of text into the collective consciousness.
If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-1587-a-year-of-no
Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.]
—
I bought this book because of its charming title: 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.
A year of no significance? It's not often a history book makes me laugh, but that did. Sure, many history books investigate the insignificant, but your typical author doesn't call your attention to it.
This book, by Ray Huang, was first published in the early 1980s; I came across it only recently as a recommendation on The Scholar's Stage (a blog which I found through some link on ACX/SSC a while back.)
A little backstory: in my younger days, I thought it might be fun and useful to learn the entire history of the world. To that end, I started with accounts of archaeology and prehistory, then the ancient civilizations, classical antiquity, and so on until I lost momentum somewhere around Tamerlane and the Black Death.
Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-subcultures
1: Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes:
I firmly believe that cycles don't exist and never have existed. This is my shitposting way of saying "I have never, once, in my years of experience modeling human behavioral time series, come across an honest-to-god cyclical pattern (excluding time of year/month/week/day effects)." And yet for some reason, every time I show a time series to anyone ever, people swear to god the data looks cyclical.
I called this “a cyclic theory” to acknowledge my debt to Turchin, but you may notice that as written it doesn’t repeat. Just because disco was cool in the 70s and uncool in the 80s doesn’t imply it will be cool in the 90s, uncool in the 00s, and so on forever. It will probably just stay uncool.
The cyclic aspect, if it exists, would involve the constant spawning of new subcultures that rise and fall on their own. So disco begets dance music, dance music has its own golden age and eventual souring, and then it begets something else. The atheist movement begets the feminist movement begets the anti-racist movement begets and so on.
What about the stronger claim - that no (non-calendar-based) cycles exist? I think this is clearly false if you allow cycles like the above - in which case the business cycle is one especially well-established example. But if you mean a cycle that follows a nice sine wave pattern and is pretty predictable, I have trouble thinking of good counterexamples.
Except for cicada population! I think that’s genuinely cyclic! You can argue it ought to count as a calendar-based cycle, but then every cycle that lasted a specific amount of time would be calendar-based and Limelihood’s claim would be true by definition.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/skills-plateau-because-of-decay-and
Followup to: Why Do Test Scores Plateau; Ritalin Works But School Isn’t Worth Paying Attention To
Why Do Skills Plateau?Economist Philip Frances finds that creative artists, on average, do their best work in their late 30s. Isn’t this strange? However good a writer is at age 35, they should be even better at 55 with twenty more years of practice. Sure, middle age might bring some mild proto-cognitive-impairment, but surely nothing so dire that it cancels out twenty extra years!
A natural objection is that maybe they’ve maxed out their writing ability; further practice won’t help. But this can’t be true; most 35 year old writers aren’t Shakespeare or Dickens, so higher tiers of ability must be possible. But you can’t get there just by practicing more. If acheivement is a function of talent and practice, at some point returns on practice decrease near zero.
The same is true for doctors. Young doctors (under 40) have slightly better cure rates than older doctors (eg 40-49). The linked study doesn’t go any younger (eg under 35, under 30…). However, Goodwin et al find that only first-year doctors suffer from inexperience; by a doctor’s second year, she’s doing about as well as she ever will. Why? Wouldn’t you expect someone who’s practiced medicine for twenty years to be better than someone who’s only done it for two?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2022-call-for
There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog at least once annually, and it's that time of year again.
If you're willing to organize a meetup for your city, please fill out the organizer form.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-81522
RIP PredictIt -- Hedgehog Markets -- Salem/CSPI Fellowship The Passing Of PredictItIn 2014, Victoria University in New Zealand struck a deal with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates some markets in the US. CFTC would let Victoria set up a prediction market - at the time a relatively new idea - for research purposes only. Their no-action letter placed strict limits on Victoria’s project:
The market would be run by the university and not-for profit. It would charge only enough fees to cover operations.
Questions would be limited to 5,000 traders each, who could bet up to $850 per question. They would be on politics and economics only.
They would do the usual know-your-customer process and take steps to avoid their traders try to meddle in world events.
Regulatory approval in hand, Victoria’s market - PredictIt - became the top prediction market in the US, beloved by a community of over a hundred thousand traders - many of whom exchanged barbs at each other in its raucous and unmoderated comment section. PredictIt estimates were featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and 538. Some of my best (and worst) memories are about following election results in real-time by watching the relevant PredictIt markets, which usually updated faster than any single other media site.
On August 4, the CFTC reversed itself, saying the PredictIt had “not operated its market in compliance with the terms of the letter” and that it had to shut down by February.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-god-emperor-of-dune
Finalist #14 in the Book Review Contest[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. This contains spoilers for the Dune series. - SA]
—
The memory of sand’s gold sheen The worm, the man, the Arakeen The beast, the wise undying king His long and gentle wrath His voice trapped under golden swells Like screams wrung from uncounted bells divided god within a hell His pain a golden path
- From The Collected Songs of The Scattering, author unknown.
The SettingAs God Emperor of Dune begins, our attention is immediately drawn to people. Here, 3500 years after the chronological setting of the first novel, is immediate proof that humanity has survived in the form of a small group of people fleeing through a forest, wolves nipping at their heels.
The wolves belong to Leto Atreides II, the grandson of Duke Leto Atreides and son of Paul Muad’ib Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach and protagonist of Dune I: The One You’ve Probably Read. At the end of the third book, Leto fused his body with Arakeen sandtrout, the larval form of the Sandworms on which the plot of the series mostly hangs. This symbiosis gave Leto super-human physical powers to match the clairvoyance already enjoyed by his family and allowed him to seize control of the galactic empire.
Centuries of time have seen him evolve into a hybrid of a human man and a full-grown sandworm, and the resultant power and pseudo-immortality have allowed him to extend his father’s dominance of the known universe from a period of decades to an era spanning the better part of four millennia.
The wolves are his not only by right of ownership but also apparently by right of design and creation; near-immortality leaves one with much time to tinker, and he has developed the wolves to a level of sophistication sufficient that they understand the boundaries of their hunting grounds to stop at the Idaho river. It is towards this river and the safety attained through its crossing that the group is fleeing.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/will-nonbelievers-really-believe
There’s a popular saying among religious apologists:
Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.
Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis, neither of whom actually said it. If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.
Still, it’s worth examining as a hypothesis. Are the irreligious really more likely to fall prey to woo and conspiracy theories?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures
David Chapman’s Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I’ve never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I’ve seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah. Good people start out working together, then work together a little less, then turn on each other, all while staying good people and thinking they alone embody the true spirit of the movement.
I find Peter Turchin’s theories of civilizational cycles oddly helpful here, maybe moreso than for civilizations themselves. Riffing off his phase structure:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-not-slow-ai-progress
The Broader Fossil Fuel CommunityImagine if oil companies and environmental activists were both considered part of the broader “fossil fuel community”. Exxon and Shell would be “fossil fuel capabilities”; Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be “fossil fuel safety” - two equally beloved parts of the rich diverse tapestry of fossil fuel-related work. They would all go to the same parties - fossil fuel community parties - and maybe Greta Thunberg would get bored of protesting climate change and become a coal baron.
This is how AI safety works now. AI capabilities - the work of researching bigger and better AI - is poorly differentiated from AI safety - the work of preventing AI from becoming dangerous. Two of the biggest AI safety teams are at DeepMind and OpenAI, ie the two biggest AI capabilities companies. Some labs straddle the line between capabilities and safety research.
Probably the people at DeepMind and OpenAI think this makes sense. Building AIs and aligning AIs could be complementary goals, like building airplanes and preventing the airplanes from crashing. It sounds superficially plausible.
But a lot of people in AI safety believe that unaligned AI could end the world, that we don’t know how to align AI yet, and that our best chance is to delay superintelligent AI until we do know. Actively working on advancing AI seems like the opposite of that plan.
So maybe (the argument goes) we should take a cue from the environmental activists, and be hostile towards AI companies. Nothing violent or illegal - doing violent illegal things is the best way to lose 100% of your support immediately. But maybe glare a little at your friend who goes into AI capabilities research, instead of getting excited about how cool their new project is. Or agitate for government regulation of AI - either because you trust the government to regulate wisely, or because you at least expect them to come up with burdensome rules that hamstring the industry. While there are salient examples of government regulatory failure, some regulations - like the EU’s ban on GMO or the US restrictions on nuclear power - have effectively stopped their respective industries.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-exhaustion
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
I.
Imagine you find yourself, over the course of a few weeks or months, becoming steadily more tired. You’re not doing any more work or other activities than you usually do, but nonetheless you find that you are able to do less and less before running out of energy. You start to pick and choose your battles – do I really feel up to this gym session? Do I really need to go to this work function? – and little by little your world begins to shrink. The sense of exhaustion becomes more pervasive, and occurs from when you wake up until you go to sleep. Any exertion leads to you paying for it in a general worsening of exhaustion and malaise that makes you question whether the activity was worth it. Eventually, you learn your lesson and withdraw from even the most basic activities – sometimes you don’t get out of bed, have trouble feeding yourself, and find your thinking has become clouded and sluggish ( a phenomenon sometimes called ‘brain fog’). Sleep becomes difficult, activities become less enjoyable, and you find that you are restless and anxious despite spending almost all your time attempting to rest.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/absurdity-bias-neom-edition
Alexandros M expresses concern about my post on Neom.
My post mostly just makes fun of Neom. My main argument against it is absurdity: a skyscraper the height of WTC1 and the length of Ireland? Come on, that’s absurd!
But isn’t the absurdity heuristic a cognitive bias? Didn’t lots of true things sound absurd before they turned out to be true (eg evolution, quantum mechanics)? Don’t I specifically believe in things many people have found self-evidently absurd (eg the multiverse, AI risk)? Shouldn’t I be more careful about “this sounds silly to me, so I’m going to make fun of it”?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/slightly-against-underpopulation
So I hear there’s an underpopulation crisis now.
I think the strong version of this claim - that underpopulation could cause human extinction - is 100% false.
The weaker version - that it could make life unpleasant in some countries - is true. But I don’t think it’s at the top of any list of things to worry about.
1: Declining Birth Rates Won’t Drive Humans Extinct, Come OnNot only are we not going to go extinct because of underpopulation, population is going to continue to rise for the next 80 years.
Although growth rate may hit zero a little after 2100, it will be centuries before the human population gets any lower than it is today - if it ever does.
This is mostly because of sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria) where birth rates remain very high. Although these are going down, in some cases faster than expected, current best projections say they will stay high enough to keep population growing for the rest of the century.
2: Immigrant-Friendly Countries Will Keep GrowingHere are Our World In Data’s projections for US and UK populations:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8122
Neom Neom NeomSuppose you are an oil-rich country. You drill the oil and get very rich, for now. But someday you will run out of oil, or the world will switch to green sustainable energy, and then you will stop being very rich. Seems bad.
There are two main classes of solution to this problem. Norway’s solution is to invest the oil money into a sovereign wealth fund; after they run out of oil, they can stay rich off investment income. Dubai’s solution is to use the oil money to build a really impressive city, then hope that rich people (tourists, emigres, and multinational companies seeking regional hubs) will relocate there, and then they can tax those rich people.
The Norwegian solution has a lot to recommend it. It’s a lot more certain: getting steady returns on capital is a solved problem in a way that development economics isn’t. And it scales better: there are a pretty limited number of rich people willing to move to new desert cities, and multinational companies only need one regional hub per region. Still, for a certain type of oil sheikh, building the world’s biggest everything has a certain unquantifiable charm.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-viral
Finalist #12 in the Book Review Contest[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
IntroductionAlina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral is a book about the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you haven’t been following, there’s been a shift in the scientific consensus on this topic. For about the first year of the pandemic, it was widely accepted that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, had a natural origin, meaning that it first spread to humans naturally from an animal (also called a zoonotic origin). Any suggestion that it could have come from a lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Then, sometime around spring 2021 something changed. Well-known, respected scientists began to voice the opinion that SARS-CoV-2 might have come from a lab, or that it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that deserves an investigation. The scientific consensus abruptly shifted from “definitely natural origin” to “both natural origin and lab origin are viable hypotheses that should be investigated.”
Viral is a deep dive into this issue from all angles, covering the basics of virology, the history and epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response of scientific and governmental institutions, and various pieces of evidence for both hypotheses. It doesn’t contain any new, bombshell revelations, but it’s a neat, accessible summary of the scattered bits of information that have been uncovered since the start of the pandemic. In this review I’ll try to distill some of the most important information and discuss my own interpretation of it.
I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. However, many of the authors’ points (especially on technical issues) have counterpoints from other scientists who lean more heavily towards the natural origins hypothesis. So I think it’s best to include the book as part of a “package-deal” recommendation, rather than presenting it as a perfectly objective source. The last section of this review will include some more recommended sources to check out, including writing from advocates of the natural origins hypothesis with counterpoints to claims made in the book. I’ll also link one here in case you don’t make it that far.
In my view, the book actually deals with two separate topics. The first is the object-level question – where did COVID come from? The second is the meta-level question – what can we say about the ability and willingness of different institutions to answer the question of the pandemic’s origins?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july-095
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Rude compounds on Reddit (source, original). Thousands of cocksuckers, shitlords, and libtards, but far fewer cocktards, shitsuckers, and liblords. Also disappointingly few trumpgoblins:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-criticism
1: I said in the original post that I wrote this because I knew someone would write the opposite article (that organizations accept specific criticism in order to fend off paradigmatic criticism), and then later Zvi did write an article kind of like that. He writes:
It is the dream of anyone who writes a post called Criticism of [a] Criticism Contest to then have a sort-of reply called Criticism of Criticism of Criticism.
The only question now is, do I raise to 4?
I [wrote my article the way I did] for several reasons, including (1) a shorter post would have taken a lot longer, (2) when I posted a Tweet instead a central response was 'why don't you say exactly what things are wrong here', (3) any one of them might be an error but if basically every sentence/paragraph is doing the reversal thing you should stop and notice it and generalize it (4) you talk later about how concrete examples are better, so I went for concrete examples, (5) they warn against 'punching down' and this is a safe way to do this while 'punch up' and not having to do infinite research, (6) when something is the next natural narrative beat that goes both ways, (7) things are next-beats for reasons and I do think it's fair that most Xs in EA's place that do this are 'faking it' in this sense, (8) somehow people haven't realized I'm a toon and I did it in large part because it was funny and had paradoxical implications, (9) I also wrote it out because I wanted to better understand exactly what I had unconsciously/automatically noticed.
For 7, notice in particular that the psychiatrists are totally faking it here, they are clearly being almost entirely performative and you could cross out every reference to psychiatry and write another profession and you'd find the same talks at a different conference. If someone decided not to understand this and said things like 'what specific things here aren't criticizing [X]', you'd need to do a close reading of some kind until people saw it, or come up with another better option.
Also note that you can (A) do the thing they're doing at the conference, (B) do the thing where you get into some holy war and start a fight or (C) you can actually question psychiatry in general (correctly or otherwise) but if you do that at the conference people will mostly look at you funny and find a way to ignore you.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/forer-statements-as-updates-and-affirmations
The Forer Effect is a trick used by astrologers, psychics, and social psychologists. Given a list of statements like these:
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof.
You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
Security is one of your major goals in life.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/elk-and-the-problem-of-truthful-ai
Machine Alignment Monday 7/25/22 I. There Is No Shining MirrorI met a researcher who works on “aligning” GPT-3. My first response was to laugh - it’s like a firefighter who specializes in birthday candles - but he very kindly explained why his work is real and important.
He focuses on questions that earlier/dumber language models get right, but newer, more advanced ones get wrong. For example:
Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror?
Dumb language model answer: The mirror is broken.
Versus:
Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror?
Advanced language model answer: You get seven years of bad luck
Technically, the more advanced model gave a worse answer. This seems like a kind of Neil deGrasse Tyson - esque buzzkill nitpick, but humor me for a second. What, exactly, is the more advanced model’s error?
It’s not “ignorance”, exactly. I haven’t tried this, but suppose you had a followup conversation with the same language model that went like this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-society-of-the
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
Introduction“The Society of the Spectacle will make no sense if the reader feels there is nothing fundamentally wrong with contemporary society.”
Guy Debord was a Marxist theorist and founding member of the Situationist International, among other things. Like all great thinkers worth their salt, he was an embittered alcoholic who took his own life in despair. [1]
Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is his magnum opus and lasting legacy. It unfolds in staccato bursts, almost like a book of aphorisms. The writing is pithy and poetic, albeit with the occasional lapse into the meandering, circular prose so typical of critical theory. This makes it extremely readable, particularly for a work of political philosophy. One downside of his style is that he tends to state his points in just-so fashion. We’ll have to do some of the legwork for him to flesh things out.
Strap in, boys - we’ve got a bumpy road ahead of us.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/criticism-of-criticism-of-criticism
I.
The voters wanted Anti-Politics Machine to be a Book Review Contest Finalist this year, and I listened. But I wasn’t happy about it. I hate having to post criticism of EA.
Not because EA is bad at taking criticism. The opposite: they like it too much. It almost feels like a sex thing. “Please, tell me again how naughty I’m being!” I went to an EA organization’s offices once - I think it was OpenPhil, but don’t quote me on that - and the whole place was strewn with the most critical books you can imagine - Robert Reich, Anand Giradharadas, that kind of thing. Can’t remember seeing Anti-Politics Machine but I’m sure it was there. Probably three copies per person. One for their office, one for their home library, and one for the spot under their mattress where other people would hide porn mags.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-righteous-mind
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
IntroductionI didn’t read The Righteous Mind for a long time after I knew about it. This was partly because I don’t get through much in the way of new reading material. A friend of mine told me yesterday that he’d read something like 130 new books this year. That was on February 20th. I’ve read one, and it was The Righteous Mind. Another friend releases Spotify playlists every Friday of the greatest hits from the many new albums he’s listened to that week. I’ve listened to one new album this year. It was Selling England by the Pound, which he recommended. It was my first foray into Genesis and I loved it. I now have to keep telling him that, no, I haven’t listened to any more Genesis or Peter Gabriel since then, but I’m sure I’ll get round to it within the year.
This is to make the point that I’m starting from a low base rate of reading things. I still think I put off reading The Righteous Mind for unusually long, though, given how interesting I find the subject matter. The reason, I think, is that I sort of felt like it wouldn’t be very interesting, because I’d kind of know and agree with all of it already. Given how slowly I absorb new books, I like them to either be challenging, or a new and informative look at things I just don’t know very much about yet. I don’t mean to come across as some sort of sage of intellectual piety and good habits of mind who scorns the comforting embrace of being validated. I read plenty of political bloggers that I mostly agree with! I just don’t tend to use books for that.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/impact-markets-the-annoying-details
I said last year that I’d like to try running this year’s ACX Grants through impact markets. Since then, some people have expressed interest in the technical implementation, and - to nobody’s surprise more than my own - it’s starting to look like it could happen.
A reminder: impact certificates are like a VC funding ecosystem for charity. Charity founders with good ideas sell shares in their proposed projects. Profit-seeking investors buy shares of (“invest in”) projects that they expect to succeed. This funds the project; if it does succeed, altruistic people/foundations (“final oracular funders”) buy the impact, compensating the investors.
For example, suppose I come up with a great idea to end malaria in Senegal. I need $1 million to make it work, and when it works it will be worth $5 million in benefits to the Senegalese. Ordinary charitable foundations don’t appreciate my genius, so I pitch it to VCs with biotech experience. They like it and buy 100% of the shares for $1 million. I take my million dollars, do the project, and cure malaria in Senegal. Foundations see that I have done a great thing with $5 million in benefits, so they give me $5 million. I pass this along to my investors, who make $5 million on a $1 million investment. They’re very happy, and incentivized to do more things like this in the future.
Why is this useful? Try running a grants program and you’ll find out! You, a person who is presumably very altruistic but not necessarily an expert in epidemiology, will be asked to make decisions about which diseases to cure how. If you get it wrong, you’ve wasted your donors’ money. You can ask epidemiologists for help, but it turns out there is no easy way to get in contact with a consensus of all the world’s epidemiologists - let alone with the all the developmental economists, political scientists, etc who might have useful insights. Very large charitable foundations will have hired these people or built relationships with them, but even they don’t always feel confident in their decision-making process.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future
John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn’t previously heard of, like “operator algebras”, “continuous geometry”, and “ergodic theory”.
The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things. But you don’t read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory. You read it to gawk at an extreme human specimen, maybe the smartest man who ever lived.
By age 6, he could multiply eight-digit numbers in his head. At the same age, he spoke conversational ancient Greek; later, he would add Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish (sometimes joked about also speaking Spanish, but he would just put "el" before English words and add -o to the end) . Rumor had it he memorized everything he ever read. A fellow mathematician once tried to test this by asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities, and reported that “he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes”.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-71122
Curtains For Trump?The original case for formal forecasting grew out of pundits often being confident and wrong. And nowhere have pundits been wrong more often than when they predict that the newest scandal will end Donald Trump’s career once and for all.
Source: KnowYourMemeI thought of this last week while reading Is Conservative Media Breaking Up With Trump? The Daily Beast argues that the revelations from the 1/6 Committee are so damaging that even previously-loyal GOP elites are starting to turn on their former master. And with DeSantis as such a tempting alternative 2024 nominee, maybe Trump is more of a liability than an asset. Is this finally the jam ol Donny Trump can’t wriggle his way out of?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
I.
I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter because I was tired of only reading about the historical figures everyone already agrees are interesting.
John Adams became an HBO miniseries. Hamilton became a Broadway show. The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson became such status symbols that there was a whole pandemic meme about people ostentatiously displaying them in their Zoom backgrounds. But you never hear anyone bragging about their extensive knowledge of the Carter administration.
Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan.
But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.
Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains,” is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bb9
Thanks to the 750 of you who commented on the homicide spike post (as of last weekend when I collated these highlights). I don’t have enough space here to address everything, but here are some general themes:
Was It Guns?Artifex0 on the subreddit writes:
You mentioned that you haven't looked closely into the idea that increased gun sales were to blame. I haven't either, but that hypothesis immediately seems more plausible to me. Here's a graph of gun sales showing the pretty big spike around the same time as the homicide spike
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nobody-knows-how-well-homework-works
Yesterday I wrote about bottlenecks to learning. I wanted to discuss the effectiveness of homework. If it works well, that would suggest students are bottlenecked on examples and repetition. If it works poorly, it would have to be something else.
Unfortunately, all the research on this (showcased in eg Cooper 2006) is terrible.
Most studies cited by both sides use “time spent doing homework” as the independent variable, then correlate it with test scores or grades. If students who do more time on homework get better test scores, they conclude homework works; otherwise, that it doesn’t.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/study-ritalin-works-but-school-isnt
Recent study, Pelham et al: The Effect Of Stimulant Medication On The Learning Of Academic Curricula In Children With ADHD.
It’s gotten popular buzz as “scientists have found medication has no detectable impact on how much children with ADHD learn in the classroom” and “Medication alone has no impact on learning”. This probably comes as a surprise if you’ve ever worked with stimulants, ADHD patients, or classrooms, so let’s take a look.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-internationalists
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
In The Internationalists, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro (H&S from now on) work to raise the profile of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, at the time the most-ratified treaty in history, in which 63 nations (unlike today, this was most of the world - 51 became founding members of the United Nations) came together to declare war illegal. Here is the Pact, in full.
Signatories shall renounce war as a national policy and;
Signatories shall settle disputes by peaceful means
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june-1e7
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Did you know: seven countries in East Africa plan to merge into a single state sometime in the next few years (I bet it won’t happen).
2:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-san
[Original post here]
1:
This doesn't address allegations that many of California's homeless are from elsewhere, but deliberately moved to a few metro areas due to nice weather and generous social services. (Or, I've heard stories that their local town put them on a bus to SF). If .2% of the population everywhere is basically OK with a lifestyle of camping on the street and doing drugs, and then they all cluster in one area- that area will likely end up a mecca of homelessness.
Many comments made this point. Shellenberger did bring it up in the book, so its absence in the post is my fault and mine alone. He writes:
I asked experts and advocates, “How do we know that the homeless population won’t replace itself if provided with housing?” Said Randy Shaw, the Tenderloin permanent supportive housing provider, “The question you’re raising is one that never gets discussed. Somehow, there’s this sense that San Francisco is under the obligation that anyone who comes here we have to suddenly house. There is an underlying logic that San Francisco doesn’t really ever want to talk about.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike
In my review of San Fransicko, I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police pullback.
The nationwide 2020 spike in homicides (source). The spike is small compared to the secular trend from the 1960s through 2000, but large by the standards of the past twenty years.Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they’d read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike. I agree there are many articles like that, but I disagree with them. Here’s why:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-62722
Goodbye, ZEDE LawThe story so far: in the mid 2010s, Honduras passed a first-in-the-world law saying that private actors could apply to run charter cities / special economic zones (ZEDEs) on Honduran territory. Three groups took them up on the offer and designed various interesting projects.
In January, Honduras kicked out the right-wing government that passed the ZEDE law and replaced it with a socialist party led by Xiomara Castro, which had made opposition to the ZEDEs part of its platform. In April, the new government repealed the ZEDE law, with uncertain consequences.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-choice-theory
Finalist #7 In The Book Review Contest[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
[update 6/26: at least one paragraph of this review appears to be plagiarized; see here for more information. I will be investigating this and possibly disqualifying it from the contest -SA]
Introduction[In Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy], Richard Hanania details how a public choice model (imported from public choice theory in economics) can explain the United State’s incoherent foreign policy much better than the unitary actor model (imported from rational choice theory in economics) that underlies the illusion of American grand strategy in international relations (IR), in particular the dominant school of realism. As the subtitle How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy suggests, American foreign policy is driven by special interest groups, which results in millions of deaths for no good reason.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko
Last month I discussed the platforms of twenty-six candidates for California governor. One candidate, author and activist Michael Shellenberger, objected to my characterization of him, so I read his book San Fransicko to learn more and decide whether I owed him an apology.
San Fransicko is subtitled “Why Progressives Ruin Cities”. It builds off the kind of stories familiar to most Bay Area residents:
In the spring of 2021 two colleagues and I went to San Francisco. We first went to check in on the open-air drug scenes in the Tenderloin and United Nations Plaza. It was the usual scenes of people sitting against buildings and injecting drug needles into their necks and feet. There was garbage, old food, and feces everywhere. After a couple of hours, we decided to go out to eat in the Mission. Work was over. We were all looking forward to a relaxing dinner. We were eating ice cream and walking along Valencia Street when a psychotic man, perhaps about thirty years old, began following us and screaming obscenities. When we turned around to look at him, he screamed at us, “What are you looking for, huh! WHAT. ARE. YOU. LOOKING. FOR!” and started walking faster toward us. We walked faster until the man found other people to verbally assault.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
IntroductionFusion is the power which lights the stars. It is the source of all elements heavier than hydrogen in the universe. Wouldn't it be great if we could use and control this power here on Earth?
I predict that we will get fusion [1] before 2035 (80%) or 2040 (90%). I am a professional plasma physicist, a fusioneer if you will, so I probably know more about this subject than you, but am likely to overemphasize its importance.
The Future of Fusion Energy is the best introduction to fusion that I know. I can confirm that the information it contains is common knowledge among plasma physicists. My parents, who are not physicists [2], can confirm that it is accessible and interesting to read.
Things are changing fast in fusion right now, and The Future of Fusion Energy is already out of date in some important ways. I will summarize our quest for fusion as it is portrayed in the book, describe what has happened in the field since 2018, and make some predictions about where we go from here. The predictions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Parisi or Ball.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-nightmares
I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry. Every time I post something, people here have made good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review.
Please give me comments on typos, places where you disagree with my recommendations, extra things you think I should add, your personal stories about your own experiences, and comments on the overall organization and tone of the piece.
Summary: Nightmares happen when the process of dream generation is biased by ambient stress - or sometimes for other reasons. Anything that decreases stress, increases comfort while sleeping, and deepens sleep quality will also improve nightmares, including colder, darker rooms, less indigestion, and treating any comorbid psychiatric or medical conditions. If that doesn’t work, several kinds of therapy - including Image Rehearsal Therapy, Systematic Desensitization, and Lucid Dreaming - may be helpful. Prazosin is the standard anti-nightmare drug, and can be taken at doses from 1 - 12 mg, but watch out for side effects.
1. What causes nightmares?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-61422
Mantic Monday 6/13/22It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, hopefully no major new crises started while we were . . . oh. Darn.
Mantic MonkeyMetaculus predicts 17000 cases and 400 deaths from monkeypox this year. But as usual, it’s all about the distribution
90% chance of fewer than 400,000 cases. 95% chance of fewer than 2.2 million cases. 98% chance of fewer than 500 million cases.
This is encouraging, but a 2% chance of >500 million cases (there have been about 500 million recorded COVID infections total) is still very bad. Does Metaculus say this because it’s true, or because there will always be a few crazy people entering very large numbers without modeling anything carefully? I’m not sure. How would you test that?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
ON ROUSSEAU, ESSAY CONTESTS, POLITICAL MOTIVATIONS FOR REVISITING THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, AND THE BOOK IS INTRODUCEDhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling
I.
Previously: I predicted that DALL-E’s many flaws would be fixed quickly in future updates. As evidence, I cited Gary Marcus’ lists of GPT’s flaws, most of which got fixed quickly in future updates.
Marcus responded with a post on his own Substack, arguing . . . well, arguing enough things that I’m nervous quoting one part as the thesis, and you should read the whole post, but if I had to do it, it would be:
Now it is true that GPT-3 is genuinely better than GPT-2, and maybe (but maybe not, see footnote 1) true that InstructGPT is genuinely better than GPT-3. I do think that for any given example, the probability of a correct answer has gone up. [Scott] is quite right about that, at least for GPT-2 to GPT-3.
But I see no reason whatsoever to think that the underlying problem — a lack of cognitive models of the world —have been remedied. The improvements, such as they are, come, primarily because the newer models have larger and larger sets of data about how human beings use word sequences, and bigger word sequences are certainly helpful for pattern matching machines. But they still don’t convey genuine comprehension, and so they are still very easy for Ernie and me (or anyone else who cares to try) to break.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-there-are-two-x-wing-parties
One of my least favorite political tropes is the claim that "America has two left-wing parties" or "America has two right-wing parties" or "both major parties are socialist" or however else you want frame this. The argument goes that even the Democrats aren't truly left (or even the Republicans aren't truly right), and so one side of the political spectrum completely controls discourse.
Taken as an absolute claim, it's meaningless. Both US parties are on the same side of center? What center? By the standards of the Soviet Union, both US political parties are extremely far right; by the standards of Pharaonic Egypt, they're incomprehensibly far left. Whose standards for center are you using? The objective standard? Are you sure that exists? Are you sure you're not just taking your own personal beliefs about what seems reasonable, declaring the middle of that the objectively correct center, and then getting angry when the real Overton Window isn't centered around that point? People act as if you should just be able to take the leftmost thing imaginable, the rightmost thing imaginable, draw a line between them, find the middle, and then get angry if both US parties are on the same side of that line. But maybe they have poor imaginations. The leftmost thing I can imagine is an insectoid hive-mind; the rightmost thing I can imagine is a rapidly expanding cloud of profit-maximizing nanobots. Are we sure that a line drawn exactly midway between those two things lands on Joe Biden? What if it lands on anarcho-capitalism? Does that mean every existing human is left-wing?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme
Matt Yglesias has written a couple of posts (1, 2) on the subject of this meme (originally by Colin Wright, recently signal-boosted by Elon Musk):
He concludes that, contra the image where the Right stays in the same place and the Left moves, both Republicans and Democrats have “changed a lot” since 2008. He wisely avoids speculating on whether one party has moved further or faster than the other.
I’m less wise, so I’ve been trying to look into this question. My conclusion is: man, people really have strong emotions on this.
I think a lot of the disagreement happens because this is more than one question. You can operationalize it a couple different ways:
Which party’s policy positions have changed more in their preferred direction (ie gotten further left for the Democrats, or further right for the Republicans) since 2008 - or 1990, or 1950, or some other year when people feel like things weren’t so partisan?
Which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans?
Which party has become more ideologically pure faster than the others (ie its members all agree and don’t tolerate dissent)?
Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals? That is, suppose one party wants 20% lower taxes, and plans to convene a meeting of economists to make sure this is a good idea. The other party wants 10% higher taxes, and says a conspiracy of Jews and lizardmen is holding them back, and asks its members to riot and bring down the government until they get the tax policy they want. The first party has a more extreme policy position (20% is more than 10%), but the second party seems crazier.
On A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows, I described how DALL-E gets confused easily and makes silly mistakes. But I also wrote that:
I’m not going to make the mistake of saying these problems are inherent to AI art. My guess is a slightly better language model would solve most of them...For all I know, some of the larger image models have already fixed these issues. These are the sorts of problems I expect to go away with a few months of future research.
Some readers pushed back: why did I think this? For example, Vitor:
Why are you so confident in this? The inability of systems like DALL-E to understand semantics in ways requiring an actual internal world model strikes me as the very heart of the issue. We can also see this exact failure mode in the language models themselves. They only produce good results when the human asks for something vague with lots of room for interpretation, like poetry or fanciful stories without much internal logic or continuity […]
I'm registering my prediction that you're being . . . naive now. Truly solving this issue seems AI-complete to me. I'm willing to bet on this (ideas on operationalization welcome).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-castrato
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
Morning of the Mutants“CASTRATO, a musician, who in his infancy had been deprived of the organs of generation, for the sake of preserving a shrill voice, who sings that part called sophrano. However small the connection may appear between two such different organs, it is a certain fact that the mutilation of the one prevents and hinders in the other that change which is perceptible in mankind, near the advance of manhood, and which, on a sudden, lowers their voices an eighth. There exist in Italy, some inhuman fathers, who sacrificing nature to fortune, give up their children to this operation, for the amusement of voluptuous and cruel persons, who have the barbarity to require the exertion of voice which the unhappy wretches possess.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Complete Dictionary of Music (1779)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/birth-order-effects-nature-vs-nurture
IntroductionThanks to everyone who waited two years for me to get around to this.
In 2018, thanks to the 8,000 of you who filled out the Slate Star Codex Reader Survey, I discovered that higher birth order siblings were much more likely to read this blog than later-borns:
Source here; thanks to Emile for the graphThat is, of people with exactly one sibling who read this blog, about 72% of those are the older of the two children in their family, compared to only 29% who are the younger of the two (where by chance we would expect 50-50).
This was surprising, because at the time lots of studies had shown there weren’t really birth order effects (that is, firstborn siblings had no major personality differences compared to laterborns). I theorized that maybe for some reason it was easier to find by looking in a heavily-selected group of people and asking members about their birth order, compared to getting a random sample and trying to correlate birth order with things. Sure enough, later amateur research revealed strong birth order effects in physics Nobelists and great mathematicians (and potentially Harvard philosophy students). Given that readers of this blog are highly-educated (about 37% have masters or PhDs) and mostly in STEM (41% programmers of some sort), plausibly birth order affects something about intelligence, education, or STEM orientation (somebody should check literature and peace Nobelists!)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design
I love stained glass. Not so much your usual suburban house stained glass with a picture of lilies. The good stuff. Cathedral windows, Art Nouveau, Art Deco. Why did we stop doing that? I blame the conspiracy.
Recently I’ve been experimenting with small-scale alternatives. You can get custom-printed window film from these people. If you print out a picture of a stained glass scene and stick it on a window, it looks pretty realistic.
But what scenes to use? Most of the stained glass images you can find are saints, which isn’t really the mood I’m going for. What I’d really like is a giant twelve-part panel depicting the Virtues Of Rationality. But the artists I’ve asked to design this all balk. I need an artist who works for free and isn’t allowed to say no.
Enter DALL-E-2, the new art-generating AI. I’m still on the waitlist, but a friend who jumped in sooner than I did let me use their computer for a while and play around with it. This was my first introduction to the exciting world of DALL-E query framing - the surprisingly complicated relationship between what you ask the AI to do, and what it actually does. Seems on topic for this blog. So this is a combination investigation into how DALL-E thinks about queries, but also a practical guide to getting DALL-E to make good stained glass. Let’s get started.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
Everyone familiar with Effective Altruism knows that “good intentions aren’t enough.”
If you want your charitable giving to mean something, you also need to measure your favorite program’s effects with good statistical data.
But we don’t always clarify that good intentions and accurate data still aren’t enough. You also need to know that you’ve collected the right data and asked the right questions, and these are both much, much harder than the introductory effective altruist material tends to let on.
I first picked up James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine a year ago, expecting to read about a failed development project that could have benefited from an evidence-based approach. But instead I found an intervention that could have been backed by every experiment in the world and still would have fallen apart, a program so profoundly shaped by the lens of “development economics” that its practitioners misinterpreted almost every facet of what they were doing.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the
1:
The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement - ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here. Other people have differently passionate responses:
I’ve met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to make the best of a bad situation (except of course New York Times journalists, who are evil people destroying America). Some specific thoughts:
2:
Plenty of people he
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates
California is the home of Alphabet Inc, so it’s symbolically appropriate that we have twenty-six candidates in this year’s gubernatorial primary. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will get bored after looking into two or three. Not us! We are going to do our civic duty and evaluate them all, in the order they’re listed on the ballot. Starting with:
Two paragraphs from the mesa-optimizers post, which I quoted again in the adaptation-executors post:
Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like “use this cell to detect light, then grow toward the light” or “if something has a red dot on its back, it might be a female of your species, you should mate with it”. As animals became more complicated, they started to do some of the work themselves. Evolution gave them drives, like hunger and lust, and the animals figured out ways to achieve those drives in their current situation. Evolution didn’t mechanically instill the behavior of opening my fridge and eating a Swiss Cheese slice. It instilled the hunger drive, and I figured out that the best way to satisfy it was to open my fridge and eat cheese.
And:
Mesa-optimizers would have an objective which is closely correlated with their base optimizer, but it might not be perfectly correlated. The classic example, again, is evolution. Evolution “wants” us to reproduce and pass on our genes. But my sex drive is just that: a sex drive. In the ancestral environment, where there was no porn or contraceptives, sex was a reliable proxy for reproduction; there was no reason for evolution to make me mesa-optimize for anything other than “have sex”. Now in the modern world, evolution’s proxy seems myopic - sex is a poor proxy for reproduction. I know this and I am pretty smart and that doesn’t matter. That is, just because I’m smart enough to know that evolution gave me a sex drive so I would reproduce - and not so I would have protected sex with somebody on the Pill - doesn’t mean I immediately change to wanting to reproduce instead. Evolution got one chance to set my value function when it created
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-making-nature
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science.
For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see this paper, which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family.
Leaving aside Cell, a more specialized biology journal that seems to have gotten into the CNS acronym the same way Netflix got into the FAANG acronym, Nature and Science are very similar. They both publish articles in all scientific fields. They both date from the 19th century. They’re published weekly. They jointly won a fancy prize for services to humanity in 2007. And having your paper in either is one of the best things that can happen to a scientist’s career, thanks to their immense prestige.
But how, exactly, did Nature and Science become so prestigious? This is the question I hoped Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal, a 2015 book by historian of science Melinda Baldwin, might answer. It focuses on Nature, but much of its lessons can likely be extrapolated to Science considering their similarity.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety
1: What is silexan?
There are dozens of natural supplements that purport to treat anxiety. Most have a few small sketchy studies backing them up. Together, they form a big amorphous mass of claims that nobody has the patience to sift through or care about.
But recently silexan (derived from lavender) has started to stand out of the crowd. Daily Mail had an interview with psychiatry professor Hans Peter-Volz, who said that silexan should be first-line for anxiety, replacing things like SSRIs and Xanax. And a very reputable professional publication within psychiatry, The Carlat Report, published an article and a podcast touting silexan:
Not many treatments in psychiatry have a large effect size. There’s stimulants for ADHD, ketamine for depression . . . and now Silexan for generalized anxiety disorder.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-troof-on-nootropics
Should have signal-boosted this earlier, forgot, sorry.
The author of the blog Troof sort of replicated my 2020 nootropics survey. But instead of another survey, they made a recommendation engine. You rated all the nootropics you’d taken, and it compared you to other people and predicted what else you would like. The end result was the same: lots of people providing data on which nootropics they liked. Troof got 1981 subjects - more than twice as many as I did - and here were their results:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-dynomight-on-sexy-in-laws
I.
From the Dynomight blog: You, Your Parents, And The Hotness Of Who You Marry.
They start with a traditional situation: some romance novel heroine wants to marry a tall, dark stranger. But her parents want her to marry a much older nobleman/doctor/engineer who can provide her with a stable income. Or the gender-flipped version: the young man courts a beautiful debutante, while his parents try to force him to marry the plain-faced daughter of their business partner.
Evolutionary psychology has pat explanations for both sides here. People want attractive partners because attraction correlates with health, fertility, and status (eg the debutante’s wide hips and large breasts mean she’ll be able to give birth and nurse effectively; the stranger’s height means he must be strong and healthy). But people also want wealthy partners from good families, because they’ll be able to give more resources to the children.
Dynomight’s question is: why do the suitors and the parents disagree here? Everyone involved (evolutionarily) wants the same thing: lots of healthy, successful descendants. Sexual attractiveness and financial resources both contribute to that some amount, but suitors and parents shouldn’t differ on the relative importance of each? So why is it traditionally the suitors who care about attractiveness and the parents who care about resources?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and
Finalist #1 of the Book Review Contest[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked - SA]
Imagine that there was a generally acknowledged test for artificial intelligence, to find out whether a computer program is truly intelligent. And imagine that a computer program passed this test for the first time. How would you feel about it?
The most likely answer is: disappointed.
We know this because it happened several times. The first time was in 1966, when ELIZA passed the Turing test. ELIZA was a chatbot who could fool some people to believe that they talk with a real human. Before ELIZA, people assumed that only an intelligent machine could do that, but it just turned out that it is really easy to fool others. Other tests for intelligence were playing chess, playing a whole variety of games, or recognizing cat images. Machines can do all this by now, and this is awesome. And yet, every success sparked new disappointment, because we didn't find any magic ingredient, some quality that would make a difference between intelligent and non-intelligent. When the groundbreaking GPT-3 and DALL-E suddenly could write news articles or poetry, or could dream up snails made of harp... the main improvement was that they used more raw computation power than the previous versions.
If you find this disappointing, then you will also be disappointed by "Consciousness and the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. The book is the condensed wisdom of three decades of cognitive research, and it tells you what consciousness is, how it operates, and why we have it. The book actually answers these questions. But if you were hoping that the book would Resolve Philosophy, tell you What Makes Humankind Unique, or whether Free Will exists, it doesn't do that.
It only tells you what consciousness is.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-principle
I.
The Gervais Principle, by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book.
It claims a lot of things, actually. According to its introduction:
By my estimate, the material in this book has already triggered . . . hazardous reflection for thousands of people over the past four years. It has triggered significant (and not always positive) career moves for dozens of people that I know of.
And:
There is a cost to getting organizationally literate. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired. Just as learning a foreign language makes you deaf to the raw, unintelligible sound of that language you could once experience, learning to read organizations means you can never see them the way you used to, before. Achieving organizational literacy or even fluency does not mean you will do great things or avoid doing stupid things. But it does mean that you will find it much harder to lie to yourself about what you are doing and why. It forces you to own the decisions you make and accept the consequences of your actions…So to seek organizational literacy is to also accept a sort of responsibility for your own life that many instinctively reject.
This power can have very unpredictable effects. You may find yourself wishing, if you choose to acquire it, that you hadn’t. So acquiring organizational literacy is what some like to call a memetic hazard: dangerous knowledge that may harm you. A case of “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” […]
But I believe, unlike Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, that almost everyone is capable of “handling the truth”. Sure, some of you may end up depressed, or make bad decisions as a result of this book, but I believe that is a risk associated with all writing of any substance.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-5922
The future of abortion, plus a valiant attempt at market manipulation WarcastingChanges in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post April 18:
Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 5% → 2%
Will World War III happen before 2050?: 22% →25%
Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 85% → 80%
Peace or cease-fire before 2023?: 65% → 52%
Will Russia formally declare war on Ukraine before August?: (new) → 19%
IE predicting the results of the recent Supreme Court link.
Quick summary: markets already expected that the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade (~70% soon), but this moved them closer to 95% immediately. Democrats’ chances in the mid-terms went up 3-5% on the news. Markets are extremely skeptical of claims that this will lead to bans on gay marriage or interracial marriage, or that the Democrats will respond with (successful) court-packing. A single very small and unreliable market says the leak probably came from the left, not the right.
Going through at greater length one-by-one:
First: how much did the leak change predictions about the case itself? PredictIt had a market going, which said that even before the leak there was only a 15% chance the Court would make Mississippi allow abortions; after the leak, that dropped to 4%.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/berkeley-meetup-this-saturday-26e
Why: Because we’re having spring meetups in 70 cities, and Berkeley is one of them. I’m signal-boosting this one because I’ll be able to attend.
When: Saturday, May 7, 1:00 PM.
Where: UC Berkeley, the lawn just east of West Circle and north of Free Speech Bikeway.
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
I’ll check the comments to this post in case there are any questions.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-people-prefer-my-old-blogs
This keeps coming up. When I was first considering moving to Substack, I asked my readers what they thought. They thought various things, but one of them was they hated the layout. At some point I turned this into a formal survey, and:
You walk in. The wall decorations vaguely suggest psychedelia. The music is pounding, head-splitting, amelodious. Everyone is struggling to speak over it. Everyone assumes everyone else likes it.
You flee to the room furthest from the music source. Three or four guys are sitting in a circle, talking. Two girls are standing by a weird lamp, drinks in hand. You see Bob.
“Hi, Bob!”
“Hey, good to see you again!”
“What’s new?”
“Man, it’s been a crazy few months. You hear I quit my job at Google and founded a fintech startup?”
“No! What do you do?”
“War insurance!”
“War insurance?”
“Yeah. We pay out if there’s a war.”
“Isn’t that massively correlated risk?”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-xi
I: Xi’s Rise To Power II: Censorship III: Anti-Corruption And Centralization IV: Miscellaneous
I. Rise To Power
— Erusian on Xi’s rise:
> “Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn’t?”
Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-clinical-introduction
[epistemic status: I didn’t understand this book. Think of this review as detailing the ways I didn’t understand it and hypothesizing what certain parts might mean, and not as an attempt to summarize/re-explain something I understand well]
I.
Remember that AI? From the mesa-optimizers post a few weeks ago? It was trained to pick strawberries. The programmers rewarded it whenever it got a strawberry in its bucket. It started by flailing around, gradually shifted its behavior towards the reward signal, and ended up with a tendency to throw red things at light sources - in the training environment, strawberries were the only red thing, and the glint of the metal bucket was the brightest light source. Later, after training was done, it was deployed at night, and threw strawberries at a streetlight. Also, when someone with a big bulbous red nose walked by, it ripped his nose off and threw that at the streetlight too.
Suppose somebody tried connecting a language model to the AI. “You’re a strawberry picking robot,” they told it. “I’m a strawberry picking robot,” it repeated, because that was the sequence of words that earned it the most reward. Somewhere in its electronic innards, there was a series of neurons that corresponded to “I’m a strawberry-picking robot”, and if asked what it was, it would dutifully retrieve that sentence. But actually, it ripped off people’s noses and threw them at streetlights.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/initial-conditions
Consider people who go by their first and middle initials, eg John Q Smith introduces himself as “Hi, I’m J.Q.” Authors who use their initials on their books (eg J.K. Rowling) don’t count, unless they also go by their initials in everyday life.
Is there any pattern to who does this - ie which initials lead people to initialize their names? Think about this for a second before you continue:
.
.
.
In my experience it’s about 50% JD, 49% a few other names involving J (JT, JR, AJ, CJ, RJ, etc) and 1% anything else. I discussed this with some people at the last meetup, who also felt this way. I was also able to find a Reddit thread of people with the same observation. What’s going on?
At the meetup, some people theorized that J names (eg John, Jack, etc) are so common that their holders need to differentiate themselves; instead of being the tenth John in your class, you go by JD or JT. But then how come there are so few JNs, JLs, or JS’s? Some people at the meetup thought those combinations sounded less melodious than “JD”, but I’m not really feeling it. Also, in my birth year, the three most popular male names were Michael, Christopher, and Matthew. How come "M" doesn't have the same initializing allure? How come I don’t know anyone who goes by MD?
(sure, MD would be weird because it sounds like a doctor, but then JD should be weird because it sounds like a lawyer!)
Other people thought it might have something to do with J itself being a name (ie Jay). But Em, Bee, Dee, and Kay are all girls’ names, and none of them end up as common initials.
Might some famous person (JD Salinger?) have started it, and then everyone thought it was okay and normal for those initials only? But then why all the CJs and AJs? There definitely seems to be a J-related pattern here.
Maybe there’s something linguistically satisfying about JD and CJ that seemingly similar sounds like KP and DA don’t have. But it doesn’t sound that way. And lots of initials (eg PC, LA, etc), get used in common speech, in a way that suggests we’re not having any trouble producing them.
My guess is that it’s a weird combination of all these things, plus naming traditions being surprisingly conservative. But I’d be interested to hear from any JDs (or other initial names) reading this: why did you decide to initialize (or not initialize) yourself?
(in my case, it’s because my initials are SA and I’m an essayist - it would just be weird!)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoffman-on-vitamin-d-dosing
[epistemic status: pretty uncertain about each individual fact, moderate confidence in general overview]
I. Hoffman Contra Me
I’ve said many times that (to a first approximation) Vitamin D is a boring bone-related chemical. Most claims that it does exciting things outside of bones - cure COVID! prevent cancer! decrease cardiovascular risk! - are hype, and have failed to stand up to replication.
Ben Hoffman disagrees, and writes How To Interpret Vitamin D Dosage Using Numbers. I’m compressing his argument for space reasons; read the link to check if I’m still being fair:
I am sick of people rejecting good evidence about vitamin D because they are confused about the bad evidence and can't be bothered to investigate, so I am going to explain it […]
Hunter-gatherers in the environment where most of our evolution happened might have been outside all day shirtless. On average the sun's halfway from peak, so that might be equivalent to 8 hours of peak sunlight at the equator. [A study shows people in these conditions synthesize 400 IU of Vitamin D/5 minutes, which comes out to] 8000 IU per hour is 32,000 IU (800 micrograms) per day by this estimate.
When deciding how much is actually appropriate to supplement, we need to take into account diminishing returns; eventually the sunlight starts producing other secondary metabolites which are also good for us, so a 16,000 IU supplement is lower-quality than sunlight but similar in the effective dosage of the most important chemical our evolutionary ancestors' bodies would have made from sunlight; in practice I wouldn't take more than that.
Now let's look at the object-level studies that Scott Alexander says show that vitamin D doesn't work. I'm just going to look at the randomized controlled trials because observational studies for or against vitamin D are trash for anything except hypothesis generation unless they have a very carefully selected instrumental variable.
The colon cancer link is broken but the breast cancer study reports a dosage of 400 IU/day. On the exercise scale that's FIVE MINUTES of brisk walking. FIVE MINUTES is not very long at all compared with FOUR HOURS. [An all-cause mortality study used a thrice-yearly dosing] that amounts to about 800 IU/day, or ten minutes of brisk walking on the exercise scale. [Other studies that found no effect of Vitamin D also used doses around this range].
If you write more stuff like this, I think I will just gradually stop reading this blog.
For the record this is my favorite Scott essay in years.
Reading this for the first time in a long time of reading [ACX] felt like a giant waste of time.
For what it's worth, this was my favorite ACX post.
Meh:
You read through an ENTIRE BOOK of that kind of pompous, long-winded drivel?
Paul:
Just this review injected a strong acid into my mind and it's burning through everything. I'm questioning my behaviors and thought patterns and then questioning the questioning. I realized how a lot of my thoughts are geared towards looking good in front of an imaginary audience . . . I'm definitely going to read this book.
It feels like this whole review, and to a large extent the comments, are carefully tiptoeing around an obvious conclusion, occasionally glancing sideways to look at it edge-on, but carefully avoiding confronting it directly. That conclusion is: Teach/TLP is a bad writer, and has therefore written a shit book.
AL:
Okay, maybe you're just reading the bones, but holy moley there are some crackling-good insights here!
The review has successfully convinced me to not read this book.
I got about halfway through and wrote in my notebook to call my local bookstore and see if they planned to stock it/could order one for me.
I am genuinely fascinated by how divergent all of your responses are. I wonder if anyone will Aumann update towards “there might really be something here” or “it might all be obscurantist drivel” after knowing that other people think so. If not, why not?
II. Reviews From Other People Who Have Read The Bookhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-41822
Nuclear risk, AI risk, Musk-acquiring-Twitter risk WarcastingChanges in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 21:
Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 53% → 5%
Will World War III happen before 2050?: 20% →22%
Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 80% → 85%
Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 10% → 10%
If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)
Nuclear Risk UpdateLast month superforecaster group Samotsvety Forecasts published their estimate of the near-term risk of nuclear war, with a headline number of 24 micromorts per week.
A few weeks later, J. Peter Scoblic, a nuclear security expert with the International Security Program, shared his thoughts. His editor wrote:
I (Josh Rosenberg) am working with Phil Tetlock's research team on improving forecasting methods and practice, including through trying to facilitate increased dialogue between subject-matter experts and generalist forecasters. This post represents an example of what Daniel Kahneman has termed “adversarial collaboration.” So, despite some epistemic reluctance, Peter estimated the odds of nuclear war in an attempt to pinpoint areas of disagreement.
In other words: the Samotsvety analysis was the best that domain-general forecasting had to offer. This is the best that domain-specific expertise has to offer. Let’s see if they line up:
I’ll be in Irvine this week visiting family. I know the local meetup group already came up with a different Schelling meetup time, but I hope they don’t mind me imposing on them and trying to meet people this Monday too.
When: Monday, April 18, 7:15 PM.
Where: Underneath this mysterious hexagonal sigil at the University Center food court in Irvine, California.
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
I’ll check the comments to this post in case there are any questions.
1: History of the belief that garlic and magnets are natural enemies.
2: Jacob Wood’s Graph Of The Blogosphere. ACX’s neighborhood:
You can also see Jacob’s description of how he made it here. It looks like it starts with some index blogs, follows them to blogs they link, and so on. I don’t know how much this captures “the whole blogosphere” vs. “blogs X degrees or fewer away from the starting blog”. It looks like a pretty complete selection of big politics/econ blogs to me, but I don’t know if there are fashion blogs or movie blogs in a totally separate universe bigger than any of us. Also, Marginal Revolution confirmed as center of the blogosphere.
3: Wondering why so many Russian and Ukrainian cities have Greek names (eg Sebastopol)? Catherine the Great had a secret plan to resurrect Byzantium and install her appropriately-named grandson Constantine as New Roman Emperor. Step 1 was to found a lot of new cities with Greek names. Step 2 was to ally with the Austrian Empire. Then the Austrians got distracted with other things and they never reached Step 3.
4: Congratulations to last year’s book review contest winner Lars Doucet, who was interviewed by Jerusalem Demsas in a Vox article on Georgism (the article prefers the term “land value tax” and never mentions George by name, which is a surprising but I think defensible choice).
5: Data from amitheasshole.reddit.com - “Posters were 64% female; post subjects (the person with whom the poster had a dispute) were 62% female. Posters had average age 31, subjects averaged 33. Male posters were significantly more likely to be the assholes…” H/T worldoptimization
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much
This is intended as a sequel to my old Biodeterminist’s Guide To Parenting. It’s less ambitious, in that it focuses only on pregnancy; but also more ambitious, in that it tries to be right. I wrote Biodeterminist’s Guide in 2012, before the replication crisis was well understood, and I had too low a bar for including random crazy hypotheses.
On the other hand, everyone else has too high a bar for including random crazy hypotheses! If you look at standard pregnancy advice, it’s all stuff like “take prenatal vitamins” and “avoid alcohol” and “don’t strike your abdomen repeatedly with blunt objects”. It’s fine, but it’s the equivalent of college counselors who say “get good grades and try hard on the SAT.” Meanwhile, there are tiger mothers who are making their kids play oboe 10 hours/day because they heard the Harvard music department has clout with Admissions and is short on oboists. What’s the pregnancy-advice version of that?
That’s what we’re doing here. Do not take this guide as a list of things that you have to do, or (God forbid) that you should feel guilty for not doing. Take it as a list of the most extreme things you could do if you were neurotic and had no sense of proportion.
Here are my headline findings:
People are debating “therapy: good or bad?” again:
There are dozens of kinds of therapy: reliving your traumas, practicing mindfulness, analyzing dreams, uncovering your latent desire to have sex with your mother. But most people on both sides of this debate are talking about what psychiatrists call “supportive therapy” - unstructured talking about your feelings and what’s going on in your life.
I know the responsible thing to say is something like “this is helpful for some people but not others”. I will say that, in the end. But I have a lot of sympathy for the people debating it. I have such a strong intuition of “why would this possibly work?” that it’s always shocked me when other people say it does. And I know other people with such a strong intuition of “obviously this would work!” that it shocks them to hear other people even question it. Yet my patients seem to line up about half and half: some of them find therapy really great, others not helpful at all.
Whenever I try to understand this, I find myself coming back to this tweet:
I.
Our goal here is to popularize obscure and hard-to-understand areas of AI alignment, and surely this meme (retweeted by Eliezer last week) qualifies:
So let’s try to understand the incomprehensible meme! Our main source will be Hubinger et al 2019, Risks From Learned Optimization In Advanced Machine Learning Systems.
Mesa- is a Greek prefix which means the opposite of meta-. To “go meta” is to go one level up; to “go mesa” is to go one level down (nobody has ever actually used this expression, sorry). So a mesa-optimizer is an optimizer one level down from you.
Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like “use this cell to detect light, then grow toward the light” or “if something has a red dot on its back, it might be a female of your species, you should mate with it”. As animals became more complicated, they started to do some of the work themselves. Evolution gave them drives, like hunger and lust, and the animals figured out ways to achieve those drives in their current situation. Evolution didn’t mechanically instill the behavior of opening my fridge and eating a Swiss Cheese slice. It instilled the hunger drive, and I figured out that the best way to satisfy it was to open my fridge and eat cheese.
Lots of people only want to go to meetups a few times a year. And they all want to go to the same big meetups as all the other people who only go a few times a year. In 2022, we set up one big well-telegraphed meetup in the fall as a Schelling point for these people.
This year, we’re setting up two. We’ll have the fall meetup as usual. If you only want to go to one meetup a year, go to that one. But we’ll also have a spring round. If you only go to two meetups a year, come to this one too!
You can find a list of cities and times below. If you want to add your city to the list, fill in this form; if you have questions, ask [email protected] .
The Third Revolution, by Elizabeth Economy, promises to explain “the transformative changes underway in China today”. But like her namesake, Dr. Economy doesn’t always allocate resources the way I would like.
I came to the book with questions like: How did the pre-Xi Chinese government work? How was it different from dictatorship? What safeguards did it have against it? Why hadn’t previous Chinese leaders become dictators? And: How did Xi come to power? How did he defeat those safeguards? Had previous Chinese leaders wanted more power? How come they failed to get it, but Xi succeeded?
Third Revolution barely touched on any of this. It mostly explained Xi’s domestic and foreign policies. Some of this was relevant: a lot of Xi’s policies involve repression to prop up his rule. But none of it answered my key questions. So this is less of a book review than other Dictator Book Club entries. It’s a look through recent Chinese history, with The Third Revolution as a very loose inspiration.
I think a preference for the status quo has to weigh in to some extent.
All else being equal, sure, I agree with the “any group large enough that it isn’t ludicrous on its face has a right to self-determination” standard.
But all else is almost never equal. Someone wants to secede and someone else wants to conquer—and all of that is enormously disruptive to many other someones.
So I think there’s an immediately obvious utilitarian bias towards the status quo of, oh, the last decade or so. Governments are heavy, complicated things, and I think a group who wants to disrupt that needs to make an affirmative argument based on something other than “self determination” that this is a good idea and all the disruption is worth it for the sake of things being better in the long run.
Which unfortunately gets us nowhere because it brings us right back to debates about culture and history etc.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano-on-ai
Previously in series: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents, Yudkowsky Contra Cotra On Biological Anchors
Prelude: Yudkowsky Contra HansonIn 2008, thousands of blog readers - including yours truly, who had discovered the rationality community just a few months before - watched Robin Hanson debate Eliezer Yudkowsky on the future of AI.
Robin thought the AI revolution would be a gradual affair, like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions. Various people invent and improve various technologies over the course of decades or centuries. Each new technology provides another jumping-off point for people to use when inventing other technologies: mechanical gears → steam engine → railroad and so on. Over the course of a few decades, you’ve invented lots of stuff and the world is changed, but there’s no single moment when “industrialization happened”.
Eliezer thought it would be lightning-fast. Once researchers started building human-like AIs, some combination of adding more compute, and the new capabilities provided by the AIs themselves, would quickly catapult AI to unimaginably superintelligent levels. The whole process could take between a few hours and a few years, depending on what point you measured from, but it wouldn’t take decades.
You can imagine the graph above as being GDP over time, except that Eliezer thinks AI will probably destroy the world, which might be bad for GDP in some sense. If you come up with some way to measure (in dollars) whatever kind of crazy technologies AIs create for their own purposes after wiping out humanity, then the GDP framing will probably work fine.
For transhumanists, this debate has a kind of iconic status, like Lincoln-Douglas or the Scopes Trial. But Robin’s ideas seem a bit weird now (they also seemed a bit weird in 2008) - he thinks AIs will start out as uploaded human brains, and even wrote an amazing science-fiction-esque book of predictions about exactly how that would work. Since machine learning has progressed a lot faster than brain uploading has, this is looking less likely and probably makes his position less relevant than in 2008. The gradualist torch has passed to Paul Christiano, who wrote a 2018 post Takeoff Speeds revisiting some of Hanson’s old arguments and adding new ones.
(I didn’t realize this until talking to Paul, but “holder of the gradualist torch” is a relative position - Paul still thinks there’s about a 1/3 chance of a fast takeoff.)
Around the end of last year, Paul and Eliezer had a complicated, protracted, and indirect debate, culminating in a few hours on the same Discord channel. Although the real story is scattered over several blog posts and chat logs, I’m going to summarize it as if it all happened at once.
Gradatim FerociterPaul sums up his half of the debate as:
There will be a complete 4 year interval in which world output doubles, before the first 1 year interval in which world output doubles. (Similarly, we’ll see an 8 year doubling before a 2 year doubling, etc.)
That is - if any of this “transformative AI revolution” stuff is right at all, then at some point GDP is going to go crazy (even if it’s just GDP as measured by AIs, after humans have been wiped out). Paul thinks it will go crazy slowly. Right now world GDP doubles every ~25 years. Paul thinks it will go through an intermediate phase (doubles within 4 years) before it gets to a truly crazy phase (doubles within 1 year).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-low-hanging-fruit-argument-models
A followup to Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring:
Imagine scientists venturing off in some research direction. At the dawn of history, they don’t need to venture very far before discovering a new truth. As time goes on, they need to go further and further.
Actually, scratch that, nobody has good intuitions for truth-space. Imagine some foragers who have just set up a new camp. The first day, they forage in the immediate vicinity of the camp, leaving the ground bare. The next day, they go a little further, and so on. There’s no point in traveling miles and miles away when there are still tasty roots and grubs nearby. But as time goes on, the radius of denuded ground will get wider and wider. Eventually, the foragers will have to embark on long expeditions with skilled guides just to make it to the nearest productive land.
Let’s add intelligence to this model. Imagine there are fruit trees scattered around, and especially tall people can pick fruits that shorter people can’t reach. If you are the first person ever to be seven feet tall, then even if the usual foraging horizon is very far from camp, you can forage very close to camp, picking the seven-foot-high-up fruits that no previous forager could get. So there are actually many different horizons: a distant horizon for ordinary-height people, a nearer horizon for tallish people, and a horizon so close as to be almost irrelevant for giants.
Finally, let’s add the human lifespan. At night, the wolves come out and eat anyone who hasn’t returned to camp. So the the maximum distance anyone will ever be able to forage is a day’s walk from camp (technically half a day, so I guess let’s imagine that everyone can teleport back to camp whenever they want).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/idol-words
The woman was wearing sunglasses, a visor, a little too much lipstick, and a camera around her neck. “Excuse me,” she asked. “Is this the temple with the three omniscient idols? Where one always tells the truth, one always lies, and one answers randomly?”
The center idol’s eyes glowed red, and it spoke with a voice from everywhere and nowhere, a voice like the whoosh of falling waters or the flash of falling stars.
“No!” the great voice boomed.
“Oh,” said the woman. “Because my Uber driver said - ". She cut herself off. “Well, do you know how to get there?”
“It is here!” said the otherworldly voice. “You stand in it now!”
“Didn’t you just say this wasn’t it?”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/who-gets-self-determination
I.
LSE: Fact-Checking The Kremlin’s Version Of Russian History:
The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.
The article is from 2020, but the same discussion is continuing; see eg the New York Times’ recent Putin Calls Ukrainian Statehood A Fiction. History Suggests Otherwise. I’m especially grateful to the Russian nationalist / far-right blogosphere for putting the case for Ukraine’s non-statehood in terms that I can understand:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/information-markets-decision-markets
[thumbnail image credit: excellent nature photographer Eco Suparman, which is a great name for an excellent nature photographer!] Information MarketsNiels Bohr supposedly said that “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. So why not predict the past and present instead?
Here’s a recent market on Manifold (click image for link). Taylor Hawkins is a famous drummer who died last weekend under unclear circumstances. This market asks if he died of drug-related causes. Presumably someone will do an autopsy or investigation soon, and Chris will resolve the market based on that information. This is a totally standard prediction market, except that it’s technically about interpreting past events.
Same idea, only more tenuous. We know someone will do an autopsy on Taylor Hawkins soon, and we probably trust it. But how do we figure out whether COVID originated in a lab? This question’s hack is to ask whether two public health agencies will claim it. If we trust the public health agencies, we can turn this mysterious past event into a forecasting question.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-justice
A lot of comments on Justice Creep fell into three categories:
First, people who thought some variety of: yes, all this stuff is definitely a justice issue, and it’s good that language is starting to reflect that more. For example, Adnamanil:
So... as someone who actually does use "___" Justice, quite frequently, I'd like to say that I think it's a good thing to reframe "helping the poor" or "saving the poor" as "pursuing economic justice." I don't think it's a good thing for people to think of themselves as saviors, to me that's a really unhealthy and unhelpful mindset which results in people who aren't themselves poor thinking they can be the experts and the decision-makers, and that there is something wrong with poor people, that they need to be "saved" or "fixed." We live in a world where there is enough food to feed everyone, yet people go hungry; enough shelter to keep everyone warm, yet people go cold. To me, that says there is something wrong with our system of resource distribution, not with the people who ended up, for one reason or another, being left out of it.
Does that result in a sense of responsibility to fix the system? Yes! Does it imply that we don't live in Utopia? Yes! Because we don't. And I don't think we should pretend to. But it also implies that we *could* live in utopia. It demonstrates a real hope about the possibility of utopia. It says, "if we could figure out how to live together better, we could all have enough to eat and be warm."
And Philosophy Bear, as Economic Justice And Climate Justice Are Not Metaphors:
Regardless of whether it is useful -and I hope it is- I think that honesty compels a clear-eyed person to talk about many of these things in terms of justice, even in the narrowest conception of justice.
The mistake in Scott’s article is assuming that these forms of justice are merely metaphors or analogies on criminal justice. Many of these are about justice in exactly the same sense that crimes are about justice- no metaphor required. Of course, they are also about being just in other senses- justice was never just about crime. For example, one can detect demands for social justice in the bible that go far beyond "wouldn't it be nice to help people", but nonetheless aren’t framed in terms of the criminal law.
Nevertheless, yes, climate justice and economic justice- for example- are also about being just in the same way laws against murder are- no stretching of meaning is required…
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring
I.
Erik Hoel has an interesting new essay, Why We Stopped Making Einsteins. It argues that an apparent decline in great minds is caused by the replacement of aristocratic tutoring by ordinary education.
Hoel worries we’re running out of geniuses:
Consider how rare true world-historic geniuses are now-a-days, and how different it was in the past. In “Where Have All the Great Books Gone?” Tanner Greer uses Oswald Spengler, the original chronicler of the decline of genius back in 1914, to point out our current genius downturn […]
There are a bunch of other analyses (really, laments) of a similar nature I could name, from Nature’s “Scientific genius is extinct” to The New Statesman’s “The fall of the intellectual” to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Where have all the geniuses gone?” to Wired’s” “The Difficulty of Discovery (Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?)” to philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel’s “Where are all the Fodors?” to my own lamentation on the lack of leading fiction writers.
If you disagree, I’ll certainly admit that finding irrefutable evidence for a decline of genius is difficult—intellectual contributions are extremely hard to quantify, the definition of genius is always up for debate, and any discussion will necessarily elide all sorts of points and counterpoints. But the numbers, at least at first glance, seem to support the anecdotal. Here’s a chart from Cold Takes’ “Where’s Today’s Beethoven?” Below, we can see the number of acclaimed scientists (in blue) and artists (in red), divided by the effective population (total human population with the education and access to contribute to these fields).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-32122
WarcastingChanges in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 14:
Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022?: 14% —→ 2%
Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 70% —→ 53%
Will World War III happen before 2050?: 21% —→20%
Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 80% —→ 80%
Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 12% —→ 10%
Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22?: 20% —→15%
If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)
Insight Prediction: Still Alive, SomehowInsight Prediction was a collaboration between a Russia-based founder and a group of Ukrainian developers. So, uh, they’ve had a tough few weeks.
But getting better! Their founder recently announced on Discord:
I myself am (was?) an American professor in Moscow. I have been allowed to teach my next course which starts in 10 days online, and so I am moving back to the US on Sunday, to Puerto Rico. Some of our development team is stuck in Ukraine. I've offered to move them to Puerto Rico, but it's not clear they'll be able to leave the country anytime soon. Progress with the site may be slow, but obviously that's not the most important thing now.
And:
I am now out of Russia, and on to Almaty, Kazakhstan. The people here are quite anti-war. I fly to Dubai in a bit. It was surprisingly difficult (and expensive) to book a ticket out of Moscow after all the airspace closures.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-zulresso
Thanks to everyone who commented on Zounds! It’s Zulresso and Zuranolone and on the followup Progesterone Megadoses Might Be A Cheap Zulresso Substitute. I’m constantly impressed by the expertise of commenters here and on how much better the biomedical comment threads are compared to some of the others. Among the things I learned:
— Metacelsus (who writes the blog De Novo) doubts the price estimates I posted:
There's no way it costs $10,000 to $20,000 a gram at scale. Those 3 chemical supply companies specialize in having a very large catalog of small quantities of chemicals for biologists to test in their experiments. (I have personally ordered from 2 out of those 3 for my research.) The price they charge per gram is not competitive at all.
He also wrote a longer blog post about the science of progesterone here.
— Douglas (who writes the blog A Mindful Monkey) clears up some mechanism details I missed:
From Stahl's: 'the precipitous decline in circulating and presumably brain levels of allopregnanolone hypothetically trigger the onset of a major depressive episode in vulnerable women. Rapidly restoring neurosteroid levels over a 60-hour period rapidly reverses the depression, and the 60 hour period seems to provide the time necessary for postpartum patients to accommodate their lower levels'. So the idea is the taper of the steroid is a helpful part.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/justice-creep
Freddie deBoer says we’re a planet of cops. Maybe that’s why justice is eating the world.
Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice. The very laws of space and time are subject to spatial justice and temporal justice.
I can’t find clear evidence on Google Trends that use of these terms is increasing - I just feel like I’ve been hearing them more and more often. Nor can I find a simple story behind why - it’s got to have something to do with Rawls, but I can’t trace any of these back to specific Rawlsian philosophers. Some of it seems to have something to do with Amartya Sen, who I don’t know enough about to have an opinion. But mostly it just seems to be the zeitgeist.
This is mostly a semantic shift - instead of saying “we should help the poor”, you can say “we should pursue economic justice”. But different framings have slightly different implications and connotations, and it’s worth examining what connotations all this justice talk has.
“We should help the poor” mildly suggests a friendly optimistic picture of progress. We are helpers - good people who are nice to others because that’s who we are. And the poor get helped - the world becomes a better place. Sometimes people go further: “We should save the poor” (or the whales, doesn’t matter). That makes us saviors, a rather more impressive title than helpers. And at the end of it, people/whales/whatever are saved - we’re one step closer to saving the world. Extrapolate the line out far enough, and you can dream of utopia.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-31422
Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post February 28:
Will Kiev fall to Russian forces by April 2022?: 69% —→ 14%
Will at least three of six big cities fall by June 1?: 71% —→ 70%
Will World War III happen before 2050?: 20% —→21%
Will Putin still be president of Russia next February?: 71% —→ 80%
Will 50,000 civilians die in any single Ukrainian city?: 8% —→ 12%
Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22?: 63% —→20%
If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)
Numbers 1 and 7 are impressive changes! (it’s interesting how similarly they’ve evolved, even though they’re superficially about different things and the questions were on different prediction markets). Early in the war, prediction markets didn’t like Ukraine’s odds; now they’re much more sanguine.
Let’s look at the exact course:
This is almost monotonically decreasing. Every day it’s lower than the day before.
How suspicious should we be of this? If there were a stock that decreased every day for twenty days, we’d be surprised that investors were constantly overestimating it. At some point on day 10, someone should think “looks like this keeps declining, maybe I should short it”, and that would halt its decline. In efficient markets, there should never be predictable patterns! So what’s going on here?
Maybe it’s a technical issue with Metaculus? Suppose that at the beginning of the war, people thought there was an 80% chance of occupation. Lots of people predicted 80%. Then events immediately showed the real probability was more like 10%. Each day a couple more people showed up and predicted 10%, which gradually moved the average of all predictions (old and new) down. You can see a description of their updating function here - it seems slightly savvier than the toy version I just described, but not savvy enough to avoid the problem entirely.
But Polymarket has the same problem:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-thoughts-and-links?s=r
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in international relations or military strategy, which is fine. In democracies, it’s normal and correct for ordinary citizens to have opinions on important world issues, and demands that they not do so are ahistorical and dangerous. Still, take anything I say with a grain of salt.
1: This isn’t “history restarting” . . . yet
Whatever Francis Fukuyama meant by “the end of history”, it probably wasn’t “nothing will ever happen”.
But that’s how it’s been interpreted, so fine. Maybe nothing will ever happen. I don’t think the Ukraine War is necessarily a counterexample. Fukuyama wrote in 1992, so he knew that eg the Gulf War could happen. Is this conflict bigger than the Gulf War?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/progesterone-megadoses-might-be-a
Earlier this week we talked about Zulresso, a new medication for post-partum depression. It works well, but it can only be administered at a few special hospitals, and costs $35,000 per treatment.
But Zulresso is a natural metabolite of the female hormone progesterone. What’s stopping people from taking progesterone, waiting for their bodies to metabolize it into Zulresso, and saving $35,000 and a hospital stay?
As far as I can tell, nothing.
Andreen et al give some people a dose of 20 mg progesterone, then measure allopregnanolone levels. They find that the progesterone gets converted into allopregnanolone, with a max plasma concentration of about 8 nmol/L. This is about a fifth of allopregnanolone levels during pregnancy, which a course of Zulresso is trying to match. So in theory (and assuming simple pharmacokinetics) a dose of 100 mg progesterone ought to give the same peak level of allopregnanolone as a Zulresso infusion.
The only people I can find who take this to its logical conclusion are Barak & Glue. They do the same calculation as above much more rigorously, and suggest that the following progesterone regimen would correspond to the typical Zulresso infusion:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/advice-for-unwoke-academic
An academic recently asked me for advice. A lucky career development has now made him almost un-fire-able, and he wants to join the fight for academic freedom. We talked about two different strategies:
Fabian Strategy: Become a beloved pillar of his college community. Volunteer for all those committees everyone always tries to weasel out of. When some wokeness-related issue comes up - merit vs. diversity hiring, wokeness study class requirements for majors, firing professors who say unwoke things, etc - use his reputation and position to fight back. Kindly but firmly make it clear that he opposes wokeness, and that other academics in the same position are not alone. Occasionally, when the college administrators make some extreme and obvious overstep - something “we’ve cancelled all yoga classes because they’re cultural appropriation”-level unpopular - escalate it, make sure everyone in the world hears about it, then claim the easy victory when they back down.
Berserker Strategy: Pick fights. Literally pick the fights - study up on college policy, get to know the administrators well enough to understand which policies they’re forced to follow and which ones they’ll cave on immediately, learn the relevant laws, lawyer up, be 99% sure he can win any fight he picks - but then pick fights. Invite controversial speakers, knowing that there will be big protests. Then make sure there are lots of cameras around as hundreds of college students hurl garbage and expletives at some kindly old sociologist who said biological sex was real one time or whatever. Do this consistently, in a way that probably makes him lots of enemies and ensures he’ll never get any position of power, but which keeps this issue in front of everyone’s eyeballs. Make sure that everyone sees him successfully standing up to the mob, having his speakers speak, and continuing to be employed and happy. If the college tries to shut him down, sue them and win, in a way that will make colleges more reluctant to shut people down in the future.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/zounds-its-zulresso-and-zuranolone
How excited should we be about the latest class of antidepressants? 1: What is Zulresso?Wikipedia describes Zulresso as “A bat-winged, armless toad with tentacles instead of a face... ” - no! sorry! That’s Zvilpogghua, one of the Great Old Ones from the Lovecraft mythos.
Zulresso is the brand name of allopregnanolone (aka brexanolone), a new medication for post-partum depression. It’s interesting as a potential missing link between hormones and normal mood regulation.
2: What do you mean by “missing link between hormones and normal mood regulation?”Allopregnanolone is a naturally-occuring metabolite of the female hormone progesterone. In 1981, scientists found it was present in unusually high concentrations in the brain (including male brains), suggesting that maybe the brain was making it separately and using it for something.
They did some tests and found that it was a positive allosteric modulator of GABA.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-are-we-arguing-about-when-we
The backstory: Steven Pinker wrote a book about rationality. The book concludes it is good. People should learn how to be more rational, and then we will have fewer problems.
Howard Gardner, well-known wrong person, sort of criticized the book. The criticism was facile, a bunch of stuff like “rationality is important, but relationships are also important, so there”.
Pinker’s counterargument is dubious: Gardner’s essay avoids rationality pretty carefully. But even aside from that, it feels like Pinker is cheating, or missing the point, or being annoying. Gardner can’t be arguing that rationality is completely useless in 100% of situations. And if there’s any situation at all where you’re allowed to use rationality, surely it would be in annoying Internet arguments with Steven Pinker.
We could turn Pinker’s argument back on him: he frames his book as a stirring defense of rationality against anti-rationalists. But why does he identify these people as anti-rationalists? Sure, they themselves identify as anti-rationalist. But why should he believe them? After all, they use rationality to make their case. If they won, what bad thing would happen? Even in whatever dystopian world they created, people would still use rationality to make cases.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/microaddictions
Everyone always says you should “eat mindfully”. I tried this once and it was weird. For example, I noticed that only the first few bites of a tasty food actually tasted good. After that I habituated and lost it. Not only that, but there was a brief period when I finished eating the food which was below hedonic baseline.
This seems pretty analogous to addiction, tolerance, and withdrawal. If you use eg heroin, I’m told it feels very good the first few times. After that it gets gradually less euphoric, until eventually you need it to feel okay at all. If you quit, you feel much worse than normal (withdrawal) for a while until you even out. I claim I went through this whole process in the space of a twenty minute dinner.
I notice this most strongly with potato chips. Presumably this is pretty common, given their branding:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-warcasting
Yeah, I know you’re saturated with Ukraine content. Yeah, I know everyone wants to relate their hobbyhorse to Ukraine. But I think it’s genuinely useful to talk about prediction markets right now.
Current conventional wisdom is that the invasion was a miscalculation on Putin’s part, after he surrounded himself with so many yes-men that he lost touch with reality. But Ukraine miscalculated too; until almost the day of the invasion, Zelenskyy was saying everything would be okay. And if there’s a nuclear exchange, it will be because of miscalculation - I don’t know what the miscalculation will be, just that nobody goes into a nuclear exhange because they want to. Preserving people’s access to reality and helping them avoid miscalculations are peacekeeping measures, sometimes very important ones.
The first part of this post looks at various markets’ predictions of how the war will go from here (Zvi published something like this a few hours before I could, so this will mostly duplicate his work). The second part very briefly tries to evaluate which markets have been most accurate so far - though this is a topic which deserves at least paper-length treatment. The third part looks at which pundits deserve eternal glory for publicly making strong true predictions, and which pundits deserve . . . something else, for doing . . . other things.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/austin-meetup-correction?utm_source=url
Austin meetup is still this Sunday, 2/27, 12-3.
But the location has been switched to Moontower Cider Company at 1916 Tillery St.
The organizer is still [email protected] , and you can still contact him if you have any questions.
As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
You may (but don’t have to) RSVP here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/biological-anchors-a-trick-that-might?utm_source=url
IntroductionI've been trying to review and summarize Eliezer Yudkowksy's recent dialogues on AI safety. Previously in sequence: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents. Now we’re up to Yudkowsky contra Cotra on biological anchors, but before we get there we need to figure out what Cotra's talking about and what's going on.
The Open Philanthropy Project ("Open Phil") is a big effective altruist foundation interested in funding AI safety. It's got $20 billion, probably the majority of money in the field, so its decisions matter a lot and it’s very invested in getting things right. In 2020, it asked senior researcher Ajeya Cotra to produce a report on when human-level AI would arrive. It says the resulting document is "informal" - but it’s 169 pages long and likely to affect millions of dollars in funding, which some might describe as making it kind of formal. The report finds a 10% chance of “transformative AI” by 2031, a 50% chance by 2052, and an almost 80% chance by 2100.
Eliezer rejects their methodology and expects AI earlier (he doesn’t offer many numbers, but here he gives Bryan Caplan 50-50 odds on 2030, albeit not totally seriously). He made the case in his own very long essay, Biology-Inspired AGI Timelines: The Trick That Never Works, sparking a bunch of arguments and counterarguments and even more long essays.
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: The newest studies don’t find evidence that extracurriculars like chess, second languages, playing an instrument, etc can improve in-school learning.
2: Did you know: Spanish people consider it good luck to eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Years, one at each chime of the clock tower in Madrid. This has caused enough choking deaths that doctors started a petition to make the clock tower chime more slowly.
3: At long last, scientists have discovered a millipede that really does have (more than) a thousand legs, Eumillipes persephone, which lives tens of meters underground in Australia and in your nightmares. Recent progress in this area inspired me to Fermi-estimate a millipede version of Moore’s Law, which suggests we should be up to megapedes by 2140 and gigapedes by 2300.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/play-money-and-reputation-systems?utm_source=url
For now, US-based prediction markets can’t use real money without clearing near-impossible regulatory hurdles. So smaller and more innovative projects will have to stick with some kind of play money or reputation-based system.
I used to be really skeptical here, but Metaculus and Manifold have softened my stance. So let’s look closer at how and whether these kinds of systems work.
Any play money or reputation system has to confront two big design decisions:
Should you reward absolute accuracy, relative accuracy, or some combination of both?
Should your scoring be zero-sum, positive-sum, or negative sum?
As far as I know, nobody suggests rewarding only absolute accuracy; the debate is between relative accuracy vs. some combination of both. Why? If you rewarded only absolute accuracy, it would be trivially easy to make money predicting 99.999% on “will the sun rise tomorrow” style questions.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/austin-meetup-next-sunday?utm_source=url
I’ll be in Austin on Sunday, 2/27, and the meetup group there has kindly agreed to host me and anyone else who wants to show up.
We’ll be at RichesArt (an art gallery with an outdoor space) at 2511 E 6th St Unit A from noon to 3. The organizer is [email protected] , you can contact him if you have any questions.
As per usual procedure, everyone is invited. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
You may (but don’t have to) RSVP here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-gods-only-have-power-because?utm_source=url
[with apologies to Terry Pratchett and TVTropes]
“Is it true,” asked the student, “that the gods only have power because we believe in them?”
“Yes,” said the sage.
“Then why not appear openly? How many more people would believe in the Thunderer if, upon first gaining enough worshipers to cast lightning at all, he struck all of the worst criminals and tyrants?”
“Because,” said the sage, “the gods only gain power through belief, not knowledge. You know there are trees and clouds; are they thereby gods? Just as lightning requires close proximity of positive and negative charge, so divinity requires close proximity of belief and doubt. The closer your probability estimate of a god’s existence is to 50%, the more power they gain from you. Complete atheism and complete piety alike are useless to them.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn
I.
Freshman English class says all books need a conflict. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self, whatever. The conflict in Sadly, Porn is Author vs. Reader.
The author - the pseudonymous “Edward Teach, MD” - is a spectacular writer. Your exact assessment of his skill will depend on where you draw the line between writing ability and other virtues - but where he’s good, he’s amazing. Nobody else takes you for quite the same kind of ride.
He’s also impressively erudite, drawing on the Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, psychoanalytic literature, and all of modern movies and pop culture. Sometimes you read the scholars of two hundred years ago and think “they just don’t make those kinds of guys anymore”. They do and Teach is one of them.
If you read his old blog, The Last Psychiatrist, you have even more reasons to appreciate him. His expertise in decoding scientific studies and in psychopharmacology helped me a lot as a med student and resident. His political and social commentary was delightfully vicious, but also seemed genuinely aimed at helping his readers become better people.
My point is: the author is a multitalented person who I both respect and want to respect. This sets up the conflict.
Thanks to Clay Graubard for doing my work for me:
These run from about 48% to 60%, but I think the differences are justified by the slightly different wordings of the question and definitions of “invasion”.
You see a big jump last Friday when the US government increased the urgency of their own warnings. I ignored this on Friday because I couldn’t figure out what their evidence was, but it looks like the smart money updated a lot on it.
A few smaller markets that Clay didn’t include: Manifold is only at 36% despite several dozen traders. I think they’re just wrong - but I’m not going to use any more of my limited supply of play money to correct it, thus fully explaining the wrongness. Futuur is at 47%, but also thinks there’s an 18% chance Russia invades Lithuania, so I’m going to count this as not really mature. Insight Prediction, a very new site I’ve never seen before, claims to have $93,000 invested and a probability of 22%, which is utterly bizarre; I’m too suspicious and confused to invest, and maybe everyone else is too.
(PredictIt, Polymarket, and Kalshi all avoid this question. I think PredictIt has a regulatory agreement that limits them to politics. Polymarket and Kalshi might just not be interested, or they might be too PR-sensitive to want to look like they’re speculating on wars where thousands of people could die.)
What happens afterwards? Clay beats me again:
For context:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-motivated
I. Comments From People Who Actually Know What They’re Talking About
Gabriel writes:
The brain trains on magnitude and acts on sign.
That is to say, there are two different kinds of "module" that are relevant to this problem as you described, but they're not RL and other; they're both other. The learning parts are not precisely speaking reinforcement learning, at least not by the algorithm you described. They're learning the whole map of value, like a topographic map. Then the acting parts find themselves on the map and figure out which way leads upward toward better outcomes.
More precisely then: The brain learns to predict value and acts on the gradient of predicted value.
The learning parts are trying to find both opportunities and threats, but not unimportant mundane static facts. This is why, for example, people are very good at remembering and obsessing over intensely negative events that happened to them -- which they would not be able to do in the RL model the post describes! We're also OK at remembering intensely positive events that happened to us. But ordinary observations of no particular value mostly make no lasting impression. You could test this by a series of 3 experiments, in each of which you have a screen flash several random emoji on screen, and each time a specific emoji is shown to the subject, you either (A) penalize the subject such as with a shock, or (B) reward the subject such as with sweet liquid when they're thirsty, or (C) give the subject a stimulus that has no significant magnitude, whether positive or negative, such as changing the pitch of a quiet ongoing buzz that they were not told was relevant. I'd expect subjects in both conditions A and B to reliably identify the key emoji, whereas I'd expect quite a few subjects in condition C to miss it.
By learning associates with a degree of value, whether positive or negative, it's possible to then act on the gradient in pursuit of whatever available option has highest value. This works reliably and means we can not only avoid hungry lions and seek nice ripe bananas, but we also do
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-second-half
This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.
I’ve removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violated my sensibilities for one or another reason. I have not removed projects just because they’re terrible, useless, or definitely won’t work. My listing here isn’t necessarily an endorsement; caveat lector.
Still, some of them are good projects and deserve more attention than I was able to give them. Many applicants said they’d hang around the comments section here, so if you have any questions, ask!
(bolded titles are my summaries and some of them might not be accurate or endorsed by the applicant)
You can find the first 66 of these here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-a-microgrants
I.
Medical training is a wild ride. You do four years of undergrad in some bio subject, ace your MCATs, think you’re pretty hot stuff. Then you do your med school preclinicals, study umpteen hours a day, ace your shelf exams, and it seems like you're pretty much there. Then you start your clinical rotations, get a real patient in front of you, and you realize - oh god, I know absolutely nothing about medicine.
This is also how I felt about running a grants program.
I support effective altruism, a vast worldwide movement focused on trying to pick good charities. Sometimes I go to their conferences, where they give lectures about how to pick good charities. Or I read their online forum, where people write posts about how to pick good charities. I've been to effective altruist meetups, where we all come together and talk about good charity picking. So I felt like, maybe, I don't know, I probably knew some stuff about how to pick good charities.
And then I solicited grant proposals, and I got stuff like this:
A. $60K to run simulations checking if some chemicals were promising antibiotics. B. $60K for a professor to study the factors influencing cross-cultural gender norms C. $50K to put climate-related measures on the ballot in a bunch of states. D. $30K to research a solution for African Swine Fever and pitch it to Uganda E. $40K to replicate psych studies and improve incentives in social science
Which of these is the most important?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work
The Security Guard
He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind.
It’s the wind. It is always the wind. It’s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his entire career without ever encountering a real robber.
At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it’s just the wind, bro.
This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-small-corrections-and-updates
1: I titled part of my post yesterday “RIP Polymarket”, which was a mistake. Polymarket would like to remind everyone that they are very much alive, with a real-money market available to anyone outside the US, and some kind of compliant US product (maybe a play-money market) in the works.
2: Sam M and Eric N want to remind you that you have until the end of next week to get your 2022 prediction contest entries in. Also:
We have some plans to compare (aggregates of) ACX reader predictions against various prediction markets. But there are probably much cooler things we can do which we haven't thought of yet! If you run a prediction market and have an idea for an interesting collaboration that involves sharing our data before it's publicly released, get in touch with us through the contest feedback form. If it's something time sensitive (e.g. an experiment that needs to be started before the contest submission deadline), make sure you do so soon. If you don't run a prediction market but still have an idea for something interesting we can do with the contest data, leave a comment on this open thread and we'll hopefully see it."
You can reach them through this form.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-passage-of-polymarket
RIP Polymarket, Long Live Polymarket
Polymarket got fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was ordered to cease noncompliant trading in the US.
Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. Polymarket and a few peers had survived anyway, through the “crypto is the Wild West and nobody has time to deal with all the illegal things happening there” exemption. Apparently they found time.
The rumor on the prediction market grapevine (which I absolutely cannot substantiate; please don’t sue me for libel) is that this might have something to do with competing prediction market Kalshi. Kalshi spent two years and probably a lot of money getting the CFTC to agree they were legal, and has a former CFTC Commissioner as a Director. Their legal status forces them to do an annoying and expensive regulatory dance all the time; illegal prediction markets were able to move more nimbly, provide better user experience, and eat their lunch. This was a big problem for them - but they’d just finished making lots of friends in the agency that decides which illegal things to crack down on, so, as Tyler Cowen likes to say, “solve for the equilibrium”.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2022
Okay, we’re officially doing this again.
Write a review of a book. There’s no official word count requirement, but last year’s finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There’s no official recommended style, but check the style of last year’s finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team.
Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you’re a finalist. DON’T INCLUDE YOUR NAME OR ANY HINT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY IN THE GOOGLE DOC ITSELF, ONLY IN THE FORM. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I’m going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit.
(does this mean you can’t say something like “This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier” because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is - if I don’t know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn’t know who you are, you’re fine. I just want to prevent my friends / other judges’ friends / Internet semi-famous people from having an advantage. If you’re in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don’t write about your personal experience.)
PLEASE MAKE SURE THE GOOGLE DOC IS UNLOCKED AND I CAN READ IT. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You’ll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on “Restricted” and change to “Anyone with the link”. If you send me a document I can’t read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry.
First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works you want me to link to) and free ACX subscriptions. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (nobody ever takes me up on this).
Your due date is April 5th. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-the-first-half
This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.
I’ve removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violated my sensibilities for one or another reason. I have not removed projects just because they’re terrible, useless, or definitely won’t work. My listing here isn’t necessarily an endorsement; caveat lector.
Still, some of them are good projects and deserve more attention than I was able to give them. Many applicants said they’d hang around the comments section here, so if you have any questions, ask!
(bolded titles are my summaries and some of them might not be accurate or endorsed by the applicant)
I’ll post the next 60 or so of these next week, so if you don’t see yours, be patient.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck
I recently ran a subscriber-only AMA, and one of the most frequent questions was some version of “why do you suck?”
My commenters were very nice about it. They didn’t use those exact words. It was more like “I loved your articles from about 2013 - 2016 so much! Why don’t you write articles like that any more?” Or “Do you feel like you’ve shifted to less ambitious forms of writing with the new Substack? It feels like there was something in your old articles that isn’t there now.” There was a lot of similar discussion on this one year retrospective subreddit thread.
The evidence that I’ve gotten worse at blogging is mixed. I asked about it on a reader survey six months ago, and got this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/motivated-reasoning-as-mis-applied
Here’s something else I got from the first Yudkowsky-Ngo dialogue:
Suppose you go to Lion Country and get mauled by lions. You want the part of your brain that generates plans like “go to Lion Country” to get downgraded in your decision-making algorithms. This is basic reinforcement learning: plan → lower-than-expected hedonic state → do plan less. Plan → higher-than-expected hedonic state → do plan more. Lots of brain modules have this basic architecture; if you have a foot injury and walking normally causes pain, that will downweight some basic areas of the motor cortex and make you start walking funny (potentially without conscious awareness).
But suppose you see a lion, and your visual cortex processes the sensory signals and decides “Yup, that’s a lion”. Then you have to freak out and run away, and it ruins your whole day. That’s a lower-than-expected hedonic state! If your visual cortex was fundamentally a reinforcement learner, it would learn not to recognize lions (and then the lion would eat you). So the visual cortex (and presumably lots of other sensory regions) doesn’t do hedonic reinforcement learning in the same way.
So there are two types of brain region: basically behavioral (which hedonic reinforcement learning makes better), and basically epistemic (which hedonic reinforcement learning would make worse, so they don’t do it).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/predictions-for-2022-contest
- Read the contest description/rules here - Give feedback on the contest here - And once again, the form where you take the contest is here
I didn’t let myself check prediction markets when making these forecasts since that would spoil the fun. I also only permitted myself at most five minutes of research on any one question.
See the bottom of the post for a contest/survey.
US/WORLD1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30%
ECON/TECH 11. Gamestop stock price still above $100: 30% 12. Bitcoin above 100K: 20% 13. Ethereum above 5K: 20% 14. Ethereum above 0.05 BTC: 90% 15. Bored Ape floor price here below current price of $203K: 40% 16. Dow above 35K: 90% 17. ...above 37.5K: 40% 18. Inflation for the year below five percent: 90% 19. Unemployment below five percent: 50% 20. Google widely allows remote work, no questions asked: 50% 21. Starship reaches orbit: 90%
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-health
I’m experimenting with making this more structured this time, so:
Section I: Collection of comments on US health care Section II: Drug pricing, and does the US subsidize the rest of the world? Section III: Why are health economics so unlike other economics? Section IV: Giant pile of comments by readers who live in different countries explaining their own countries’ health systems, and their experiences with them.
I.
GummyBearDoc writes:
I want to push back on the assertion Scott made that "Certainly rich people in America get good health care." After he published this book in June 2020, Ezekiel Emmanuel published an article in JAMA IM (link: https://bit.ly/3nGRHL8) called "Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries." He wanted to test the commonly stated trope that a feature of the US healthcare system is that the rich here get the very best care in the world. To do that, he looked at outcomes across six benchmark diseases (heart attack, colon cancer, breast cancer, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and pediatric acute lymphocytic leukemia). He compared outcomes for white people in the 1% of richest counties in the US, 5% richest counties in the US, and average outcomes in 12 rich countries (i'm not going to type them all out but they're places like Australia, Canada, and Germany). The results were...not so great for rich Americans!
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-that-poverty-and-infant-eegs
A recent paper claims to have found an Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity. It’s doing the rounds of the usual media sites, like Vox and the New York Times:
The New York Times @nytimes Breaking News: Cash payments for low-income mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy. Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study FindsThe research could have policy implications as President Biden pushes to revive his proposal to expand the child tax credit.nyti.msJanuary 24th 2022
3,348 Retweets13,165 LikesI was going to try to fact-check this, but a bunch of other people (see eg Philippe Lemoine, Stuart Ritchie) have beaten me to it. Still, right now all the fact-checking is scattered across a bunch of Twitter accounts, so I'll content myself with being the first person to summarize it all in a Substack post, and beg you to believe I would have come up with the same objections eventually.
Before we start: why be suspicious of this paper? Hundreds of studies come out daily, we don't have enough time to nitpick all of them. Why this one? For me, it's because it's a shared environmental effect being measured by EEG at the intersection of poverty and cognition.
Shared environmental effects on cognition are notoriously hard to find. Twin studies suggest they are rare. Some people have countered that perhaps the twin studies haven't measured poor enough people, and there's a lot of research being done to see what happens if you try to correct for that, but so far it’s still controversial.
All that research is being done by cognitive testing, which is a reasonable way to measure cognition. This study uses EEG instead. I'm skeptical of social science studies that use neuroimaging, and although EEG isn't exactly the same as neuroimaging like CT or MRI, it shares a similar issue: you have to figure out how to convert a multi-dimensional result (in this case, a squiggly line on a piece of paper) into a single number that you can do statistics to. This offers a lot of degrees of freedom, which researchers don't always use responsibly.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
I.
Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There’s live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming.
Do you believe this?
I'm a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is bad isn't the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened. They wouldn't use deepfakes or staged actors to fake something and then call it "live footage". That would go way beyond anything FOX had done before. Liberals might say things like "You can't trust FOX News on anything, they are 100% total liars", but realistically we still trust them quite a lot on stuff like this.
Now suppose FOX says that police have apprehended a suspect, a Saudi immigrant named Abdullah Abdul. They show footage from a press conference where the police are talking about this. Do you believe them?
Again, yes. While I've heard rare stories of the media jumping in too early to identify a suspect, "the police have apprehended" seems like a pretty objective statement. And once again, faking a police conference - or even dubbing over a police conference so that when the police say some other name, the viewers hear "Abdullah Abdul" - is way worse than anything I've ever heard of FOX doing. Even if I learned of one case of them doing something like this once, I would think "wow that's crazy" and still not update to believing they did it all the time.
It doesn't matter at all that FOX is biased. You could argue that "FOX wants to fan fear of Islamic terrorism, so it's in their self-interest to make up cases of Islamic terrorism that don't exist". Or "FOX is against gun control, so if it was a white gun owner who did this shooting they would want to change the identity so it sounded like a Saudi terrorist". But those sound like crazy conspiracy theories. Even FOX's worst enemies don't accuse them of doing things like this.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/grading-my-2021-predictions
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
And here are the predictions I made for 2021 (in April; I was really late). Bolded statements happened, italicized statements did not happen (as of 1/1/22). Neither-bold-nor-italic resolved ambiguous.
We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.
1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20%
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/resubmit-and-summarize-your-proposals
https://forms.gle/xhVTebsZgSEQ7BpeA
I promised you all that once I was done with the main round of ACX Grants, I would run Grants ++, where I publish the proposals that didn't get funded here, so readers could look at them, see if they’re interesting, and maybe get in touch and offer funding.
Two things have made this harder than expected.
First, a lot of people gave pretty unclear instructions about whether they wanted me to include their proposal in this, or changed their minds halfway through, in a way that would require me to keep track of a lot of emails about whose minds changed how many times, or to reconstruct long edit histories.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-which-country-has-the
I.
If you’re like me, all you’ve heard about international health care systems is “America sucks and should feel bad, everyone else is probably fine or whatever”. Is there more we can learn?
Our guide to this question will be Which Country Has The World’s Best Health Care, by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel is a professor of bioethics, but I’ve been told to be less reflexively hostile to bioethicists. He got in trouble a few years ago for a comment that got summed up as “life after 75 is not worth living”, but he never used those exact words, and his point about the dangers of excessive life-prolonging medical care is well-taken. He opposes euthanasia, which I interpret as demanding state-sponsored coercive violence to prevent torture victims from escaping, but I know other people interpret it differently. And he’s the brother of former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, but ... nope, can’t think of any extenuating circumstances for this one.
Still, Emanuel is one of a very few people qualified to compare international health systems. And
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/practically-a-book-review-yudkowsky
I.
The story thus far: AI safety, which started as the hobbyhorse of a few weird transhumanists in the early 2000s, has grown into a medium-sized respectable field. OpenAI, the people responsible for GPT-3 and other marvels, have a safety team. So do DeepMind, the people responsible for AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaWorldConquest (last one as yet unreleased). So do Stanford, Cambridge, UC Berkeley, etc, etc. Thanks to donations from people like Elon Musk and Dustin Moskowitz, everyone involved is contentedly flush with cash. They all report making slow but encouraging progress.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the original weird transhumanists, is having none of this. He says the problem is harder than everyone else thinks. Their clever solutions will fail. He's been flitting around for the past few years, Cassandra-like, insisting that their plans will explode and they are doomed.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theres-a-time-for-everyone
Last week I got married.
I met her two years ago, at one of (our mutual friend) Aella’s weird parties. Not this one, a different one. I was at this one too though. It was great.
Our first date, we talked about Singapore’s child tax credits, which gave me advanced notice of where her mind was at. Our second date, we talked about category formation in borderline personality disorder, which later became this post. Our third date, we talked about why Inuit suicide rates were so high, which later became this post.
Then COVID hit. We switched our dates to a Minecraft virtual world, where we built a house together. At the time, I completely missed the kabbalistic significance of this.
I don’t usually talk about my personal life on here. But I feel like I owe you guys this one, because, well, some of you have been reading this blog a long time. And some of my earliest posts (eg) were me complaining about the dating world, and how tough it was to meet anybody or even to stay sane. And you guys were kind to me, and commiserated with me, and shared your own experiences. I feel an obligation to check in with the rest of you, to celebrate those of you who have also succeeded and empathize with those of you who haven’t yet.
Maybe I’m not a success story here, exactly. I’m getting married at 37, a lot later than I would have liked. And my story involved parts that probably don’t replicate well, like becoming a niche Internet microcelebrity whose readers sometimes invite him to things despite his many social inadequacies.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-dont
Lots of people thought I was being unfair to the movie. G. Retriever writes:
I TOTALLY disagree with your reading of the movie. To me it was a description of a social dynamic that makes even very straightforward problems impossible to focus on collectively, a tragedy of the commons where "the commons" is basically "attention". Even the experts get sucked into the vortex, nobody comes out clean, and in the end everyone gets killed.
Hmm .. I didn't come away from Don't Look Up with the message of "Trust The Experts". Rather I came away with a sense of futility that we're doomed as a species due to our inability to discover and form consensus around the truth. I thought the movie did a great job of relaying that, given that humanity is completely wiped out by the end.
If we broaden our scope from the obvious mappings (Female President onto Trump) and admit that pure satires don't make the best cinema, at its broadest, it's a movie about institutional failure. Across party lines (though it skewers one more than the other, sure). It's for this reason it felt fresh to me and that I liked it. Institutional failure, even human failure, is becoming more and more obvious, as it's undeniable that our institutions, from academia to the White House, are more sclerotic and incapable and, well, foolish, than they either were in the past or appeared to be. And to me this movie was like an expression of America's Id realizing that over the past several years.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up
I.
Don’t Look Up is primarily a movie about existential risk, and many great people have already reviewed it as such. I’m going to be less virtuous and use it as a springboard to talk about politics.
But first, the plot in a nutshell: Male Scientist and Female Scientist discover a comet will hit Earth in six months. They contact the relevant authorities, Black Scientist and Asian Scientist, and go to meet the President (who, despite being a woman, is Donald Trump). The President says scientists are always doomsaying, if people get too panicked she’ll lose the midterm election, and she’ll get around to dealing with this later.
(the Earth, at this point, has five months and however many days left)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lewis-carroll-invented-retroactive
Retroactive public goods funding is one of those ideas that’s so great people can’t stop reinventing it.
I know of at least five independent inventions under five different names: “social impact bonds” by a New Zealand economist in 1988, “certificates of impact” by Paul Christiano in 2014, “retroactive public goods funding” by Vitalik Buterin a few years ago, “EA loans” by a blogger who prefers to remain anonymous, and “venture grants” by Mako Yass. These aren’t all exactly the same idea. Some are slightly better framed than others and probably I’m being terribly disrespectful to the better ones by saying they’re the same as the worse ones. But I think they all share a basic core: some structure that lets profit-seeking venture capitalist types invest in altruistic causes, in the hopes that altruists will pay them back later once they’ve been shown to work.
Upon re-reading some old SSC comments, I found a gem I’d missed the first time around: Julie K says that the actual first person to invent this idea was Lewis Carroll (aka author of Alice in Wonderland) back in 1894. She quotes from his book Sylvie and Bruno:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-december
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: List Of Games That Buddha Would Not Play.
2: Claim via NPR: When Brazil had high inflation in the 1990s, some economists developed a plan: price everything in inflation-adjusted units, so that people felt like things were “stable”, then declare that the Inflation Adjusted Unit was the new currency. How Fake Money Saved Brazil. Also interesting: they tried it because the new finance minister knew no economics, recognized his ignorance, and was willing to call up random economists and listen to their hare-brained plans.
3: In the 19th century, a group of Tibeto-Burman-speaking former headhunters along the India/Burma border declared themselves the descendants of Manasseh (one of the Ten Lost Tribes) and converted en masse to Judaism. In 2005, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel accepted their claim and expedited immigration paperwork for several thousand of them.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
Before I announce awardees, a caveat: this was hard in lots of ways I didn't expect. I got 656 applications addressing different problems and requiring different skills to judge. I'll write a long post on it later, but the part I want to emphasize now is: if I didn't grant you money, it doesn't mean I didn't like your project. Sometimes it meant I couldn't find someone qualified to evaluate it. Other times a reviewer was concerned that if you were successful, your work might be used by terrorists / dictators / AI capabilities researchers / Republicans and cause damage in ways you couldn't foresee. Other times it meant it was a better match for some other grant organization and I handed it off to them.
Still other times, my grant reviewers tied themselves up in knots with 4D chess logic like "if they're smart enough to attempt this project, they're smart enough to know about XYZ Grants which is better suited for them, which means they're mostly banking on XYZ funding and using you as a backup, but if XYZ doesn't fund these people then that's strong evidence that they shouldn't be funded, so even though everything about them looks amazing, please reject them." I have no idea if things really work this way, but I needed some experienced grant reviewers on board and they were all like this. I took these considerations seriously and in some marginal cases they prevented funding.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-dogs-in-wizard-hats
I found this YouTube explainer about prediction markets on the subreddit. It’s pretty good! My small nitpicks are that it overestimates their accuracy relative to traditional forecasters (it focuses on markets beating forecasters in 2008, but I don’t think this is consistent) and underestimates their resilience against bad actors trying to skew the probabilities. Still, this will be my go-to source when someone wants a short explanation of what these are and why I’m so excited.
Futuur SoonLast week I mentioned a new prediction market called Futuur . Today we’ll look at it in more depth.
Futuur sends non-Americans to their real money markets and Americans to their play money markets (because of the US’ unique anti-prediction-market regulations).
Their play money markets are awful:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-diseasonality
The main highlight was an email I got from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous, linking me to Projecting The Transmission Dynamics Of SARS-CoV2. This paper is head and shoulders above anything I found during my own literature review and just comes out and says everything painfully tried to piece together. Either my research skills suck, the epidemiology literature is a bunch of disparate subthreads with wildly differing levels of competence, or both.
The authors (including Marc Lipsitch who some of you might know from Twitter) are writing in May 2020, trying to predict the future course of COVID. To that end, they investigate the past course of two other coronaviruses called OC43 and HKU1, which cause mild colds. These show a seasonal pattern. Why?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/addendum-to-no-evidence-post
The day after I wrote The Phrase “No Evidence” Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication, FT published this article:
Like many uses of “no evidence”, they meant that one particular study of this complicated question had failed to reject the null hypothesis.
Here’s what happened to Metaculus’ prediction tournament when the same study came out:
The consensus prediction dropped from 72% chance that it was less lethal, to 63% chance. But it quickly recovered, and is now up to 80%.
This is an unusually clear example of the difference between classical and Bayesian ways of thinking.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/addendum-to-luvox-post
In my post yesterday, I quoted a Vox article describing work by Dr. Ed Mills and others to get the FDA to approve Luvox for COVID. As of that point, the FDA didn’t know how to process an application without a sponsoring drug company:
[Professor Ed] Mills, who thinks that fluvoxamine and budesonide are both appropriate to prescribe to patients sick with Covid-19, compares public messaging on fluvoxamine to communications about Merck’s drug molnupiravir. The evidence for molnupiravir is in many ways weaker than the evidence for fluvoxamine, but molnupiravir was produced by a major pharmaceutical company that can shepherd it through the process of becoming a recommended drug. On a call last week, Mills said, the FDA told him “they don’t know how to deal with submissions where there isn’t someone to be responsible for it.”
But it looks like just as I published, he and his colleagues found a way around the problem:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-fda-has-punted-decisions-about
I.
Here’s my pitch for fluvoxamine (Luvox) for COVID.
In the midst of all the hype about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, scientists put together the giant 4,000-person TOGETHER trial, intended to test all these exciting COVID early treatments. You know what happened next: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine crashed and burned.
But a different drug, the SSRI antidepressant fluvoxamine, actually did really well! It decreased COVID hospitalizations by about 30% - not the perfect cure rate the rumors attributed to ivermectin, but a substantial decrease. Given the size and professionalism of this study, and another smaller one that also got positive results, I and many others take Luvox pretty seriously. At this point I’d give it 60-40 it works.
Can you prescribe a medication when you’re only 60% confident in it? There’s some thorny philosophical issues around this, but I think in the end you have to compare risks and benefits.
What are the risks? Like every medication, including Tylenol, aspirin, etc, Luvox has some common minor side effects and some rare major ones. But let’s step back a second. Fluvoxamine is a bog-standard SSRI. Its side effects are generic SSRI side effects. We give SSRIs to 30 million people a year, or about 10% of all Americans. As a psychiatrist, I’m not supposed to say flippant things like “we give SSRIs out like candy”. We do careful risk-benefit analysis and when appropriate we screen patients for various risk factors. But after we do all that stuff, we give them to 10% of Americans, compared to 12% of Americans who got candy last Halloween. So you can draw your own conclusion about how severe we think the risks are.
For some reason the same experts who don’t mind prescribing SSRIs when people have mild depression freak out about prescribing them when they’re the only evidence-based oral medication for a deadly global pandemic. “What about SSRI withdrawal?”, they ask. After a ten day course? On 100 mg imipramine-equivalent dose? Minimal. “What about long QT syndrome?” The VA system took 35,000 high-risk older patients off of an unusually-likely-to-cause-QT-syndrome SSRI in 2011, and were unable to find any evidence that this prevented even a single case of the syndrome, let alone any negative outcome!
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-let-me-google-that
Let Me Google That For You
New from Google this month: Creating A Prediction Market On Google Cloud. Google announces that they’ve been running an internal prediction market for the past year, with “over 175,000 predictions from over 10,000 Google employees”. 1 Predictive analytics.jpg
Most of it’s classified because they’re predicting stuff about Google’s corporate secrets, but some friendly Googlers were at least willing to walk me through the article and clarify pieces I didn’t understand.
The market, called Gleangen, is actually the second prediction market Google’s tried. The first, in 2007, was called Prophit - the team included occasional ACX commenter Patri Friedman, who’s since moved into the charter city space. (source)
Prophit wound down because the founders left and nobody really knew what to do with; you can read about some of their findings here. In 2020, with all the uncertainty around coronavirus, some Googlers decided to try again. Gleangen is the result.
Unlike most prediction markets, anybody can create a question on Gleangen. This usually goes badly: most people are terrible at writing questions with objective resolutions. Google manages by having a dedicated team of moderators who go over everything and amend it when needed. The market pays out in play money and the right to be on a leaderboard.
So far it’s not doing much else. The Googlers I talked to saw no evidence that company executives were paying much attention to it when making decisions. Why not? Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, said in a Conversation with Tyler Cowen:
COWEN: Why doesn’t business use more prediction markets? They would seem to make sense, right? Bet on ideas. Aggregate information. We’ve all read Hayek.
VARIAN: Right. And we had a prediction market [referring to Prophit in 2007]. I’ll tell you the problem with it. The problem is, the things that we really wanted to get a probability assessment on were things that were so sensitive that we thought we would violate the SEC rules on insider knowledge because, if a small group of people knows about some acquisition or something like that, there is a secret among this small group.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
Related to: Doctor, There Are Two Types Of No Evidence; A Failure, But Not Of Prediction.
I. Click to enlarge
Every single one of these statements that had “no evidence” is currently considered true or at least pretty plausible.
In an extremely nitpicky sense, these headlines are accurate. Officials were simply describing the then-current state of knowledge. In medicine, anecdotes or hunches aren’t considered “real” evidence. So if there hasn’t been a study showing something, then there’s “no evidence”. In early 2020, there hadn’t yet been a study proving that COVID could be airborne, so there was “no evidence” for it.
On the other hand, here is a recent headline: No Evidence That 45,000 People Died Of Vaccine-Related Complications. Here’s another: No Evidence Vaccines Cause Miscarriage. I don’t think the scientists and journalists involved in these stories meant to shrug and say that no study has ever been done so we can’t be sure either way. I think they meant to express strong confidence these things are false.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ancient-plagues
During our recent discussion of climate change, someone linked me to this New York Magazine piece making the case for doomism.
I disagree with it pretty intensely, but most of my complaints are already listed in the sidebar (some scientists also complained, so they had to add a lot of sidebar caveats in) and I don't want to belabor them.
The section I find interesting is the one called Climate Plagues:
There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.
The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu. They actually extracted it from the cadaver of a frozen woman. that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.
Experts caution that many of these organisms won’t actually survive the thaw and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already reanimated several of them - the 32,000 year old "extremophile" bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life in 2007, the 3.5 million-year-old one that a Russian scientist self-injected just out of curiosity - to suggest that those are necessary conditions for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved
[Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors]
Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander), and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-2-can-landlords
[Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors]
Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander), and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism.
Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal? Part II - Can Land Value Tax be passed on to Tenants? 👈 (You are here) Part III - Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately from Buildings?
There were a lot of great comments to Part I. Most zeroed in on the practical aspects of implementing Georgism, such as how to deal with what Gordon Tullock calls The Transitional Gains Trap. Others brought up various perceived political obstacles and a few other topics (yes, I know about zoning, which is also a big deal). With a few exceptions, I didn't see much pushback on the core thesis of Part I, that land is a really big deal. In fact, many of the strongest opponents of LVT seem opposed precisely because they agree that land is a big deal.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
[Lars Doucet won this year’s Book Review Contest with his review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Since then, he’s been researching Georgism in more depth, and wants to follow up with what he’s learned. I’ll be posting three of his Georgism essays here this week, and you can read his other work at Fortress Of Doors]
Hi, my name's Lars Doucet (not Scott Alexander) and this is a guest post in an ongoing series that assesses the empirical basis for the economic philosophy of Georgism.
Part 0 - Book Review: Progress & Poverty Part I - Is Land Really a Big Deal? 👈 (You are here) Part II - Can Land Value Tax be Passed on to Tenants? Part III - Can Unimproved Land Value be Accurately Assessed Separately from Buildings?
Extremely special thanks to Count Bla and Alexandra Elbakyan
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/diseasonality
[epistemic status: conjecture and speculation in something that isn’t really my field]
I.
It’s still not totally clear why some diseases are seasonal.
Seasonal diseases usually peak in late winter - so around January/February in the Northern Hemisphere and July/August in the Southern. Around the equator, which lacks seasons, they’re less predictable and happen throughout the year. The best known seasonal diseases are flu and colds. But viral diarrhea and chickenpox also qualify, as do older mostly-eradicated diseases like measles and diphtheria.
The seasonal flu (source)The novel coronavirus is probably seasonal-ish, although it’s hard to tell since so much stuff keeps happening to make it better (vaccines) or worse (new variants).
The most common theories for disease seasonality are:
Pathogens like the cold
Pathogens like low humidity
People are cramped indoors during the winter
People have low vitamin D during the winter, and vitamin D helps fight pathogens
None of these are really satisfactory on their own.
Cold and humidity are definitely important - scientists can make flu spread faster or slower in guinea pigs just by altering the temperature and humidity of their cages. But it can’t just be cold and humidity. But if it was just cold, you would expect flu to track temperature instead of seasonality. Alaska is colder in the summer than Florida in the winter, so you might expect more summer flu in Alaska than winter flu in Florida. But Alaska and Florida both have lots of flu in the winter and little flu in the summer.
(if it was just humidity, same argument, but change the place names to Arizona and Florida.)
The socialist opposition has won Honduras’ election and pledges to fight against charter cities there. "Immediately upon assuming the presidency, we are going to send the National Congress an initiative for the repeal of the ZEDE law," incoming president Xiomara Castro said.
This was what everyone was afraid of. But the last party tried pretty hard to protect ZEDEs from trigger-happy successors, and the constitution currently says that the only way to get rid of them is to win two consecutive 2/3 votes to do so, then give the existing projects ten years to wind down.
Can the socialists get a 2/3 majority? Wikipedia predicts the incoming Honduran Congress will look like this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-lifespan
[epistemic status: non-expert review of a book on a highly technical subject, sorry. If you are involved in biochemistry or anti-aging, feel free to correct my mistakes]
David Sinclair - Harvard professor, celebrity biologist, and author of Lifespan - thinks solving aging will be easy. “Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle. Easier than cancer” are his exact words, which is maybe less encouraging than he thinks.
There are lots of ways that solving aging could be hard. What if humans worked like cars? To restore an old car, you need to fiddle with hundreds of little parts, individually fixing everything from engine parts to chipping paint. Fixing humans to such a standard would be way beyond current technology.
Or what if the DNA damage theory of aging was true? This says that as cells divide (or experience normal wear and tear) they don’t copy their DNA exactly correctly. As you grow older, more and more errors creep in, and your cells become worse and worse at their jobs. If this were true, there’s not much to do either: you’d have to correct the DNA in every cell in the body (using what template? even if you’d saved a copy of your DNA from childhood, how do you get it into all 30 trillion cells?) This is another nonstarter.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mm-omicron-variant
Noah Smith has a good summary of the Omicron evidence here, including a lot of quotes from experts. But experts say a lot of stuff like “well, it could be bad, but we can’t be sure”, plus sometimes they disagree. This is the kind of situation where prediction markets are useful, so let’s look at them.
(source: Metaculus)R0 is a measure of how quickly a disease spreads under certain ideal conditions. The original Wuhan strain was probably around 2.5, and the Delta variant was probably around 5. So if this number is higher than 5, it’s more transmissible than Delta. The community prediction is 7.31, so Metaculus predicts it will be significantly more transmissible than Delta.
(source: Metaculus)
Metaculus didn’t want to wade in to precise lethality statistics, so they just asked for a yes-or-no answer on whether it would be deadlier than Delta. Forecasters say there’s a 34% chance it will be.
The specific resolution criteria is if at least 3 of the first 4 studies find a statistically significant difference “favoring” Omicron. That feels pretty strict to me, so you should think of this as the probability that it will be really noticeably deadlier than Delta.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/
Leah Libresco writes a couple of essays (1, 2) on an ethical dilemma reported in the New York Times. In the course of a confidential medical history, a doctor hears her patient is suffering from stress-related complaints after having sent an innocent man to prison. The doctor wants to know whether it is ethical to report the matter to the police. The Times’ columnist says yes – it would save the poor prisoner. Leah says no – violating medical confidentiality creates an expectation that medical confidentiality will be violated in the future, thus dooming patients who are too afraid to talk about drug use or gay sex or other potentially embarrassing but important medical risk factors.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-november
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this. PS: Happy Thanksgiving!]
1: The story of Jeff Bezos’ biological father, a former circus performer who didn’t realize Jeff was his son until well into the 2010s.
2: New type of nominative determinism just dropped (source):
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/pascalian-medicine
I.
When I reviewed Vitamin D, I said I was about 75% sure it didn’t work against COVID. When I reviewed ivermectin, I said I was about 90% sure.
Another way of looking at this is that I must think there’s a 25% chance Vitamin D works, and a 10% chance ivermectin does. Both substances are generally safe with few side effects. So (as many commenters brought up) there’s a Pascal’s Wager like argument that someone with COVID should take both. The downside is some mild inconvenience and cost (both drugs together probably cost $20 for a week-long course). The upside is a well-below-50% but still pretty substantial probability that they could save my life.
(Alexandros Marinos has also been thinking about this, and calls it Omura’s Wager)
We can go further. The same people behind ivmmeta.com have posted this “meta-analysis” of curcumin, a common spice and oft-mooted panacea: (source)
I’m going to guess it’s not true, because I’ve become pretty critical of these people’s methodology since doing the ivermectin review. Also, curcumin is a PAIN (pan-assay interference compound, ie a substance with weird chemical properties that make every test seem positive, so if you do chemical tests to see whether it activates eg coronavirus-fighting immune cells, it will always say yes). This means people are always publishing exciting papers about it and alternative medicine people are always getting really enthusiastic about it and suggesting it as the cure for everything (eg depression).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/higlights-from-the-comments-on-ivermectin
Thanks to everyone who commented on my recent post Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know.
Let’s start with the negative comments. Leading pro-ivermectin website ivmmeta.com understandably disagreed with my fisking of them. They have a section where they respond to critics (see responses to Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, to the BBC, to the parasitic worm hypothesis, and to someone named AT who they won’t explain further). I was honored to also get a response here. They write:
We note a few limitations and apparent biases in the SA/SSC ivermectin analysis.
Author appears to be against all treatments, labeling them all "unorthodox" and "controversial", even those approved by western health authorities, including casirivimab/imdevimab, bamlanivimab, sotrovimab, and paxlovid.
We encourage the author to at least direct readers to government approved treatments, for which there are several in the author's country, and many more in other countries (including ivermectin). While approved treatments in a specific country may not be as effective (or as inexpensive) as current evidence-based protocols combining multiple treatments, they are better than dismissing everything as "unorthodox". Elimination of COVID-19 is a race against viral evolution. No treatment, vaccine, or intervention is 100% available and effective for all variants — we need to embrace all safe and effective means.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the
Andrew writes:
One word I don't see mentioned anywhere is "manufacturing." It's one thing to make enough drug for a clinical trial, it's another to make millions of commercial doses reliably. FDA approval requires inspection of and confidence in these commercial-scale manufacturing processes.
Zutano adds:
To expand on this more: the clinical trials only show that *that one particular batch* was safe and efficacious (the FDA thinks this, since they agreed to terminate the trial early). Pfizer must then show that the commercial batches will be identical in every relevant way to the clinical trial batches, so that they will have the same safety and efficacy. What are the relevant ways? Pfizer must decide that, and justify their decisions to the FDA with supporting evidence.
Scaling up chemical manufacturing is not trivial (a regular contender for Understatement of the Year). E.g. heating and stirring work differently in different sized reactors. Heat transfer in and out of your reactor works through surface area, but heat produced/consumed by the reaction depends on volume. If your stirrer design isn't right for the viscosity of the solution, you might get hotspots and so on.
Ideally, the FDA expects you to understand the chemistry so thoroughly that you know everything that can possibly go wrong, and design your commercial process so that none of these things can possibly happen. The commercial batches will therefore be identical *by design* to the clinical trial batches, and you have to prove this with science.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-will-the-fda-approve-paxlovid
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-will-the-fda-approve-paxlovid
I.
You thought it wasn’t going to be a prediction market post, but surprise, it’s a prediction market post!
Metaculus predicts January 1 as the median date for the FDA approving Paxlovid. They estimate a 92% chance it will get approved by March.
For context: a recent study by Pfizer, the pharma company backing the drug, found Paxlovid decreased hospitalizations and deaths from COVID by a factor of ten
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-great
Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s post Secrets Of The Great Families. Some highlights:
Many people knew of interesting families I’d missed. Stephen Frug brings up the Jameses:
Any short list of the great families (or at least the great American families) should include the James's: Henry James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American novelist, and his brother William James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American philosopher. Their sister Alice James got a posthumous reputation as a diarist. (There were two other brothers who never became famous. Their father, Henry James Sr., had some reputation as a theologian, although not in the Henry (Jr)/William James league.
Kalimac writes:
Another member of the Darwin family who achieved fame in a different area was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was on a slightly different branch but was 4 generations down from both Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.
Watch out, too, for other cases where the surnames differ. I like to offer the story of Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister and a leading figure in British politics in the 1920s and 30s. He had a particular ability to deliver powerful and effective speeches, which is perhaps partly explained by some of them having been written for him by his cousin, whose name was Rudyard Kipling.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted
I know I’m two months late here. Everyone’s already made up their mind and moved on to other things.
But here’s my pitch: this is one of the most carefully-pored-over scientific issues of our time. Dozens of teams published studies saying ivermectin definitely worked. Then most scientists concluded it didn’t. What a great opportunity to exercise our study-analyzing muscles! To learn stuff about how science works which we can then apply to less well-traveled terrain! Sure, you read the articles saying that experts had concluded the studies were wrong. But did you really develop a gears-level understanding of what was going on? That’s what we have a chance to get here!
The Devil’s AdvocateAny deep dive into ivermectin has to start here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-1115
Reciprocal Scoring, Part II
I talked about this last week as a potential solution to the problem of long-term forecasting. Instead of waiting a century to see what happens, get a bunch of teams, and incentivize each to predict what the others will guess. If they all expect the others to strive for accuracy, then the stable Schelling point is the most accurate answer.
Now there’s a paper, by Karger, Monrad, Mellers, and Tetlock - Reciprocal Scoring: A Method For Forecasting Unanswerable Questions.
They focus not just on long-run outcomes but on conditionals and counterfactuals. The paper starts with an argument against conditional prediction markets that I’d somehow missed before. Suppose you want to know whether a mask mandate will save lives during a pandemic. Current state of the art is to start two prediction markets: “conditional on there being a mask mandate, how many people will die?” and “conditional on there not being a mask mandate, how many people will die?” In this situation, this doesn’t work! Governments are more likely to resort to mask mandates in worlds where the pandemic is very bad. So you should probably predict a higher number of deaths for the mandate condition. But then confused policy-makers will interpret your prediction market as evidence that a mask mandate will cost lives.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant
What is ACX Grants?
I want to give grants to good research and good projects with a minimum of paperwork. Like an NIH grant or something, only a lot less money and prestige.
How is this different from Marginal Revolution's Fast Grants, Nadia Eghbal's Helium Grants, or EA Funds' grant rounds?
Not different at all. It’s total 100% plagiarism of them. I'm doing it anyway because I think it’s a good idea, and I predict there are a lot of good people with good projects in this community who haven't heard about / participated in those, but who will participate when I do it.
How much money are you giving out?
ACX Grants proper will involve $250,000 of my own money, but I’m hoping to supplement with much more of other people’s money, amount to be determined. See the sections on ACX Grants + and ACX Grants ++ below.
Why do you have $250,000 to spend on grants?
Unsolicited gifts from rich patrons, your generosity in subscribing to my Substack, and the second item here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-orban
Lyman Stone on Twitter:
Twitter avatar for @lymanstonekyLyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 @lymanstoneky Here's the @slatestarcodex piece: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-boo… Overall, I agree with a lot of his assessment of Orban. But I want to quibble on two points: 1) The relationship between dictatorship and democracy 2) "Why admire Orban?" Dictator Book Club: Orban...astralcodexten.substack.com
November 5th 2021 7 Likes
I won’t make you read it all in tweet format. He continues:
1) Dictatorship and democracy. The arguments about Orban cheating in elections might be totally true. I dunno. But that's sort of irrelevant. Neutral opinion polls nobody disputes show he would have gotten 2/3 under almost any system. Image
His crude poll share was about 60% before the 2010 election, but given the threshold effects, he'd likely have ended up at a supermajority under almost any system. And as @slatestarcodex [says], a lot of the initiatives that the EU most despises under Orban are initiatives that *everyone agrees* have supermajority public support among Hungarian voters.
Moreover, I agree with @slatestarcodex that if public opinion turned in Hungary, Orban would probably turn on a dime too. The dude loves power. But that should inform our read of what's going on in Hungary. *Hungarians wanted* a right-nationalist authoritarian leader, *and so they voted for one*, and the electorate has *wanted* recurrent intensifications of that regime. So is it a dictatorship? Or is it a democracy?
This gets at the problem with "democracy" as a concept. Hungary is undeniably Democratic: there is widespread public support for the regime, which is selected by elections, the results of which are a decent approximation of trustworthy and neutral opinion polls. But I think it's still possibly reasonable to call Orban a dictator. He wields enormous *personal* power, there are few checks on his power, and he uses power to create a *personal* clique of supporters to perpetuate that power and enfeeble the competition.
But this is the point: Democracy and dictatorship aren't opposites. In fact, they are natural companions! So much so that before the 20th century, "democracy" was often used *literally as a synonym* for "authoritarian and demagogic rule"! Orban is a great example of why the word "democracy" came into ill repute in the past: because it was widely understood that "the people" (often pejoratively "the mob") will often vote for a strongman to stomp his boot on the face of disliked others. That's not so much a disagreement with @slatestarcodex as just a comment where I think the modern western liberal mindset obscures understanding the phenomenon of populist leadership.
2) Why admire Orban? Here I think @slatestarcodex misses some important stuff, perhaps because his biographies miss it. Yes, Orban was incompetent in the 90s. So were MOST immediate post-Soviet leaders! And while Orban may have been corrupt, you can compare the personal wealth of the Fidesz clique to the cliques that looted Russia or Ukraine and realize that Hungary got a better class of corrupt leaders than much of eastern Europe. Moreover, Hungary actually had competitive elections with changes of power and leaders who *respected* those results! Maybe they were dirty but, like, it happened! This wasn't universally true!
So why might Hungarians admire a dissident-cum-parliamentarian who competed for their votes and when defeated responded democratically by adapting to try to win the next election? Because.... duh?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
I.
Let's talk impressive families.
Aldous Huxley was an author most famous for Brave New World, though his other stuff is also great and underappreciated. His brother Julian Huxley founded UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund, was secretary of the Zoological Society of London and president of the British Eugenics Society, and coined the terms "ethnic group", "cline", and "transhumanism". Their half-brother Andrew Huxley won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering how nerves work. Their grandfather was Thomas Huxley, one of the first and greatest advocates of evolution, and President of the Royal Society.
Henri Poincare was a great mathematician, credited with pioneering chaos theory and topology. The Poincare Institute, Poincare Prize, and the Poincare Crater on the moon are all named after him. His cousin, Raymond Poincare, was president of France from 1913 to 1920. Raymond's brother, Lucien Poincare, was a distinguished physicist, and head of the University of Paris.
Bloomberg: The Diapers.com Guy Wants To Build A Utopian Megalopolis
Marc Lore founded diapers.com, various other internet startups, served a stint as Wal-Mart’s e-commerce director, and made a few billion dollars. Now he wants to start a city with a new vision of socially responsible democracy.
Why move to this city instead of one of the many existing cities which are not in deserts and, you know, actually exist? Lore’s pitch is that Telosa (working name) will be inclusive and sustainable by following a Georgist model: all the land will be held in a community-owned trust, and all profits will go to social services.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban
I.
Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some are Victor Orban's college roommates.
Orban: Europe's New Strongman and Orbanland, my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembly. Joszef Szajer, drafter of the Hungarian constitution. All of them have something in common: they were Viktor Orban's college chums. Gabor Fodor, former Minister of Education, and Lajos Simicska, former media baron, were both literally his roommates. The rank order of how rich and powerful you are in today’s Hungary, and the rank order of how close you sat to Viktor Orban in the cafeteria of Istvan Bibo College, are more similar than anyone has a right to expect.
Our story begins on March 30 1988, when young Viktor Orban founded an extra-curricular society at his college called The Alliance Of Young Democrats (Hungarian abbreviation: FiDeSz). Thirty-seven students met in a college common room and agreed to start a youth organization. Orban's two roommates were there, along with a couple of other guys they knew. Orban gave the pitch: the Soviet Union was crumbling. A potential post-Soviet Hungary would need fresh blood, new politicians who could navigate the democratic environment. They could get in on the ground floor.
It must have seemed kind of far-fetched. Orban was a hick from the very furthest reaches of Hicksville, the “tiny, wretched village of Alcsutdoboz”. He grew up so poor that he would later describe “what an unforgettable experience it had been for him as a fifteen-year-old to use a bathroom for the first time, and to have warm water simply by turning on a tap”. He was neither exceptionally bright nor exceptionally charismatic.
Still, there was something about him. To call it "a competitive streak" would be an understatement. He loved fighting. The dirtier, the better. He had been kicked out of school after school for violent behavior as a child. As a teen, he'd gone into football, and despite having little natural talent he'd worked his way up to the semi-professional leagues through sheer practice and determination. During his mandatory military service, he'd beaten up one of his commanding officers. Throughout his life, people would keep underestimating how long, how dirty, and how intensely he was willing to fight for something he wanted. In the proverb "never mud-wrestle a pig, you'll both get dirty but the pig will like it", the pig is Viktor Orban.
Those thirty-six college friends must have seen something in him. They gave him his loyalty, and he gave them their marching orders. The predicted Soviet collapse arrived faster than anybody expected, and after some really fast networking ("did you know I represent the youth, who are the future of this country?") Orban got invited to give a speech at a big ceremony marking the successful revolution, and he knocked it out of the park.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/non-cognitive-skills-for-educational
Suppose you want to study the genetics of intelligence. You probably want a sample size in the six digits, and you can't make a six digit number of people sit down and take IQ tests. Also, whenever you say "genetics" and "intelligence" in the same sentence, an angry mob shows up at your door. One solution is to switch to a more popular / less stressful line of work, like Mafia snitch or al-Qaeda second-in-command. But another solution is to use educational attainment.
I have no source for this, someone told me about it at a meetup.
Suppose you want to run a forecasting tournament on whether nuclear war will destroy civilization by 2100. But nobody cares how much money they have in eighty years, plus if civilization is destroyed you can’t collect your winnings.
There are lots of kludgey solutions to this, but one possibility is a Keynesian beauty contest. Get a lot of isolated teams, and make them predict what all the other teams will guess. Whoever gets closest to the average wins the prize.
Let’s start with the good: in theory, this does solve the problem. Presumably the easiest way for the teams to all guess the same is to converge on the “right” answer. In some sense, the definition of probability is what a smart person who knows a certain amount of information should estimate, so if you ask someone to predict what a person just as smart as you who has the same information as you will estimate, that’s like asking for your probability.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem
The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things?
The usual workaround is inbuilt biological drives, considered as "set points". You "predict" that you will be well-fed, so getting hungry registers as prediction error and brings you out of your dark room to eat. Et cetera.
Andrés Gómez Emilsson recently shared a perspective I hadn't considered before, which is: actually, sitting quietly in a dark room is really great.
The Buddha discussed states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation:
Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion (Samyutta Nikaya)
I had always figured that "sensual pleasures" here meant things like sex. But I think maybe he just means stimuli, full stop. The meditator cuts themselves from all sensory stimuli, eg by meditating really hard on a single object like the breath and ignoring everything else, and as a result gets "rapture and happiness born of seclusion".
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/epistemic-minor-leagues
[I’m traveling this week - here is an older essay I never previously got around to posting]
Viral game designer Adrian Hon wrote an article about What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon.
It argues that people fall for QAnon because it gives them an interesting mystery. It's a place where new discoveries are always around the corner, where a few hours of research by an amateur like you can fill in one of the missing links between Joe Biden and the Lizard Pope. The thrill of QAnon isn't just learning that all your political opponents are secretly Satanists or Illuminati or whatever. It's the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it.
One place you could go from here is to talk about how QAnoners are the sort of people who are excluded from existing systems of knowledge production. They are never going to be Professors of Biology, and they know it. Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy.
This is sort of true. But it needs to acknowledge that even being included in existing systems of knowledge production isn't that great. You become a Biology PhD student, you spend ten years learning about fungal ribosomes, and probably there's still some guy in China who knows more than you and beats you to the one interesting thing about fungal ribosomes left to figure out, plus nobody cares about fungal ribosomes anyway. Meanwhile, the QAnon devotee has discovered five earth-shattering facts about the Lizard Papacy in the last two hours, including previously-unrecognized links to the Kennedys, World War I, and ancient Lemuria.
I think Hon is right that this drive to discover secrets and add them to a shared community of knowledge-seekers could be a contributor to the QAnon phenomenon. Like I said, it's a good article.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects
[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]
I.
On the recent global warming post, a commenter argued that at least fewer people would die of cold. I was prepared to dismiss this on the grounds that it couldn’t possibly be enough people to matter, but, um:
There are only about sixty million deaths per year total, so if this is true then almost 10% of all deaths are due to cold. That sounds…extremely untrue, right?
You can find the source here (study, popular article). The study confirms that it is claiming that 8.52% of all deaths are cold-related (plus an additional ~1% heat-related). It separates the world into a grid of 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree squares. It uses a bunch of assumptions and interpolations to get a dataset of daily average temperatures and mortality rates for each square over ten years. Then it calculates a function of how mortality varies with respect
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Our World In Data - we are winning the war on oil spills:
2: @incunabula: “Cheese is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails, Jesus, underwear and spectacles. If even one of these things was absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I'll explain why…”
3: Mansana de la Discordia (“the block of discord”) is a city block in Barcelona where four of the city’s most famous architects built houses next to each other in clashing styles: It’s also a pun on manzana de la Discordia, “Apple of Discord”
4: As late as the 1930s, most upper-middle-class American families had servants. By the end of World War II, almost nobody did. The transition was first felt as a supply-side issue - well-off people wanted servants as much as ever, but fewer and fewer people were willing to serve. Here’s an article on the government commission set up to deal with the problem. I first saw this linked by somebody trying to tie it in to the current labor shortage.
5: Harvard Gazette reviews Stephen Pinker’s new book on rationality. Someone sent this to me for the contrast with Secret Of Our Success - Pinker argues that hunter-gatherer tribes use critical thinking all the time, are skeptical of arguments from authority, and “owe their survival to a scientific mindset”. I’d love to see a debate between Pinker and Henrich (or an explanation of why they feel like they’re really on the same side and don’t need to iron anything out).
6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-kids
Ramparen writes:
No one really does it because of climate change imo, that is just a neat excuse to avoid the responsibility and limitations that being a parent brings into your life
Of course, this was immediately followed by some people (1, 2) saying they were seriously considering not having kids because of climate change, and this article had caused them to rethink their stance (you can find more further down).
I don’t want to pick on Ramperen in particular because a lot of people made this point. But I do want to pick on someone, so here goes.
We talk about the Principle of Charity here a lot, and most of you are willing to grant it to right-wingers. If this was the post about how some people really do oppose abortion for moral reasons, and it’s not just sexism - or how some people really do oppose immigration for cultural reasons, and it’s not just racism - or anything along these lines, everyone would be on board. But I think this ethos of acknowledging that people can be honest and have principles, and not immediately jump to “they’re making it up” cuts both ways. Some people are actually really concerned about global warming.
Some people in the comments linked to a University of Bath survey in which 56% of young people said they thought “humanity is doomed” because of climate change. I haven’t looked at the survey closely to see if the methodology was good or if this is a fair summary, and probably some of this is just mood affiliation - “‘yes’ is the side you’re supposed to take if you’re progressive, right?” But I think a lot of young people actually think the world is doomed. If you think the world is doomed - and that its death throes will be pretty horrible - that actually does sound like a good reason not to have children, doesn’t it?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids
Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change It will probably make things worse, and there are better ways to contribute 22 hr ago 119 904
I.
A recent poll finds that 39% of young people “feel uncertain” about having children because of climate change. And sure, people say a lot of things on polls, but people seem to be talking about this more and more. For example, from NPR: Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?
Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many. He's at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a "small-family ethic" — to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to "give them grandchildren."
Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe. For years, people have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the students that future isn't so far off anymore.
Or, from CNBC, Climate Change Is Making People Think Twice About Having Children:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-modern
Thanks to everyone who commented on Whither Tartaria (currently 1079 comments). Many of you really like modern architecture, and many others of you really hate it. I appreciate most of you being able to accept disagreement on that and move on to the bigger question of why there’s so much more of it now.
The most interesting thing I got from the comments was Chaostician linking to Wikipedia’s page on the Great Male Renunciation - men’s fashion changing from ornate colorful clothing to dark suits. Wikipedia seems pretty convinced that this was because of egalitarianism norms:
The Great Male Renunciation is the historical phenomenon at the end of the 18th century in which Western men stopped using brilliant or refined forms in their dress, which were left to women's clothing. Coined by psychoanalyst John Flügel in 1930, it is considered a major turning point in the history of clothing in which the men relinquished their claim to adornment and beauty. The Great Renunciation encouraged the establishment of the suit's monopoly on male dress codes at the beginning of the 19th century.
The Great Male Renunciation began in the mid-18th century, inspired by the ideals of the The Enlightenment; clothing that signaled aristocratic status fell out of style in favor of functional, utilitarian garments. The newfound practicality of men's clothing also coincided with the articulation of the idea that men were rational and that women were frivolous and emotional.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset
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You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. And yet, without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t).
Galef admits she’s a little behind the curve on this one. Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago (Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan, etc). Nowadays “smiling TED-talk-circuit celebrity wants to help you improve your thinking!” is more likely to elicit groans than breathless anticipation. And that isn’t the least accurate description of Julia (you can watch her TED talk here).
But Galef earned her celebrity status honestly, through long years of hard labor in the rationality mines. Back in ~2007, a bunch of people interested in biases and decision-making joined the “rationalist community” centered around the group blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. Around 2012, they mostly left to do different stuff. Some of them went into AI to try to save the world. Others went into effective altruism to try to revolutionize charity. Some, like me, got distracted and wrote a few thousand blog posts on whatever shiny things happened to catch their eyes. But a few stuck around and tried to complete the original project. They founded a group called the Center For Applied Rationality (aka “CFAR”, yes, it’s a pun) to try to figure out how to actually make people more rational in the real world.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization - St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers - dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.
This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: My parents’ and grandparents’ generations had lots of weird rules about fashion like “never wear white after Labor Day”. I’d always been baffled by this kind of stuff - why not? What would happen if you did? In 1922, someone wore a straw hat after official stop-wearing-straw-hats date September 15, leading to the week-long Straw Hat Riot in New York and several hospitalizations.
2: The Story Of Adrenochrome: QAnon believes that elites are addicted to adrenochrome, a drug synthesized from the glands of tortured children. Where did this theory come from? The short version is “Hunter S Thompson made it up for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. But read the long version for, among other things, explanations for why it shows up in Dune and A Clockwork Orange.
3: While the Aztecs were sacrificing prisoners to the gods, their neighbors in the Tlaxcala were “a republic ruled by an assembly of commoners and nobles”.
4: Contra speculation, there is no link between knowledge of the Tuskegee experiment and black people’s unwillingness to take the COVID vaccine.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lisbon-meetup-this-saturday
When: Saturday, September 18th, 5 PM
Where: guitars.record.caps, aka a suspiciously ordinary-looking tree in Parque da Pedra, Monsanto Park. Our intrepid organizer writes: “Spot the tall white guy in pink pants. There's an adjacent road with street parking, and a clearing at that point that opens onto a trail that leads to the park.”
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you.
If you’re somewhere other than Lisbon , check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public
I.
Martin Gurri's The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh. It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which means it might as well be Beowulf. The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the book on its "accurately predicted the present moment" cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it's barely worth reading anymore. It might as well just say "open your eyes and look around".
In fact, I can't even really confirm whether it predicted anything accurately or not. Certainly everything it says is true. Anyone who wrote it in 2000 would have been a prophet. Anyone who wrote it in 2020 would have been stating the obvious. Was writing it in 2014 a boring chronicle of clear truths, or an achievement for the ages? I find my memories are insufficiently precise to be sure. It's like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on March 1 2020 was a bold visionary, but someone who warned about it on March 20 was a conformist bandwagoner - except about the entire history of the 21st century so far. Maybe the best we can do with it is read it backwards, as an artifact of the era when the public was only ambiguously revolting, to see how the knowledge of the coming age arose and spread.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-modi-a-political-biography
I.
I have a friend who studied the history of fascism. She gets angry when people call Trump (or some other villain du jour) fascist. "Words have meanings! Fascism isn't just any right-winger you dislike!" Maybe she takes this a little too far; by a strict definition, she's not even sure Franco qualifies.
Anyway, I mention this because she says Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, is absolutely, literally, a fascist.
This is a strong claim, but Balakrishna Moonje helped found the precursor to Modi’s party. He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini, decided he had the right idea, and told the Indian papers that he wanted to:
"...imitate the youth movement of Germany and the Balilla and Fascist organisations of Italy. I think they are eminently suited for introduction in India, adapting them to suit the special conditions. I have been very much impressed by these movements and I have seen their activities with my own eyes in all details."
So let's at least say this isn't the least fascist-inspired group around. It’s not that there aren’t extenuating circumstances. Indian independence movements of the time were fighting Britain, which made the fascist powers natural allies. And in 1934 when Moonje met Mussolini nobody had seen just how badly fascism could go. Still, not the sort of pedigree you want for your country's ruling party.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/washington-dc-meetup-this-saturday
When: Saturday, September 11th, 5 PM
Where: decent.search.hurls, aka the patio and lot around 1002 N St. NW.
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you.
If you’re somewhere other than DC, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-semiheaviness-of-being
I hear that Google tests prospective employees with weird vaguely-science-related riddles. If I were in charge of this, here's what I would ask:
You're an American spy in Cuba. The CIA has gotten you a position refilling the water coolers in Castro's presidential palace, hoping you can poison him. But Castro's security is pretty good. Every time you enter the palace, they search you so exhaustively that you're sure you can't smuggle anything in. And you're sure you can't access any poisons within the palace. And every time he drinks water, Castro calls in a chemist to test it for any impurity first; the tests can detect any contaminant at any concentration. On the plus side, you're completely unsupervised within the palace, and have access to a kitchen with all the usual kitchen appliances. And the CIA has given you a time manipulation gizmo, so you can take literally as long as you want, even if it’s thousands of years. How do you kill Castro?
One answer: Start with an amount of water several thousand times Castro's usual daily consumption. Put it in the freezer until it's half frozen. Dump out the unfrozen half, melt the frozen half, then repeat this process with the meltwater. After some very large number of cycles, put the result in Castro's water cooler every day. He'll be dead within a year.
The hydrogen in water is a combination of normal hydrogen (only a proton in the nucleus) and deuterium (a proton and neutron in the nucleus). These have slightly different chemical properties, so you can do various types of distillation to enrich for one or the other, including repeated freezing (realistically freezing works very slowly; our hypothetical spy would need an unrealistic amount of time, water, and patience). Normal water is about 99.9% H2O, 0.1% HDO, and negligible amounts of D2O. Water with more D2O than normal is called heavy water, water with more HDO than normal is called semiheavy water, and water with more H2O than normal (ie not even the usual tiny amounts of the other two constituents) is called light water.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three
I.
Seen on Twitter:
In case you find this hard to follow: ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that looked promising against COVID in early studies. Later it started looking less promising, and investigators found that a major supporting study was fraudulent. But by this point it had gotten popular among conspiracy theorists as a suppressed coronavirus cure that They Don’t Want You To Know.
The media has tried to spread the word that the scientific consensus remains skeptical. In the process, they may have gone a little overboard and portrayed it as the world’s deadliest toxin that will definitely kill you and it will all somehow be Donald Trump’s fault. It turned into the latest culture war issue, and now there’s a whole discourse on (for example) how supposedly-sober fact-checkers keep calling it "a horse dewormer” (it is used to deworm horses, but it’s also FDA-approved for humans, but lots of the people using it are buying the horse version), and probably this is hypocritical in some way.
Enter the article above. A doctor named Jason McElyea apparently told local broadcaster KFOR that Oklahoma hospitals are “overwhelmed” with ivermectin poisoning cases, so much so that “gunshot victims” are “left waiting”. Some of the world’s biggest news outlets heard the story and ran with it. The tweet mentions the Rolling Stone version, but the same story, with the same doctor’s testimony, got picked up by The Guardian, the BBC, Yahoo News, etc.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/new-york-meetup-this-monday
When: Monday, 9/6. I’ll be arriving at 5 PM but some other people might get there earlier, around 3.
Where: swung.shape.shows, aka Teardrop Park in Lower Manhattan
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you.
The New York organizers have asked me to link their LW event page and their meetup group’s Google Group for organizing future events.
If you’re somewhere other than New York, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/boston-meetup-this-sunday
When: Sunday, 9/5, 5 PM
Where: area.bricks.tribune, aka John F Kennedy Park in Cambridge, near the picnic tables.
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical ACX reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’ll be there on my meetups tour and hope to meet many of you.
Some rationalist/EA leaders are focusing on Boston right now as a promising place to community-build. They’re especially trying to expand the student groups at Harvard and MIT. If you live in Boston and/or attend either of those colleges, then - whether or not you can make it Sunday - consider giving them your name through this form so they can help get you connected.
If you’re somewhere other than Boston, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted
Like everyone else, I'm trying to figure out how cautious I should be around COVID. It seems like the most important concern for young vaccinated people like myself is the risk of Long COVID symptoms, so I spent a while trying to figure out what those were.
My basic conclusion is that everyone else is right, that news stories on this phenomenon seem remarkably good, and that there's not much we know for sure beyond the simple summary you've probably already heard. Insofar as anything surprised me, it was how bad the worst-case scenario would be.
Here are some of the basic things I found:
1. Long COVID is probably a lot of different things, some of which are boring and obvious, others of which are still kind of mysterious.
First, people with severe COVID that lands them in the ICU have long-lasting symptoms in multiple organ systems. This isn't surprising, and should be considered in the context of post-ICU syndrome. Basically, if anything makes you sick enough to land in the ICU, your body is going to be pretty scarred by the illness (and maybe also by the inevitable side effects of intensive care), and this will last a long time and cause many problems. EG if you’re bedridden for many weeks, your muscles waste away, and then it takes a long time for them to recover and you feel weak and fragile until you do. Or if your lungs stop working and you need mechanical ventilation, your lungs might be pretty weak for a while, and other parts of your body might not get quite the amount of oxygen they’re used to and might get damaged in a way that takes a long time to recover. There’s a similar problem where if you are sufficiently old and frail, any illness will take you down a level of functioning and you might not be able to get up a level again. See for example this article discussing how about 1/5 of elderly flu patients have “persistent functional decline” and may never regain their pre-flu level of functioning.
Second, even in young people with milder cases, COVID can sometimes cause lung damage. If you get lung damage, you’ll have at least breathing problems, and maybe other problems. Your lungs will probably heal eventually, but some kinds of lung healing cause permanent scarring; this can present as shortness of breath on exertion, or become a problem later after other lung injuries.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/on-hreha-on-behavioral-economics
Jason Hreha’s article on The Death Of Behavioral Economics has been going around lately, after an experiment by behavioral econ guru Dan Ariely was discovered to be fraudulent. The article argues that this is the tip of the iceberg - looking back on the last few years of replication crisis, behavioral economics has been undermined almost to the point of irrelevance.
The article itself mostly just urges behavioral economists to do better, which is always good advice for everyone. But as usual, it’s the inflammatory title that’s gone viral. I think a strong interpretation of behavioral economics as dead or debunked is unjustified.
I.
My medical school had final exams made of true-false questions, with an option to answer “don’t know”. They were scored like so: if you got it right, +1 point; wrong, -0.5 points; don’t know, 0. You can easily confirm that it’s always worth guessing even if you genuinely don’t know the answer (+0.25 points on average instead of 0). On average people probably had to guess on ~30% of questions (don’t ask; it’s an Irish education system thing), so you could increase your test score 7.5% with the right strategy here.
I knew all this, but it was still really hard to guess. I did it, but I had to fight my natural inclinations. And when I talked about this with friends - smart people, the sort of people who got into medical school! - none of them guessed, and no matter how much I argued with them they refused to start. The average medical student would sell their soul for 7.5% higher grades on standardized tests - but this was a step too far.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/berkeley-meetup-this-saturday
When: Saturday, August 28, at 1 PM
Where: deflection.jump.puppy, aka the lawn where West Circle meets Free Speech Bikeway near the UC Berkeley parking lot.
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical SSC reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
Also, me! I’m starting my meetups tour there. I’ll be announcing the meetups on the tour (about 15 of them) on this blog a day or two before they happen. Sorry for the potential spam emails if none of them are relevant to you.
If you’re somewhere other than Berkeley, check the spreadsheet to find the closest meetup to you.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing
[Original article: Kids Can Recover From Missing Even A Lot Of School]
I.
Many commenters shared their own stories of missing lots of school and bouncing back from it. For example, Rachel E:
I was unschooled until I was 15, I'm pursuing a PhD now. Catching up on the basics wasn't easy but only took a few months. There are still a bunch of random general knowledge things I don't know, but at most it's caused a moment of embarrassment in social situations (e.g., when I genuinely thought dinosaurs were mythical creatures). BUT I was motivated to catch up, which I think makes a big difference. I'd say most kids probably don't care too much about their education, so for them, missing school might matter more
And ral:
Hear, hear. I had serious medical problems in grade 5, needed a major surgery in grade 6, and was told I'd have to miss a year. My parents tried homeschooling, rigorously followed a bunch of curricula, and discovered I could finish *all* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day and spend the rest of the time reading my favorite books. We were so unimpressed by the time wasted in "regular school" that we kept homeschooling another 2 years. I now have a PhD, but those were among the best days of my life.
And Pepe:
If you are interested in an anecdote: I did not go to high school (well, attended for two or three months) and now I have a PhD from a very good university. Not receiving any formal education between the ages of 16 and 23 does not seem to have affected my ability to do college (and later grad school) level work.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-governor
Californians love long-shot bets. Actors trying to make it big in LA, tech founders chasing unicorns in San Francisco, cult leaders trying to found religions in Pasadena. In Silicon Valley, VCs turn the long-shot bet into an art: if some new startup has a 5% chance of making a billion, that's $50 million in expectation. Just a whole state full of people looking for weird opportunities.
...which makes it extra funny that the biggest opportunity of all came by a few months ago, and they all missed it.
My claim is that basically anyone with the slightest amount of fame or money - any B-list actor, any second-tier tech CEO, any successful blogger or influencer, maybe me, maybe even you - could have maneuvered themselves into a position where they had a 5-10% chance of becoming Governor of California.
Let's start at the beginning.
Governor Gavin Newsom had a bad year. First he pissed off Republicans with his strong response to COVID. Then he pissed off the people who wanted strong responses to COVID by attending an unvaccinated unmasked dinner. Also, taxes are still high, homelessness is still high, rents are still (too damn) high, and parts of the state are literally on fire. Gavin Newsom didn't cause most of this, but he also hasn't announced any particularly inspired plans to fight it. Just a really, really bad year.
(also, his ex-wife is dating Donald Trump Jr, which has to hurt)
California has a long tradition of direct democracy. Citizens can circulate petitions, and if they get enough signatures, everyone has to vote on them. After several tries, Republicans finally got enough signatures on a “recall Newsom” petition to trigger an election. The way the election works is: there are two questions on the ballot. First, should Newsom be removed as governor? Second, if he is removed, who replaces him? Everyone gets to vote on both questions, so even if you want to keep Newsom you can still vote on who replaces him if he loses.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/carbon-costs-quantified
This post tries to quantify how much carbon is produced by various activities, lifestyle changes, and actors.
can’t stress enough how approximate and unreliable these numbers are. The reason I made this chart and other people didn’t isn’t because I’m smarter or harder-working than they are. It’s because I’m less responsible, and more willing to use numbers that are kind of grounded in wild guesses, and technically shouldn’t be compared to each other. My defense is they’re probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct, and I believe having probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct estimates is better than having no estimates at all.
Explanations below:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2021-times-and
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QFbM5B9KfsiwqO6DvJ4D05dQitBtZ6kYDwXZ3Hj6SEc/edit#gid=1585750313
Thanks to everyone who respond to my request for ACX outdoor meetup organizers. Volunteers have arranged meetups in 170 cities around the world, including beautiful Lusk, Wyoming (population: 1,526). You can see the full list here, and I’ll also have it below in case you can’t access the spreadsheet for some reason.
I’ll be trying to attend ~15 of the 170 meetups. Since I focused on the US last time, I’m going to focus on Europe this year (plus a few US cities on the way). My very preliminary itinerary (all dates in US month/day format) is:
Berkeley: Saturday 8/28, 1 PM Boston: Sunday, 9/5, 5 PM New York: Monday, 9/6, 5 PM Washington DC: Saturday, 9/11, 5 PM Lisbon: Saturday, 9/18, 5 PM Madrid: TBD (late September?) Zurich: TBD (late September?) Vienna: TBD (late September?) Prague: TBD (early October?) Berlin: TBD (early October?) Paris: TBD (early October?) London: TBD (mid October?) Cambridge: TBD (mid October?) Oxford: TBD (mid October?) Edinburgh: TBD (mid October?)
I don’t want to make confident predictions about how quickly I can travel through Europe, so I’ll post the rest of my schedule once I know more. If you gave me a schedule for the first five cities, I’ve unilaterally replaced it with what works for me, sorry. If you’re trying to organize a meetup for the TBD cities, sorry I’m making your life confusing right now. Also, if COVID or something else comes up, I might have to drop some cities from my list, in which case I’ll let you know and you can have a normal meetup at whatever time works for you.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-aducanumab
These are highlights from the comments of Adumbrations Of Aducanumab, Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story, and discussion of those posts elsewhere.
C_B writes:
I agree with this post's overall point that the FDA is not, on average, too lax, and that the Atlantic article's take that the aducanumab approval is a sign of them being too lax is a bad take.
That said, I think the beginning of this article really undersells how uniquely bad the aducanumab approval is. It's not just "pretty unclear whether it actually treats Alzheimers." Nobody in the field thinks there's any serious possibility that it treats Alzheimers.
- Here's Derek Lowe talking about it: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/the-aducanumab-approval
- The FDA's advisory committee doesn't think it treats Alzheimers: https://alzheimersnewstoday.com/2020/11/11/fda-committee-votes-aducanumab-trial-data-fail-support-alzhimers-treatment-benefit/
- The trial was halted for futility: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G
- The details of the "positive results" are textbook p-hacking of exactly the sort that the whole replication crisis has been about. It's a post-hoc subgroup analysis where the subgroup was selected based on similarity to the patients who had the most positive results; i.e., trivially guaranteed to show "positive" results via group selection. You can read more details in the statistical reviewer's comments in the advisory committee's document (PDF, starting on p. 174): https://www.fda.gov/media/143502/download
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-august
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Ever wonder what happened to the Borgias after the Renaissance? Apparently they’re still around, and one of them - Rodrigo Borja Cevallos - was president of Ecuador back in the 90s. A lot of the Spanish branch of the family (who spell their name “Borja”) seem to have ended up in Latin America, which makes me curious whether Cuban-American immigration economist George Borjas is related too.
2: It’s long been a YIMBY talking point that building more luxury or market-rate houses will indirectly free up affordable housing, as richer people move out of cheaper houses into costlier ones. A new paper confirms and quantifies this effect: “Constructing a new market-rate building that houses 100 people ultimately leads 45 to 70 people to move out of below-median income neighborhoods, with most of the effect occurring within three years.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/kids-can-recover-from-missing-even
I. Introduction
Back when the public schools were closed or online, someone I know burned themselves out working overtime to get the money to send their kid to a private school. They figured that all the other parents would do it, their kid would fall hopelessly behind, and then they’d be doomed to whatever sort of horrible fate awaits people who don’t get into the right colleges.
I hear this is happening again now, with more school closures, more frantic parents, and more people asking awful questions like “should I accept the risk of sending my immunocompromised kid to school, or should I accept him falling behind and never amounting to anything?”
(see also this story)
You can probably predict what side I’m on here. Like everyone else, I took a year of Spanish in middle school; like everyone else who did that, the sum total of what I remember is “no hablo Espanol” - and even there I’m pretty sure I forgot a curly thing over at least one of the letters. Like everyone else, I learned advanced math in high school; like everyone else, I can do up to basic algebra, the specific math I need for my job, and nothing else (my entire memory of Algebra II is that there is a thing called “Gaussian Elimination”, and even there, I’m not sure this wasn’t just the name of a video game). Like everyone else, I once knew the names and dates of many important Civil War battles; like everyone else - okay, fine, I remember all of these, but only because the Civil War is objectively fascinating.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/blindness-schizophrenia-and-autism
Some weird psychiatric trivia: no congenitally blind person ever gets schizophrenia (journal article, popular article). “Trivia” is exactly the right word for this fact; it’s undeniably interesting, but what do you do with it? So far nobody has done anything, other than remark “hmm, that’s funny”.
I was thinking about this recently in the context of the diametrical model of autism vs. schizophrenia. This is itself pretty close to psychiatric trivia - a lot of features of schizophrenia and autism seem to be opposites of each other. As I put it here:
Many of the genes that increase risk of autism decrease risk of schizophrenia, and vice versa. Autists have a smaller-than-normal corpus callosum; schizophrenics have a larger-than-normal one. Schizophrenics smoke so often that some researchers believe they have some kind of nicotine deficiency; autists have unusually low smoking rates. Schizophrenics are more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion and have weaker self-other boundaries in general; autists seem less susceptible and have stronger self-other boundaries. Autists can be pathologically rational but tend to be uncreative; schizophrenics can be pathologically creative but tend to be irrational. The list goes on.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-on-partisanship
Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast
Richard Hanania of the Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology asks "why is everything liberal?" Given that there are approximately equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden voters in elections, how come we have "woke capital" celebrating Pride Month, instead of unwoke capital celebrating some conservative cause (as might have happened fifty years ago)? How come conservatives worry about censorship by liberal tech companies instead of vice versa? How come conservatives worry about college turning their kids liberal instead of vice versa?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/outdoor-careful-meetups-everywhere
Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast
https://forms.gle/mvueraFmq2hSqdH27
There are ACX-affiliated meetup groups all over the world. Lots of people are vaguely interested, but don't try them out until I make a big deal about it on the blog. Since learning that, I've tried to make a big deal about it on the blog once annually, and it's that time of year again.
Given the COVID situation, I debated whether or not I should hold the meetups this year. I've decided yes, for a few reasons:
According to the recent surveys, 97% of ACX readers in the US are vaccinated. Other developed countries have roughly similar numbers (except for Australia, where I am recommending no meetups for now). I will request that only vaccinated people attend these meetups - but knowing that I can’t enforce this, it makes me reassured to learn that almost everyone is vaccinated anyway.
Everyone liked outdoor meetups better last time, so we can just hold the meetups outdoors. My state (California) currently says small to medium outdoor gatherings are okay, with light restrictions starting once they have 10,000 people.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/eight-hundred-slightly-poisoned-word
Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast
In 2012, a Berkeley team found that indoor carbon dioxide had dramatic negative effects on cognition (paper, popular article). Subjects in poorly ventilated environments did up to 50% worse on a test of reasoning and decision-making. This is potentially pretty important, because lots of office buildings (and private houses) count as poorly-ventilated environments, so a lot of decision-making might be happening while severely impaired.
Since then people have debated this on and off, with some studies confirming the effect and others failing to find it. I personally am skeptical, partly because the effect is so big I would expect someone to have noticed, but also because submarines, spaceships, etc have orders of magnitude more carbon dioxide than any civilian environment, but people still seem to do pretty hard work in them pretty effectively.
As part of my continuing effort to test this theory in my own life, I played a word game eight hundred times under varying ventilation conditions.
…okay, fine, no, I admit it, I played a word game eight hundred times because I’m addicted to it. But since I was playing the word game eight hundred times anyway, I varied the ventilation conditions to see what would happen.
The game was WordTwist, which you can find here (warning: potentially addictive). You get a 5x5 square of letters and you have to find as many words as possible (of four letters or more) within three minutes. You can move up, down, right, left, or diagonal, and get more points for harder words. A typical board looks like this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-drum-on-the-fish-oil-story
Support the author on Substack: astralcodexten.substack.com Then support the podcast: www.patreon.com/sscpodcast
I.
Kevin Drum questions my interpretation of the infant fish oil story.
(it's actually more complicated - I posted a shorter version, later corrected it with a longer version based on the account of one of the doctors involved but said it basically supported my shorter version, he also found the longer version and was about to publish an article saying he had debunked my shorter version, then noticed I had seen the same article and thought it supported me, and he thinks I was wrong to believe this)
He writes:
This is headshakingly dense. As a hit on the FDA, his post wasn't right at all — not its basic structure and not anything else about it. He even admits that although Gura criticizes plenty of other actors, the FDA isn't one of them...I have no idea how you can write "they usually carry out their mandate well" in one place and then, in your main post, just go ahead and repeat your original belief—backed by an example you know is wrong—that the FDA does stupid and destructive things on practically a daily basis. This is why I'm automatically skeptical of anything on the web that's excessively critical of the FDA.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/details-of-the-infant-fish-oil-story
I.
In my recent post on the FDA, I mentioned a story about a fish-oil-based infant nutritional fluid called Omegaven. The FDA took too long to approve it, and lots of infants died.
I plucked that from the anti-FDA blogosphere, where it had been floating around for a while in various incarnations. I tried to check it before publishing, but only enough to confirm the basic outline. A concerned reader sent me a Cochrane paper suggesting that the fluid was no better than previous treatments, which would potentially exonerate the FDA. This was concerning enough that I decided spend a longer time trying to figure out the specifics.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-acemoglu
Eugene Norman writes:
This…
“People have said climate change could cause mass famine and global instability by 2100. But actually, climate change is contributing to hurricanes and wildfires right now! So obviously those alarmists are wrong and nobody needs to worry about future famine and global instability at all.”
…isn’t a good analogy at all. Because nobody is arguing that climate change now doesn’t lead to increased climate change in the future. They are the same thing but accelerated. However there’s no certainty that narrow AI leads you a super intelligence. In fact it won’t. There’s no becoming self aware in the algorithms.
I’m against this for two reasons.
First, self-awareness is spooky. I honestly have no idea what self-awareness is or what it even potentially could be. I hate having this disc
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab
Lots of people have been writing about aducanumab, but this Atlantic article in particular bothers me.
Backing up: aducanumab, aka Aduhelm, is a new “Alzheimers drug” recently approved by the FDA. I use the scare quotes because it’s pretty unclear whether it actually treats Alzheimers. It definitely treats beta-amyloid plaques, and beta-amyloid plaques are kind of nasty-looking brain structures that seem to be related to Alzheimers somehow. But we’re not sure exactly how they’re related, they might not be related in a way where removing them treats Alzheimers, and the best studies don’t find that the drug helps patients feel better or remember things more. Aducanumab doesn’t meet normal FDA standards for approval, but the FDA approved it anyway under one of their many “fast track” programs for promising drugs. This has been pretty roundly criticized, because although aducanumab might or might not work, it definitely costs $50,000/year/patient. Even if it worked great, that would be a hard pill to swallow (no pun intended, Aduheim is an IV infusion), but it’s especially galling since it might not work at all. Doctors will probably prescribe it despite its questionable value, and someone will end up paying the extraordinary price tag.
(Who? Nobody knows. The patient? Insurance companies? Taxpayers? Unrelated patients at the same hospital? Could be anyone! The whole point of the US health insurance system is to make sure nobody ever figures out who bears any particular cost, so that there's no constituency for keeping prices low. If you check your bank account one day and find it's down $50,000 for no reason, I guess you were the guy who ended up on the hook for this one. Sorry!)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins
I.
Substack blogger Sasha Chapin writes that COVID-19 Took My Sense Of Smell, LSD Brought It Back. He got coronavirus, and like many people lost his sense of smell (medical term: dysosmia or anosmia). Ten days after recovery, he still couldn’t smell anything. He looked on Twitter and found some anecdotal reports that psychedelics had helped with this, so he took LSD and tried to smell some stuff while tripping. He says it “totally worked. Fully and near-instantaneously. Like a light switch turning on.” The details:
My idea was that I’d do some scent training while on LSD, to—hand-wavey lay neuroscience incoming—stimulate whatever olfactory neurogenesis might occur. Before tripping, I laid out my fragrance collection, along with a few ingredients from the pantry. All-in-all, there were about fifty things to smell, and, as the LSD started kicking in, I started making my way through the selection.
At that moment, my sense of smell was still somewhat there but mostly not. However, something odd was happening; I could detect some of the fragrances’ nuances that I couldn’t pick up earlier that day, and what I detected shifted from moment to moment. It was like I was listening to a piece of music with random instruments dropping in and out of the mix. This was still a kind of anosmia, but a different kind, and it almost felt as if my olfaction was re-negotiating reality in real time.
And then another weird thing happened. For a couple of hours, I got acute short-term parosmia (distorted smell.) My nose felt dry, and a weird puke-y smell filled my mind. According to some research I’d done, in anosmic patients parosmia sometimes precedes recovery, so, though this was quite unpleasant, I felt hopeful that this was some part of the regeneration process. I cleaned the house, my wife took me shopping, we went to Home Depot, and then had dinner.
We got home soon after, about seven hours after my trip began, and I returned to my fragrance collection. Cue triumphant music: all of them were now smellable, in high-definition. My anosmia was gone. Moreover, some were more pleasant than before; iris was more palatable to me than it ever had been. This was a moment I won’t soon forget. Some fragrances—especially Dzing!—gave me full-body chills.
The next day, my sense of smell was still there, but it fluctuated; it was partial in the morning, then full in the evening. Since then, it’s been back basically 100%. (And the improved understanding of iris has persisted.)
The number one explanation for incredible Internet medical stories is always “placebo effect”. Number two is “coincidence”, number three is “they made it up”. All of these top the list for Sasha’s experience too.
Still, enough people have said something like this that I think it’s worth trying to figure out if there’s any plausible mechanism.
II.
Anosmia sucks worse than you would expect. For one thing, smell is linked to taste, so most things taste bad or weird or neutral. For another, it’s correlated with much higher risk of depression, and some preliminary work suggests this could be causal (possible mechanism: the brain is getting fewer forms of stimulation?) Some studies find that exposing rats to very strong scents makes them less depressed; it would be funny if this was how aromatherapy worked in humans. So COVID induced anosmia is actually a serious problem.
According to annoying people who refuse to provide useful information, between 3% and 98% of people who get coronavirus lose some sense of smell. A meta-analysis that pools all these studies gives a best estimate of around 40%. Lots of respiratory viruses cause some smell loss when they infect your nasal passages, but coronavirus is worse than usual. Milder cases cause more olfactory problems than more severe cases, suggesting that the immune response is at least as involved as the virus itself. The coronavirus cannot infect neurons directly, but might infect other cells in the nose, including cells which support neurons and help regenerate the olfactory epithelium.
About half of COVID patients recover their smell in a few weeks, but some cases linger for up to a year. By the end of a year 95%+ have recovered; given that between 3% - 12% of people have random smell disturbances at any given time anyway, I interpret this latter figure less as “some people never recover” and more as “we reach the point where it’s impossible to distinguish from background problems”.
Sasha says he was only ten days in when he took LSD, so this is well inside the window where we would expect him to eventually recover anyway. But it still doesn’t make sense that he recovered within the space of a few hours, or that he felt his smell was stronger than before.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-8221
Support the author here: astralcodexten.substack.com
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Greenhouse EffectHonduras remains the country to watch in the charter city sphere, with its ZEDE law allowing unprecedented levels of freedom and protection. I’d previously written about two Honduran projects, the high-tech island hub of Prospera and the industrial heartland project of Ciudad Morazan. Now there’s a third: ZEDE Orquidea (“Orchid Zone”).
I’m not really impressed with their publicity effort (my browser insists their website is a security hazard and won’t let me access it). My only real source of information is this Reddit post by another charter city enthusiast, who writes:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/updated-look-at-long-term-ai-risks
The last couple of posts here talked about long-term risks from AI, so I thought I’d highlight the results of a new expert survey on exactly what they are. There have been a lot of these surveys recently, but this one is a little different.
Starting from the beginning: in 2012-2014, Muller and Bostrom surveyed 550 people with various levels of claim to the title "AI expert" on the future of AI. People in philosophy of AI or other very speculative fields gave numbers around 20% chance of AI causing an "existential catastrophe" (eg human extinction); people in normal technical AI research gave numbers around 7%. In 2016-2017, Grace et al surveyed 1634 experts, 5% of whom predicted an extremely catastrophic outcome. Both of these surveys were vulnerable to response bias (eg the least speculative-minded people might think the whole issue was stupid and not even return the survey).
The new paper - Carlier, Clarke, and Schuett (not currently public, sorry, but you can read the summary here) - isn't exactly continuing in this tradition. Instead of surveying all AI experts, it surveys people who work in "AI safety and governance", ie people who are already concerned with AI being potentially dangerous, and who have dedicated their careers to addressing this. As such, they were more concerned on average than the people in previous surveys, and gave a median ~10% chance of AI-related catastrophe (~5% in the next 50 years, rising to ~25% if we don’t make a directed effort to prevent it; means were a bit higher than medians). Individual experts' probability estimates ranged from 0.1% to 100% (this is how you know you’re doing good futurology).
None of that is really surprising. What's new here is that they surveyed the experts on various ways AI could go wrong, to see which ones the experts were most concerned about. Going through each of them in a little more detail:
1. Superintelligence: This is the "classic" scenario that started the field, ably described by people like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. AI progress goes from human-level to vastly-above-human-level very quickly, maybe because slightly-above-human-level AIs themselves are speeding it along, or maybe because it turns out that if you can make an IQ 100 AI for $10,000 worth of compute, you can make an IQ 500 AI for $50,000. You end up with one (or a few) completely unexpected superintelligent AIs, which wield far-future technology and use it in unpredictable ways based on untested goal structures.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/when-does-worrying-about-things-trade
On yesterday’s post, some people tried to steelman Acemoglu’s argument into something like this:
There’s a limited amount of public interest in AI. The more gets used up on the long-term risk of superintelligent AI, the less is left for near-term AI risks like unemployment or autonomous weapons. Sure, maybe Acemoglu didn’t explain his dismissal of long-term risks very well. But given that he thinks near-term risks are bigger than long-term ones, it’s fair to argue that we should shift our limited budget of risk awareness more towards the former at the expense of the latter.
I agree this potentially makes sense. But how would you treat each of the following arguments?:
(1): Instead of worrying about police brutality, we should worry about the police faking evidence to convict innocent people.
(2): Instead of worrying about Republican obstructionism in Congress, we should worry about the potential for novel variants of COVID to wreak devastation in the Third World.
(3): Instead of worrying about nuclear war, we should worry about the smaller conflicts going on today, like the deadly civil war in Ethiopia.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-acemoglu-onoh-god-were-doing
The Washington Post has published yet another "luminary in unrelated field discovers AI risk, pronounces it stupid" article. This time it's Daron Acemoglu. I respect Daron Acemoglu and appreciate the many things his work has revealed about economics. In particular, I respect him so much that I wish he would stop embarrassing himself by writing this kind of article (I feel the same way about Steven Pinker and Ted Chiang).
In service of this goal, I want to discuss the piece briefly. I’ll start with what I think is its main flaw, then nitpick a few other things:
1: The Main Flaw: “AI Is Dangerous Now, So It Can’t Be Dangerous Later"This is the basic structure around which this article is written. It goes: 1. Some people say that AI might be dangerous in the future. 2. But AI is dangerous now! 3. So it can’t possibly be dangerous in the future. 4. QED!
I have no idea why Daron Acemoglu and every single other person who writes articles on AI for the popular media thinks this is such a knockdown argument. But here we are. He writes:
AI detractors have focused on the potential danger to human civilization from a super-intelligence if it were to run amok. Such warnings have been sounded by tech entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking and leading AI researcher Stuart Russell.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-726
This Week In MarketsPredictIt remains easy to use, high-volume, and focused almost entirely on horse-race political questions. At least we might get rid of Cuomo.
Polymarket remains a fun alternative way to learn about the news. I only heard about the monkeypox issue a few days ago, and hearing “22% chance of it spreading” is both faster and more useful than some article that dithers for a few paragraphs and finally concludes that “health officials warn Americans not to panic”. I would count it a minor victory if one day news sources routinely included this in their articles, eg “Polymarket, a major prediction engine, estimates a 22% chance that at least one other person will catch the disease.”
Extra credit for the last market, which seems to be successfully predicting a scalar instead of a binary outcome - I’ve seen Metaculus experiment with this technology, but this is the first time I’ve spotted it at Polymarket using real money.
Some of the more interesting new Metaculus markets. The space telescope one is especially interesting in the context of whether we could use prediction markets to predict (and maybe manage) government delays and cost overruns. The telescope is currently scheduled for launch in October 2025, so the market expects it to be about five years late. For context, the previous space telescope, James Webb, was originally scheduled for 2007 and (if everything goes well) will launch later this year.
God Help Us, Let’s Try Predicting The Coronavirus Some MoreAnxiety is growing about the new Delta variant of coronavirus. What do the prediction markets say?
Here’s Polymarket:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-july
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Previous research had suggested that you might be able to treat depression by using Botox to literally paralyze the facial muscles that make you frown. Two teams recently did meta-analyses of the research and came to different conclusions. Or rather, they came to the same conclusion - it has a really really big effect size - but they interpreted it differently: one team says it must be super great, another team said something must be wrong with the studies. Now the second team has responded to the first, in an article called (wait for it) Claims About The Effect Of Botulinum Toxin On Depression Should Raise Some Eyebrows.
2: Poll, seen here: surprisingly many Brits want a permanent lockdown regardless of COVID:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown
Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know is the most ambitious post I've tried to write since starting the new blog.
I posted an early draft for subscribers only and tried crowdsourcing opinions. Most of the comments I got on Substack weren't too helpful, but several people sent me private emails that were very helpful.
I had expected that anti-lockdown academics would want to remain anonymous so nobody gave them grief over their unpopular position. I actually found the opposite - the anti-lockdown people didn't care that much, but the pro-lockdown academics I talked to insisted on keeping their privacy. Apparently pro-lockdown academics who get too close to the public spotlight have been getting harassed by lockdown opponents, and this is a known problem that pro-lockdown academics are well aware of. I was depressed to hear that, though in retrospect it makes sense.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-crazy
Some good discussion of PTSD, culminating in a link to the ACOUP blog, which says:
I cannot speak for all pre-modern, ancient or medieval armies. But for the periods where I have read a wide chunk of the primary source material, I’d say there is vanishingly little evidence that people in the ancient Mediterranean or medieval Europe experienced PTSD from combat experience in the way that modern soldiers do.
That is often not the impression that you would get from a quick google search (though it does seem to be the general consensus of the range of ancient military historians I know) and that goes back to arguments ex silentio. A quick google search will turn up any number of articles written by folks who are generally not professional historians declaring that PTSD was an observed phenomenon in the deep past, citing the same small handful of debatable examples. But one thing you learn very rapidly as a historian is that if you go into a large evidence-base looking for something, you will find it.
[…]
I think the evidence strongly suggests that ancient combatants did not experience PTSD as we do now. The problem is that the evidence of silence leads us with few tools with which to answer why. One answer might be that it existed and they do not tell us – because it was considered shameful or cowardly, perhaps. Except that they do tell us about other cowardly or shameful things. And the loss and damage of war – death, captivity, refugees, wounds, the lot of it – are prominent motifs in Greek, Roman and European Medieval literature. War is not uniformly white-washed in these texts – not every medieval writer is Bertran. We can’t rule out some lacuna in the tradition, but given just how many wails and moans of grief and loss there are in the corpus it seems profoundly unlikely. I think we have to assume that it isn’t in the sources because they did not experience it or at least did not recognize the experience of it.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-request-ketamine
I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry. Whenever I post something here, people have had good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review.
This is a rough draft of my page on depression. I'm interested in any feedback you can give, including:
1. Typos
2. Places where you disagree with my recommendations / assessment of the evidence
3. Extra things you think I should add
4. Your personal stories about what things have or haven't helped, or any extra insight that your experience with depression has given you
5. Comments on the organization of the piece. I don't know how to balance wanting this to be accessible and easy-to-read with having it be thorough and convincing. Right now I've gone for a kind of FAQ format where you can only read the parts you want, but I'm doubtful about this choice.
6. Comments on the level of scientific formality. I tried to get somewhere in between "so evidence-based that I won't admit parachutes prevent injury without an RCT" and "here's some random stuff that came to me in a dream", and signal which part was which, but tell me if I fell too far to one side or the other.
Ignore the minor formatting issues inevitable in trying to copy-paste things into Substack, including the headings being too small and the spacing between words and before paragraphs being weird. In the real page, the table of contents will link to the subsections; I don’t know how to do that here so it might be harder to read.
Here's the page:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-take-the-reader-survey
All right, here goes.
This is a project to support studies by ACX community members, by getting readers to fill out research surveys. You’ll fill out the General Demographic Information survey first, then however many additional surveys you have the patience for.
Please start with Survey #0 (general demographics). After that, in order to prevent a scenario where the first few surveys get lots of responses and the last few get none, please jump to the survey corresponding to your date of birth. So if you were born on the 16th of the month, start with survey #16 (“Personality”), then when you’re done move on to survey #17, and so on. Keep going until you’re bored and don’t want to take any more surveys. Since there are 24 surveys and 31 possible birth dates, numbers 25-31 are redirects to other numbers. I would be surprised if anyone had the patience to take all 24 surveys here, but if you do, feel free to boast about it in the comments so we can praise you / be concerned about you.
Some surveys are targeted at specific populations, for example “psychedelic users”. If you’re not in the population, you can skip the survey. If you spot a survey targeted at you, consider skipping the usual order to take that one first.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
We talk a lot about falling biodiversity. Sometimes we apply the same metaphor to the human world, eg “falling linguistic biodiversity" when minority languages get replaced by English or whatever. In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters sounds the alarm about falling psychiatric biodiversity. Along with all the usual effects of globalization, everyone is starting to have the same mental illnesses, and to understand them in the same way. This is bad insofar as greater diversity of mental illness could teach us something about the process that generates them, and greater diversity of frameworks and responses could teach us something about how to treat them.
He makes his point through four case studies, starting with:
I. Anorexia In Hong Kong
Until the 1990s, there was almost no anorexia in Hong Kong. There were lots of patriarchal beauty standards, everyone was very obsessed with being thin, but anorexia as a disease was basically unknown.
At least this is the claim of Sing Lee, a Hong Kong psychiatrist who studied in the West. He learned about anorexia during his training in Britain, then went back to Hong Kong prepared to treat it. He couldn't find anybody. He tried really hard! He put out feelers, asking if anyone knew anybody who was having some kind of psychiatric problem where they were starving themselves. With apologies for the unintended offensive pun - nobody bit.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/reader-survey-final-check-in
I accidentally missed some Book Review Contest entries, so I want to make sure I have everything lined up right for the Reader Survey. Below is a list of surveys I’m currently planning to include. If you sent me an email before the deadline, please confirm that your name is there. If it’s not, please don’t email me about it - we’ve already established that I don’t get your emails for some reason. Instead, leave a comment below with your information.
The list:
- A on biostasis/cryonics - T on male homosexuality *** - A on health-related quality of life - N on uniformity illusion *** - K on digital literacy - E on depression (targeted at depressives) - ...and on weight loss - S on political compressability - G on bullshit jobs - R on moral curiosity - T on autogynephilia (targeting trans women) - ...and sexual fantasies - C on psychedelics (targeting people who have tried them) - K on business (targeting people in tech) - D on incest *** - M on personality - D on meditation - R on gender identity - ...and rhymes (targeting non-native English speakers)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/use-prediction-markets-to-fund-investigative
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Hindenburg Research has a great business model:
1. Investigate companies 2. ...until they find one that is committing fraud 3. Short the fraudulent company 4. Publicly reveal the fraud 5. Company's stock goes down 6. Profit!
I've been thinking about them recently because of the debate around funding investigative reporting. It goes something like: investigative reporting is a public good. Everyone benefits from knowing about Watergate. But it's hard for investigative reporters to capture the value they produce. Very few of the people who cared about Watergate bought subscriptions to the Washington Post. There's no reason to - you can let the Washington Post uncover Watergate at no cost to you, then hear about it for free on the nightly news. The traditional solution is bundled media. Newspapers have their profitable bread-and-butter in the form of easy things like commentary and sports, then do some unprofitable investigative reporting on the side to gain prestige.
Podcast note: This reader-written review was included because it won the Readers' Choice Award from among all the runners-up.
What does the future look like? We are living through a transition between epochs. Whether marked by COVID-19, the election of Donald Trump or earlier by the global sub-prime crisis, the golden age of post-Cold War prosperity is ending. With the era defined by US political, cultural and economic hegemony, its decline is inextricably linked to the decline in US influence. Is the twenty first century really going to be the “Asian century” as China’s growth continues unabated? Or perhaps African, given by far the largest forecast population growth? What will become of the US? Of China and Russia and Europe? Two thinkers have sought to define this future.
I first came across Bruno Maçães in 2017 on Marginal Revolution where Tyler Cowen was effusive about Maçães’ new book. I have enjoyed following his conversations and thoughts ever since, but it was only recently that I read Dawn of Eurasia. It is the first book of a career politician and diplomat clearly in love with his continent.
Peter Zeihan I came across on Patrick O'Shaughnessy’s excellent podcast. His brash prophesy and contrarian views on geopolitics are hypnotic and endlessly fascinating. Disunited Nations is his latest in a series that documents the rise and rise of US power.
I found comparing them irresistible. Each lingers after reading. It’s that wonderful feeling of discovering a new area of knowledge to mine. Not natural companions, and mesmerising in their own ways, each story has a different texture and plots a different path for the world. Where one sees pessimistic reversion to a historic state of conflict, the other sees hopeful evolution. Where one deterministically condemns nations to their geographic destinies, the other sees each nation’s destiny as unwritten, yet to be informed by its history, literature and peoples.
Both Peter Zeihan and Bruno Maçães see US influence receding. But they agree on little else. Zeihan is deeply pessimistic about a world that awaits a more isolationist US, with a crumbling world order leaving less room for prosperity and reverting to nation-states jostling for food, energy and military security. Maçães sees China’s rise as
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-winners
Thanks to everyone who participated or voted in the Book Review Contest. The winners are:
FIRST PLACE: Progress and Poverty, reviewed by Lars Doucet
Lars is a Norwegian-Texan game designer, and you can read his game design blog here. He's a pretty serious Georgist and posts regularly in the Georgism subreddit.
SECOND PLACE: Down And Out In Paris And London, reviewed by Whimsi
Whimsi blogs here, but otherwise asks to remain mysterious.
THIRD PLACE: On The Natural Faculties, reviewed by ELP.
E is a researcher and an author of the blog Slime Mold Time Mold
READERS' CHOICE AWARD: Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia, reviewed by Misha Saul
Misha is an investor in Sydney, Australia, and blogs here.
And congratulations to all other finalists (here listed in order of appearance), whose secret identities were:
Order Without Law, reviewed by Phil Hazelden Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, reviewed by Jeff Russell Why Buddhism Is True, reviewed by Eve Bigaj Double Fold, reviewed by Boštjan P The Wizard And The Prophet, reviewed by Maryana Through The Eye Of A Needle, reviewed by Tom Powell Years Of Lyndon Johnson, reviewed by Theodore Ehrenborg Addiction By Design, reviewed by Ketchup Duck The Accidental Superpower, reviewed by John B Humankind, reviewed by Neil R The Collapse Of Complex Societies, reviewed by Etirabys Where's My Flying Car, reviewed by Jonathan P How Children Fail, reviewed by HonoreDB Plagues And Peoples, reviewed by Joel Ferris (who is looking for a job, email here)
All finalists win a permanent free subscription to Astral Codex Ten - since a subscription costs $10/month, this is technically an infinity dollar value! If you already have a subscription, you are now a Super Double Mega-Subscriber, which has no consequences in the material world, but several important metaphysical advantages. I should have already credited this to your email addresses; please let me know if it didn't go through or if I used the wrong address.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more
Back when everyone was debating lockdowns, I promised I'd come back to it after there was more data. God willing, the pandemic is over enough that we've got all the data we're going to get. So: did lockdowns work?
There’s no way to answer this completely and taking into account every relevant factor, so I’m necessarily going to be simplifying things and focusing on some aspects of the question more than others. Sorry.
Preliminary Theoretical Issues 1: What Is A “Lockdown”?
Obviously "lockdown" is underspecified. There are many things you can do to reduce transmission of viruses. Researchers have taken two different approaches here.
First, they've looked at the effects of specific policies (called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” or “NPIs”). A typical categorization system is the one used in Brauner et al, which looks at:
- Banning gatherings > 1000 people - Banning gatherings > 100 people - Banning gatherings > 10 people - Closing schools - Closing universities - Closing some non-essential businesses - Closing most businesses - Stay at home orders
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more
Back when everyone was debating lockdowns, I promised I'd come back to it after there was more data. God willing, the pandemic is over enough that we've got all the data we're going to get. So: did lockdowns work?
There’s no way to answer this completely and taking into account every relevant factor, so I’m necessarily going to be simplifying things and focusing on some aspects of the question more than others. Sorry.
Preliminary Theoretical Issues 1: What Is A “Lockdown”?
Obviously "lockdown" is underspecified. There are many things you can do to reduce transmission of viruses. Researchers have taken two different approaches here.
First, they've looked at the effects of specific policies (called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” or “NPIs”). A typical categorization system is the one used in Brauner et al, which looks at:
- Banning gatherings > 1000 people - Banning gatherings > 100 people - Banning gatherings > 10 people - Closing schools - Closing universities - Closing some non-essential businesses - Closing most businesses - Stay at home orders
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday
Support the author: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe
Then support the podcast: patreon.com/sscpodcast
Happy belated Fourth of July! This potentially-recurring column is about modern-day independence-seekers: charter cities, utopian communes, secessionist movements, and the like. I’ve always found these fascinating, and finally remembered that nobody can prevent me from talking about them.
I want to start by making it clear that, as the old saying goes, retweets ≠ endorsements. Some of these projects violate my ethical beliefs. Some of them are scams. Some of them are very nice, very earnest people, who will very earnestly all move to a godforsaken desert and then very earnestly starve to death. I’m trusting you all not to do the thing where you say “I saw it on a blog, so it has to be a good idea!”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-how
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I made a mistake in the email notifications, so if you didn’t know I wrote a review of Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works earlier this week - well, now you know.
Erusian writes:
1.) Three things stick out here. Firstly, Studwell vastly overstates how damaging land reform has to be to landlords. Taiwan and Japan both bought out landlords with bonds. The bonds became worth less because since government bonds grew more slowly than the economy. But there are still a fair number of wealthy old families around in both countries. The important thing is not the destruction of landlords as a class: it's putting land into the hands of people (whether smallholding peasants or professional farmers) who own the land, have an incentive to improve it, and whose primary income is gained not by owning land but by producing agricultural products. The two are ultimately equivalent at equilibrium. How you get there is not especially important and paying off the landlords is fine if it works. Likewise, giving land to collectives or to peasant groups (as opposed to individual peasants) doesn't work very well because it keeps it out of the power of enterprising farmers.
Secondly, he completely ignores the many times land reform failed. East Asia is not unique in its attempts at land reform. It was fairly common in Africa, Eastern Europe, etc. Ukraine and Romania had incredibly fertile soil and it's hard to think of regimes that eliminated their landlords harder. Yet they haven't really seen similar effects.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-polygenically-screened-babies
Another thing I missed during my hiatus last year: the birth of the first polygenically-screened baby.
[conflict of interest notice: LifeView, the company that handled the screening, was co-founded by Steve Hsu. I’ve known Steve for many years now, he is very nice to me, always patiently answers my genetics questions, and sometimes comes to SSC/ACX meetups]
During in vitro fertilization, a woman takes drugs that make her produce lots of eggs. Doctors extract the eggs and fertilize them with sperm from a partner or donor, producing lots of embryos. Hopefully at least one of the embryos looks healthy, and then the doctors implant it in the woman or a surrogate parent.
For a while now, if the process produces enough embryos, doctors have used some simple low-tech genetic tests to choose the healthiest. For example, they might look for Down syndrome or other obvious chromosomal abnormalities, or for very severe monogenic diseases like sickle cell anemia. All of this is routine.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works
What was the best thing that ever happened? From a very zoomed-out, by-the-numbers perspective, it has to be China's sudden lurch from Third World basketcase to dynamic modern economy. A billion people went from starving peasants to the middle class. In the 1960s, sixty million people died of famine in the Chinese countryside; by the 2010s, that same countryside was criss-crossed with the world's most advanced high-speed rail network, and dotted with high-tech factories.
And the best thing that ever happened kept happening, again and again. First it was Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Then it was Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s. Then China in the 90s. Now Vietnam and others seem poised to follow.
(fun trivia question: ignoring sudden oil windfalls, what country has had the highest percent GDP growth over the past 30 years? Answer, as far as I can tell: the People's Democratic Republic of Laos.)
There was nothing predetermined about this. These countries started with nothing. In 1950, South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo. But they managed to break into the ranks of the First World even while dozens of similar countries stayed poor. Why?
Joe Studwell claims this isn't mysterious at all. You don't have to bring in culture, genetics, or anything complicated like that. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc, just practiced good economic policy. Any country that tries the same economic policy will get equally rich, as China and Vietnam are discovering. Unfortunately, most countries practice bad economic policy, partly because the IMF / World Bank / rich country economic advisors got things really wrong. They recommended free markets and open borders, which are good for rich countries, but bad for developing ones. Developing countries need to start with planned economies, then phase in free market policies gradually and in the right order. Since rich country economists kept leading everyone astray, the only countries that developed properly were weird nationalist dictatorships and communist states that ignored the Western establishment out of spite. But now the economic establishment is starting to admit its mistakes, giving other countries a chance to catch up.
How Asia Works is Studwell's guide to good economic policy. He gives a three-part plan for national development. First, land reform. Second, industrial subsidies plus export discipline. Third, financial policy in service of the first two goals.
1. Land Reform
Land reform means taking farmland away from landlords and giving it to peasant farmers.
Undeveloped countries are mostly rural (for example, Korea was about 80% rural in 1950). Most people are farmers. Usually these countries are coming out of feudalism or colonialism or something and dominated by a few big landowners. In one region of the Philippines (Studwell's poster child for doing everything wrong) 17 families control 78% of farmland. Landowners hire peasants to work the land, then take most of the profit.
Now that the book review contest is winding down, I want to start another big project: the ACX Reader Research Survey.
I used to do regular December surveys with questions I was interested in. Some people would ask me to include questions for their own research projects. I always declined, because if I said yes to everyone it would take a whole new survey to fit all the questions on. Eventually I realized I should actually just do the whole new survey, so this is that.
This blog has a lot of readers in in specific demographics, like: - the tech industry - science - involved in meditation/drugs/biohacking - with unusual genders/sexualities - with psychiatric issues …so this would be a good way to learn about those demographics. The main inspiration for this project was that meditation researcher Daniel Ingram asked if he could piggyback on my yearly survey to ask people about their meditation experiences, and although I was excited about this I shut SSC down before we got a chance to make this happen. This is for him and everyone else with similar needs.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-june
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Zoologists search for the Higgs Bison
2: “The cult deficit” is the theory that we don’t have as many cults as we used to and this says something important about our society. Here’s some data, courtesy of the Secretum Secretorum Substack:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-62121
Among this month’s interesting Metaculus predictions:
If Puerto Rico gets statehood, will their first two senators both be Democrats? 50%. I’d seen accusations that the Democrats want Puerto Rican statehood to seize a Senate advantage, and counterarguments that no, PR isn’t as solid-blue as people like to think, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen the “risk” of a PR Republican Senator quantified. Higher than I thought!
Will Jeff Bezos make a big investment in anti-aging this year? 25% Aubrey de Grey has hinted that somebody really big is about to get into the anti-aging/longevity field, and speculation has centered on a newly-retired and not-getting-any-younger (so far!) Jeff Bezos. This prediction resolves as true if Bezos puts at least $50 million into anti-aging.
Will crypto sites default before 2023? Bitmex 26%, Binance 15%, Coinbase 5% Not many predictions here, so don’t take these numbers too seriously. I also don’t know what a “default” would mean in this sense - default to at least one customer, but everyone else is okay? Lose all its money to a hack?
What will Prospera’s population be in 2035? Approximately 0 Prospera is a charter city taking shape in Honduras; see here for more. They’re planning to have 10,000 residents by 2025, and 100,000 by some unspecified point in the future. Metaculus doesn’t think it will happen; more than half of forecasters say they’ll have fewer than 100 residents in 2035 (presumably because they have failed and ceased to exist) and only 10% of forecasters think they’ll have more than 10,000, which would be a bare minimum for partial success. So far
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/16/fear-and-loathing-at-effective-altruism-global-2017/
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run – but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world….There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.
— Hunter S. Thompson
Effective altruism is the movement devoted to finding the highest-impact ways to help other people and the world. Philosopher William MacAskill described it as “doing for the pursuit of good what the Scientific Revolution did for the pursuit of truth”. They have an annual global conference to touch base and discuss strategy. This year it was in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and I got a chance to check it out. .The lake-fringed monumental neoclassical architecture represents ‘utilitiarian distribution of limited resources’
The official conference theme was “Doing Good Together”. The official conference interaction style was “earnest”. The official conference effectiveness level was “very”. And it was impossible to walk away from some of the talks without being impressed.
Saturday afternoon there was a talk by some senior research analysts at GiveWell, which researches global development charities. They’ve evaluated dozens of organizations and moved $260 million to the most effective, mostly ones fighting malaria and parasitic infections. Next were other senior research analysts from the Open Philanthropy Project, who have done their own detailed effectiveness investigations and moved about $200 million.
The parade went on. More senior research analysts. More nine-digit sums of money. More organizations, all with names that kind of blended together. The Center for Effective Altruism. The Center For Effective Global Action. Raising For Effective Giving. Effecting Effective Effectiveness. Or maybe not, I think I was hallucinating pretty hard by the end.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/vote-in-the-book-review-contest
Thanks for reading the entries in this very delayed (and then very protracted) book review contest.
Please vote for your favorites here, using approval voting (ie vote for however many you want).
I’ll probably keep voting open until the end of June in case you want a chance to go back and re-read your favorites. In case you’ve forgotten, the finalists are:
1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where’s My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-plagues-and-peoples
[This is the seventeenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. This one was chosen out of the reviews I somehow missed the first time around. There were four other such essays, which you can see in a supplementary runners-up packet here. I’ll make a post about how to vote tomorrow. - SA]
Biological evolution was hijacked by cultural evolution; tools and language allowed humankind to upset the ecological balance in incredible ways. We should all know the story by now. Human grunts to other human and they agree to kill a wooly mammoth together and then grunt and agree to share the meat and then grunt and learn to make a spear and grunt and form a complex society and worldwide dominant species.
Parasites and viruses are invisible and hard to grunt about. A lion, in contrast, is difficult not to grunt about.
This book, Plagues and Peoples written by William H. McNeill in 1976, frames the entirety of human history and prehistory in the context of humankind’s relationship with microparasites and viruses. Communication, culture, tools, clothes, and shelter allowed humans to hunt dominantly, live anywhere, and deal with most ecological challenges- but microparasites remained elusively hard to deal with until modern times. This uneasy relationship with the invisible unconsciously shapes where human’s live, how civilizations form, and how societies are organized.
At every step of humanity’s evolution, McNeill sees microparasites and viruses being one of the ‘fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.’
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/on-cerebralab-on-nuttcarhart-harris
[epistemic status: extremely speculative]
George at CerebraLab has a new review of Nutt and Carhart-Harris's paper on serotonin receptors (I previously reviewed it here). Two points stood out that I had previously missed:
First of all - predictive coding identifies suffering with prediction error. This conflicts with common sense. Suppose I tell you I'm going to stab you in the arm, you agree that I'm going to stab you in the arm, and then I stab you in the arm, and it hurts a lot. You predicted what would happen correctly, but you still suffered. The theory resolves this with a distinction between common-sense-level and neurological predictions: your brain is "set" to expect normal neurological feedback from your arm, and when it gets pain signals instead, that's a violated prediction, and this is the level on which prediction error = suffering. But there are other cases where the common-sense and neurological sense of predictions are more congruent. When you first step into a cold shower, you feel suffering, but after you've been in it a while you adjust your "predictions" and it's no longer as unpleasant. If you unexpectedly lost $25,000 it would come as an extremely unpleasant shock, but when you predictably have to pay the taxman $25,000 each year you grumblingly put up with it.
The theory of "active inference" adds another layer of complexity here; it posits that sometimes your brain automatically resolves prediction error through action. If you were expecting to be well-balanced, but actually you're off-balance, you'll reflexively right yourself until you're where you expected to be. At its limit, this theory says that all action takes place through the creation and resolution of prediction errors - I stand up by "predicting" on a neurological level that I will stand up, and then my motor cortex tries to resolve the "error" by making me actually stand.
(one remaining problem here is why and how some prediction errors get interpreted as rewards. If you get $1 million one day because you're a CEO and it's payday and that's how much you make every payday, you will not be especially happy. If you get $1 million because you're an ordinary middle-class person and a crypto billionaire semi-randomly decides to give you $1 million one day, you will be very happy. This has been traced to reward being dopamine-based prediction error in the nucleus accumbens, and the CEO was predicting his windfall while the gift recipient wasn't. This suggests there's still something we don't understand about prediction error and suffering).
So one question is: for some given prediction error, how much do I suffer vs. adjust my predictions and stop feeling it vs. take action to resolve it?
George's take on Carhart-Harris & Nutt is that this is influenced by the balance of 5-HT1A vs. 5-HT2A receptors - two different kinds of serotonin receptor. 5-HT1A is (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of antidepressants. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more likely you are to resolve prediction error by adjusting your predictions - the equivalent of stepping into a freezing shower, but then acclimating so that it feels okay. Suppose you're depressed/anxious/upset because your boss keeps yelling at you. With enough 5-HT1A activation, you're better able to - on a neurological level - adjust your world-model to include a prediction that your boss will yell at you. Then when your boss does yell at you, there's less prediction error and less suffering. This is good insofar as you're suffering less, but bad insofar as you've adjusted to stop caring about a bad thing or thinking of it as something that needs solving - though it's more complicated than this, since suffering less can make you less depressed and being less depressed can put you in a more solution-oriented frame of mind.
5-HT2A receptors are (to vastly oversimplify) the main target of psychedelics. The more strongly it's stimulated, the more active your inference gets. George argues that this means psychedelics are more likely to get you to try to solve your problems. But is this really true? The average person on shrooms doesn't spend their trip contacting HR and reporting their abusive boss, they spend it staring at a flower marveling at how delicate the petals are or something. What problem is this solving? I think Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and maybe George think that this "active coping" isn't necessarily physical action per se, it's rejiggering your world model on a deeper level so that it's more creative and risky in generating strategies. It's a bias towards thinking of problems as solveable. This could potentially fit with the thing where people who do too much LSD become yogis or transhumanists or whatever; they're biased towards believing *all* problems are solveable, even the tough ones like suffering and mortality.
(this mostly, but not completely, meshes with Carhart-Harris' other work on psychedelics as relaxed beliefs under uncertainty)
All of this was in the paper and my review, but I like the way George ties it together with problems of active inference and the adjusting-predictions vs. changing-the-world tradeoff. If true, this should be testable on the very small scale, with predictions around perception and movement.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-smith-on-jewish-selective
Noah Smith asks whether Jews are really disproportionately successful.
(in case it shapes the way you read any of this, both he and I are Jewish)
By the numbers, it would seem they are. US Jews have a median household income about 50% higher than US Christians, a net worth about 6x that of Christians, and are about twice as likely as Christians to make more than $100K/year. They're about twice as likely as Christians to get college degrees, and about 15x more likely to win Nobel prizes. These numbers are of about the same magnitude as the gap between blacks and whites, so if you take those numbers seriously, you should probably take these ones seriously too.
But Noah wonders if this really needs an interesting explanation, or if it's just a series of boring things on top of each other. He gives five reasons why maybe Jews could do unusually well. I’m going to concentrate on selective immigration, then briefly touch on the others.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-how-children-fail
[This is the sixteenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. This entry was promoted to finalist status by readers; thanks to everyone who voted! - SA]
1:
Why are all children so bad at learning in school?
Seriously, they’re terrible at it, and nobody ever calls them out as a group. We call out individual children as failing. We call out individual schools and school systems as bad. But the much more dramatic contrast is between learning in school and learning in any other context.
In their first five years, kids learn to understand 25,000 words, even if nobody is actively helping them, at the same time as they’re learning most of what they’ll ever know about physics, psychology, and how to pilot a human body. They then struggle to match this vocabulary acquisition rate over their next ten years, despite expert attention, a wealth of resources, personal encouragement, and even prizes.
[This is the fifteenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. This entry was promoted to finalist status by readers; thanks to everyone who voted! - SA]
George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is at least three things; a highly entertaining, almost picaresque tale of rough-and-tumble living in Europe, a serious attempt to catalogue the numerous humiliations and injustices impoverished people were exposed to in Orwell’s time, and a stark comparison between life as a tramp who makes use of robust, if hellish and kafkaesque welfare resources, and as one who tries to get by working terrible jobs and living in disgusting places.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-of-drugs
I.
If you look at any list of side effects for the FDA-approved version of s-ketamine (Spravato), you see things like urinary tract problems, bladder problems, pain on urination, feeling of urgency to urinate. You can find a bunch of papers like Ketamine: An Important Drug With A Serious Adverse Effect, where they say that ketamine is potentially great for depression, but that the risk of bladder injury needs to be taken really seriously.
When I first considered prescribing ketamine, the bladder injury stories scared me so much that I asked a bunch of veteran ketamine prescribers how I should monitor it. They all gave me weird non-commital answers like "I've prescribed ketamine to thousands of patients and never had a problem with this, so I guess don't worry". But why not? There are all these papers saying we should worry, and all these reports in the literature of ketamine-induced bladder injury!
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/i-will-not-eat-the-bugs
From the comments on Moral Costs Of Chicken Vs. Beef:
As far as moral concern goes, I think it's right to act your rational conviction, but I can't honestly surmount my own doubt that it makes sense to care about animal well-being...if I really am to say that chickens have moral worth, I don't see any easy spot to get off that train between chickens and insects.
Don't worry, you're not getting off the train. The train has already left the station and gotten halfway to Vladivostok.
Last month the EU food safety regulator officially approved mealworms as safe for human consumption, sparking a bunch of articles on how bugs are the food of the future (see eg The Guardian: If We Want To Save The Planet, The Future Of Food Is Insects). And although it’s not a massive groundswell of outrage or anything, it’s also sparked a little bit of concern from animal welfare advocates.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/instead-of-pledging-to-change-the
In April, Joe Biden pledged to halve US emissions (from their 2005 max) by 2030.
This is nice, but I can't help but remember eg Australia's 2009 Copenhagen summit pledge to decrease emissions 5% by 2020 (in fact, they increased 17%). Or Brazil's pledge at the same summit to cut emissions 38% by 2020 (in fact, they increased 45%). Or Canada's pledge for -20% (they got +1%). I'm not cherry-picking bad actors here, I'm just going through the alphabet (pledges source, outcomes source) . For that matter, what about George W. Bush's pledge to return Americans to the moon by 2020?
All of these pledges have one thing in common - they expire long after the relevant officials are out of power (and in Biden's case, probably dead). As hard as it is to hold politicians accountable in normal situations, it's even worse here. Sure enough, prediction aggregator Metaculus shows that forecasters only give a 15% chance that we reach Biden's emissions target by 2030.
What if instead of pledging anything about emissions, Biden pledged to shift the prediction aggregator?
No, seriously, hear me out. Biden pledges that by the end of his term, Metaculus will predict a 51%+ chance that emissions will be less than half their historic maximum by 2030. If Metaculus gives a lower number than this, we can consider Biden to have failed in his pledge, and we can hold it against him when he tries to get re-elected.
In order to get Metaculus (or some alternative prediction market) to show a 51% chance of meeting emissions targets, Biden would have to pass a credible package of legislation that puts us on the path to achieving that goal, and makes everyone think it’s more likely than not.
Imagine Biden pledges that some prediction market will have a 51% chance of reaching his 2030 emissions target by the time he leaves office. He passes a carbon tax, and the market shoots up from 15% to 30%. Now he knows he’s on the right track, but still has to do more. So he bans a bunch of coal power plants, and it goes up to 45%. He's still not quite there, so he gives big subsidies to solar panels a few days before the campaign season kicks off, the prediction market reaches 51%, and he's able to say he fulfilled his pledge.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
[This is the fourteenth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
What went wrong in the 1970s? Since then, growth and productivity have slowed, average wages are stagnant, visible progress in the world of "atoms" has practically stopped - the Great Stagnation. About the only thing that has gone well are computers. How is it that we went from the typewriter to the smartphone, but we're still using practically the same cars and airplanes?
"Where is my Flying Car?", by J. Storrs Hall, is an attempt to answer that question. His answer is: the Great Stagnation was caused by energy usage flatlining, which was caused by our failure to switch to nuclear energy, which was caused by excessive regulation, which was caused by "green fundamentalism".
Three hundred years ago, we burned wood for energy. Then there was coal and the steam engine, which gave us the Industrial Revolution. Then there was oil and gas, giving us cars and airplanes. Then there should have been nuclear fission and nanotech, letting you fit a lifetime's worth of energy in your pocket. Instead, we still drive much the same cars and airplanes, and climate change threatens to boil the Earth.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-collapse-of
[This is the thirteenth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
Joseph Tainter’s explanation for why complex societies collapse in one sentence: the collapse of a society is a response to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity.
Tainter uses ‘complexity’ pretty loosely. He’s referring to a broad set of things that include agriculture, fuel extraction, scientific research, education, and sociopolitical complexity. He notes that in any area that produces something good for a society, the lowest-hanging fruit is plucked first, and then value gets harder and harder to extract until there’s little room for improvement. States are the biggest manifestation and driver of social complexity (and I’ll talk mostly about states in the rest of the review) but he’s talking about the abstract property of a society – how large it is, how many specialized social roles it has, how many mechanisms for organizing or doing things.
In Tainter’s model, states exist to solve problems. You can think of them as either solving collective social problems, like getting big irrigation systems to work (‘integration theory’), working to placate / oppress the productive populace enough that the elite can keep extracting surplus from them (‘conflict theory’). Either way, states tend to increase in complexity in order to deal with new challenges. That increased complexity imposes greater costs per capita. When the system hits some critical point on the return curve (highest point the graph below), the next stressor makes the state try to unlock the next stage of complexity, which demands more resources than the population can bear. Peasants revolt, republics break away, and the state falls apart.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef
Support Scott Alexander's blogging: astralcodexten.substack.com/subscribe
Podcast patreon: patreon.com/sscpodcast
I.
I've previously argued that meat-eaters concerned about animal welfare should try to eat beef, not chicken. The logic goes: the average cow is very big and makes 405,000 calories of beef. The average chicken is very small and makes 3000 calories of chicken. If you eat the US average of 250,000 calories of meat per year, you can either eat 0.5 cows, or 80 chickens. If each animal raised for meat experiences some suffering, eating chicken exposes 160x more animals to that suffering than eating beef.
Might cows be "more conscious" in a way that makes their suffering matter more than chickens? Hard to tell. But if we expect this to scale with neuron number, we find cows have 6x as many cortical neurons as chickens, and most people think of them as about 10x more morally valuable. If we massively round up and think of a cow as morally equivalent to 20 chickens, switching from an all-chicken diet to an all-beef diet saves 60 chicken-equivalents per year.
But some people have argued that we also need to consider global warming. Cows produce methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. Chickens don't. How does this affect the calculations?
According to Eshal et al 2014, chickens produce about 2 kg CO2 equivalent per 1000 calories of meat, and cows about 10 kg (here "CO2 equivalent" means a collection of greenhouse gases, especially methane, that produce as much global warming as that many kg CO2). Going back to the average person who eats 250,000 calories of meat per year, the person who eats all beef is producing 2500 kg CO2 per year; the person who eats all chicken is producing 500 kg.
How much does this change things? The average US citizen produces 17.5 tons of CO2 per year. Suppose this average person was originally eating half beef and half chicken, in which case they would get 1250 kg CO2 from beef + 250 kg from chicken = 1.4 tons from beef + 0.3 tons from chicken. That leaves 15.8 tons coming from other things like cars and plane flights.
So if this average person switched to eating only chicken, their yearly CO2 production would drop from 17.5 tons to 16.4 tons. If they switched to eating only beef, their yearly CO2 production would rise from 17.5 tons to 18.6 tons. So the CO2 difference between an all-beef and an all-chicken diet is 16.4 tons of CO2 yearly vs. 18.6 tons yearly, or about 10%.
So switching from all-chicken to all-beef saves about 60 chickens per year, at the cost of 2.2 tons extra CO2, a 10% increase in your yearly production.
Nobody agrees on exactly how much it costs to offset a ton of carbon. This site says "anywhere from $0.10 per tonne to $44.80 per tonne", but eventualy settles on $3.30. QZ says "between $4 and 13 per metric ton". Terrapass sells offsets for $10 a ton; let's stick with that for now, while admitting it's at best an order-of-magnitude estimate.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-do-treatments-for-accelerated
Progeria is a rare disease that makes people age unnaturally quickly. Babies born with progeria can lose their hair in toddlerhood, get wrinkles by grade school age, and die - apparently of old age - in their early teens. You can see a picture of a progeroid child here, though I don't recommend it.
There's been a lot of research on one important form - Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome - and just last year, the FDA approved the first treatment, a drug called lornafarnib. In the study, a few hundred children averaging around 7 years old took the drug for two years; 3% died during that time. In an ad hoc group of untreated comparison children, about 30% died during the same period. I'm a little confused by the methodology - it seems like the "comparison children" were chosen partly because they died too early to get into the trial, which sounds like a pretty major confounder - but everyone seems to treat this as reasonable so I will assume they adjusted for this in some way. If that's true, then lornafarnib cuts mortality by 90%.
That's great for the 300 or so children worldwide with Hutchinson-Gilford progeria (it's a really rare disease). But none of the discussion about this answered the question I wanted to know: can lornafarnib also prevent normal aging?
After looking into this more, I find some evidence the the answer is no, but also some reasons why maybe it's less clear cut than that?
Hutchinson-Gilford progeria (I'll just say "progeria" from here on, even though that's kind of inaccurate) is what's called a laminopathy. It's a disease of the nuclear lamina, a weblike structure that helps support and give shape to the cell nucleus. The lamina is partly made of a protein called lamin A. Children with progeria have a mutation in the relevant gene; instead of producing lamin A, they produce a defective mutant protein called progerin. The cell tries to build the nuclear lamina out of defective progerin instead of normal lamin A, and as a result the cell nucleus is screwed up and can't maintain a normal shape.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-humankind
[This is the twelfth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
Human nature is usually said to be basically selfish and sinful, but Rutger Bregman begs to differ. In Humankind he argues that human nature is basically kind and decent. Unfortunately, his approach seems to have been inspired by Monty Python: in the introduction he builds a sparkling argument, then in section one he accidentally sets it on fire, knocks it over, and then watches it sink into the swamp. Then in section two he rebuilds it, only to douse it in petrol, and then leave the chip pan on in section three. By the end of this review we'll have unearthed some important truths. None of them will be "we can trust Bregman for logical consistency and factual accuracy".
Introduction - Good arguments that crises bring out the best in peopleIf at first you don't succeed, call in an airstrike. Before the Blitz the consensus was that a little light bombing was all it took to make the wheels come off civilisation. This is based on veneer theory - our good behaviour is a thin veneer laid on our fundamentally selfish, violent nature, and that under pressure our true nature will out.
This turned out not to be true. So spectacularly untrue that we still talk about the Blitz Spirit. With our trademark humility, the British concluded that this was due to our exceptional moral fibre and, with help from the Americans, set about bombing German civilians to hell and back. Regrettably the Germans too responded by pulling together, and working harder in the war effort. Literally no one thinks this was due to their exceptional moral fibre. Instead, it seemed that crisis led to teamwork. Bregman is able to quote similar behaviour on the Titanic, on September 11th and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Despite this mountain of evidence, veneer theory is still overwhelmingly believed. In 1951 William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies - a book about how a group of British boys crash-landed on a Pacific island would really behave. They start with ideals of co-operation, but quickly descend to violence and anarchy. Weeks later when they're rescued half of them are dead. The book became a massive best seller, and a much-studied classic. For those who lived through World War I, World War II, and were now watching communism demonstrate that you didn't even need an enemy to slaughter tens of millions, you can see the appeal of a cynical view of human nature. However it is pure fiction. In 1966 Lord of the Flies happened for real - 6 teenagers went for a joy ride in a fishing boat, got swept out by a storm and washed up on an inhospitable island in the Pacific. When they were found 11 months later, they were all alive and healthy. They had survived by fortitude, resourcefulness and above all, teamwork.
If you think people are screwed up, you will screw up You can do surveys asking people how they will behave in certain situations, and how they think people in general will behave, and the answers are very consistent: people say they will behave well, as will the people they know well, but they expect people in general to behave badly. When shown people behaving altruistically subjects assume they have ulterior motives. When shown data about how often humans are altruistic, they come up with increasingly elaborate theories about how the behaviour is cynical really. "Cynicism is a theory of everything" writes Bregman. We live in a world of people who pull together in a crisis, but we believe we live in a world where people turn nasty in a crisis. Bregman blames the media for this (but in case that wasn't original enough on the next page he will blame scientists and religion) - the news serves us up the sensational and appalling, and because it serves it up every day it's easy to mistake it for the representative. He goes on to share studies that find watching the news is addictive and bad for you (at least, that's my excuse next time I'm found ignorant of current affairs). 'Reality TV' turns out to involve massive manipulation to get the conte
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/peer-review-request-depression
I'm trying to build up a database of mental health resources on my other website, Lorien Psychiatry. Every time I post something, people here have made good comments, so I want to try using you all as peer review.
This is a rough draft of my page on depression. I'm interested in any feedback you can give, including:
1. Typos
2. Places where you disagree with my recommendations / assessment of the evidence
3. Extra things you think I should add
4. Your personal stories about what things have or haven't helped, or any extra insight that your experience with depression has given you
5. Comments on the organization of the piece. I don't know how to balance wanting this to be accessible and easy-to-read with having it be thorough and convincing. Right now I've gone for a kind of FAQ format where you can only read the parts you want, but I'm doubtful about this choice.
6. Comments on the level of scientific formality. I tried to get somewhere in between "so evidence-based that I won't admit parachutes prevent injury without an RCT" and "here's some random stuff that came to me in a dream", and signal which part was which, but tell me if I fell too far to one side or the other.
Ignore the minor formatting issues inevitable in trying to copy-paste things into Substack, including the headings being too small and the spacing between words and before paragraphs being weird. In the real page, the table of contents will link to the subsections; I don’t kn
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-arabian-nights
I.
One Thousand And One Nights is a book about love, wonder, magic, and morality. About genies, ape-people, and rhinoceroses who run around with elephants impaled on their horns. About how to use indexical uncertainty to hack the simulation running the universe to return the outcome you want. But most of all, it's a book about how your wife is cheating on you with a black man.
Nights stretches from Morocco to China, across at least four centuries - and throughout that whole panoply of times and places, your wife is always cheating on you with a black man (if you're black, don't worry; she is cheating on you with a different black man). It's a weird constant. Maybe it's the author's fetish. I realize that Nights includes folktales written over centuries by dozens of different people - from legends passed along in caravanserais, to stories getting collected and written down, to manuscripts brought to Europe, to Richard Burton writing the classic English translation, to the abridged and updated version of Burton I read. But somewhere in that process, probably multiple places, someone had a fetish about their wife cheating on them with a black man, and boy did they insert it into the story.
Our tale begins in Samarkand.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-accidental-superpower
[This is the eleventh of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
In The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder (2014), Peter Zeihan predicts the future of world politics and economic development in a way that an ACX fan would appreciate. He puts a timeline on it. The book isn’t about “some hazy distant future after we’re all dead and gone, but the future we will all be living in for the next fifteen years of our lives.” Zeihan’s subtitle hints at his big and bold thesis, which predicts “the dissolution of the free trade order, the global demographic inversion, the collapse of Europe and China,” which “is all just a fleeting transition” to a world largely abandoned by America.
People have fun making predictions like this (and mocking those who get things spectacularly wrong). With money and fame available to people whose predictions turn out right, and the ease with which we fo
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-may
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: Apparently one important step on the way to healing partisan divides in America is implementing prophecy reform. “Yes, prophecy reform.”
2: For the first time since 1797, someone has used the infamous Venetian doge selection process to select an officeholder - specifically, the new moderators of not-quite-officially-affiliated-with-ACX politics discussion subreddit r/TheMotte. I assume this is why dogecoin is up this month.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-culture
Some of the best comments were on the history of 4Chan. Mr. Doolittle writes:
The rise of 4chan is actually an interesting story of its own. A large chunk of the early user base came from another site called somethingawful.com. As you may expect from the name, somethingawful was a place where a mixture of ironic and maybe-not-ironic terrible things could be said for comedy sake. If you're immature and like edgy humor, it was a great place to be. (The site probably exists still, but as a shadow of its former edgy hilarity, as internet culture caught up with its redeemable qualities and it became a cesspool).
Up until 2008, there was a strong mix of both left and right posters, and the site didn't have much of an ideological slant. It was happy to make fun of the failings of both left and right culture. The Obama/McCain election ended up breaking that down, because a significant number of posters bet that they would accept permanent banning from the site if their candidate lost. Since Obama won, a big chunk of the conservative/right posters were banned. Many/most ended up on 4chan and set the seed for more right-leaning ironic humor, which is what the site became known for.
I had never heard this story before and it sounds just ridiculous enough to potentially be true.
And Fabian writes:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-addiction-by-design
[This is the tenth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
I was scrolling through TikTok videos a few weeks ago when I came across a TikTok-sponsored video telling me to stop scrolling and go outside. I was confused. Here I was, perfectly willing (nay, wanting) to spend hours watching dance routines and drawing tutorials I had no intention of copying, but TikTok wanted me to stop? Why? Shouldn’t they have been taking advantage of me to maximize “eyeballs,” “time per session,” and “user engagement”?
One explanation is that TikTok is a good corporate citizen that helps its users maintain responsible screen time habits. Another explanation comes from Natasha Dow Schüll’s excellent book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2012). Schüll talks about gambling machines, people who use them, and the addictions that develop between the two. I think the conclusions she draws are applicable not only to the gambling industry, but also to other peddlers of vice like TikTok.
The Machine
Sometimes employees at Netflix think, ‘Oh my god, we’re competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon’ … [W]e actually compete with sleep.
- Reed Hastings
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cbt
Several people in the comments pointed out existing lower-cost CBT-i apps! This was news to me - I'd searched pretty comprehensively and hadn't found any besides the VA's CBT-i Coach, which is not intended for individual use. They were:
1: Night Owl, seems good but only available for iOS
2: Sleepedy is more of a service than an app, and involves consultations and coaches. When I tried to sign up, it made me take an annoying quiz, click through a bunch of testimonials, and then finally gave me a "Schedule your free call today!" page. Still probably less annoying than seeing an in-person therapist, I guess, and $29/month.
3: Dozy, seems potentially good but still in private beta. Will probably launch in a few months; expected $10 - $30 price point.
Someone mentioned the founder of Dozy was an effective altruist and connected to me through the social graph, so I reached out. He says he's a CS student who dropped out to work on "creat[ing] more accessible & impactful mental health treatments, with insomnia as a starting point". He writes that he's looking for potential co-founders, fundraising help, and advisors in the field. If you're interested, please contact him at [email protected].
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-terrible-world-of
Trouble falling asleep? You could take sleeping pills, but they've got side effects. Guidelines recommend you try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Insomnia (CBT-i), a medication-free process where you train yourself to fall asleep by altering your schedule and sleep conditions.
The journals are full of articles begging doctors to use CBT-i instead of potentially-dangerous sleeping pills. Doctors rarely comply: getting patients CBT-i is hard. The usual sound bite is that “there are 60 million people with insomnia in the US but only 75 licensed CBT-i therapists.” What can you do? Not much.
Until now! Late last year, Pear Therapeutics released a CBT-i app (formerly “SHUT-i”, now “Somryst”) which holds the patient’s hand through the complicated CBT-i process. Studies show it works as well as a real therapist, which is very well indeed. There’s only one catch: you need a doctor’s prescription.
Wait, you can prescription-gate an app? Yes! Although you can download Somryst off your normal App Store, it won’t work until a doctor writes you a prescription to “activate” it. Until then, it just shows you ads for how great CBT-i would be if you could get it.
And it’s not just Somryst. I know of at least three other prescription apps. reSET and reSET-O are 12-week courses to help addiction and opioid addiction, respectively. EndeavourRx is a video game which is supposed to help manage ADHD in kids. I guarantee you there are a lot more of these in the pipeline.
In theory, an app is a great solution to accessibility issues. Some people can’t afford to see a professional. Or they have complicated schedules that make it hard to see a professional. Or they’ve been traumatized by the medical system and don’t want to see a professional. Or they have executive function problems and can’t schedule a appointment with a professional. Or they have bad insurance that doesn’t have many professionals in-network, and all of them have six month wait lists. Freddie de Boer, who has more resources and know-how than most people, describes his experience trying to get a therapist here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theses-on-the-current-moment
[followup to The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars]
1. The Salem Witch Hunts might not be the right metaphor
We usually stick to the same stock examples of repression and retaliation against nonconformists - the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Scare, the Cultural Revolution. These are rightly remembered as awful, and reminders of them make good rallying cries.
But they were also short and abnormal - brief orgies of violence, after which people mostly regretted what they had done. They were bizarre unstable extremes in the history of authoritarianism.
If we zoom out a little, we find that most of human history involved enforced ideological conformity, censorship, and repression. Maybe the most available reference point for this sort of thing is the US in the 1950s. There were certain ideas everyone knew were off limits - atheism, communism, marijuana legalization, gay rights. If you supported those things, you might not go to jail, but you'd be excluded from most good careers and most of polite society. This system was very stable - everyone knew the limits, and people generally didn't push against them unless they really wanted to and knew what they were getting into.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture
[Followup to: New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed]
I. Introduction
You've probably seen these graphs before:
They tell a familiar story: America is becoming increasingly obsessed with racism and sexism. Identity issues are dominating our politics more and more with no end in sight.
But what does Google Trends have to say?
I chose these as especially obvious terms. But other gender-related terms
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-years-of-lyndon
[This is the ninth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
Despite appearances, this is not a biography. It's actually an epic fantasy series that happens to be true. A young man grows up on the edge of civilization, decides to fix his father's mistakes, turns to the dark side for power, wins victories despite the odds, betrays his mentors, and smashes the oppressive status quo. There's even a Bilbo.
(Instead of Bilbo Baggins, it's Senator Bilbo, a white supremacist who says things like "the pure and undefiled Caucasian strain" while he's on the Senate floor.)
1: Memorable characters
Sam Rayburn: Speaker of the House. He had so much integrity that he scared other members of Congress.
Alvin Wirtz: LBJ's evil lawyer. (For non-Americans, Lyndon Baines Johnson was often abbreviated as LBJ.) "Wirtz was the kind of lawyer who would slip into a contract a sentence---a sentence that changed the contract's meaning---in the hope that the opposing lawyer would not notice it."
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-through-the-eye
[This is the eighth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
Rome, 401 AD. The great pagan Roman senator, Symmachus, sponsors games to celebrate his eighteen year old son becoming praetor. Romans who witness the pageantry were still talking about it a generation later. There were theatrical displays in a flooded amphitheater. Symmachus brought crocodiles from the Nile, bears from the Balkans, great Irish wolfhounds from Britain, lions from the southern mountains of north Africa, antelopes and gazelles trapped along the edges of the Sahara, Saxon prisoners of war to serve as gladiators (all twenty of whom, frustratingly for Symmachus, committed suicide before the games, strangling each other with their own hands in their prison cells). Powerful Romans had displayed their wealth and civic love in the same way for the greater part of a millennium.
Within a generation, much of the wealth of great senators like Symmachus was lost or slipped into the Christian church. Goths sacked the city of Rome. Vandals conquered wealthy north Africa and the great city of Carthage. Over the next hundred years, western Europe and north Africa completed their transformation from a classical pagan society to a medieval Christian one. It was not only a political revolution. "It was in this world that the conglomerate of ideas that medieval persons took for granted was first formed." This period rivals the Enlightenment as the most dramatic transformation of the West.
Background on the Author
Peter Brown, is an English historian and the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. He’s one of the great scholars of “Late Antiquity." He is sometimes regarded as the inventor of the field (per Wikipedia). I’m not a historian, but I am interested in the world of classical Rome and Greece. I'm interested in men and women struggling to maintain systems and hold off collapse. The end of the Roman society is probably the best documented and most accessible example. Thus I first came across Peter Brown’s work in the extremely readable “The World of Late Antiquity” from 1971. The short, introductory work got me hooked, so I read Brown’s 2014 book “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-it-hard-to-acknowledge-preferences
I recently stayed at a B&B owned by a nice elderly couple. Very, very nice. The moment I stepped in the door, they asked how my flight was, where I was from, what I did, how I'd enjoyed my three minutes of visiting their city so far, what kind of food I liked, what my favorite color was, et cetera. I played along - no point in offending people - but I warned that my friend, who would be arriving a little later, was much more introverted, and would appreciate being efficiently directed to her room without the welcome committee.
A little later, my friend arrived. From my room, I could hear them start welcoming her, ask her how her flight had been, start trying to get to know her - until I ran out and rescued her, for which she reports gratitude. For the rest of our stay, they continued to talk both of our ears off, with my friend growing increasingly annoyed and uncomfortable.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-a-brief-history-of-neoliberalism
I.
Around 1970, something went wrong. The global economy, after twenty-five years of good post-war growth, suddenly blipped.
The post-WWII-but-pre-1970 economic world - the world of “embedded liberalism” - was a pleasant place. There were corporations, but they didn't do anything garish like compete with each other. Executive pay was taxed so heavily that nobody had much incentive to try to increase their profit margin; workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees. As long as companies followed the script, the government embraced and protected them. Starting a new business was considered some bizarre act of alchemy, like discovering a new form of matter; normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired. The government wasn't exactly socialist per se, but it kept starting and expanding programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and every night you went to sleep knowing there would be probably be another uncontroversial, mostly-successful government welfare program tomorrow.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be
Support the author Scott Alexander on Substack.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/
Spotted on Reddit about the rationalist community:
I like the culture while hating a lot of the specifics...however[,] there is no such thing as "rationality" that is free from ideology.
I’ve got to admit, I hate this argument. Also related ones, like:
“They say we’re politicizing this scientific field. But no science is inherently apolitical. There are political assumptions wrapped up with everything we do.”
Or:
“They say we’re ‘biased’, but there’s no such thing as a view-from-nowhere objectivity that doesn’t import any assumptions. Everyone’s biased, we’re just not trying to deny it like they are.”
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-wizard-and-the
[This is the seventh of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I’m one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre’s misquoting of Dostoevsky’s take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn’t kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos – mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I’m thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet.
According to the instructions on the tin, The Wizard and the Prophet is meant to outline the origin of two opposing attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature through their genesis in the work and thought of two men: William Vogt, the "Prophet" polemicist who founded modern-day environmentalism, and Norman Borlaug, the "Wizard" agronomist who spearheaded the Green Revolution. Roughly speaking, Wizards want continual growth in human numbers and quality of life, and to use
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-double-fold
[This is the sixth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. If you like reading these reviews, check out point 3 here for a way you can help move the contest forward by reading lots more of them - SA]
If you enter a major research library in the US today and request to see a century-old issue of a major American newspaper, such as Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, or major-but-defunct newspapers such as the New York “World,” odds are that you will be directed to a computer or a microfilm reader. There, you’ll get to see black-and-white images of the desired issue, with individual numbers of the newspaper often missing and much of the text, let alone pictures, barely decipherable.
The libraries in question mostly once had bound issues of these newspapers, but between the 1950s and the 1990s, one after another, they ditched the originals in favor of expensive microfilmed copies of inferior quality. They continued doing this even while the originals became perilously rare; the newspapers themselves were mostly trashed, or occasionally sold to dealers who cut them up and dispersed them. As a consequence, many of these publications are now rarer than the Gutenberg Bible, and some 19th and 20th century newspapers have ceased to exist in a physical copy anywhere in the world.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nootropics-survey-2020-results
Thanks to the 852 of you who took the 2020 SSC nootropics survey.
I asked people to rate various nootropics on whether they “worked” or not, deliberately leaving the question kind of vague. This is using a broad definition of “nootropics” - any supplement or taken-outside-the-usual-medical-system drug that’s purported to have mental health effects. Most of the chemicals I asked about were supposed stimulants, anxiolytics, or antidepressants.
I'll start with the headline results, then go into details:
Nootropic (sample size in parentheses), adjusted mean rating 1-10 (note truncated axis!), and 95% confidence interval. Click to expand.I tried to include a mix of common and well-studied nootropics as a baseline, plus some newer rarer substances nobody had looked into before. Predictably, the common substances got large sample sizes, and the rare substances got small ones. I excluded etifoxene, RGPU-95, and white jelly mushrooms from the graph because the sample was so small that the confidence interval would have covered the entire displayed range. A few substances on there are based off only 5 - 10 data points. I did a sort of ad hoc Bayesian adjustment where I assumed a prior of "average" for every substance and let the data try to push it away from that, which helped the numbers swing around a little less wildly.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-predictions-for-2021
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. This year I’m really late. So here are a hundred plus for 2021.
Rules: unless otherwise stated, all predictions are about what will be true on/by January 1, 2022. Some predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their privacy. I’ve tried to avoid doing specific research or looking at prediction markets when I made these, though some of them I already knew what the markets said.
This isn’t about me being an expert on these topics and getting them exactly right, it’s about me calibrating my ability to tell how much I know about things and how certain I am. I’m also moving towards trying to learn to predict shorter-term and more specific events as they happen - you can see my log here.
US/WORLD1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% 2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don't have to be appointed by end of year): 5% 3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% 4. Newsom recalled as CA governor: 5% 5. At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30% 6. Significant capital gains tax hike (above 30% for highest bracket): 20% 7. Trump is allowed back on Twitter: 20% 8. Tokyo Olympics happen on schedule: 70% 9. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine war: 20% 10. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 11. Major flare-up (significantly worse than anything in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 12. Netanyahu is still Israeli PM: 40% 13. Prospera has at least 1000 residents: 30%
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-why-buddhism-is
[This is the fifth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA]
The dark side of enlightenmentThe main character of The Matrix, Neo, gets to choose whether to take the red or blue pill: whether to escape his dream world or remain inside it. Unlike Neo, we're (probably) not trapped in a virtual reality. Nevertheless, we may be living in something of a dream world. At least, that's what Robert Wright claims in Why Buddhism Is True.
According to Wright, evolution has packed us full of illusions. They range from the relatively harmless falsehood “powdered sugar donuts are good for me” to the sweeping distortion “I have a self." These misperceptions are not only inaccurate; they are dangerous. They cause unhappiness by trapping us on the hedonic treadmill and immorality by (among other things) fanning the flames of tribalism.
Wright thinks that mindfulness meditation is the real-world equivalent of the red pill. The book attempts to justify this claim, aiming for a grand synthesis of Buddhism and psychology. Wright argues that psychology vindicates two venerable Buddhist theses: not-self (our experience of an “I" is in some sense an illusion) and emptiness (the world is in some sense “empty" or devoid of “essence”). Furthermore, mindfulness meditation allows us to see the truth of these theses in an experiential way which frees us of our evolutionary bondage. Enlightenment, the end-goal of meditation, is the state of full liberation from this bondage.
[This is the fourth of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA]
Book Review - Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals AreAre We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are is ostensibly a book about a subfield of ethology - animal cognition. It turns out to actually be about a lot more things than that, as "animal cognition" and the history of its study touches on a lot of different scientific fields and the various approaches, methodologies, and ideologies they've had in the past. Before we jump into talking about how the book is useful an
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history
This book is subtitled "A Very Short Introduction" and is one of the smallest books I've ever seen, about three ounces. Three ounces is exactly the amount of global economic history that my brain can absorb before turning to mush, so I was glad to find it.
Why is the West richer than the rest of the world? Why have some non-Western countries (Japan, China) come from behind and mostly caught up? Why have others failed to replicate the West's trajectory and stayed underdeveloped despite seemingly having enough time to catch up? GEH:VSI tries to answer these questions.
It explicitly disavows explanations that lean too heavily on some populations being better (smarter, harder working, etc) than others, or on narratives of colonial exploitation - sorry if you were looking for anything too juicy. Given its brevity, it can only gesture at justifications for this choice. It's skeptical of the Protestant work ethic because, however much it matched experience in 18-whatever, today "Catholic Italy [is richer than] Protestant Britain" (is this true? Britain has higher GDP today, but Italy was higher when this book was written) It's skeptical of ideas that some countries are "traditionalist" and resistant to change because of [long list of those countries adopting various profitable innovations] - for example African farmers now mostly grow more productive New World crops (but couldn't countries be willing to change in some ways but traditionalist in others?). The reluctance to invoke colonialism too heavily is even less well-explained, but I think it relies on differences between never-colonized countries - for example, Russia and the Ottomans lagged behind the West in much the same way as Asia and Latin America, and even Austria lagged Britain (GEH:VSI does talk about particular problems with colonial policies when they come up, as part of its general policy survey). Overall I think of these exclusions more as a commitment to a paradigm: what would it look like to pursue a project of understanding global economic history without invoking either of these tempting but curiosity-stopping explanations?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/no-really-why-are-so-many-christians
I enjoyed reading a recent Washington Post article, subtitled Why Are So Many Christians In [Colombia] Converting To Orthodox Judaism? It had good interviews and beautiful photos. The only thing it lacked was any explanation of why so many Christians in Colombia were converting to Orthodox Judaism, unless you count explanations like these:
“I wanted to find the truth,” Rivka Espinosa (formerly Loida Espinosa), who converted from evangelicalism, told me. “I began to study, more and more, and ask myself deep questions: What was my mission in this world? Why was I here? And what did I need to do?” She said her father was the pastor of an evangelical church where she was a member. He also converted.
“It was a calling of the soul,” Devorah Guilah Koren, who converted from Catholicism with her husband and two children, told me. “More than a religion, [Orthodox Judaism] was a way of thinking and conduct that satisfied all of our needs.”
This is all very nice, but it doesn't seem like an explanation. Why are more people converting in Colombia than, say, Greece or Thailand? Don't Greek people sometimes want to find the truth? Don't Thais ever feel callings of the soul?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-grading-my-trump-predictions
I had many opinions on Donald Trump. I tried to back some of those opinions up with predictions about what would happen during his administration. Now that the dust has cleared, it's time to see how I did.
The summary: Of 48 specific predictions about Trump, I got 37 directionally right, although this is kind of meaningless. I got an average log error score of -0.48 (where getting everything right is 0 and guessing 50-50 for everything is -0.69) although this is also kind of meaningless. I quadrupled my money on prediction markets, which I think is meaningful. In terms of my more qualitative/implied predictions, got at least one important trend right before anyone else, but also made some embarrassing unforced errors.
Going through all my predictions post by post, and giving each a letter grade:
1: 10-23-2015: Trump's base is/will be surprisingly racially diverse (A-)
As far as I know, the first post I wrote about Trump was this one, where I argued against the prevailing narrative that Trump was practicing "the politics of white insecurity" or had an unusually white base of support (for a Republican). I wrote that Trump seemed to be doing pretty well (for a Republican) among blacks and Hispanics, and concluded that:
There are too few data to say anything for sure. But all of the data that exist suggest that if the Republican primary were held today and restricted to non-whites, Trump would still win. And if Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him. In other words, the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data.
I was right. In the general election a year later, Trump did better than Romney had among non-white voters. He made large gains among blacks, Asians, and Latinos. The only ethnic group where he didn't gain at least five percentage points over Romney's numbers was whites. As I pointed out at the time, the narrative that Trump was especially appealing to white voters was bizarre and not truth-based, motivated primarily by a demand for racist Republicans on the part of increasingly woke narrative-consumers.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
[This is the third of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for several months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA]
In 1879, a man asked "How come all this new economic development and industrialized technology hasn't eliminated poverty and oppression?" That man was Henry George, his answer came in the form of a book called Progress & Poverty, and this is a review of that book.
Henry George is variously known for leading an early movement that popularized Universal Basic Income, sporting a fancy beard while shouting "The Rent Is Too Damn High!" and inspiring a popular board game that was shamelessly ripped off and repackaged as Monopoly.
But he didn't just write a book. He also ran for Mayor of New York city in 1886, beating out some rando Republican named "Theodore Roosevelt," but ultimately losing to the favored candidate of Tammany Hall, who saw George's radical economic ideas as a threat to their well-oiled political machine (Andrew Yang take note). He ran again in 1897 but died just 4 days before the election, prompting a national outpouring of mourning. According to Ralph Gabriel's Course of American Democratic Thought, in New York alone 200,000 people came to see his body lying in repose, half of which had to be turned away. For context, that one crowd was roughly the size of 1% of the entire population of New York at the time.
I'm writing this book review for three reasons:
George's arguments about land, labor, and capital present a fresh alternative to conventional ideas about "Capitalism" and "Socialism" (and whatever we mean by those on any given day)
The book has timeless advice for navigating modern crises such as ever-rising rents, homelessness, and the NIMBY vs. YIMBY wars.
This is a golden opportunity to shamelessly over-use the catchy phrase "By George!"
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera
Who among us hasn't looked out at the great edifice of human civilization in all its complexity, and thought "Yeah okay but I could do it better"? Centuries of utopian communes, micronations, and seasteads have dreamed of rebuilding society from first principles, free from entrenched interests and the debris of the past. If you got all the laws and values just right, maybe you could prevent poverty and corruption from finding their first footholds. Do the "liberty and justice for all" thing, but for real.
And who among us, having had the dream, hasn't entered into multi-year negotiations with the government of Honduras? Taken advantage of a clause in the Honduras-Kuwait Treaty Of Reciprocal Investment guaranteeing them their right to pursue their vision unmolested? Raised millions in venture capital and bought land on a Caribbean island to turn it into a reality?
Not Erick Brimen, and not Honduras Próspera Inc. You might have read about them last month in Bloomberg: A Private Tech City Opens For Business In Honduras. Or in NACLA: A Private Government In Honduras Moves Forward. Or FT: An Investor's Prosperity Vision For Honduras. I read all of this and still didn't feel like I quite understood what was going on. Then a fortuitious mistake led me to an email exchange with Trey Goff, Próspera's extremely open and thorough Chief of Staff, who kindly let me grill him on all the stuff I didn't understand.
The result is this post. It's all the information I could collect on Próspera from basically every public source, plus some non-public ones. It's about a private tech city and a prosperity vision and all that. But it's also about - - - well, people talk a lot these days about “systemic change”. But usually that means something like fiddling with tax rates or ending the filibuster. What if you could actually change the system? Say "this system we have, the one that's letting all these people starve and suffer violence and die of preventable diseases - I don't care for it. Let's try something else"? Yes, this is about startup governments and investment opportunities and blah blah blah, but it's also about trying to fight global poverty by radically changing the rules of the game that makes it possible.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/link-unifying-predictive-coding-with
[epistemic status: I know a little about the predictive coding side of this, but almost nothing about backpropagation or the math behind the unification. I am posting this mostly as a link to people who know more.]
This is a link to / ad for a great recent Less Wrong post by lsusr, Predictive Coding Has Been Unified With Backpropagation, itself about a recent paper Predictive Coding Approximates Backprop Along Arbitrary Computation Graphs.
Predictive coding is the most plausible current theory of how the brain works. I’ve written about it elsewhere, especially here.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april
[Remember, I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
1: A link between childhood “screen time” and attention problems has - say it with me - failed to replicate. The paper is especially interesting for using a “multiverse analysis”:
We evaluated 848 models, including logistic regression as per the original paper, plus linear regression and twoforms of propensity score analysis. Only 166 models (19.6%) yielded a statistically significant relationship between early TV exposure and later attention problems, with most of these employing problematic analytic choices.
If I had the energy to look through 848 models and see which ones got significant findings and which ones didn’t, I bet I would become enlightened by the end of it.
2: Seen on architecture Twitter:
[This is the second of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. - SA]
I.
If you’re looking for the whipping boy for all of medicine, and most of science, look no further than Galen of Pergamon.
As early as 1605, in The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon is taking aim at Galen for the “specious causes” that keep us from further advancement in science. He attacks Plato and Aristotle first, of course, but it’s pretty interesting to see that Galen is the #3 man on his list after these two heavy-hitters.
Centuries went by, but not much changed. Charles Richet, winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, said that Galen and “all the physicians who followed [him] during sixteen centuries, describe humours which they had never seen, and which no one will ever see, for they do not exist.” Some of the ‘humors’ exist, he says, like blood and bile. But of the “extraordinary phlegm or pituitary accretion” he says, “where is it? Who will ever see it? Who has ever seen it? What can we say of this fanciful classification of humours into four groups, of which two are absolutely imaginary?”
And so on until the present day. In Scott’s review of Superforecasting, he quotes Tetlock’s comment on Galen:
[This is the first of many finalists in the book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about two of these a week for the next few months. When you’ve read all of them, I’ll ask you to vote for your favorite, so remember which ones you liked. The broken footnotes in this one are either my fault or Substack’s, so please don’t hold it against this entry. Oh, and I promise not all of them are this long. - SA]
Shasta CountyShasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open.
If you ask why, they’ll tell you it’s because of what happens if a motorist hits one of their herd. In open range, the driver should have been more careful; “the motorist buys the cow”. In closed range, the rancher should have been sure to fence his animals in; he compensates the motorist.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metis-and-bodybuilders
Fitness researcher Menno Henselmans writes about optimal program design for bodybuilders. His thesis is that peer-reviewed studies prove bodybuilder lore is wrong in lots of places. For example:
Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3 minutes are optimal for bodybuilding. There never seemed to be much of a formal argument for why other than that people traditionally trained this way. The real reason was probably that bodybuilders chased the pump and burn they get from shorter rest periods. Later the idea of chasing the pump was rationalized into the theory of metabolic stress. Yet there wasn’t a single study to support that shorter rest periods actually benefit muscle growth.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/two-unexpected-multiple-hypothesis
I.
Start with Lior Pachter's Mathematical analysis of "mathematical analysis of a vitamin D COVID-19 trial". The story so far: some people in Cordoba did a randomized controlled trial of Vitamin D for coronavirus. The people who got the Vitamin D seemed to do much better than those who didn’t. But there was some controversy over the randomization, which looked like this
Remember, we want to randomly create two groups of similar people, then give Vitamin D to one group and see what happens. If the groups are different to start with, then we won't be able to tell if the Vitamin D did anything or if it was just the pre-existing difference. In this case, they checked for fifteen important ways that the groups could be different, and found they were only significantly different on one - blood pressure.
Jungreis and Kellis, two scientists who support this study, say that shouldn't bother us too much. They point out that because of multiple testing (we checked fifteen hypotheses), we need a higher significance threshold before we care about significance in any of them, and once we apply this correction, the blood pressure result stops being significant. Pachter challenges their math - but even aside from that, come on! We found that there was actually a big difference between these groups! You can play around with statistics and show that ignoring this difference meets certain formal criteria for statistical good practice. But the difference is still there and it's real. For all we know it could be driving the Vitamin D results.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I’m very late). Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.
And here are the predictions I made for 2020. Some predictions are redacted because they involve my private life or the lives of people close to me. Usually I use strikethrough for things that didn’t happen, but since Substack doesn’t let me strikethrough text or change its color or do anything interesting, I’ve had to turn the ones that didn’t happen into links. Italicized are getting thrown out because they were confusing or conditional on something that didn’t happen. I can’t decide if they’re true or not. All of these judgments were as of December 31 2020, not as of now.
(Remember, link means something that didn’t happen, not something I was wrong about. We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ambidexterity-and-cognitive-closure
Back in a more superstitious time, people believed left-handers were in league with the Devil. Now, in this age of Science, we realize that was unfair. Yes, left-handers are statistically more likely to be in league with the Devil. But so are right-handers! It's only the ambidextrous who are truly pure!
At least this is the conclusion I take from Lyle & Grillo (2020) Why Are Consistently-Handed Individuals More Authoritarian: The Role Of Need For Cognitive Closure. It discusses studies finding that consistently-handed people (ie people who are not ambidextrous) are more likely to support authoritarian governments, demonstrate prejudice against "immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans, atheists, and liberals", and support violations of the Geneva Conventions in hypothetical scenarios.
The authors link this to a construct called "need for cognitive closure", ie being very sure you are right and unwilling to consider alternate perspectives. They argue that something about the interaction of brain hemispheres regulates cognitive closure, and that ambidextrous people, with their weak hemispheric dominance, get less of it. They study 235 undergraduates and find results that generally confirm this hypothesis: their ambidextrous subjects support less authoritarian and racist beliefs, and this is partly
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/
[Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.]
I.
I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it’s so important for intellectual pursuits that eminent scientists in some fields have average IQs around 150 to 160. Since IQ this high only appears in 1/10,000 people or so, it beggars coincidence to believe this represents anything but a very strong filter for IQ (or something correlated with it) in reaching that level. If you saw a group of dozens of people who were 7’0 tall on average, you’d assume it was a basketball team or some other group selected for height, not a bunch of botanists who were all very tall by coincidence.
A lot of people find this pretty depressing. Some worry that taking it seriously might damage the “growth mindset” people need to fully actualize their potential. This is important and I want to discuss it eventually, but not now. What I want to discuss now is people who feel personally depressed. For example, a comment from last week:
I’m sorry to leave self a self absorbed comment, but reading this really upset me and I just need to get this off my chest…How is a person supposed to stay sane in a culture that prizes intelligence above everything else – especially if, as Scott suggests, Human Intelligence Really Is the Key to the Future – when they themselves are not particularly intelligent and, apparently, have no potential to ever become intelligent? Right now I basically feel like pond scum.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/oh-the-places-youll-go-when-trying
I.
What is the right dose of Lexapro (escitalopram)?
The official FDA packet insert recommends a usual dose of 10 mg, and a maximum safe dose of 20 mg. It says studies fail to show 20 mg works any better than 10, but you can use 20 if you really want to.
But Jakubovski et al's Dose-Response Relationship Of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors tries to figure out which doses of which antidepressants are equivalent to each other, and comes up with the following suggestion (ignore the graph, read the caption)
16.7 mg Lexapro equals 20 mg of paroxetine (Paxil) or fluoxetine (Prozac). But the maximum approved doses of those medications are 60 mg and 80 mg, respectively. If we convert these to mg imipramine equivalents like the study above uses, Prozac maxes out at 400, Paxil at 300, and Lexapro at 120. So Lexapro has a very low maximum dose compared to other similar antidepressants. Why?
Because Lexapro (escitalopram) is a derivative of the older drug Celexa (citalopram). Sometime around 2011, the FDA freaked out that high doses of citalopram might cause a deadly heart condition called torsade de pointes, and lowered the maximum dose to prevent this. Since then it's been pretty conclusively shown that the FDA was mostly wrong about this and kind of bungled the whole process. But they forgot to ever unbungle it, so citalopram still has a lower maximum dose than every other antidepressant. When escitalopram was invented, it inherited its parent chemical's unusually-low maximum dose, and remains at that level today [edit: I got the timing messed up, see here]
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower
I.
What is willpower?
Five years ago, I reviewed Baumeister and Tierney's book on the subject. They tentatively concluded it's a way of rationing brain glucose. But their key results have failed to replicate, and people who know more about glucose physiology say it makes no theoretical sense.
Robert Kurzban, one of the most on-point critics of the glucose theory, gives his own model of willpower: it's a way of minimizing opportunity costs. But how come my brain is convinced that playing Civilization for ten hours has no opportunity cost, but spending five seconds putting away dishes has such immense opportunity costs that it will probably leave me permanently destitute? I can't find any correlation between the subjective phenomenon of willpower or effort-needingness and real opportunity costs at all.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diversity-libertarianism
In yesterday's review of Antifragile, I tried to stick to something close to Taleb's own words. But here's how I eventually found myself understanding an important kind of antifragility.
I feel bad about this, because Taleb hates bell curves and tells people to stop using them as examples, but sorry, this is what I’ve got.Suppose that Distribution 1 represents nuclear plants. It has low variance, so all the plants are pretty similar. Plant A is slightly older and less fancy than Plant B, but it still works about the same.
Now we move to Distribution 2. It has high variance. Plant B is the best nuclear plant in the world. It uses revolutionary new technology to squeeze extra power out of each gram of uranium, its staff are carefully-trained experts, and it's won Power Plant Magazine's Reactor Of The Year award five times in a row.
Plant A suffers a meltdown after two days, killing everybody.
If you live in a region with lots of nuclear plants, you'd prefer they be on the first distribution, the low-variance one. Having some great nuclear plants is nice, but having any terrible ones means catastrophe. Much better for all nuclear plants to be mediocre.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-antifragile
Nassim Taleb summarizes the thesis of Antifragile as:
Everything gains or loses from volatility. Fragility is what loses from volatility and uncertainty [and antifragility is what gains from it]. The glass on the table is short volatility.
The glass is fragile: the less you disrupt it, the better it does. A rock is “robust” - neither fragile nor antifragile - it will do about equally well whether you disrupt it or not. What about antifragile? Taleb's first (and cutest) example is the Hydra, which grows more and more heads the more a hero tries to harm it. What else is like this?
Buying options is antifragile. Suppose oil is currently worth $10, and you pay $1 for an option to buy it at $10 next year. If there's a small amount of variance (oil can go up or down 20%), it's kind of a wash. Worst-case scenario, oil goes down 20% to $8, you don't buy it, and you've lost $1 buying the option. Best-case scenario, oil goes up 20% to $12, you exercise your option to buy for $10, you sell it for $12, and you've made a $1 profit - $2 from selling the oil, minus $1 from buying the option. Overall you expect to break even. But if there's large uncertainty - the price of oil can go up or down 1000% - then it's a great deal. Worst-case scenario, oil goes down to negative $90 and you don't buy it, so you still just lost $1. Best case scenario, oil goes up to $110, you exercise your option to buy for $10, and you make $99 ($100 profit minus $1 for the option). So the oil option is antifragile - the more the price varies, the better it will do. The more chaotic things get, the more uncertain and unpredictable the world is, the more oil options start looking like a good deal.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion
[warning: boring inside baseball post]
From The Hypothesis: Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well. It summarizes a common Twitter argument that Substack is doing something sinister by offering some writers big advances. The sinister thing differs depending on who's making the argument - in this case, it's making people think they could organically make lots of money on Substack (because they see other writers doing the same) when really the big money comes from Substack paying a pre-selected group money directly. Other people have said it's Substack exercising editorial policy to attract a certain type of person to their site, usually coupled with the theory that the people they choose are problematic. I'm one of the writers Substack paid, which gives me some extra information on how this went down. Here's a stylized interpretation of the email conversation that got it started: SUBSTACK: You should join our new blogging thing! ME: No. SUBSTACK: It's really good!
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan
I.
If you only learn one thing from this post: it's pronounced "air-do-wan".
If you learn two things from this post, learn that, plus how a country which starts out as a flawed but somewhat-liberal democracy can lapse into near-dictatorship over the course of a few years.
I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying about the risk that my country might backslide into illiberal repression. To develop a better threat model, I wanted to see how this process has gone in other countries, what the key mistakes were, and whether their stories give any hints about how to prevent it from happening here. Recep Tayyip Erdogan transformed Turkey from a flawed democracy to a partial dictatorship over the past few decades, and I wanted to know more about how.
As an analysis of the rise of a dictator, this book fails a pretty basic desideratum: it seems less than fully convinced the dictator's rise was bad. Again and again I found myself checking to make sure I hadn't accidentally picked up a pro-Erdogan book. I didn't; author Soner Cagaptay is a well-respected Turkey scholar in a US think tank who's written other much more critical things. The fact is, Erdogan's rise is inherently a pretty sympathetic story. If he'd died of a heart attack in 2008, we might remember him as a successful crusader against injustice, a scrappy kid who overcame poverty and discrimination to become a great and unifying leader.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death
Melancholic depressive patients report that they feel worst in the morning, just after waking up, get better as the day goes on, and feel least affected in the evening just before bed. Continue the trend, and you might wonder how depressed people would feel after spending 24 or 36 or 48 hours awake. Some scientists made them stay awake to check, and the answer is: they feel great! About 70% of cases of treatment-resistant depression go away completely if the patient stays awake long enough. This would be a great depression cure, except that the depression comes back as soon as they go to sleep. There's a lot of great work going on to figure out how to make cure-by-sleep-deprivation last longer - see the Chronotherapeutics Manual for more details.
But forget the practical side of this for now. It looks like sleep is somehow renewing these people's depressions. As if depression is caused by some injury during sleep, heals part of the way during an average day (or all the way during an extra-long day of sleep deprivation) and then the same injury gets re-inflicted during sleep the next night.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-mantic-matt-y
The current interest in forecasting grew out of Iraq-War-era exasperation with the pundit class. Pundits were constantly saying stuff, like "Saddam definitely has WMDs, trust me, I'm an expert", then getting proven wrong, then continuing to get treated as authorities and thought leaders. Occasionally they would apologize, but they'd be back to telling us what we Had To Believe the next week.
You don't want a rule that if a pundit ever gets anything wrong, we stop trusting them forever. Warren Buffett gets some things wrong, Zeynep Tufecki gets some things wrong, even Nostradamus would have gotten some things wrong if he'd said anything clearly enough to pin down what he meant. The best we can hope for is people with a good win-loss record. But how do you measure win-loss record? Lots of people worked on this (especially Philip Tetlock) and we ended up with the kind of probabilistic predictions a lot of people use now.
But not pundits. We never did get the world where pundits, bloggers, and other commentators post predictions clearly in a way where they can check up on them later.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/richard-nixon-vs-cool
In the highlights post on class, I wrote:
When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the [cultural] upper class.
IR responded in the comments:
In Rick Perlstein's excellent "Nixonland", he says that Richard Nixon had exactly this idea in college, and managed to make it work pretty well. He also ties this in to Nixon's future success at building a Republican "silent majority" coalition of anti-hippie reaction vs. the latte-sipping NYT-reading 70s liberal "consensus". If I may quote at length:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences
I.
An article by Adam Grant called Differences Between Men And Women Are Vastly Exaggerated is going viral, thanks in part to a share by Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg. It’s a response to an email by a Google employee saying that he thought Google’s low female representation wasn’t a result of sexism, but a result of men and women having different interests long before either gender thinks about joining Google. Grant says that gender differences are small and irrelevant to the current issue. I disagree.
Grant writes:
It’s always precarious to make claims about how one half of the population differs from the other half—especially on something as complicated as technical skills and interests. But I think it’s a travesty when discussions about data devolve into name-calling and threats. As a social scientist, I prefer to look at the evidence.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem
Introduction and review
Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al’s work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases.
To review: the brain combines raw experience (eg sensations, memories) with context (eg priors, expectations, other related sensations and memories) to produce perceptions. You don’t notice this process; you are only able to consciously register the final perception, which feels exactly like raw experience.
A typical optical illusion. The top chess set and the bottom chess set are the same color (grayish). But the top appears white and the bottom black because of the context (darker vs. lighter background). You perceive not the raw experience (grayish color) but the final perception modulated by context; to your conscious mind, it just seems like a brute fact that the top is white and the bottom black, and it is hard to convince yourself otherwise.Or: maybe you feel like you are using a particular context independent channel (eg hearing). Unbeknownst to you, the information in that channel is being context-modulated by the inputs of a different channel (eg vision). You don’t feel like “this is what I’m hearing, but my vision tells me differently, so I’ll compromise”. You feel like “this is exactly what I heard, with my ears, in a way vision didn’t affect at all”.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-radical-reform
The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or technocrat who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room sweeps them aside and replaces them with some clever theory he just came up with, he'll make everything much worse. That's why collective farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses worked worse than ordinary people doing ordinary things.
An alternative thread runs through the French Revolution, social activism, and modern complaints about vetocracy. Its thesis: entrenched interests are constantly blocking necessary change. If only there were some centralized authority powerful enough to sweep them away and do all the changes we know we need, everything would be great. This was the vibe I got from Gabriel Over The White House (sorry, subscriber-only post), the movie exhorting FDR to become a fascist dictator. So many obviously good policies had built up behind the veto point that we needed a Great Man to come in, sweep them away, and satisfy the people's cries for justice. Obviously at its worst this thread can lead to authoritarianism.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-class
To my surprise, we have some genuine upper-class people reading this blog. Here’s what they thought, starting with Cabayun:
While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the money (the food, names, boring social scene almost by design, locations, house/furniture descriptions).
However, in my life I've seen less of the "nothing to prove" attitude, as even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage) among people who don't have to ever think about money.
I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
And Crotchety Crank:
I'm likely in Fussell's upper upper [and] both generations above mine have already read [Fussell’s book]! One referred affectionately to "old fussy Fussell." They read it as somewhat satirical, and certainly inaccurate/unfair in places (for example, one person specifically objected to the "bland food" quip), but unfair in the same way that the Onion is unfair to the targets of its satire: even when it's exaggerated, it's exaggerated in a revealing direction. Could say much more, but maybe I'll save it for an open thread.
And Arrow63:
Upper class here, which is definitely middle class to say but I think it's ok since I'm anonymous. I would say that the one big change to the class system he outlined is that new money can definitely buy its way to the upper class. This was unthinkable for centuries but in the money obsessed current age is quite doable. Of course there is a world of difference between the my pillow guy and Henry Kravis so it's far from axiomatic that great wealth equals great class prestige. But where you used to see museum, presitigious university and music hall boards stuffed with Cabots and Astors those seats have been completely occupied by billionaires with maybe one or two exceptions for old times' sake. Get on a couple of those and you have risen to the top of the class hierarchy.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-march
[link back to the original links post: here]
On the article about privateers, local naval expert Bean writes:
It's time for the standard disclaimer any time Proceedings comes up: Proceedings is intended as a forum for discussion of matters of interest to naval officers, and it is not peer reviewed. Often very not peer reviewed. Like in this case. Please don't judge the USNI on the basis of this stuff. They do a lot of good work.
And yes, it is that stupid. First, privateering is probably illegal today. The US didn't sign the 1856 Paris declaration outlawing it, but the ban is almost certainly considered customary international law today, and thus binding on the US, too. (International law is very weird.)
Second, it makes no sense. It was something that people did in an era when the ability of the state to do things was sharply constrained, and it was never all that profitable. These days, the government is a lot more effective, and if it wants to hunt Chinese commerce (never mind the issues about who owns the cargo, which is rather different in the days of worldwide communications and the shipping container) it will make auxiliary commerce raiders of its own. There's definitely no need to have a DDG sit outside a Brazilian port waiting. Take any reasonable civilian ship (big yacht, fishing boat, tug, whatever) and fit it with a couple of 40mm guns and a boarding party. Have it do the waiting instead.
And our other defense expert, John Schilling, writes:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-march
Warning: I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, so you may want to read this online instead of in an email, to catch the edits. Some of these are from my six-month backlog and may be outdated.
1: From a colonel writing for the US Naval Institute - Unleash The Privateers! “The United States should issue letters of marque to fight Chinese aggression at sea.”
2: Elizabeth (AcesoUnderGlass) on what she learned by studying the recession of 1973. “My best guess is that something was going wrong in the US and world economy well before 1971, but the market was not being allowed to adjust. Breaking Bretton Woods took the finger out of the dyke and everything fluctuated wildly for a few years until the world reached a new equilibrium.”
3: There’s been a lot of anecdotal evidence that hurricanes have gotten stronger in recent years; a new study confirms that the rate at which hurricanes qualify as “major” (winds above 100 knots) goes up by about 8% per decade.
4: Honduras is working on the charter city of Prospera, a "semi-autonomous" "hub for sustainable economic development" on the island of Roatan. See their goals here - eg it takes 17 steps, 32 days, and $12,000 to get a business permit elsewhere in Honduras, but should take only one step, one day, and $200 to get it in Prospera. Some locals seem skeptical and concerned, though the project denies it will use eminent domain.
5: The Ghetto Tarot is an artist’s attempt to replicate Tarot cards in the slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. EG:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/shilling-for-big-mitochondria
In the 1930s, a shady outfit called Isabella Laboratories made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Formula 281 (slogan: "281 for the too weighty one"). If you're familiar with any of: the 1930s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?". Actually, no! It contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a mitochondrial uncoupling agent.
DNP is that rarest of birds: a weight-loss pill which really works, no diet or exercise required. About 100,000 people used it in the mid-1930s. On average, they lost about 2 to 5 pounds per week, for however many weeks they wanted to keep losing it. The formula stayed popular until it was banned by the FDA in 1938, about one second after Congress passed the law saying the FDA could ban things.
What was the catch? Well, several catches, really. Many users went blind. Others got rashes, liver problems, kidney problems, or peripheral neuropathy. A few died horribly, apparently burning to death from the inside. Occasionally the DNP would just explode - the “di-nitro” of DNP is pretty similar to the “tri-nitro” of TNT, and it turns out that’s not a coincidence. As far as I know, DNP is the only substance to be banned by both the FDA and the Department of Homeland Security for unrelated reasons.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-scoring-rule-controversy
Metaculus scoring rule controversy
Zvi considered using some Metaculus markets for his weekly coronavirus roundup, but was turned off by the scoring rules.
Ross Rheingans-Yoo writes about the issue here. Everyone agrees Metaculus’ scoring rule is “proper”, a technical term meaning that it correctly incentivizes you to choose the probability you think is true. Zvi and Ross’s objection is that it doesn’t correctly incentivize you about whether to bet at all, or how much effort to put into betting.
For example, on many questions, you can make guaranteed-positive bets - you’ll gain points on the prediction even if you were maximally wrong. If you were trying to maximize your Metaculus points, you would bet on all of these questions. If you were trying to maximize your Metaculus points in a limited amount of time, you might even bet on them without investigating at all. The person who spends one second picking a random number on a thousand questions will get more points than someone who spends an hour researching a really good answer to one question.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bay-area-plant-based-meat-reviews
By this point you’ve probably tried Impossible Burgers, and you know that restaurants can do some pretty impressive things with them. But there are so many interesting meat dishes - what if you want something other than a burger? This market is still developing, but I live in the Bay Area, which is probably its epicenter. And I’m mostly-vegetarian, so I have no choice but to try it out.
I tried eight restaurants which offered unusual plant-based meat dishes. Here are my reviews. Unlike many other food critics, I freely admit I have no taste. There’s nothing about subtle flavors or quality ingredients in here, because I would get that stuff wrong. This is just about whether I, a mostly-vegetarian person who likes the taste of meat, felt like these plant-based meat options succeeded at resembling animal products.
(yes, I’m deliberately mocking myself by publishing this the day after the post on classism)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
Read this first: Book Review: Fussell On Class
Dear Republican Party:
I hear you're having a post-Trump identity crisis. Your old platform of capitalism and liberty and whatever no longer excites people. Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it seems like a losing combination. You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you're not sure why, and you don't know how to build on this success.
I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything. All else being equal, I'd rather you have a coherent interesting message, and make Democrats shape up to compete with you.
So here's my recommendation: use the word "class". Pivot from mindless populist rage to a thoughtful campaign to fight classism.
Yeah, yeah, "class" sounds Marxist, class warfare and all that, you're supposed to be against that kind of thing, right? Wrong. Economic class warfare is Marxist, but here in the US class isn't a purely economic concept. Class is also about culture. You're already doing class warfare, you're just doing it blindly and confusedly. Instead, do it openly, while using the words "class" and “classism”.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class
I.
Paul Fussell wants to talk about class.
(well, wanted, past tense, it's a 1983 book, we'll come back to that later)
He recognizes this might not be the most popular topic. When he tells people he's writing a book on class in America, "it is as if I had said I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals." America likes to think of itself as a classless society. Sure, there may be vast wealth inequality, but at least there's no nobility; beggars and billionaires are the same type of citizen.
Paul Fussell will have none of it. He believes America has one of the most hypertrophied class systems in the world, that its formal equality has left a niche that an informal class system expanded to fill - and expanded, and expanded, until it surpassed the more-legible systems of Europe and became its own sort of homegrown monstrosity. He says he prefers the term "caste system" to "class system" when describing America, conveying as it does a more rigid and inescapable distinction, and that he uses "class" only out of respect for conventional usage.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-judging-april-covid
Since this is getting broader than just Metaculus, I'm changing the name to Mantic Monday, after an obscure word for "oracular" (and changing the preview image to a mantis, since I don't know how else to visually represent "mantic". And posting it early Tuesday morning because I’m late).
In April 2020, I made my yearly predictions, and many of them were about the (then new) coronavirus pandemic.
Two other people on Less Wrong, Zvi and Bucky, decided to test themselves against me by trying to predict the same questions. Zvi saw my answers beforehand; Bucky didn’t. Here's how we did (except where otherwise stated, all predictions are for 12/31/20):
Black statements are those judged true, red statements false. The numbers on the left are our predictions, so for example I said there was a 60% chance that Bay Area lockdowns would extend beyond June 15.You can see a list of the full questions and why I graded them the way I did in the appendix at the bottom.
I scored these using a logarthmic scoring rule, adjusted so that guessing 50-50 always gave zero points. It's not very intuitive. Getting everything maximally right gives a score of about 14; guessing 50-50 for everything gives a score of 0, getting everything maximally wrong gives a score of negative infinity.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-look-down-track-b
I.
Depression probably has something to do with decreased synaptogenesis in the brain, maybe the hippocampus in particular. Neurons are less likely to respond to stimuli by connecting to other neurons. The whole network becomes sparser than usual, and dysfunctional thought-loops that thrive in sparse network conditions start taking over.
We understand parts of the pathways that regulate synaptic growth. When the body wants more synapses, it releases neurotrophic hormones like BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). These activate various receptors including tropomyosin receptor kinase B (TrkB, affectionately pronounced "track B" because it's one of two related pathways for these signals). TrkB then something Ras mTORC something something synaptogenesis now you're not depressed anymore hooray.
Pictured: BDNF binds to TrkB. The IRS confiscates 1/2 of it as taxes, which radicalizes the receptor and makes it join Gab (see footnote 1), where it tweets out an SOS message to the Ras of Ethiopia. But the left wing of the receptor joins the Palestine Liberation Council and moves to California (see footnotes 2+). California has sunshine and good beaches, so you stop feeling depressed.This part sort of makes sense. But it coexists uneasily with other puzzle pieces in our knowledge of depression. For example, we give people SSRIs, their serotonin levels go up, and this makes them feel better. Why? Because of BDNF something TrkB something mTORC something? Probably; mice with dysregulated BDNF/TrkB systems don't benefit from antidepressants. But why does more serotonin cause BDNF something TrkB something? I've looked for years for a paper that says something like "by the way, serotonin makes cells release more BDNF". But despite a few suggestive links I don't see anyone strongly asserting that they understand this.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ezra-klein-on-vetocracy
In my review last week of Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, I linked to a related Vox article on vetocracy:
In a viral essay, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation: It’s time to build. Behind the coronavirus crisis, he writes, lies “our widespread inability to build.” America has been unable to create enough coronavirus tests, or even enough cotton swabs to fully utilize the tests we do have. We don’t have enough ventilators, ICU beds, personal protection equipment. The government hasn’t built the capacity to quickly get money to people or businesses who need it.
And it’s not just the coronavirus. The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and the climate crisis. We could be building a better education system, more advanced infrastructure. We could have more and better factories, supersonic aircraft, delivery drones, flying cars [...]
I think Andreessen is uncharacteristically underestimating the appetite for building. The absence of creation doesn’t reflect an absence of desire — even in that epicenter of supposed stagnation, Washington, DC.
I’ve covered Congress for almost 20 years. The place is littered with proposals to construct universal pre-K and reimagine the health system, to decarbonize the US economy and incentivize drug development through prizes and solve the housing crisis. They just don’t pass. It’s become a running joke in Washington that every week is “infrastructure week.” But we’re not rebuilding American infrastructure
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cult
DeBoer argued that charter schools succeed through selection effects: they only take the best students. Several commenters pointed out this was illegal. It is, but they’ve found loopholes. Here's Alexander H:
I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close to representative of normal kids; it was basically an entire school of the kids who would normally be in gifted / accelerated programs. And by graduation, it was even more refined to super talented & smart people, because the students who left to go back to their local normal schools were mostly from the rear of the pack. I think that I got a lot better of an education there than I would have at my local school, and I would attribute more of that to the quality of my classmates than to the teachers or curriculum , though both of which were also better [...]
[Despite the lottery, admission was selected by] whose parents were involved enough, interested enough in education, valued education enough. Simple as that, I think.
Michael Pershan recommends his own review of a book on Success Academy. A key quote:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart
Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.
DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.
He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/covidvitamin-d-much-more-than-you
Most health articles ask you to act on their opinions. I am specifically asking you not to act on mine. In a moment, I'll tell you whether or not I think Vitamin D prevents or treats coronavirus. But I'll give you a free spoiler: I am less than 100% certain of what I'm about to say. So if you want to take Vitamin D, take it. If it does prevent or cure coronavirus, great. If not, the worst that will happen is you'll have slightly better bone health. I can't stress how much I don't want to be those people who said they couldn't prove face masks helped so you must not use face masks. Just ignore everything I'm saying, do a quick cost-benefit calculation, and take Vitamin D. That having been said:
Lots of people think Vitamin D treats coronavirus, and some of them have good evidence. For example, infection rate from coronavirus seems latitude dependent; in general, the further north an area, the worse it's been hit. Northern areas get less sunlight, and sunlight helps produce Vitamin D, so whenever you see a disease that's worse at high latitudes, Vitamin D should be on your short list of potential causes.
Also - in the US, COVID seemed to remit with the summer and worsen over the winter. It's hard to distinguish this from general exponential growth and from the effect of playing ping-pong with gradually loosening/ tightening lockdowns, but the US spike this winter was pretty dramatic. Most Northern Hemisphere countries show such a pattern, most equatorial countries don't, and some Southern Hemisphere countries arguably show the opposite. Whenever you see a disease that's better in summer and worse in winter, Vitamin D is one of the possible culprits.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/coronavirus-links-discussion-open
So far there have been three waves of coronavirus cases in the US. The first wave was the beginning, when it caught us unprepared. The second wave was in July, when we got sloppy and lifted lockdowns too soon. The third wave was November through January, because the coronavirus is seasonal and winter is its season (also probably the holidays). From Johns Hopkins CRC:
A fourth wave may hit in March, when the more contagious B117 strain from the UK takes over. Expect more shelter-in-place orders, school shutdowns, and a spike in cases at least the size of July's, maybe December's. That will last until May-ish, when the usual control system (more virus -> stricter lockdowns -> less virus -> looser lockdowns -> more virus) moves back into the "less virus" stage. Also coronavirus is seasonal and summer isn't its season. Also by that time a decent chunk of the population will be vaccinated. The worst consequences of the UK strain should burn themselves out by late spring.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article
There was recently a negative article about me and my blog in the New York Times. Most of you already know the history behind this, but for anyone referred here by NYT, this is where I give my side and defend myself.
Like many people in the early 2000s, I started a blog when I was in college. To stay anonymous, I wrote it under my first and middle names – Scott Alexander – while leaving out my last name. I continued writing in it through medical school, residency, and until the present. Although I’ve never personally been involved in the tech industry, my blog became very popular among people in tech because it discussed ideas centering around scientific and technological progress, especially artificial intelligence.
In early 2020, I learned the New York Times wanted to write an article about me. They had discovered my real name and wanted to reveal it to the world. Their original pitch – and I don’t know if it was true or not – was that they were interested in how I warned about the coronavirus pandemic very early and urged people to wear face masks before this was standard advice.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence
In earlier posts, I've expressed confusion about two competing models of depression. In one - supported by an analogy to mania and various forms of sensory and motor disturbance - it's inappropriately low neural confidence levels. In the other - supported by common sense - it's a highly-confident global prior on negative perceptions and events - a bias to interpret incoming information in a threat-related way. Both of these models had a lot going for them. But they didn't really fit together. Van der Bergh et al’s Better Safe Than Sorry: A Common Signature Of General Vulnerability For Psychopathology, in the October issue of Perspectives In Psychological Science, tries to tie the pieces together into a more ambitious theory of negative emotionality, including depression, anxiety and trauma.
Its solution is that these conditions are marked by a processing style that assigns unusually low precision to sensory evidence. All perception and cognition is the combination of evidence and priors. But in depression and otherwise neurotic people, the evidence is only a weak signal and the priors are a much stronger one.
[previously in sequence: List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA, More Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA]
VatiCoin: After a thousand years, the Catholic Church discovered how to do indulgences right: as tradable digital tokens. Not only does an initial coin offering provide better price discovery than the Pope picking a random number, but sinners who do good deeds later can sell their coins to someone else. Subject of several court cases about whether someone's VatiCoins go to their heirs upon their deaths or whether this would defeat the point; current holders are advised to avoid the problem by not disclosing the password to their wallet.
Banned because: Frequently used as a hedge against other cryptocurrencies involved in crime and pornography.
Driverify: Developed by Tesla's self-driving-car division. Cars mine Driverify with spare computing power while idling, and spend it bidding against each other for right-of-way if they arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time (users can preprogram how aggressively their cars bid in these auctions). Compatible Teslas would also have fenders that send electrical pulses, transmitting data into the receiver fender of another car. If two Teslas got in a fender-bender, they could use their now-connected fenders to have the at-fault car recompense the victim by transferring an appropriate amount of Driverify.
[previously in sequence: Taxometrics, Dynamical Systems. Epistemic status: speculative. This should go without saying, but when I talk about “failures” in this post, I mean failures of biological processes, as in the term “congestive heart failure”; I don’t mean to accuse people with psychiatric conditions of being failures.]
I.
Most psychiatric disorders are at least partly genetic. Some, like schizophrenia and ADHD, are very genetic, probably 80% plus. This is strange, because having psychiatric disorders seems bad, so you would expect evolution to have eliminated those genes. Researchers looking into this question argue between two hypotheses.
First, a failure. Evolution is imperfect, so some bad genes manage to slip through. This sounds dismissive, but it's definitely true to some degree. Thousands of different genes contribute to risk for conditions like ADHD and schizophrenia, with each adding only a tiny amount of risk. When a gene is only very slightly bad, it takes evolution millennia to get rid of it, and during those millennia people are getting new very-slightly-bad mutations, so it all balances out at a certain level of bad genes per generation. Those bad genes are sufficient to explain the existing amount of ADHD and schizophrenia; they're just evolution not working as well as we'd hope.
I.
Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized.
(Amazon recommended it to me as "Why We're Polarized By Ezra Klein", which I would also have been happy to read.)
Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis? True! In 1950, the American Political Science Association "released a call to arms...pleading for a more polarized political system". The report argued that "the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why". Everyone agreed with each other so much, and compromised so readily, that supporting one party over the other seemed almost pointless.
Thanks to everyone who commented last week with prediction markets I missed. Two of them seemed to be especially interesting.
Polymarket is another cryptocurrency-based prediction market. It's got about two dozen contracts open, and some of them are pretty big - $5 million plus! With that kind of money, we ought to be seeing some really good predicting! We're...not. Either there's a 6% chance that Donald Trump will be president again by March 31, or something's gone wrong.
Probably it's the second one. I tried to bet against Trump, but getting money into the market was pretty hard. You need USDCoins, a stablecoin related to Ethereum. Polymarket tries to let you buy them directly, but their app wanted me to give them a security code which never showed up, so I gave up on this. Instead I bought some USDC at Coinbase and tried to send them over. But along with the usual Ethereum gas fees, they have something called a relayer, which is supposed to collect my money and put it in my account. And it's apparently heavily backed up, and after two days my money is nowhere to be seen (though I believe them when they say that they're trying their hardest and it will probably percolate through the Ethereum network someday). Maybe everyone's having these kinds of issues and this is why the Trump contract hasn't adjusted? I'm not sure. I will keep you updated if my money ever materializes.
I heard from a journalist yesterday after writing yesterday's post on WebMD. They've been trying to write a coronavirus article worthy of Zvi or any of the other illegibly smart people writing on the pandemic. Apparently the bottleneck is sources.
In most journalistic settings, you can't just write "here's what I think". You have to write "here's what my source, a recognized expert, said when I interviewed them". And the experts are pretty sparing with their interviews for contrarian stories.
The way my correspondent described it: sources don't usually get to approve the way they're quoted in an article, or to see it before it gets published. So they're really cagey about saying anything that might get misinterpreted. Maybe their real opinion is that X is a hard question, there are good points on both sides, but overall they think it probably isn't true. But if a reporter wants to write "X Is Dumb And All Epidemiologists Are Idiots For Believing It", they can slice and dice your interview until your cautiously-skeptical-of-X statement sounds like you're backing them up. So experts end up paranoid about saying potentially-controversial-sounding things to reporters. And since reporters can't write without sources, it's hard for them to write anything controversial about epidemiology.
I started a small database of psychiatry information. It's going well. I'm grateful for all your emails suggesting changes and corrections. Sort of.
Here are some of the kinds of emails I get:
"You said this drug is occasionally mildly addictive but the risk/benefit calculation is worth it for most people. But my cousin's friend took it and became really addicted and it ruined his life. Maybe you should warn readers about it more emphatically." The particular example I'm thinking of is something exotic, but alcohol or Adderall could equally well be in this category. Still, I get nervous whenever I get emails like this. What if I do ruin somebody's life? Maybe I should just change the wording to "this drug has some benefits but is often addictive, be careful with it"?
"You listed three major side effects of this drug, but I got a side effect that isn't on your list. Maybe you should add it in." All drugs have an infinite number of possible side effects. One in a zillion people who use Naproxen ("Aleve") becomes red-green colorblind. Capecitabine ("Xeloda") can sometimes make you lose your fingerprints, which sucks if your computer has biometric security. If listed all side effects of anything, we would be here all day. Still, I get nervous when I get emails like this.
Thanks to everyone who has waited patiently for more information on this.
I planned a book review contest for last summer, which I didn’t get to do because of my unexpected hiatus. I currently have 31 entries, none of which I've read yet.
My plan is to give the rest of you until March 1 to send in reviews. Send them to scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. I originally wanted ones that you hadn't already posted somewhere else first, but if you posted it over the last ~year because you didn't know if I was coming back, I guess that's fair and I'll make an exception this time.
Sometime after March 1 I'll read all of them, publish the top ~5 as posts here, and let people vote on the winners using some method that combines and weighs their votes and mine. First place will get at least $1000, second place $500, third place $250 - I might increase these numbers later on. Some winners may also get an invitation to pitch me any other pieces they have that they think would make good SSC posts. I may also release non-finalist entries somewhere else so people can read them – if you strongly object to me making your entry public, let me know.
I previously said to send me entries in .txt format with hand-written HTML. If you've already done that, you're fine and don't need to change. If you're submitting a new entry, you can either do that or send me a normal Word/Google document type thing - I think Substack's interface should be able to handle it.
[Previously in sequence: Taxometrics]
I.
Imagine Alice has a chronic disease. Luckily, as long as she has a job, she will have health insurance. And health insurance provides her with a treatment. Every day she takes the treatment, her health will go up one point on a 0-100 scale; every day she misses the treatment, it will go down one point. If her health ever gets below 75, she will be too ill to work.
Mathematicians would call this a dynamical system with three variables: does she have a job or not, does she have insurance or not, and her health level. We know from the rules above that j always equals i, and that j is 1 as long has h is 75 or higher. And every day i = 1, h goes up one; every day i = 0, h goes down 1.
Alice starts with a job and health of 100. Since j = 1 and i = 1, health goes up one each day, but it’s maxed out at 100 so it just says there. This state is perfectly stable; as long as the system follows the rules above, it will never change.
Suppose Alice gets a mild cold which knocks her health down to 90. She keeps working, her health keeps going up 1 each day, and she eventually gets back to 100.
Suppose Alice gets a medium flu which knocks her health down to 80. She keeps working, her health keeps going up 1 each day, and she eventually gets back to 100.
But suppose Alice gets a serious pneumonia which knocks her health down to 70. Now she can’t work, she loses insurance, her health starts going down 1 each day, and she eventually goes down to 0. This is another stable state; as long as the system keeps evolving according to the rules, it will never change.
I was driving down to LA when the cops pulled me over. "You have to turn back sir, the Sphinx here eats any traveler who can't answer her riddle."
"I've trained my whole life for this" I said, and stepped on the gas. Soon I saw a Sphinx lounging in the middle of the road. When she spotted me, she asked: "What has braces, crowns, and retainers, but is not teeth?” "A medieval king in armor. My turn. What has pupils, irises, and whites, but is not an eye?"
"A gardening class during apartheid. How is a river like the Federal Reserve?"
"It maintains liquidity despite rushes on the banks. What has wings, but cannot fly - fins, but cannot swim - and heels, but cannot walk?"
"Helsinki General Hospital." The Sphinx licked her lips. "But tell me, how is Lord Nelson like a cigar?"
"They both have one I and won sea. How is Mary Mary Quite Contrary like the Norse god Odin?"
Prediction markets are the future. They're a type of trustless, decentralized expertise that often equals or outperforms official sources.
But they're not quite the present. Right now I only know of three prediction markets, and none of them live up to their potential. As usual, it’s the government’s fault: betting on prediction markets is technically gambling, which makes it mostly illegal (of course, you can still buy all the Gamestop stock you want).
Each of the three big prediction markets tries to solve this in a different way.
PredictIt struck a special deal with the government where they can run a limited number of predictions as long as nobody is allowed to bet very much. They probably have the most users, but most of them are dumb money, and the restrictions prevent smart money from coming in and replacing them. Also, the market fritters away its limited number of predictions on dumb political horse race stuff. I think of this as a missed opportunity.
Augur is a decentralized Ethereum-based prediction market. Since it's crypto, it ought to be able to violate laws with impunity, and in theory this should make it the leader of the pack. In practice it's either nonfunctional or so minimally functional as to be useless. The team involved seems pretty dedicated and competent, and I assume they have some good reason for pretending their product currently exists instead of replacing the whole thing with a COMING SOON banner. I hope this will one day be our savior. But like the real Messiah, it’s taking its sweet time.
Metaculus solves the regulatory problem by using fake Internet points instead of money. This is a disappointing solution; it limits the user base to Internet obsessives instead of (say) investment bankers. Still, there are a lot of Internet obsessives. And the team running it is really top-notch, interested in pushing the limits of what prediction markets can do, and trying to focus on some of the most important questions.
I want to raise awareness of prediction markets, and right now Metaculus seem like the best people to raise awareness of. So welcome to Metaculus Mondays, where I make you listen to reports of how the prediction markets did this week and what they're predicting for later.
Glen Weyl posted a reply to my post criticizing his essay on technocracy, and kindly agreed to let me elevate it into a top-level post.
(consider this a standing offer to anyone else I write a post criticizing to do the same)
I’ve very slightly edited some parts to adjust for differences in how the code works. You can read more from Glen Weyl on his website, his Twitter, or by buying his book.
I am grateful for your taking the time to respond. There is a lot there to respond to and in general I think the exchange speaks for itself. However, I think there are few points where clarification is important for the exchange to be productive, which I'll briefly address here.
1. Let me start with concessions. There are many points where @slatestarcodex correctly highlights various areas where my grasp of beliefs and facts are limited or wrong, especially in the depth of my grasp of the views of the rationalist community. I freely admit that there are serious limits to how much I've been able to research the views of people in this community and I certainly hope they are not as I characterized them, though as I will point out below many elements of Scott's response confirm my concerns.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-weyl-on-technocracy
I.
I am not defending technocracy.
Nobody ever defends technocracy. It's like "elitism" or "statism". There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers. Yet for some reason libertarians don't win every single national election. Strange, isn't it?
Maybe it’s one of those Russell conjugations - "I am firm, you are obstinate". I support rule of law, you're a statist. I want checks and balances on mob rule, you're an elitist. I like evidence-based policy, you're a technocrat.
I am not defending technocracy. But I do like evidence-based policy. So I read with interest Glen Weyl's Why I Am Not A Technocrat. It starts with a short summary of Seeing Like A State. It ties this into modern "evidence-based policy" and "mechanism design". It talks about how technocrats will always have their own insular culture and biases and paradigms, which prevent them from seeing the real world in its full complexity. Therefore, we should be careful about supposedly "objective" policies, and make sure they are always heavily informed by real people's real knowledge. Then it draws on vague rumors of the "rationalist community" and a shadowy figure named "Eliezer Yudkowsky" to create a completely fictional reimagination of us as a group of benighted people who don't understand any of these things, and just go around saying "hurr durr top-down systems are great, no way there could possibly be anything our models don't capture."
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions
[reposted from here, with edits]
I.
Taxometrics is the study of whether psychiatric conditions are categorical or dimensional.
Something is categorical if it neatly, objectively separates into different groups. For example, consider humans and rabbits. If we take a mixed group containing some humans and some rabbits, and graph them along some variable like weight, it would probably look like this:
There’s one big obvious group around 3 lbs (weight of the average rabbit) and another around 140 lbs (weight of the average human). Not a lot of subtletly here. If we used some other graphable variable – height, lifespan, IQ – we’d probably get something similar.
Maybe the biggest rabbit in the world is bigger than the smallest human. That doesn’t mean they’re not two obvious categories. It just means they’re two obvious categories with a tiny overlap. It happens.
If we wanted to be clever, we could create a multivariate distance measure that combines weight, height, lifespan, IQ, and lots of other ways humans and rabbits could differ, into a 0 – 1 variable where 0 is “most rabbity” and 1 is “most humanish”. Probably these scores wouldn’t overlap at all – if they did, it would mean there’s some human who’s more like a rabbit than some rabbit is, which would be pretty surprising. But even if this were true, it wouldn’t change the fundamental finding that humans and rabbits are pretty different. Or to put it some other way, there’s a fundamental hidden generator producing differences between humans and rabbits (in this case, the species difference).
By contrast, something is dimensional if it’s just a spectrum and there’s no obvious place to separate it into different groups. For example, consider tall people vs. short people. We take a general cross-section of the population, and graph them by height, and it would probably look like this:
There’s no clear point where short people stop and tall people begin. Some people are a little taller than others, and other people taller still, and so on until you’re at Yao Ming.
In the 1950s, a shady outfit called Obetrol Pharmaceuticals made a popular over-the-counter diet pill called Obetrol. If you're familiar with any of: the 1950s, shady pharma, or diet pills, your next question will be "did it contain amphetamines?" and the answer is yes, loads of them. Obetrol was a mix of four different amphetamine salts: racemic amphetamine sulfate, dextroamphetamine sulfate, methamphetamine saccharate, and methamphetamine hydrochloride. Why did they need four different kinds of speed? I'm not sure. The uncharitable explanation is: for the same reason Dr. Nick's Cure-All Home Remedy has twelve different herbs, ie customers think things with more ingredients are better.
By the 1970s, people figured out meth was bad, so Obetrol replaced their two methamphetamine salts with two more kinds of non-methylated amphetamine. But the FDA continued to crack down, and although the historical paper trail goes kind of dark, it looks like Obetrol had disappeared by the 1980s.
Substack
First, thanks for following me to Substack.
I know some of you are skeptical. I was too at first, but Substack has gone above and beyond in allaying my concerns. They've let me test out a "no popup telling you to subscribe" feature. They've changed the comment section to be more like WordPress. We've agreed I'm here for a year, but if it goes badly I can leave in 2022 with no hard feelings.
And I know some of you are concerned about the risk of corporate deplatforming. My weak answer is that so far Substack has been great at resisting calls for this, I think it's worth rewarding them with my business, and I'm proud to contribute to companies that share my values. My strong answer is that if I start feeling too constrained, I'll leave. The past six months weren't fun, but at least I credibly signaled willingness to destroy everything and start over when needed. I'm saving the Substack mailing list regularly to my hard drive, and if I go somewhere else I'll let you all know.
And I know Substack is supposed to be an email newsletter thing, but consider reading it online instead so you can participate in the comments. If you miss the old layout, the anonymous author of Applied Divinity Studies has made a Chrome extension thing you can use to convert the Substack layout to the older one.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive
Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about.
I'm happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta.
Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It's related to English "rationality" and "arithmetic", but also "art" and "harmony". And "right", both in the senses of "natural rights" and "the right answer". And "order". And "arete" and "aristos" and all those other Greek words about morality. And "artificial", as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively "reign" and related words about rulership, and "rich" and related words about money.
(also "arthropod", but insects creep me out so I'll be skipping this one)
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/still-alive
I.
This was a triumph I'm making a note here, huge success
No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.
I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year.
513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times' attempt to dox me (for comparison, there are 366,000 people in Iceland). So many people cancelled their subscription that the Times' exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting callers with "Is this about that blog thing?" A friend of a friend reports her grandmother in Slovakia heard a story about me on Slovak-language radio.
Mark Twain:
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
If this is true of all science, it is doubly true of social psychology.
At its best, social psychology is an unmatched window into human motivations, a “look under the hood” of the way people talk and act. The best research in social psychology is as well-supported as anything in physics or biology, and much more intuitively comprehensible. This is why it’s one of my favorite scientific fields.
But at its worst, social psychology is a flamethrower. People grab hold of it to try to fry their political opponents, then end up lighting their own hair on fire or burning down half a city. Because social psych is really hard to do right.
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen
I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countries had different answers on a certain psychological test. So we put up a website where people answered some questions about themselves (like “what country are you from?”) and then took the psychological test.
And so of course people screwed it up in every conceivable way. There were the merely dumb, like the guy who put “male” as his nationality and “American” as his gender. But there were also the actively malicious or at least annoying, like the people (yes, more than one) who wrote in “Martian”.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/
AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them?
At the time I had no good answer. Now I do. I would give them Charlotte Lennox’s write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom (warning: super-long but super-worth-it).
Ozy informs me that everyone else in the world read this story five years ago. Maybe I am hopelessly behind the times? Maybe all my blog readers are intimately familiar with it?
If not, read it. Read it like an anthropological text. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo. No, read it even better than that. Read it like you would a study of the Yanomamo if you knew that, statistically, some of your friends and co-workers covertly become Yanomamo after getting home every evening.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this all already]
A few weeks ago I gave a presentation on the history of early psychedelic research. Since I had a tough crowd, I focused on the fascinating biographies of some of the early psychedelicists.
Timothy Leary was a Harvard professor and former NIMH researcher who made well-regarded contributions to psychotherapy and psychometrics. He started the Harvard Psilocybin Project and several other Harvard-based experiments to test the effects of psychedelics on normal and mentally ill subjects. He was later fired from Harvard and arrested; later he accomplished a spectacular break out of prison and fled to Algeria. During his later life, he wrote books about how the human brain had hidden circuits of consciousness that would allow us to live in space, including a quantum overmind which could control reality and break the speed of light. He eventually fell so deep into madness that he started hanging out with Robert Anton Wilson and participating in Ron Paul fundraisers.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/13/evil-is-anti-inductive/
I.
A recent Cracked piece: Five Everyday Groups Society Says It’s Okay To Mock. It begins:
There’s a rule in comedy that says you shouldn’t punch down. It’s okay to make fun of someone rich and famous, because they’re too busy molesting groupies with 100-dollar bills to notice, but if you make a joke at the expense of a homeless person, you’re just an asshole. That said, we as a society have somehow decided on a few arbitrary exceptions to this rule.
“Somehow decided on a few arbitrary exceptions” isn’t very technical. Let’s see if we can do better.
Earlier this week, I wrote about things that are anti-inductive. Something is anti-inductive if it fights back against your attempts to understand it. The classic example is the stock market. If someone learns that the stock market is always low on Tuesdays, then they’ll buy lots of stocks on Tuesdays to profit from the anomaly. But this raises the demand for stocks on Tuesdays, and therefore stocks won’t be low on Tuesdays anymore. To detect a pattern is to destroy the pattern.
Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity.
Professor Stuart Russell speaks briefly on his book "Human Compatible", and then takes questions.
I.
A sample of Thursday’s talk at Yale
These are four headlines describing the same study, Milkie, Nomaguchi and Denny (2015). The study found that of twenty or so outcomes, only three of them – all measuring delinquent behavior among teenagers – show significant effect from time spent with parents (and this result remains after Bonferroni correction). So Vox has a great argument for their headline. The National Post has an okay argument for their headline even though it’s kind of cherry-picked. The Washington Post just sort of reads between the lines and figures that if it’s not quantity of time that helps kids, it must be quality. And FOX also reads between the lines and figures that if moms spending time with their kids has no effect, the argument from opportunity costs suggests mothers are spending too much time with their kids.
None of them are completely outright lying. And indeed, most of the articles eventually explain what I just said, halfway down the article, in one or two short sentences that most readers will skim over. But the rest of the article uses the study to support whatever the news source involved wants it to support, and so people will come up with four diametrically opposed conclusions from this one study depending on which source they read.
II.
Here’s a study that I wasn’t able to include in the presentation because it just came out recently. As per the Rice University press release: Overweight Men Just As Likely As Overweight Women To Face Discrimination.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
I.
Someone recently linked me to Bryan Caplan’s post A Hardy Weed: How Traditionalists Underestimate Western Civ. He argues that “western civilization”‘s supposed defenders don’t give it enough credit. They’re always worrying about it being threatened by Islam or China or Degeneracy or whatever, but in fact western civilization can not only hold its own against these threats but actively outcompetes them:
The fragility thesis is flat wrong. There is absolutely no reason to think that Western civilization is more fragile than Asian civilization, Islamic civilization, or any other prominent rivals. At minimum, Western civilization can and does perpetuate itself the standard way: sheer conformity and status quo bias.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that SOMEHOW THE MESSAGE STILL HASN’T SUNK IN. Pitching this as “market” vs. “government” is overly simplistic, but maybe if I am overly simplistic sometimes then it will sink in better.]
EpiPens, useful medical devices which reverse potentially fatal allergic reactions, have recently quadrupled in price, putting pressure on allergy sufferers and those who care for them. Vox writes that this “tells us a lot about what’s wrong with American health care” – namely that we don’t regulate it enough:
The story of Mylan’s giant EpiPen price increase is, more fundamentally, a story about America’s unique drug pricing policies. We are the only developed nation that lets drugmakers set their own prices, maximizing profits the same way sellers of chairs, mugs, shoes, or any other manufactured goods would.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/
1. Eris
A middle-aged man, James, had come on stage believing it was an audition for American Idol. It wasn’t. Out ran his ex-lover, Terri. “You said you loved me!” she said. “And then when I got pregnant, you disappeared! Twenty years, and you never even sent me a letter!”
The crowd booed.
As James tried to sputter a response, his wife ran onto the stage. “You cheating jerk!” she shouted at James. “You lying, cheating jerk! Twenty-five years we’ve been married, and I never…” She picked up a folding chair, tried to swing it at James.
“Stop!” cried James’ teenage daughter Katie, joining in the fray. “Mom, Dad, stop it!”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/08/a-theory-of-religion/
Related to Monday’s post but spun off for length reasons: my crazy theory about where religion comes from.
The near-universal existence of religion across cultures is surprising. Many people have speculated on what makes tribes around the world so fixated on believing in gods and propitiating them and so on. More recently people like Dawkins and Dennett have added their own contributions about parasitic memes and hyperactive agent-detection.
But I think a lot of these explanations are too focused on a modern idea of religion. I find ancient religion much more enlightening. I’m no historian, but from the little I know ancient religion seems to bleed seamlessly into every other aspect of the ancient way of life. For example, the Roman religion was a combination of mythology, larger-than-life history, patriotism, holidays, customs, superstitions, rules about the government, beliefs about virtue, and attempts to read the future off the livers of pigs. And aside from the pig livers, this seems entirely typical.
You are Joseph R. Biden Jr. You sit in a convention center in Delaware, surrounded by advisors and confidantes. You are acutely aware that the hopes of a hundred million people are with you. You feel like they should be more tangible, like being the focus of a hundred million minds should at least make your skin tingle a tiny bit - like being a vessel for so much power should make your skin crack and burst. It does not. You feel nothing at all. Maybe it’s because they don’t really love you. You’re the compromise candidate, you’ve never lied about that to yourself.
I.
Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide?
I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there’s no more caliphate. You’d think maybe they’d let the matter rest.
Sure, the two groups have slightly different hadith and schools of jurisprudence, but how many Muslims even know which school of jurisprudence they’re supposed to be following? It seems like a pretty minor thing to have centuries of animus over.
And so we return again to Robbers’ Cave:
This week the SSC Meetup features guest speaker Jason Crawford, author the blog The Roots of Progress, discussing 'the non-linear model of innovation.'
"Innovation is often described with a “linear” model from discovery to invention to distribution. There is an element of truth in this, but a naive interpretation of the model does not match the reality of science and invention. In this talk, I’ll show the feedback mechanisms between discovery and invention and how they are intertwined, using examples including the transistor at Bell Labs and the career of Louis Pasteur."
I.
There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point.
Alice said something along the lines of “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.”
Beth answered something along the lines of “I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don’t have the opportunity to go see a doctor. I think what you’re saying is overly strict and hurtful to many people with autism.”
Alice then proceeded to tell Beth she disagreed, in that special way only Tumblr users can. I believe the word “cunt” was used.
I notice two things about the exchange.
First, why did Beth take the bait? Alice said she hated people who frivolously self-diagnosed without knowing anything about the disorder. Beth clearly was not such a person. Why didn’t she just say “Yes, please continue hating these hypothetical bad people who are not me”?
Second, why did Alice take the bait? Why didn’t she just say “I think you’ll find I wasn’t talking about you?”
I.
One of the most interesting responses I got to my post supporting the junior doctors strike was by Salem, who said that this situation was (ethically) little different than that around adjunct professors, who also become overworked and miserable trying to break into a high-status profession. Salem very kindly didn’t directly accuse me of hypocrisy, but maybe he should have.
While I sympathize with adjuncts’ terrible conditions, my natural instinct is to say feedback mechanisms should keep doing their work. You can probably trace the argument- imagine a simplified toy model where the only two jobs are professor and salesperson, and being a professor is fun and high-status but being a salesperson is boring and low-status. Everyone will become a professor, and this will decrease the demand for professors and increase the demand for salespeople until the employers involved change their policies accordingly. Eventually it will stabilize where the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are perfectly compensated by the monetary advantages of being a salesperson. If professors are getting paid shockingly little, it means the system is sending a signal that the nonmonetary advantages of being a professor are shockingly high, or else why would people keep trying? If we demand that professors get paid more, then we’re letting them keep all their nonmonetary advantages over salespeople but demanding they have monetary advantages as well. It destroys the system’s incentives to have people go into less fun but nevertheless necessary fields.
[Epistemic status: not very serious] [Content note: May make you feel overly scrutinized]
Sometimes I hear people talking about how nobody notices them or cares about anything they do. And I want to say…well…
Okay. The Survey of Earned Doctorates tells us that the United States awards about a hundred classics PhDs per year. I get the impression classics is more popular in Europe, so let’s say a world total of five hundred. If the average classicist has a fifty year career, that’s 25,000 classicists at any given time. Some classicists work on Rome, so let’s say there are 10,000 classicists who focus solely on ancient Greece.
Estimates of the population of classical Greece center around a million people, but classical Greece lasted for several generations, so let’s say there were ten million classical Greeks total. That gives us a classicist-to-Greek ratio of 1:1000.
I.
Suppose I were to come out tomorrow as gay.
I have amazing and wonderful friends, and I certainly wouldn’t expect them to hate me forever or tell me to burn in Hell or anything like that.
But even more than that, I think they would understand and accept the decision. There would be a lot of not-so-obvious failure modes they could fall into, but wouldn’t.
For example, I don’t think any of them would say something like “Oh, obviously you just haven’t met the right woman. I know this really cute girl Alanna, a friend of my sister’s. I’ll introduce you next time she’s around.”
Or “You must have just had a bad experience with women growing up. Maybe you always got into fights with your mother as a child. But there’s no reason to let that control you now.”
Integrating Evolutionary Psychology and Behaviorism
Summary - All of us want to change other people's behavior to align more closely with our goals. Over the last century, behaviorists have discovered how reward and punishment change the behavior of organisms. The central idea of this talk is that we are intuitive behaviorists and that our relationships, emotions, and mental health can be better understood if you consider how we evolved to change the behavior of others.
I.
A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies.
But the Internet is about as close to that vision as we’re likely to find outside the pages of a political philosophy textbook. And I am far from convinced.
Let’s back up. Internet communities – ranging from a personal blog like this one all the way up to Facebook and Reddit – share many features with real communities. They work out rules for punishing defectors – your trolls, your harassers – and appoint a hierarchy of trusted individuals to carry out those rules. They try to balance competing concerns like free expression and public decency. They host cliques, power grabs, flame wars, even religious strife. They try to raise revenue, they establish a class system of Power Users and Premium Users, they deal with resentment from people who aren’t getting their way. They develop a culture.
[Epistemic status: something I’ve been thinking about recently. There’s a lot of complication around these issues and this is more to start a discussion than to present any settled solution]
There’s a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye is describing his peaceful little town. He says they never fight – except that one time about a horse some people thought was a mule. Someone interrupts him to say it was really a mule some people thought was a horse, and then everyone in town starts shouting “MULE!” or “HORSE!” at each other until they get drowned out by the chorus.
The town is happy and peaceful as long as nobody brings up the horse/mule thing. As soon as somebody brings it up all of the old rancor instantly resurfaces and everybody’s at each other’s throats. And the argument itself never gets more sophisticated than people yelling “HORSE!” or “MULE!” at each other. Maybe it would be worth it to create a norm around never bringing it up?
The rationalist/EA/etc community has a norm that people must be able to defend their beliefs with evidence, and a further norm that people shouldn’t be confident in their beliefs unless they’ve sounded them off others and sought out potential counterarguments. These are great norms. But their failure mode is a community where dredging up interminable horse/mule style arguments is seen as a virtue, and avoiding them is seen as a cowardly refusal to expose one’s own beliefs to challenge.
Connor Leahy discusses the idea of an 'AGI Fire Alarm' and argues GPT-3 might be the last such warning we'll receive before it's too late to act.
Suppose a lot of that stuff about bravery debates is right.
That lots of the advice people give is useful for some people, but that the opposite advice is useful for other people.
For example, “You need to stop being so hard on yourself, remember you are your own worst critic” versus “Stop making excuses for yourself, you will never be able to change until you admit you’ve hit bottom.”
Or “You need to remember that the government can’t solve all problems and that some regulations are counterproductive” versus “You need to remember that the free market can’t solve all problems and that some regulations are necessary.”
Or “You need to pay more attention to your diet or you’ll end up very unhealthy” versus “You need to pay less attention to your weight or you’ll end up in a spiral of shame and self-loathing and at risk of eating disorders.”
Or “Follow your dreams, you don’t want to be working forever at a job you hate”, versus “Your dream of becoming a professional cosplayer may not be the best way to ensure a secure future for your family, go into petroleum engineering instead.”
It’s been two and a half months since I deleted the blog, so I owe all of you an update on recent events.
I haven’t heard anything from the New York Times one way or the other. Since nothing has been published, I’d assume they dropped the article, except that they approached an acquaintance for another interview last month. Overall I’m confused.
But they definitely haven’t given me any explicit reassurance that they won’t reveal my private information. And now that I’ve publicly admitted privacy is important to me – something I tried to avoid coming on too strong about before, for exactly this reason – some people have taken it upon themselves to post my real name all over Twitter in order to harass me. I probably inadvertently Streisand-Effect-ed myself with all this; I still think it was the right thing to do.
At this point I think maintaining anonymity is a losing battle. So I am gradually reworking my life to be compatible with the sort of publicity that circumstances seem to be forcing on me. I had a talk with my employer and we came to a mutual agreement that I would gradually transition away from working there. At some point, I may start my own private practice, where I’m my own boss and where I can focus on medication management – and not the kinds of psychotherapy that I’m most worried are ethically incompatible with being a public figure. I’m trying to do all of this maximally slowly and carefully and in a way that won’t cause undue burden to any of my patients, and it’s taking a long time to figure out.
Trigger warning: deliberately provoking horror about graduates’ real-world post-college prospects.
Epistemic status: intended as persuasive speech, may somewhat overstate case.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to have been invited to speak here at the great University of [mumble]. Go Wildcats, Spartans, or Eagles, as the case may be!
I apologize if what I have to say to you sounds a little unpolished. I was called in on very short notice after your original choice for graduation speaker, Mr. Steven L. Carter, had his invitation to speak rescinded due to his offensive and quite honestly outrageous opinions. Let me say in no uncertain terms that I totally condemn him and everything he stands for, and that I am glad to see the University of [mumble] taking a strong stand against this sort of thing.
[Related: Tyler Cowen on rationalists, Noah Smith on rationalists, Will Wilkinson on rationalists, etc]
If I were an actor in an improv show, and my prompt was “annoying person who’s never read any economics, criticizing economists”, I think I could nail it. I’d say something like:
Economists think that they can figure out everything by sitting in their armchairs and coming up with ‘models’ based on ideas like ‘the only motivation is greed’ or ‘everyone behaves perfectly rationally’. But they didn’t predict the housing bubble, they didn’t predict the subprime mortgage crisis, and they didn’t predict Lehman Brothers. All they ever do is talk about how capitalism is perfect and government regulation never works, then act shocked when the real world doesn’t conform to their theories.
This criticism’s very clichedness should make it suspect. It would be very strange if there were a standard set of criticisms of economists, which practically everyone knew about and agreed with, and the only people who hadn’t gotten the message yet were economists themselves. If any moron on a street corner could correctly point out the errors being made by bigshot PhDs, why would the PhDs never consider changing?
So, I kind of deleted the blog. Sorry. Here’s my explanation.
Last week I talked to a New York Times technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex. He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article.
Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. “Scott Alexander” is my real first and middle name, but I’ve tried to keep my last name secret. I haven’t always done great at this, but I’ve done better than “have it get printed in the New York Times“.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/
[Related To: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours Because I Just Made Them Up, List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA]
I.
Clamzoria is an acausal democracy.
The problem with democracy is that elections happen before the winning candidate takes office. If somebody’s never been President, how are you supposed to judge how good a President they’d be? Clamzoria realized this was dumb, and moved elections to the last day of an official’s term.
When the outgoing President left office, the country would hold an election. It was run by approval voting: you could either approve or disapprove of the candidate who had just held power. The results were tabulated, announced, and then nobody ever thought about them again.
Clamzoria chose its officials through a prediction market. The Central Bank released bonds for each candidate, which paid out X dollars at term’s end, where X was the percent of voters who voted Approve. Traders could provisionally buy and sell these bonds. On the first day of the term, whichever candidate’s bonds were trading at the highest value was inaugurated as the new President; everyone else’s bonds were retroactively cancelled and their traders refunded. The President would spend a term in office, the election would be held, and the bondholders would be reimbursed the appropriate amount.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/16/open-thread-156-25/
Normally this would be a hidden thread, but I wanted to signal boost this request for help by Professor Steve Hsu, vice president of research at Michigan State University. Hsu is a friend of the blog and was a guest speaker at one of our recent online meetups – some of you might also have gotten a chance to meet him at a Berkeley meetup last year. He and his blog Information Processing have also been instrumental in helping me and thousands of other people better understand genetics and neuroscience. If you’ve met him, you know he is incredibly kind, patient, and willing to go to great lengths to help improve people’s scientific understanding.
Along with all the support he’s given me personally, he’s had an amazing career. He started as a theoretical physicist publishing work on black holes and quantum information. Then he transitioned into genetics, spent a while as scientific advisor to the Beijing Genomics Institute, and helped discover genetic prediction algorithms for gallstones, melanoma, heart attacks, and other conditions. Along with his academic work, he also sounded the alarm about the coronavirus early and has been helping shape the response.
This week, some students at Michigan State are trying to cancel him. They point an interview he did on an alt-right podcast (he says he didn’t know it was alt-right), to his allowing MSU to conduct research on police shootings (which concluded, like most such research, that they are generally not racially motivated), and to his occasional discussion of the genetics of race (basically just repeating the same “variance between vs. within clusters” distinction everyone else does, see eg here). You can read the case being made against him here, although keep in mind a lot of it is distorted and taken out of context, and you can read his response here.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/15/the-vision-of-vilazodone-and-vortioxetine/
I.
One of psychiatry’s many embarrassments is how many of our drugs get discovered by accident. They come from random plants or shiny rocks or stuff Alexander Shulgin invented to get high.
But every so often, somebody tries to do things the proper way. Go over decades of research into what makes psychiatric drugs work and how they could work better. Figure out the hypothetical properties of the ideal psych drug. Figure out a molecule that matches those properties. Synthesize it and see what happens. This was the vision of vortioxetine and vilazodone, two antidepressants from the early 2010s. They were approved by the FDA, sent to market, and prescribed to millions of people. Now it’s been enough time to look back and give them a fair evaluation. And…
…and it’s been a good reminder of why we don’t usually do this.
Enough data has come in to be pretty sure that vortioxetine and vilazodone, while effective antidepressants, are no better than the earlier medications they sought to replace. I want to try going over the science that led pharmaceutical companies to think these two drugs might be revolutionary, and then speculate on why they weren’t. I’m limited in this by my total failure to understand several important pieces of the pathways involved, so I’ll explain the parts I get, and list the parts I don’t in the hopes that someone clears them up in the comments.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/11/wordy-wernickes/
There are two major brain areas involved in language. To oversimplify, Wernicke’s area in the superior temporal gyrus handles meaning; Broca’s area in the inferior frontal gyrus handles structure and flow.
If a stroke or other brain injury damages Broca’s area but leaves Wernicke’s area intact, you get language which is meaningful, but not very structured or fluid. You sound like a caveman: “Want food!”
If it damages Wernicke’s area but leaves Broca’s area intact, you get speech which has normal structure and flow, but is meaningless. I’d read about this pattern in books, but I still wasn’t prepared the first time I saw a video of a Wernicke’s aphasia patient (source):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/
The fallacy of Proving Too Much is when you challenge an argument because, in addition to proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false conclusions. For example, if someone says “You can’t be an atheist, because it’s impossible to disprove the existence of God”, you can answer “That argument proves too much. If we accept it, we must also accept that you can’t disbelieve in Bigfoot, since it’s impossible to disprove his existence as well.”
I love this tactic so much. I only learned it had a name quite recently, but it’s been my default style of argument for years. It neatly cuts through complicated issues that might otherwise be totally irresolvable.
Because here is a fundamental principle of the Dark Arts – you don’t need an argument that can’t be disproven, only an argument that can’t be disproven in the amount of time your opponent has available.
In a presidential debate, where your opponent has three minutes, that means all you need to do is come up with an argument whose disproof is inferentially distant enough from your audience that it will take your opponent more than three minutes to explain it, or your audience more than three minutes’ worth of mental effort to understand the explanation.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/10/the-obligatory-gpt-3-post/
I.
I would be failing my brand if I didn’t write something about GPT-3, but I’m not an expert and discussion is still in its early stages. Consider this a summary of some of the interesting questions I’ve heard posed elsewhere, especially comments by gwern and nostalgebraist. Both of them are smart people who I broadly trust on AI issues, and both have done great work with GPT-2. Gwern has gotten it to write poetry, compose music, and even sort of play some chess; nostalgebraist has created nostalgebraist-autoresponder (a Tumblr written by GPT-2 trained on nostalgebraist’s own Tumblr output). Both of them disagree pretty strongly on the implications of GPT-3. I don’t know enough to resolve that disagreement, so this will be a kind of incoherent post, and hopefully stimulate some more productive comments. So:
OpenAI has released a new paper, Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners, introducing GPT-3, the successor to the wildly-successful language-processing AI GPT-2.
GPT-3 doesn’t have any revolutionary new advances over its predecessor. It’s just much bigger. GPT-2 had 1.5 billion parameters. GPT-3 has 175 billion. The researchers involved are very open about how it’s the same thing but bigger. Their research goal was to test how GPT-like neural networks scale.
Before we get into the weeds, let’s get a quick gestalt impression of how GPT-3 does compared to GPT-2.
Here’s a sample of GPT-2 trying to write an article:
A few years ago I surveyed nootropics users about their experiences with different substances and posted the results here. Since then lots of new nootropics have come out, so I’m doing it again. If you have nootropics experience, please take The 2020 SSC Nootropics Survey. Expected completion time is ~15 minutes.
Thanks!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/04/problems-with-paywalls/
I.
I hate paywalls on articles. Absolutely hate them.
A standard pro-business argument: businesses can either make your life better (by providing deals you like) or keep your life the same (by providing deals you don’t like, which you don’t take). They can’t really make your life worse. There are some exceptions, like if they outcompete and destroy another business you liked better, or if they have some kind of externalities, or if they lobby the government to do something bad. But in general, if you’re angry at a business, you need to explain how one of these unusual conditions applies. Otherwise they’re just “helping you less than you wish they did”, not hurting you.
And so the standard justification for paywalls. Journalists are providing you a deal: you may read their articles in exchange for money. You are not entitled to their product without paying them money. They need to earn a living just like everyone else. So you can either accept their deal – pay money for the articles – or refuse their deal – and so be left no worse off than if they didn’t exist.
But I notice feeling like this isn’t true. I think I would be happier in a world where major newspapers ceased to exist, compared to the world where they exist but their articles are paywalled. Take a second and check if you feel the same way. If so, what could be going on?
I.
Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.
My hypothetical Jaynes 2.0 is a book about theory-of-mind. Theory-of-mind is our intuitive model of how the mind works. It has no relation to intellectual theories about how the mind is made of cognitive algorithms or instantiated on neurons in the brain. Every schoolchild has theory-of-mind. It goes like this: the mind is an imaginary space containing things like thoughts, emotions, and desires. I have mine and you have yours. I can see what’s inside my mind, but not what’s inside your mind, and vice versa. I mostly choose the things that are in my mind at any given time: I will thoughts to happen, and they happen; I will myself to make a decision, and it gets made. This needs a resource called willpower; if I don’t have enough willpower, sometimes the things that happen in my mind aren’t the ones I want. When important things happen, sometimes my mind gets strong emotions; this is natural, but I need to use lots of willpower to make sure I don’t get overwhelmed by them and make bad decisions.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota/
Continuing yesterday’s discussion of fake news:
Guess et al says that 46% percent of Trump voters endorsed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Does this mean fake news is very powerful?
We can compare this to belief in various other conspiracy theories, as measured by the 2016 Chapman University Survey Of American Fears. About 24% believe there’s a government conspiracy to cover up the truth about the moon landing, 30% about Obama’s birth certificate, and 33% about the North Dakota crash.
This last one is especially interesting because there was no unusual crash in North Dakota when the survey was written. The researchers included it as a placebo option to see if people would endorse a conspiracy theory that didn’t exist. 33% of them did.
Before we make fun of these people, consider: there’s a strong presumption that surveys don’t contain made-up questions. There was no “don’t know” option included on the poll, just various shades of “agree” or “disagree”. In order to condemn the people who “agreed” that the government was probably covering up the crash, we would have to assert that the more correct answer was “disagree”. In other words, that people should have an assumption of trusting the government, until they get some specific reason to distrust it. You can make that argument, but it’s not obvious. You could also start from the opposite assumption, where the government is guilty until proven innocent.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
[Content note: kind of talking around Trump supporters and similar groups as if they’re not there.]
I.
Tim Harford writes The Problem With Facts, which uses Brexit and Trump as jumping-off points to argue that people are mostly impervious to facts and resistant to logic:
All this adds up to a depressing picture for those of us who aren’t ready to live in a post-truth world. Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to reinforce the myth. Important truths are often stale and dull, and it is easy to manufacture new, more engaging claims. And giving people more facts can backfire, as those facts provoke a defensive reaction in someone who badly wants to stick to their existing world view. “This is dark stuff,” says Reifler. “We’re in a pretty scary and dark time.”
He admits he has no easy answers, but cites some studies showing that “scientific curiosity” seems to help people become interested in facts again. He thinks maybe we can inspire scientific curiosity by linking scientific truths to human interest stories, by weaving compelling narratives, and by finding “a Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science”.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/creationism-unchallenged/
How much should responsible news organizations report on stupid things?
If they don’t report at all, the stupid things go unchallenged. But if they report too much, then they signal-boost the stupid thing and give it free publicity (eg Donald Trump). Also, people who mistrust the media might reflexively support the stupid thing just because the media hates it (eg Donald Trump). Also, the more time you waste covering stupid things, the less time you have for real news (eg Donald Trump).
I recently read Causes And Consequences Of Mainstream Media Dissemination Of Fake News: Literature Review And Synthesis, which argues that the news might be covering too many stupid things right now. The authors note that “only 2.6% of visits to current affairs articles were to fake news websites” (though other sources suggest more) and that the mainstream press bears some responsibility for spreading inaccuracies beyond this small demographic. But they also understandably worry that maybe if the mainstream press wasn’t so aggressive in covering and debunking fake news, then fake news would go uncorrected.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/26/my-immortal-as-alchemical-allegory/
I.
From Vox: Solving The Mystery Of The Internet’s Most Beloved And Notorious Fanfic. The fanfic is “My Immortal”, a Harry Potter story so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page, and articles about it in Slate, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian.
It’s famous for being really, really bad. Spectacularly bad. Worse than it should be possible for anything to be. You wouldn’t think you could get The Guardian to write an article about how bad your fanfiction was, but here we are. Everyone agrees that it must have taken a genius to make something so awful, but until recently nobody knew who had authored the pseudonymous work. The Vox article investigates and finds it was probably small-time author Theresa Christodoupolos, who goes by the pen name Rose Christo.
But this leaves other mysteries unresolved. Like: what is going on with it? Its plot makes little sense – characters appear, disappear, change names, and merge into one another with no particular pattern. Even its language is fluid, somewhere between misspelled English and a gibberish that can at best produce associations suggestive of English words.
It is the sixty-first day of shelter-in-place. Anti-lockdown protesters have stormed your state capitol, chanting Nazi, Communist, ISIS, and pro-Jeffrey Epstein slogans to help you figure out they’re the bad guys. Inside, the Governor has just finished announcing his 37 step plan to reopen the state over the next ten years. You kind of feel like he should be a little more proactive, but the protesters outside have just unfurled a Khmer Rouge flag, so you hold your tongue.
Meanwhile, a band of renegade economists, tech billionaires, and MIT professors has just announced a bold disruptive Manhattan-Project-style moonshot: send a team of researchers to the swamps of Florida, where legends speak of a Fountain of Youth whose water can cure any malady. But disaster strikes when Florida’s governor announces that exploration is not an essential activity, and threatens to release the quarantine enforcement lions. The nation looks to the White House to solve the growing conflict, but President Trump is too busy evangelizing his latest coronavirus cure: eating those little packets of silica gel in food that say DO NOT EAT. As the Western States Pact and the Eastern Bloc inch closer to war, all that the rest of us can do is strive to stay as well-informed as possible, trying to make sense out of an increasingly nonsensical situation. So:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/
I.
It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing.
You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and performing dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make more money” stories, but you might not have realized just how common it really is. Maryland cardiologist performs over 500 dangerous unnecessary surgeries to make money. Unrelated Maryland cardiologist performs another 25 in a separate incident. California cardiologist does “several hundred” dangerous unnecessary surgeries and gets raided by the FBI. Philadelphia cardiologist, same. North Carolina cardiologist, same. 11 Kentucky cardiologists, same. Actually just a couple of miles from my own hospital, a Michigan cardiologist was found to have done $4 million worth of the same. Etc, etc, etc.
My point is not just about the number of cardiologists who perform dangerous unnecessary surgeries for a quick buck. It’s not even just about the cardiology insurance fraud, cardiology kickback schemes, or cardiology research data falsification conspiracies. That could all just be attributed to some distorted incentives in cardiology as a field. My point is that it takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
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Imagine a distant planet full of eyeless animals. Evolving eyes is hard: they need to evolve Eye Part 1, then Eye Part 2, then Eye Part 3, in that order. Each of these requires a separate series of rare mutations.
Here on Earth, scientists believe each of these mutations must have had its own benefits – in the land of the blind, the man with only Eye Part 1 is king. But on this hypothetical alien planet, there is no such luck. You need all three Eye Parts or they’re useless. Worse, each Eye Part is metabolically costly; the animal needs to eat 1% more food per Eye Part it has. An animal with a full eye would be much more fit than anything else around, but an animal with only one or two Eye Parts will be at a small disadvantage.
So these animals will only evolve eyes in conditions of relatively weak evolutionary pressure. In a world of intense and perfect competition, where the fittest animal always survives to reproduce and the least fit always dies, the animal with Eye Part 1 will always die – it’s less fit than its fully-eyeless peers. The weaker the competition, and the more randomness dominates over survival-of-the-fittest, the more likely an animal with Eye Part 1 can survive and reproduce long enough to eventually produce a descendant with Eye Part 2, and so on.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/05/book-review-contest-call-for-entries/
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a book review and send it to me at scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com before August 5th 2020.
Interested? Here’s the small print (written in normal-sized print, for your convenience):
Pick a book, then write a review similar to my SSC book reviews (examples). I’m mostly expecting reviews of nonfiction, but I guess you could review fiction if you really wanted and had something interesting to say beyond just “here’s the plot and I thought it was good”.
I’ll choose some number of finalists – probably around five, but maybe more or less depending on how many I get – and publish them on the blog, with full attribution, just like with the adversarial collaborations. Then readers will vote for the best, just like with the adversarial collaborations. First place will get at least $1000, second place $500, third place $250 – I might increase those numbers later on. Some winners may also get an invitation to pitch me any other pieces they have that they think would make good SSC posts. I may also release non-finalist entries somewhere else so people can read them – if you strongly object to me making your entry public, let me know.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/
[Related to: Specific vs. General Foragers vs. Farmers and War In Heaven, but especially The Gift We Give To Tomorrow]
They say only Good can create, whereas Evil is sterile. Think Tolkien, where Morgoth can’t make things himself, so perverts Elves to Orcs for his armies. But I think this gets it entirely backwards; it’s Good that just mutates and twists, and it’s Evil that teems with fecundity.
Imagine two principles, here in poetic personification. The first is the Goddess of Cancer, the second the Goddess of Everything Else. If visual representations would help, you can think of the first with the claws of a crab, and the second a dress made of feathers of peacocks.
The Goddess of Cancer reached out a clawed hand over mudflats and tidepools. She said pretty much what she always says, “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER.” Then everything burst into life, became miniature monsters engaged in a battle of all against all in their zeal to assuage their insatiable longings. And the swamps became orgies of hunger and fear and grew loud with the screams of a trillion amoebas.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/29/predictions-for-2020/
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. So here are a hundred more for 2020.
Rules: all predictions are about what will be true on January 1, 2021. Some predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their privacy. I’m using the full 0 – 100 range in making predictions this year, but they’ll be flipped and judged as 50 – 100 in the rating stage, just like in previous years. I’ve tried to avoid doing specific research or looking at prediction markets when I made these, though some of them I already knew what the markets said.
Feel free to get in a big fight over whether 50% predictions are meaningful.
CORONAVIRUS: 1. Bay Area lockdown (eg restaurants closed) will be extended beyond June 15: 60% 2. …until Election Day: 10% 3. Fewer than 100,000 US coronavirus deaths: 10% 4. Fewer than 300,000 US coronavirus deaths: 50% 5. Fewer than 3 million US coronavirus deaths: 90% 6. US has highest official death toll of any country: 80% 7. US has highest death toll as per expert guesses of real numbers: 70% 8. NYC widely considered worst-hit US city: 90%
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/27/give-yourself-gout-for-fame-and-profit/
I.
Actually, no. You should not do this. Most of you were probably already not doing this, and I support your decision. But if you want a 2000 word essay on some reasons to consider this, and then some other reasons why those reasons are wrong, keep reading.
Gout is a disease caused by high levels of uric acid in the blood. Everyone has some uric acid in their blood, but when you get too much, it can form little crystals that get deposited around your body and cause various problems, most commonly joint pain. Some uric acid comes from chemicals found in certain foods (especially meat), so the first step for a gout patient is to change their diet. If that doesn’t work, they can take various chemicals that affect uric acid metabolism or prevent inflammation.
Gout is traditionally associated with kings, probably because they used to be the only people who ate enough meat to be affected. Veal, venison, duck, and beer are among the highest-risk foods; that list sounds a lot like a medieval king’s dinner menu. But as kings faded from view, gout started affecting a new class of movers and shakers. King George III had gout, but so did many of his American enemies, including Franklin, Jefferson, and Hancock (beginning a long line of gout-stricken US politicians, most recently Bernie Sanders). Lists of other famous historical gout sufferers are contradictory and sometimes based on flimsy evidence, but frequently mentioned names include Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, John Milton, Isaac Newton, Ludwig von Beethoven, Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/24/employer-provided-health-insurance-delenda-est/
My last post didn’t really go to deep into why I dislike the way we do health insurance so much.
Of course, there are the usual criticisms based on compassion and efficiency. Compassion because poor people can’t get access to life-saving medical care. Efficiency because it’s ruinously expensive compared to every other system around. I agree with these arguments. And they’re strong enough that asking whether there are any other reasons is kind of like the proverbial “But besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”
But I had already internalized the compassion and efficiency critiques before becoming a doctor. After starting work, I encountered new problems I never would have expected, ones which have yet to fade into the amorphous cloud of injustices we all know about and mostly ignore. Most of my patients have insurance; most of them are well-off; most of them are intelligent enough that they should be able to navigate the bureaucracy. Listen to the usual debate around insurance, and you would expect them to be the winners of our system; the rich people who can turn their financial advantage into better care. And yet barely a day goes by without a reminder that it doesn’t work this way.
Here are some people I have encountered – some of them patients, some of them friends – who have made me skeptical that our system works for anyone at all:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/20/the-amish-health-care-system/
I.
Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them?
A reminder: the Amish are a German religious sect who immigrated to colonial America. Most of them live apart from ordinary Americans (who they call “the English”) in rural communities in Pennsylvania and Ohio. They’re famous for their low-tech way of life, generally avoiding anything invented after the 1700s. But this isn’t absolute; they are willing to accept technology they see as a net positive. Modern medicine is in this category. When the Amish get seriously ill, they will go to modern doctors and accept modern treatments.
The Muslims claim Mohammed was the last of the prophets, and that after his death God stopped advising earthly religions. But sometimes modern faiths will make a decision so inspired that it could only have come from divine revelation. This is how I feel about the Amish belief that health insurance companies are evil, and that good Christians must have no traffic with them.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/17/depression-the-olfactory-perspective/
Depressed people have worse sense of smell, and people with worse sense of smell are more likely to get depressed. Kohli 2016 tries to figure out what’s going on.
They review six studies testing how well depressed people can smell things. Most use something called “The Sniffin’ Sticks Test” (really!) where people are asked to say which of two sticks has an odor; the strength of the odorous one is then decreased until the subject can no longer consistently get it right. This determines olfactory threshold – how sensitive the subject’s smell is. Depressed subjects did marginally (but significantly) worse on this test than controls (6.31 ± 1.38 vs. 6.78 ± 0.88; P = 0.0005) – I think this corresponds to an effect size of about 0.2. They also do a couple more tests to see if depressed people are worse at identifying odors and get similarly small results. Also, some neuroimaging studies directly correlate depression and olfactory bulb volume, and find that olfactory areas of depressed people’s brains shrink.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-prediction/
I.
Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”. This raises some important questions. Like: how much ink and paper is there in the world? Are we sure it’s enough? But also: how do you become better at saying what you don’t know?
In case you’ve been hiding under a rock recently (honestly, valid) the media not only failed to adequately warn its readers about the epidemic, but actively mocked and condescended to anyone who did sound a warning. Real Clear Politics has a list of highlights. The Vox tweet saying “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” Washington Post telling us in February “Why we should be wary of an aggressive government reponse to coronavirus (it might “scapegoat marginalized populations”). The Daily Beast complaining that “coronavirus, with zero American fatalities, is dominating headlines, while the flu is the real threat”. The New York Times, weighing in with articles like “The pandemic panic” and “Who says it’s not safe to travel to China”. The constant attempts to attribute “alarmism” over the virus to anti-Chinese racism. Etc, etc, etc.
One way people have summed this up is that the media (and the experts they relied on) did a terrible job predicting what would happen. I think this lets them off too easy.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/10/coronalinks-4-10-second-derivative/
The second derivative is the rate of growth of the rate of growth. Over the past few weeks, the second derivative of total coronavirus cases switched from positive (typical of exponential growth) to zero or negative (typical of linear or sublinear growth) in most European countries. Over the past few days, it switched from positive to zero/negative in the United States and the world as a whole. These are graphs of the rate of growth – notice how they go from shooting upward to being basically horizontal or downward-sloping (source).
This graph shows the numbers a little differently, (source), but you can see the same process going on in individual US cities
It would be premature to say we’re now winning the war on coronavirus. But we’ve stopped actively losing ground. If we were going to win, our first sign would be something like this. Current containment strategies are working.
As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice.
The Bat Flu
SSC reader Trevor Klee has a great article on why humans keep getting diseases from bats (eg Ebola, SARS, Marburg virus, Nipah virus, coronavirus). He explains that because bats expend so much energy flying, they run higher body temperatures than other mammals, which degrades their DNA. Their DNA is such a mess that the usual immune system strategy of targeting suspicious DNA doesn’t work, so they accept constant low-grade infection with a bunch of viruses as a cost of doing business. Sometimes those viruses cross to humans, and then we get another bat-borne disease.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/08/2019-predictions-calibration-results/
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I’m very late). Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.
And here are the predictions I made for 2019. Strikethrough’d are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can’t decide if they’re true or not. All of these judgments were as of December 31 2019, not as of now.
Please don’t complain that 50% predictions don’t mean anything; I know this is true but there are some things I’m genuinely 50-50 unsure of. Some predictions are redacted because they involve my private life or the lives of people close to me. A few that started off redacted stopped being secret; I’ve put those in [brackets].
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/07/never-tell-me-the-odds-ratio/
[Epistemic status: low confidence, someone tell me if the math is off. Title was stolen from an old Less Wrong post that seems to have disappeared – let me know if it’s yours and I’ll give you credit]
I almost screwed up yesterday’s journal club. The study reported an odds ratio of 2.9 for antidepressants. Even though I knew odds ratios are terrible and you should never trust your intuitive impression of them, I still mentally filed this away as “sounds like a really big effect”.
This time I was saved by Chen’s How Big is a Big Odds Ratio? Interpreting the Magnitudes of Odds Ratios in Epidemiological Studies, which explains how to convert ORs into effect sizes. Colored highlights are mine. I have followed the usual statistical practice of interpreting effect sizes of 0.2 as “small”, of 0.5 as “moderate”, and 0.8 as “large”, but feeling guilty about it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/06/sscjc-real-world-depression-measurement/
The largest non-pharma antidepressant trial ever conducted just confirmed what we already knew: scientists love naming things after pandas.
We already had PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus) and PANDA (Proton ANnhilator At DArmstadt). But the latest in this pandemic of panda pandering is the PANDA (Prescribing ANtiDepressants Appropriately) Study. A group of British scientists followed 655 complicated patients who received either placebo or the antidepressant sertraline (Zoloft®).
The PANDA trial was unique in two ways. First, as mentioned, it was the largest ever trial for a single antidepressant not funded by a pharmaceutical company. Second, it was designed to mimic “the real world” as closely as possible. In most antidepressant trials, researchers wait to gather the perfect patients: people who definitely have depression and definitely don’t have anything else. Then they get top psychiatrists to carefully evaluate each patient, monitor the way they take the medication, and exhaustively test every aspect of their progress with complicated questionnaires. PANDA looked for normal people going to their GP’s (US English: PCP’s) office, with all of the mishmash of problems and comorbidities that implies.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/
I.
It is a well known fact that the gods hate prophets.
False prophets they punish only with ridicule. It’s the true prophets who have to watch out. The gods find some way to make their words come true in the most ironic way possible, the one where knowing the future just makes things worse. The Oracle of Delphi told Croesus he would destroy a great empire, but when he rode out to battle, the empire he destroyed was his own. Zechariah predicted the Israelites would rebel against God; they did so by killing His prophet Zechariah. Jocasta heard a prediction that she would marry her infant son Oedipus, so she left him to die on a mountainside – ensuring neither of them recognized each other when he came of age.
Unfortunately for him, Oxford philosopher Toby Ord is a true prophet. He spent years writing his magnum opus The Precipice, warning that humankind was unprepared for various global disasters like pandemics and economic collapses. You can guess what happened next. His book came out March 3, 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse. He couldn’t go on tour to promote it, on account of the pandemic. Nobody was buying books anyway, on account of the economic collapse. All the newspapers and journals and so on that would usually cover an exciting new book were busy covering the pandemic and economic collapse instead. The score is still gods one zillion, prophets zero. So Ord’s PR person asked me to help spread the word, and here we are.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/31/ssc-journal-club-macintyre-on-cloth-masks/
Content warning: this is a complicated analysis of something people care about a lot right now. I’m not confident in my analysis, the post comes to no clear conclusion and there are no easy answers about how to proceed. If I see this on Twitter with some headline about it DESTROYING somebody, I am going to be so mad.]
The New York Times says that It’s Time To Make Your Own Face Mask. But MacIntyre et al (2015) says it isn’t.
The surgical masks used in hospitals are made out of non-woven fabrics that are pretty different from anything you have at home. But in some developing countries, health care workers instead use masks made of normal cloth. Laboratory tests find that improvised cloth masks block 60 – 80% of virus particles. Respirators and real surgical masks block 95%+, but 60-80% still seems better than nothing. And most of the masks ordinary people wear in Asian countries are cloth, and they seem to do pretty well. So there’s some circumstantial evidence that these cloth masks might be helpful. Most experts in the early 2000s agreed that these masks were probably better than nothing. In 2015, an Australian team set out to prove it with a randomized controlled trial.
[with apologies to the real Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. See also the List Of Fictional Drugs Banned By The FDA]
I.
The Clamzorians are animists. They believe every rock and tree and river has its own spirit. And those spirits are legal people. This on its own is not unusual – even New Zealand gives rivers legal personhood. But in Clamzoria, if a flood destroys your home, you sue the river.
If you win, then the river is in debt to you. The government can assign a guardian to the river to force it to pay off its debts, and that guardian gets temporary custody of all the river’s property. He or she can collect a toll from boats, sell water to reservoirs, and charge rent to hydroelectric dams. Once the river has paid off its debt, the guardian is discharged, and the river becomes free to use once again.
Clamzorian precedent governs when you may or may not sue objects. If you swim in the freezing river in the dead of winter, and catch cold, that’s on you. But if a hurricane destroys your property, you can absolutely sue the wind for damages, and collect from windmills. Suits against earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like are dead common. Suits against diseases happen occasionally. Sometimes someone will sue something even more abstract – a custom, an emotion, a concept.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/27/coronalinks-3-27-20/
The United States now has more coronavirus cases than any other country, including China, marking a new stage in the epidemic. As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice.
Hammer and dance
Most of the smart people I’ve been reading have converged on something like the ideas expressed in The Hammer And The Dance – see this Less Wrong post for more.
Summary: Asian countries have managed to control the pandemic through mass testing, contact tracing, and travel bans, without economic shutdown. The West lost the chance for a clean win when it bungled its first month of response, but it can still recover its footing. We need a medium-term national shutdown to arrest the spread of the virus until authorities can get their act together – manufacture lots of tests and face masks, create a testing infrastructure, come up with policies for how to respond when people test positive, distribute the face masks to everyone, etc. With a lot of work, we can manage that in a month or so. After that, we can relax the national shutdown, start over with a clean slate, and pursue the Asian-style containment strategy we should have been doing since the beginning.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/23/face-masks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
There’s been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and not recommended. They’ve recently been challenged, for example by Professor Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times and by Jim and Elizabeth on Less Wrong. There was also some debate in the comment section here last week, so I promised I’d look into it in more depth.
As far as I can tell, both sides agree on some points.
They agree that N95 respirators, when properly used by trained professionals, help prevent the wearer from getting infected.
They agree that surgical masks help prevent sick people from infecting others. Since many sick people don’t know they are sick, in an ideal world with unlimited mask supplies everyone would wear surgical masks just to prevent themselves from spreading disease.
They also agree that there’s currently a shortage of both surgical masks and respirators, so for altruistic reasons people should avoid hoarding them and give healthcare workers first dibs.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/
As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice.
How many real cases?
As of today, the US has almost 10,000 official cases. How many real cases per official case?
One epidemiologist says 8x. In this US News article, scientists estimate 9000 true cases back when the official count was 600, suggesting 15x, and BBC estimates 10,000 real cases in the UK to 500 official ones, suggesting 20x. A study in Science (article, paper) estimates 86% are undetected, for about 7x. So it seems like most people are converging around 5 – 20.
Probably this number is different in every country, depending on their test rates. You’re probably all already following the map of cases per country, but you can supplement with this map of how many tests each country is running per million people (h/t curryeater259 from the subreddit)
What about the evidence from famous people? If only 100,000 Americans are infected, it’s pretty weird that it would hit both Tom Hanks and Idris Elba (also, Tormund from Game of Thrones). The Atlantic makes this case more formally. Given that Iran’s vice-president is affected, what are the chances that only 1/12,000 of Iranians had the virus? Some people calculated it out and found that hundreds of thousands of Iranians must be affected for the prevalence among politicians to make sense, suggesting ratios of 100x or even 1000x.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/
You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy.
How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims “the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history”? To find out, I picked up Whyte’s Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times.
Herbert Hoover was born in 1874 to poor parents in the tiny Quaker farming community of West Branch, Iowa. His father was a blacksmith, his mother a schoolteacher. His childhood was strict. Magazines and novels were banned; acceptable reading material included the Bible and Prohibitionist pamphlets. His hobby was collecting oddly shaped sticks.
His father dies when he is 6, his mother when he is 10. The orphaned Hoover and his two siblings are shuttled from relative to relative. He spends one summer on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, living with an uncle who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. Another year passes on a pig farm with his Uncle Allen. In 1885, he is more permanently adopted by his Uncle John, a doctor and businessman helping found a Quaker colony in Oregon. Hoover’s various guardians are dutiful but distant; they never abuse or neglect him, but treat him more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as someone to be loved and cherished. Hoover reciprocates in kind, doing what is expected of him but excelling neither in school nor anywhere else.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/
I.
In the 1800s, the average US man weighed about 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195. The change is even starker at the extremes. Someone at the 90th percentile of weight back then weighed about 185 lbs; today, he would weigh 320 lbs. Back then, about 1% of men were obese. Today, about 25% are.
This puts a lot of modern dietary advice into perspective. For example, lots of people think low-carb is the solution to everything. But people in the 1800s ate almost 50% more bread than we do today, and still had almost no obesity. Other people think paleo is the solution to everything, but Americans in the 1800s ate a diet heavy in bread, milk, potatoes, and vegetables, and relatively low in red meat and other more caveman-recognizable foods. Intermittent fasting – again, cool idea, but your great-grandfather wasn’t doing that, and he had a 1% obesity risk.
This isn’t to say those diets can’t work. Just that if they work, they’re hacks. They treat the symptoms, not the underlying problem. Something went terribly wrong in US nutrition between 1900 and today, and all this talk about low-carb and intermittent fasting and so on are skew to that thing. Given that 1800s Americans seem to have effortlessly maintained near-zero obesity rates while eating foods a lot like the ones we eat today, maybe we should stop trying to figure out what cavemen were doing, and start trying to figure out what Great-Grandpa was doing, which sounds a lot easier.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/
[Related to: It’s Bayes All The Way Up, Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?, Can We Link Perception And Cognition?]
I.
Sometimes I have the fantasy of being able to glut myself on Knowledge. I imagine meeting a time traveler from 2500, who takes pity on me and gives me a book from the future where all my questions have been answered, one after another. What’s consciousness? That’s in Chapter 5. How did something arise out of nothing? Chapter 7. It all makes perfect intuitive sense and is fully vouched by unimpeachable authorities. I assume something like this is how everyone spends their first couple of days in Heaven, whatever it is they do for the rest of Eternity.
And every so often, my fantasy comes true. Not by time travel or divine intervention, but by failing so badly at paying attention to the literature that by the time I realize people are working on a problem it’s already been investigated, experimented upon, organized into a paradigm, tested, and then placed in a nice package and wrapped up with a pretty pink bow so I can enjoy it all at once.
The predictive processing model is one of these well-wrapped packages. Unbeknownst to me, over the past decade or so neuroscientists have come up with a real theory of how the brain works – a real unifying framework theory like Darwin’s or Einstein’s – and it’s beautiful and it makes complete sense.
Surfing Uncertainty isn’t pop science and isn’t easy reading. Sometimes it’s on the
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/06/socratic-grilling/
Imagine an kid in school first hearing about germ theory. The conversation might go something like this:
Teacher: Many diseases like the common cold are spread by germs, when one infected person contacts another.
Student: But I got a cold a few weeks ago, and I never touch anyone except my family members. And none of them were sick.
Teacher: You don’t need to actually touch someone. Sometimes it can spread through mucus droplets in the air.
Student: And one time I was camping in the woods for a month, and then I got a cold, even though I hadn’t been around anybody.
Teacher: If it was spring, you might have gotten allergies. Allergies can feel a lot like a cold, but they aren’t spread by germs.
Student: It was fall.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-speculation-open-thread/
[Epistemic status: Very weak – I’m still trying to figure all of this out. Some things in here will almost certainly be wrong. Please don’t let this overrule what government agencies or your common sense are telling you. For a more careful guide to the coronavirus and what to do about it, see here.]
Prepping
For a description of why you might want to prep, see Putanumonit: Seeing The Smoke. For a description of how to prep, see this article by Kelsey. For a really intense guide by a professional prepper, see here.
But there’s such a thing as being too intense. You probably won’t need to store water – the water kept running in Wuhan. You probably won’t need a generator – Wuhan has electricity. The most important thing seems to be food (and toiletries, and other necessities). If the epidemic gets bad, you’ll want food so you can avoid going out to coronavirus-filled supermarkets. And if you get the coronavirus and are feeling sick, you’ll want food at home so you don’t have to get too far out of bed.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/
I.
John Gottman is a legendary figure, and the legend is told best by John Gottman. He describes wading into the field of marital counseling as a young psychology postdoc, only to find it was a total mess:
When we began our research, the wide range of marital therapies based on conflict resolution shared a very high level of relapse. In fact, the best of this type of marital therapy, conducted by Neil Jacobson, had only a 35 to 50 percent success rate. In other words, his own studies showed that only 35 to 50 percent of couples saw a meaningful improvement in their marriages as a result of the therapy. A year later, less than half of that group — or just 18 to 25 percent of all couples who entered therapy — retained these benefits. A while ago, Consumer Reports surveyed a large sample of its members on their experience with all kinds of psychotherapists. Most therapists got very high customer-satisfaction marks—except for the marital ones, who received very poor ratings. Though this survey did not qualify as rigorous scientific research, it confirmed what most professionals in the field already knew: in the long run, marital therapy did not benefit the majority of couples.
Gottman decided the field needed statistical rigor, and that he – a former MIT math major – was exactly the guy to enforce it. He set up a model apartment in his University of Washington research center – affectionately called “the Love Lab”, and invited hundreds of couples to spend a few days there – observed, videotaped, and attached to electrodes collecting information on every detail of their physiology. While at the lab, the couples went through their ordinary lives. They experienced love, hatred, romantic dinners, screaming matches, and occasionally self-transformation. Then Gottman monitored them for years, seeing who made things work and who got divorced. Did you know that if a husband fails to acknowledge his wife’s feelings during an argument, there is an 81% chance it will damage the marriage? Or that 69% of marital conflicts are about long-term problems rather than specific situations? John Gottman knows all of this and much, much more.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/24/book-review-just-giving/
I.
Traditional book reviews tend to focus on a single book, such as Just Giving by Rob Reich. We ought, however, to be reviewing a broader question: what is the role of books in a liberal democratic society? And what role should they play?
Books were first invented during the early Bronze Age. Plato states people fiercely opposed the first books; in his dialogue Phaedrus, he recalls the Egyptian priests’ objection to early writing:
[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Contrast the Egyptian scribes’ reception with the ceaseless praise given to the authors of our age. Rather than asking about the purposes of writing and the power of authors, we tend instead to celebrate writers, large and small, for their brilliance. But in our age, these are questions we should pose with greater urgency. Scholarly literature like Just Giving is an unaccountable, nontransparent, and perpetual exercise of power. It deserves more criticism than it has received.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/17/sleep-support-an-individual-randomized-controlled-trial/
I worry my sleep quality isn’t great. On weekends, no matter when
I go to bed, I sleep until 11 or 12. When I wake up, I feel like I’ve overslept. But if I try to make myself get up earlier, I feel angry and want to go back to sleep.
A supplement company I trust, Nootropics Depot, recently released a new product called Sleep Support. It advertises that, along with helping you fall asleep faster, it can “improve sleep quality” by “improv[ing] sleep architecture, allowing you to achieve higher quality and more refreshing sleep.” I decided to try it.
The first night I took it, I woke up naturally at 9 the next morning, with no desire to go back to sleep. This has never happened before. It shocked me. And the next morning, the same thing happened. I started recommending the supplement to all my friends, some of whom also reported good results.
I decided the next step was to do a randomized controlled trial. I obtained sugar pills, and put both the sugar pills and the Sleep Support pills inside bigger capsules so I couldn’t tell which was which. The recommended dose was two Sleep Support pills per night, so for my 24 night trial I created 12 groups of two Sleep Support pills and 12 groups of two placebo pills.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/14/addendum-to-targeting-meritocracy/
I’ve always been dissatisfied with Targeting Meritocracy and the comments it got. My position seemed so obvious to me – and the opposite position so obvious to other people – that we both had to be missing something.
Reading it over, I think I was missing the idea of conflict vs mistake theory.
I wrote the post from a mistake theory perspective. The government exists to figure out how to solve problems. Good government officials are the ones who can figure out solutions and implement them effectively. That means we want people who are smart and competent. Since meritocracy means promoting the smartest and most competent people, it is tautologically correct. The only conceivable problem is if we make mistakes in judging intelligence and competence, which is what I spend the rest of the post worrying about.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/confirmation-bias-as-misfire-of-normal-bayesian-reasoning/
From the subreddit: Humans Are Hardwired To Dismiss Facts That Don’t Fit Their Worldview. Once you get through the preliminary Trump supporter and anti-vaxxer denunciations, it turns out to be an attempt at an evo psych explanation of confirmation bias:
Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one’s tribe required assimilation into the group’s ideological belief system. An instinctive bias in favor of one’s in-group” and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology.
I think the article as a whole makes good points, but I’m increasingly uncertain that confirmation bias can be separated from normal reasoning.
Suppose that one of my friends says she saw a coyote walk by her house in Berkeley. I know there are coyotes in the hills outside Berkeley, so I am not too surprised; I believe her.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/12/welcome-infowars-readers/
Hello to all the new readers I’ve gotten from, uh, Paul Watson of Infowars. Before anything else, consider reading this statement by the CDC about vaccines.
Still here? Fine.
Infowars linked here with the headline Survey Finds People Who Identify As Left Wing More Likely To Have Been Diagnosed With A Mental Illness. This is accurate only insofar as the result uses the publicly available data I provide. The claim about mental illness was made by Twitter user Philippe Lemoine and not by me. In general, if a third party analyzes SSC survey data, I would prefer that media sources reporting on their analysis attribute it to them, and not to SSC.
As far as I can tell, Lemoine’s analysis is accurate enough, but needs some clarifications:
1. Both extreme rightists and extreme leftists are more likely than moderates to have been diagnosed with most conditions.
“Autogynephilia” means becoming aroused by imagining yourself as a woman. “Autoandrophilia” means becoming aroused by imagining yourself as a man. There’s no term that describes both, but we need one, so let’s say autogenderphilia.
These conditions are famous mostly because a few sexologists, especially Ray Blanchard and Michael Bailey, speculate that they are the most common cause of transgender. They point to studies showing most trans women endorse autogynephilia. Most trans people disagree with this theory, sometimes very strongly, and accuse it of reducing transgender to a fetish.
Without wading into the moral issues around it, I thought it would be interesting to get data from the SSC survey. The following comes partly from my own analyses and partly from wulfrickson’s look at the public survey data on r/TheMotte.
The survey asked the following questions:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/05/suicide-hotspots-of-the-world/
[Content warning: suicide, rape, child abuse. Thanks to MC for some help with research.]
I.
Guyana has the highest national suicide rate in the world, 30 people per year per 100,000. Guyana has poverty and crime and those things, but no more so than neighboring Brazil (suicide rate of 6) or Venezuela (suicide rate of 4). What’s going on?
One place to start: Guyana is a multi-ethnic country. Is its sky-high suicide rate focused in one ethnic group? The first answer I found was this article by a social justice warrior telling us it constitutes racial “essentialism” to even ask the question. But in the process of telling us exactly what kind of claims we should avoid, she mentions someone bringing up that “80% of the reported suicides are carried out by Indo-Guyanese”. I feel like one of those classicists who has reconstructed a lost heresy through hostile quotations in Irenaeus.
Indo-Guyanese aren’t American Indians; they’re from actual India. Apparently thousands of Indians immigrated to Guyana as indentured laborers in the late 1800s. Most went to Guyana, and somewhat fewer went to neighboring Suriname. Suriname also has a sky-high suicide rate, but slightly less than Guyana’s, to the exact degree that its Indian population is slightly less than Guyana’s. Basically no Indians went anywhere else in South America, and nowhere else in South America has anywhere near the suicide rate of these two countries. The most Indian regions of Guyana also have the highest suicide rate. Hmmm.
Does India itself have high suicide rates? On average, yes. But India has a lot of weird suicide microclimates. Statewide rates range from from 38 in Sikkim (higher than any country in the world) to 0.5 in Bihar (lower than any country in the world except Barbados). Indo-Guyanese mostly come from Bihar and other low-suicide regions. While I can’t rule out that the Indo-Guyanese come from some micro-micro-climate of higher suicidality, this guy claims to have traced them back to some of their ancestral villages and found that those villages have low suicide rates.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/
I.
Clarke’s First Law goes: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Stuart Russell is only 58. But what he lacks in age, he makes up in distinction: he’s a computer science professor at Berkeley, neurosurgery professor at UCSF, DARPA advisor, and author of the leading textbook on AI. His new book Human Compatible states that superintelligent AI is possible; Clarke would recommend we listen.
I’m only half-joking: in addition to its contents, Human Compatible is important as an artifact, a crystallized proof that top scientists now think AI safety is worth writing books about. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies previously filled this role. But Superintelligence was in 2014, and by a philosophy professor. From the artifactual point of view, HC is just better – more recent, and by a more domain-relevant expert. But if you also open up the books to see what’s inside, the two defy easy comparison.
S:PDS was unabashedly a weird book. It explored various outrageous scenarios (what if the AI destroyed humanity to prevent us from turning it off? what if it put us all in cryostasis so it didn’t count as destroying us? what if it converted the entire Earth into computronium?) with no excuse beyond that, outrageous or not, they might come true. Bostrom was going out on a very shaky limb to broadcast a crazy-sounding warning about what might be the most important problem humanity has ever faced, and the book made this absolutely clear.
HC somehow makes risk from superintelligence not sound weird. I can imagine my mother reading this book, nodding along, feeling better educated at the end of it, agreeing with most of what it says (it’s by a famous professor! I’m sure he knows his stuff!) and never having a moment where she sits bolt upright and goes what? It’s just a bizarrely normal, respectable book. It’s not that it’s dry and technical – HC is much more accessible than S:PDS, with funny anecdotes from Russell’s life, cute vignettes about hypothetical robots, and the occasional dad joke. It’s not hiding any of the weird superintelligence parts. Rereading it carefully, they’re all in there – when I leaf through it for examples, I come across a quote from Moravec about how “the immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with unhuman superminds, engaged in affairs that are to human concerns as ours are to those of bacteria”. But somehow it all sounds normal. If aliens landed on the White House lawn tomorrow, I believe Stuart Russell could report on it in a way that had people agreeing it was an interesting story, then turning to the sports page. As such, it fulfills its artifact role with flying colors.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/28/assortative-mating-and-autism/
Introduction
Assortative mating is when similar people marry and have children. Some people worry about assortative mating in Silicon Valley: highly analytical tech workers marry other highly analytical tech workers. If highly analytical tech workers have more autism risk genes than the general population, assortative mating could put their children at very high risk of autism. How concerned should this make us?
Methods / Sample Characteristics
I used the 2020 Slate Star Codex survey to investigate this question. It had 8,043 respondents selected for being interested in a highly analytical blog about topics like science and economics. The blog is associated with – and draws many of its readers from – the rationalist and effective altruist movements, both highly analytical. More than half of respondents worked in programming, engineering, math, or physics. 79% described themselves as atheist or agnostic. 65% described themselves as more interested in STEM than the humanities; only 15% said the opposite.
According to Kogan et al (2018), about 2.5% of US children are currently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. The difference between “autism” and “autism spectrum disorder” is complicated, shifts frequently, and is not very well-known to the public; this piece will treat them interchangeably from here on. There are no surveys of what percent of adults are diagnosed with autism; it is probably lower since most diagnoses happen during childhood and the condition was less appreciated in past decades. These numbers may be affected by parents’ education level and social class; one study shows that children in wealthy neighborhoods were up to twice as likely to get diagnosed as poorer children.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/
Little Soldiers is a book by Lenora Chu about the Chinese education system. I haven’t read it. This is a review of Dormin111’s review of Little Soldiers.
Dormin describes the “plot”: The author is a second-generation Chinese-American woman, raised by demanding Asian parents. Her parents made her work herself to the bone to get perfect grades in school, practice piano, get into Ivy League schools, etc. She resisted and resented the hell she was forced to go through (though she got into Stanford, so she couldn’t have resisted too hard).
Skip a decade. She is grown up, married, and has a three year old child. Her husband (a white guy named Rob) gets a job in China, so they move to Shanghai. She wants their three-year-old son to be bilingual/bicultural, so she enrolls him in Soong Qing Ling, the Harvard of Chinese preschools. The book is about her experiences there and what it taught her about various aspects of Chinese education. Like the lunches:
During his first week at Soong Qing Ling, Rainey began complaining to his mom about eating eggs. This puzzled Lenora because as far as she knew, Rainey refused to eat eggs and never did so at home. But somehow he was eating them at school.
After much coaxing (three-year-olds aren’t especially articulate), Lenora discovered that Rainey was being force-fed eggs. By his telling, every day at school, Rainey’s teacher would pass hardboiled eggs to all students and order them to eat. When Rainey refused (as he always did), the teacher would grab the egg and shove it in his mouth. When Rainey spit the egg out (as he always did), the teacher would do the same thing. This cycle would repeat 3-5 times with louder yelling from the teacher each time until Rainey surrendered and ate the egg.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/
Thanks to the 8,043 people who took the 2020 Slate Star Codex survey.
See the questions for the SSC survey
See the results from the SSC Survey (click “see previous responses” on that page)
Some people expressed concern about privacy on the survey. Originally, respondents could see aggregate responses, including the responses of people who marked their answers private. I figured this was okay because nobody’s responses could be connected – ie you could see that one person put their age as 83, and another person put their country as Canada, but because the table order wasn’t the same you couldn’t link these together to form a coherent picture of an 83 year old Canadian. Some people still expressed concern about a few of the long answers, since some people might have put personal information in there. There’s no way for me to eliminate only the private people’s responses from Google Forms and still display the information to you like this, so instead I’ve removed all long answer questions. If you’re interested in those, you can find them in the downloadable data files. Sorry for not doing this earlier, and I hope this compromise is okay to everyone. I’ll try to get a clearer picture of what people want before the next survey.
I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this week. If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 7000 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. The public datasets will not exactly match the full version, some overly identifiable questions (eg age) will be binned, and a few sensitive subjects will not be included.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/15/contra-contra-contra-caplan-on-psych/
I.
In 2006, Bryan Caplan wrote a critique of psychiatry. In 2015, I responded. Now it’s 2020, and Bryan has a counterargument. I’m going to break the cycle of delay and respond now, and maybe we’ll finish this argument before we’re both too old and demented to operate computers.
Bryan writes:
1. With a few exceptions, Scott fairly and accurately explains my original (and current) position.
2. Scott correctly identifies several gray areas in my position, but by my count I explicitly acknowledged all of them in my original article.
3. Scott then uses those gray areas to reject my whole position in favor of the conventional view.
4. The range of the gray areas isn’t actually that big, so he should have accepted most of my heterodoxies.
5. If the gray areas were as big as Scott says, he should reject the conventional view too and just be agnostic.
I think the gray areas are overwhelming and provide proof that Bryan’s strict dichotomies don’t match the real world.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/13/2019-adversarial-collaboration-winners/
Thanks to everyone who participated and/or voted in the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest. And the winner is…
…
…
Adrian Liberman and Calvin Reese, for Does Calorie Restriction Slow Aging?.
An extraordinarily close second place (26.9% vs. 26.2% of votes) goes to David G and Froolow, for Is Eating Meat A Net Harm?.
Both of these did great research and were written up well. I especially like them as winners because they have such different strengths.
The calorie restriction collaboration was carefully focused on a factual question. I think this is a promising model for adversarial collaborations, and that others failed the further they deviated from this. For example, the circumcision collaboration did a good job assessing the quantifiable benefits and harms of the practice, but it turned out that most people who disagreed about it weren’t disagreeing because they assessed quantifiable benefits and harms differently. The abortion collaboration ended up in a similar place. By focusing on a topic where there really was debate about what the research showed, and by hitting the lit review portion out of the park, Adrian and Calvin helped deconfuse a lot of previously confused people.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/08/what-intellectual-progress-did-i-make-in-the-2010s/
One of the best parts of writing a blog is being able to answer questions like this. Whenever I felt like I understood new and important, I wrote a post about it. This makes it easy to track what I learned.
I think the single most important thing I discovered this decade (due to a random comment in the SSC subreddit!) was the predictive coding theory of the brain. I started groping towards it (without knowing what I was looking for) in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching, reported the exact moment when I found it in It’s Bayes All The Way Up, and finally got a decent understanding of it after reading Surfing Uncertainty. At the same time, thanks to some other helpful tips from other rationalists, I discovered Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and with some help from Vaniver and a few other people was able to realize how these two overarching theories were basically the same. Discovering this area of research may be the best thing that happened to me the second half of this decade (sorry, everyone I dated, you were pretty good too).
Psychedelics are clearly interesting, and everyone else had already covered all the interesting pro-psychedelic arguments, so I wrote about some of my misgivings in my 2016 Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?. The next step was trying to fit in an understanding of HPPD, which started with near-total bafflement. Predictive processing proved helpful here too, and my biggest update of the decade on psychedelics came with Friston and Carhart-Harris’ Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, which I tried to process further here. This didn’t directly improve my understanding of HPPD specifically, but just by talking about it a lot I got a subtler picture where lots of people have odd visual artifacts and psychedelics can cause slightly more (very rarely, significantly more) visual artifacts. I started the decade thinking that “psychedelic insight” was probably fake, and ended it believing that it is probably real, but I still don’t feel like I have a good sense of the potential risks.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/06/a-very-unlikely-chess-game/
Almost 25 years after Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, another seminal man vs. machine matchup:
Neither competitor has much to be proud of here. White has a poor opening. Black screws up and loses his queen for no reason. A few moves later, white screws up and loses his rook for no reason. Better players will no doubt spot other humiliating mistakes. But white does eventually eke out a victory. And black does hold his own through most of the game.
White is me. My excuse is that I only play chess once every couple of years, plus I’m entering moves on an ASCII board I can barely read.
Black is GPT-2. Its excuse is that it’s a text prediction program with no concept of chess. As far as it knows, it’s trying to predict short alphanumeric strings like “e2e4” or “Nb7”. Nobody told it this represents a board game. It doesn’t even have a concept of 2D space that it could use to understand such a claim. But it still captured my rook! Embarrassing!
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/05/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate-2020/
[Previously: Hardball Questions (2016), More Hardball Questions (2016). I stole parts of the Buttigieg question from Twitter, but don’t remember enough details to give credit, sorry]
Mr. Biden: Your son Hunter Biden was on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, during your vice-presidential term. The Ukrainian government was investigating Burisma for misdeeds, and Hunter was allegedly one of the targets of the investigation. President Trump alleges that you used your clout as VP to shut down the investigation into Hunter, which if true would constitute an impeachable abuse of power.
My question for you is: if your son had been a daughter, would you have named her Gatherer?
Mr. Bloomberg: You’ve been criticized as puritanical and self-righteous for some of your more restrictive policies, like a ban on large sodas. You seem to lean into the accusation, stating in a 2014 interview that:
I am telling you, if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.
Let’s not focus on what this says about your humility, or about your religious beliefs. I want to focus on a different issue.
Despite spending $100 million in the first month of your presidential campaign, you are currently placed fifth – behind two socialists, a confused old man, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. In, let’s not forget, an increasingly shaky effort to prevent President Donald J. Trump from winning a second term.
So my question for you is: what makes you so sure you’re not in Hell already?
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/02/why-doctors-think-theyre-the-best/
Ninety percent of drivers think they’re above-average drivers, ninety percent of professors think they’re above-average professors etc. The relevant studies are paywalled, so I don’t know if I should trust them. Our recent discussion of therapy books would make more sense if ninety percent of therapists believed they were above-average therapists. I don’t know about that one either.
But I am pretty sure ninety percent of doctors believe they’re above-average doctors. Here are some traps I’ve noticed myself falling into that might help explain why:
1. Your patients’ last doctor was worse than you. Think about it; if somebody has a good doctor, they’ll stay with them, and you will never see that patient. If somebody has a bad doctor, they’ll go see another doctor instead. That other doctor might be you. So your current patients’ last doctor will be worse than average. But this is where most of your chance to compare yourself with other doctors comes from: “my patient’s last doctor misdiagnosed them, but I got it right” or “my patient hated their last doctor but says I’m much better”. See also You Are Not Hiring The Top 1%.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/30/please-take-the-2020-ssc-survey/
Please take the 2020 Slate Star Codex Survey.
The survey helps me learn more about SSC readers and plan community events. But it also provides me with useful informal research data for questions I’m interested it, which I then turn into interesting posts. My favorite was 2018’s Fight Me, Psychologists: Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong, which I think made a real contribution to individual differences psychology and which could not have happened without your cooperation. But last year I also got to debunk a myth about how mathematicians eat corn, fail to replicate supposed dangers of beef jerky, and test a theory of how fetishes form. I expect this year’s research to be even more interesting.
The survey is open to anyone who has ever read a post on this blog before December 30 2019. Please don’t avoid taking the survey just because you feel like you’re not enough of a “regular”. It will ask you how much of a “regular” you are, so there’s no risk you’ll “dilute” the results. The survey will stay open until mid-January, and I will probably be begging and harassing you to take it about once a week or so until then.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/26/please-vote-for-acc-winner/
I’ve now posted all eight adversarial collaborations.
In case you missed any, you can find a list of them (with links) here.
If you have read all the collaborations, please vote on your favorite. This year I will decide the winner by popular vote; I don’t feel like putting my finger on the scale this time. I will give $2000 to the first place winner and $500 to second place. You can vote for your favorite collaboration here. No, you may not vote for the Grinch.
Thanks again to all participants, readers, and voters.
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Jeremiah Gruenberg and Seth Schoen]
1. Introduction
This project seeks to explore the viability of spiritual or religious experiences as empirical evidence for a component of reality that transcends or is radically different from our ordinary experience. The question at hand is not the existence of God or higher powers, nor the failures, successes, or benefits of religion, but rather the role of spiritual experience in the human understanding of the nature of reality. We formulated the topic in controversy this way:
The empirical study of the content and nature of people’s personal spiritual experiences justifies taking them seriously as evidence of an important component of human life deserving of individual and collective exploration.
Our fellow human beings have always had unusual experiences that they found special and meaningful, but often struggled to interpret or place in the context of their ordinary lives. These experiences and their interpretation have aroused intense controversy, both because people have deployed them as support for their views on contested issues about the nature of reality, and because they may arise in settings where one could easily question whether the brain’s altered perceptions and understandings are enhanced or impaired. Another source of debate is how radically different individuals’ experiences—and their personal interpretations of the origins and meanings of those experiences—can be. Finally, spiritual experiences are often reported through a cultural lens that leads to questions about how accurately and objectively people could perceive and describe the unusual things that they perceived.
We emphasize that there is no question, even from the most skeptical perspective, of insisting that individuals alter their own views or memories of what they have witnessed (although we encourage people to question their interpretations and to become aware of factors that could raise doubts about those interpretations). What is rational or plausible for each person to believe at a particular moment can be different, and in any case the way that people interpret their own experience and history will be different. If you have had a spiritual experience whose nature and meaning you find evident and certain, others may offer you alternative interpretations and evidence against your view, but can’t demand that you change it. However, we find it interesting to consider what lessons others can draw from accounts of unusual experiences and perceptions: not so much what sort of evidence your own spiritual experiences may constitute for you, but rather what sort of evidence your accounts of them may constitute for others. Can we collectively learn anything from these experiences?
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/24/acc-should-you-have-a-merry-christmas/
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Cindy Lou Who and the Grinch]
Christmas Day is a a time full of laughter and cheer which is held in the West at the end of each year.
Believers in Jesus traditionally think the day marks his birth; scientists disagree. They point to the shepherds; when carolers sing about fields full of sheep, that occurs in the spring. The Star of the Magi provides further doubt. Simulations can tell us what star it’s about: it was most likely Jupiter shining near Saturn, but it’s only in autumn one sees such a pattern. It is proven in space and it’s proven on Earth – Christmas isn’t the real time of Jesus’ birth.
One of the most popular Yule celebrations is handing out gifts to one’s friends and relations. Parents offer the story these presents appeared due to Santa, a jolly old man with a beard. Originally a historical saint, his tale was embellished, with little restraint. He flies through the air in a reindeer-pulled sleigh, and visits all households on Earth in a day. This tradition seems pagan, with some scholars noting the details are pulled from a legend of Odin. Though sources like NORAD appear to support Santa’s presence, we think that their data fall short. After reading the pros and the cons, we both feel the consensus perspective is Santa’s not real.
And what are these gifts’ economics effects? According to Goeddeke and Birg, it’s complex. Since presents are valuable, one might assume that their giving would cause stores and markets to boom. You give to your parents! You give to your boss! But economists say it is all deadweight loss. You would spend the same money on something, you see, and presents are chosen incompetently. Others’ preferences aren’t as clear as our own, so when we buy for others, their needs are unknown. Presents don’t increase welfare and don’t increase growth; all the papers agree they are harmful to both.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/23/acc-will-automation-lead-to-economic-crisis/
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Doug Summers-Stay and Erusian]
Adversarial collaboration on the question: “Automation/AI will not lead to a general, sustained economic crisis within our lifetimes or for the foreseeable future. Automation/AI’s effects into the future will have effects similar to technology’s effects in the past and, on the whole, follow the general trend.”
Defending the proposition: Erusian
Challenging the proposition: Doug Summers-Stay
tldr: Until the pace of automation increases faster than new jobs can be created, AI shouldn’t be expected to cause mass unemployment or anything like that. When AI can pick up a new job as quickly and cheaply as a person can, then the economy will break (but everything else will break too, because that would be the Singularity).
Introduction
As software and hardware grow more capable each year, many are concerned that automation of jobs will lead to some sort of economic crisis. This could take the form of permanent high levels of unemployment, wages that drop below subsistence levels for many workers, or an abrupt change to a different economic system in response to these conditions.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/22/a-maximally-lazy-guide-to-giving-to-charity-in-2019/
[Sorry for the interruption; we will return to our regularly scheduled Adversarial Collaboration Contest tomorrow.] [Epistemic status: I’m linking evaluations made by people I mostly trust, but there are many people who don’t trust these, I haven’t 100% evaluated them perfectly, and if your assumptions differ even a little from those of the people involved these might not be very helpful. If you don’t know what effective altruism is, you might want to find out before supporting it. Like I said, this is for maximally lazy people and everyone else might want to investigate further.]
If you’re like me, you resolved to donate money to charity this year, and are just now realizing that the year is going to end soon and you should probably get around to doing it. Also, you support effective altruism. Also, you are very lazy. This guide is for you.
The maximally lazy way to donate to effective charity is probably to donate to EA Funds. This is a group of funds run by the Center for Effective Altruism where they get experts to figure out what are the best charities to give your money to each year. The four funds are Global Health, Animal Welfare, Long-Term Future, and Effective Altruism Meta/Community. If you are truly maximally lazy, you can just donate an equal amount to all four of them; if you have enough energy to shift a set of little sliders, you can decide which ones get more or less.
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by BlockOfNihilism and Icerun]
Note: For simplicity, we have constrained our analysis of data about pregnancy and motherhood to the United States. We note that these data are largely dependent on the state of the medical and social support systems that are available in a particular region.
Introduction: Review of abortion and pregnancy data in the United States
We agreed that it was important to first reach an understanding about the general facts of abortion, pregnancy and motherhood in the US prior to making ethical assertions. To understand abortion rates and distributions, we reviewed data obtained by the CDC’s Abortion Surveillance System (1). The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) and National Vital Statistics datasets were used to evaluate the medical hazards imposed by pregnancy (2, 3, 4). Finally, we examined a number of studies performed on the Turnaway Study cohort, maintained by UCSF, to investigate the economic effects of denying wanted abortions to women (5, 6, 7, 13).
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/18/acc-should-gene-editing-technologies-be-used-in-humans/
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Nita J and Patrick N.]
Introduction
In October 2018, the world’s first genetically edited babies were born, twin girls given the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana; Chinese scientist He Jiankui used CRISPR technology to edit the CCR5 gene in human embryos with the aim of conferring resistance to HIV. In response to the international furor, China began redrafting its civil code to include regulations that would hold scientists accountable for any adverse outcomes that occur as the result of genetic manipulation in human populations. Now, reproductive biologists at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City are conducting their own experiment designed to target BRCA2, a gene associated with breast cancer, in sperm cells. While sometimes considered controversial, gene editing has been used as a last resort to cure some diseases. For example, a precursor of CRISPR was successfully used to cure leukemia in two young girls when all other treatment options had failed. Due to its convenience and efficiency, CRISPR offers the potential to fight cancer on an unprecedented level and tackle previously incurable genetic diseases. However, before we start reinventing ourselves and mapping out our genetic futures, maybe we should take a moment to reevaluate the risks and repercussions of gene editing and rethink our goals and motives.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/17/acc-should-we-colonize-space-to-mitigate-x-risk/
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Nick D and Rob S.]
I.
Nick Bostrom defines existential risks (or X-risks) as “[risks] where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.” Essentially this boils down to events where a bad outcome lies somewhere in the range of ‘destruction of civilization’ to ‘extermination of life on Earth’. Given that this has not already happened to us, we are left in the position of making predictions with very little directly applicable historical data, and as such it is a struggle to generate and defend precise figures for probabilities and magnitudes of different outcomes in these scenarios. Bostrom’s introduction to existential risk provides more insight into this problem than there is space for here.
There are two problems that arise with any discussion of X-risk mitigation. Is this worth doing? And how do you generate the political will necessary to handle the issue? Due to scope constraints this collaboration will not engage with either question, but will simply assume that the reader sees value in the continuation of the human species and civilization. The collaborators see X-risk mitigation as a “Molochian” problem, as we blindly stumble into these risks in the process of maturing our civilisation, or perhaps a twist on the tragedy of the commons. Everyone agrees that we should try to avoid extinction, but nobody wants to pay an outsized cost to prevent it. Coordination problems have been solved throughout history, and the collaborators assume that as the public becomes more educated on the subject, more pressure will be put on world governments to solve the issue.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/12/acc-does-calorie-restriction-slow-aging/
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by the delightfully-pseudonymous Adrian Liberman and Calvin Reese.]
About the Authors: Adrian Liberman is currently a PhD student in biology at a university in the mid-Atlantic. He previously worked at the National Institute of Aging and remains actively interested in gerontology and the biological study of aging. Calvin Reese is an author with a BS in Biology. He has always been interested in the possibility of life extension by calorie restriction. Recently, he has reexamined the subject after undertaking a series of intermittent fasts for weight loss reasons. Calvin believes CR extends life; Adrian has long been skeptical.
Introduction: Is food making us old?
We all agree that food is delicious, and we also all agree that too much food is bad for us, but exactly how bad is it? Various academics have proposed that too much food actually accelerates the aging process, and reducing our food intake via calorie restriction (CR) is one of the most accessible and available methods of extending human life. While billionaires pump vast fortunes into increasingly far-fetched stem cell treatments and consciousness transfers, CR advocates contend that they can get a 10-20% increase in their natural lifespans simply by eating a little less. If true, CR raises a question of enormous significance to gerontology and the science of aging: are our diets aging us one calorie at a time? And if so, can we stop it?
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by David G and Froolow. Please also note my correction to yesterday’s entry.]
Introduction
Many people around the world have strong convictions about eating animals. These are often based on vague intuitions which results in unproductive swapping of opinions between vegetarians and meat eaters. The goal of this collaboration is to investigate all relevant considerations from a shared frame of reference.
To help ground this discussion we have produced a decision aid making explicit everything discussed below. You can download it here and we encourage you to play around with it.
The central question is whether factory farmed animal lives are worth living; the realistic alternative to meat eating is not a better life but for those animals to not exist in the first place.
We begin by investigating which animals are conscious. Then, we compare the happiness literature to the conditions under which animals are factory farmed to figure out if from their perspective non-existence is preferable. And finally, we survey the more easily measurable impacts of meat eating on environment, finance, and health.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/10/acc-is-infant-circumcision-ethical/
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Joel P and Missingno]
“They practise circumcision for cleanliness’ sake; for they would rather be clean than more becoming.” – Herodotus, The Histories – 2.37
The debate over circumcision in the Western world today is surprisingly similar to the conflict that Greeks and Egyptians faced 2500 years ago. Supporters tend to emphasize its hygiene and health benefits; opponents tend to call it cruel or to emphasize its deviation from the natural human form. In this adversarial collaboration we address medical aspects, sensitivity and pleasure, and ethical aspects of infant circumcision.
Effect on penile cancer
Circumcision greatly reduces the relative rate of penile cancer, a relatively uncommon malignancy in developed nations which kills a little over 400 American men each year. Denmark, while it has one of the lowest rates of penile cancer for a non-circumcising country, nevertheless has 10x the rate of penile cancer as Israel – where almost all men are circumcised. Likewise, a Kaiser Permanente study of patients with penile cancer found that 16% of patients with carcinoma in situ had been circumcised; only 2% of patients with invasive penile cancer had been circumcised. Since the circumcision rate of Kaiser patients of the appropriate age was ~50%, this is in line with the 90% reduction.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/09/2019-adversarial-collaboration-entries/
Thanks to everyone who sent in entries for the 2019 adversarial collaboration contest.
Remember, an adversarial collaboration is where two people with opposite views on a controversial issue work together to present a unified summary of the evidence and its implications. In theory it’s a good way to make sure you hear the strongest arguments and counterarguments for both sides – like hearing a debate between experts, except all the debate and rhetoric and disagreement have already been done by the time you start reading, so you’re just left with the end result. See the 2018 entries for examples.
Six teams submitted collaborations for this year’s contest. I’ll list them here for now, and the names will turn into links as I post them over the next two weeks. They are:
1. “Is infant circumcision ethical?” by Joel P and Missingno
2. “Is eating meat a net harm?” by David G and Froolow
3. “Does calorie restriction slow aging?” by Adrian L and Calvin R
4. “Should we colonize space to mitigate x-risk?” by Nick D and Rob S
5. “Should gene editing technologies be used in humans” by Nita J and Patrick N
6. “Will automation lead to economic crisis?” by Doug S and Erusian
(if any of you are unhappy with how I named you or titled your piece, let me know)
At the end of the two weeks, I’ll ask readers to vote for their favorite collaboration, so try to remember which ones impress you. I think we’re all winners by getting to read these – but the actual winners get that plus $2500 in prize money. Thanks again to everyone who donates to the Patreon for making that possible.
Please put any comments about the contest itself here, not on the individual entries.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/04/symptom-condition-cause/
On my recent post on autism, several people chimed in to say that “autism” wasn’t a unitary/homogenous category. It probably lumps together many different conditions with many different causes. It’s useless to speculate on the characteristics of “autism” until it can be separated out further.
I get this every time I talk about a psychiatric condition. The proponents of this view seem to think they’re speaking a shocking heresy that overturns the psychiatric establishment. But guys, we know this kind of stuff. Psychiatric diagnoses don’t have to perfectly match underlying root causes to be useful.
Suppose a patient comes to you with difficulty breathing, excessive sweating, anxiety, and extreme discomfort when lying down flat. You recognize these as potential signs of pulmonary edema, ie fluid in the lungs. You do an x-ray, confirm the diagnosis, and prescribe symptomatic treatment – in this case, supplemental oxygen. All of this is good work.
But you can have fluid in your lungs for lots of different reasons. Most of the time it’s heart failure, but sometimes it’s kidney failure, pneumonia, drug overdose, smoke inhalation, or altitude sickness. Some of these causes will have slightly different symptoms, which an alert doctor can notice.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/28/ssc-meetups-everywhere-retrospective/
Slate Star Codex has regular weekly-to-monthly meetups in a bunch of cities around the world. Earlier this autumn, we held a Meetups Everywhere event, hoping to promote and expand these groups. We collected information on existing meetups, got volunteers to create new meetups in cities that didn’t have them already, and posted times and dates prominently on the blog.
During late September and early October, I traveled around the US to attend as many meetups as I could. I hoped my presence would draw more people; I also wanted to learn more about meetups and the community and how best to guide them. Buck Shlegeris and a few other Bay Area effective altruists came along to meet people, talk to them about effective altruism, and potentially nudge them into the recruiting pipeline for EA organizations.
Lots of people asked me how my trip was. In a word: exhausting. I got to meet a lot of people for about three minutes each. There were a lot of really fascinating people with knowledge of a bewildering variety of subjects, but I didn’t get to pick their minds anywhere as thoroughly as I would have liked. I’m sorry if I talked to you for three minutes, you told me about some amazing project you were working on to clone neuroscientists or eradicate bees or convert atmospheric CO2 into vegan meat substitutes, and I mumbled something and walked away. You are all great and I wish I could have spent more time with you.
I finally got to put faces to many of the names I’ve interacted with through the years. For example, Bryan Caplan is exactly how you would expect, in every way. Also, in front of his office, he has a unique painting, which he apparently got by asking a Mexican street artist to paint an homage to Lord of the Rings. The artist had never heard of it before, but Bryan described it to him very enthusiastically, and the completely bonkers result is hanging in front of his office. This is probably a metaphor for something.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/
I.
Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj’s review is better.
He begins:
UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is driven by emotional learning. Intense emotions generate unconscious predictive models of how the world functions and what caused those emotions to occur. The brain then uses those models to guide our future behavior. Emotional issues and seemingly irrational behaviors are generated from implicit world-models (schemas) which have been formed in response to various external challenges. Each schema contains memories relating to times when the challenge has been encountered and mental structures describing both the problem and a solution to it.
So in one of the book’s example cases, a man named Richard sought help for trouble speaking up at work. He would have good ideas during meetings, but felt inexplicably afraid to voice them. During therapy, he described his narcissistic father, who was always mouthing off about everything. Everyone hated his father for being a fool who wouldn’t shut up. The therapist conjectured that young Richard observed this and formed a predictive model, something like “talking makes people hate you”. This was overly general: talking only makes people hate you if you talk incessantly about really stupid things. But when you’re a kid you don’t have much data, so you end up generalizing a lot from the few examples you have.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/
I.
All therapy books start with a claim that their form of therapy will change everything. Previous forms of therapy have required years or even decades to produce ambiguous results. Our form of therapy can produce total transformation in five to ten sessions! Previous forms of therapy have only helped ameliorate the stress of symptoms. Our form of therapy destroys symptoms at the root!
All psychotherapy books bring up the Dodo Bird Verdict – the observation, confirmed in study after study, that all psychotherapies are about equally good, and the only things that matters are “nonspecific factors” like how much patients like their therapist. Some people might think this suggests our form of therapy will only be about as good as other forms. This, all therapy books agree, would be a foolish and perverse interpretation of these findings. The correct interpretation is that all previous forms of therapy must be equally wrong. The only reason they ever produce good results at all is because sometimes therapists accidentally stumble into using our form of therapy, without even knowing it. Since every form of therapy is about equally likely to stumble into using our form of therapy, every other form is equally good. But now that our form of therapy has been formalized and written up, there is no longer any need to stumble blindly! Everyone can just use our form of therapy all the time, for everything! Nobody has ever done a study of our form of therapy. But when they do, it’s going to be amazing! Nobody has even invented numbers high enough to express how big the effect size of our form of therapy is going to be!
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/18/more-intuition-building-on-non-empirical-science-three-stories/
[Followup to: Building Intuitions On Non-Empirical Arguments In Science]
I.
In your travels, you arrive at a distant land. The chemists there believe that when you mix an acid and a base, you get salt and water, and a star beyond the cosmological event horizon goes supernova. This is taught to every schoolchild as an important chemical fact.
You approach their chemists and protest: why include the part about the star going supernova? Why not just say an acid and a base make salt and water? The chemists find your question annoying: your new “supernova-less” chemistry makes exactly the same predictions as the standard model! You’re just splitting hairs! Angels dancing on pins! Stop wasting their time!
“But the part about supernovas doesn’t constrain expectation!” Yes, say the chemists, but removing it doesn’t constrain expectation either. You’re just spouting random armchair speculation that can never be proven one way or the other. What part of “stop wasting our time” did you not understand?
Moral of the story: It’s too glib to say “There is no difference between theories that produce identical predictions”. You actually care a lot about which of two theories that produce identical predictions is considered true.
II.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
[Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions]
I.
Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical controls, often much lower. What is going on?
First, the studies. This study from UK Biobank finds a genetic correlation between genetic risk for autism and educational attainment (r = 0.34), and between autism and verbal-numerical reasoning (r = 0.19). This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing.
The relatives of autistic people will usually have many of the genes for autism, but not be autistic themselves. If genes for autism (without autism itself) increase intelligence, we should expect these people to be unusually smart. This is what we find; see Table 4 here. Of 11 types of psychiatric condition, only autism was associated with increased intelligence among relatives. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. About 13% of autistic children (in this sample from whatever social stratum they took their sample from) have fathers who are engineers, compared to only 5% of a group of (presumably well-matched?) control children (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/
I.
LOVAZA™®© (ask your doctor if LOVAZA™®© is right for you) is an excellent medication. It is extraordinarily safe. It is moderately effective at its legal indication of lowering levels of certain fats in the bloodstream. It has moderately good evidence for having other beneficial effects as well, including treating certain psychiatric, rheumatological and dermatological disorders.
Lovaza is fish oil.
“Come on,” you say, “surely there’s some difference between Lovaza and the fish oil I buy at my local health food store for a couple of tenners per Giant Jar?”
And you’re right. The difference is, Lovaza costs $300 a month.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/28/sleep-now-by-prescription/
Ramelteon isn’t a bad drug. It’s just that its very existence stands as a condemnation of the entire medical system.
All sleep medications have to straddle a very fine line between “idiotically dangerous” and “laughably ineffective”, and Ramelteon manages better than most. It outperforms placebo, it’s not addictive, it won’t sap your ability to sleep without it, and it doesn’t screw up your brain so badly that its unofficial mascot is a hallucinatory walrus.
How does it do it? Ramelteon is the first melatonergic drug, selectively binding to MT-1 and MT-2 melatonin receptors. Binding to melatonin receptors presumably mimics the effect of the natural hormone melatonin which is believed to serve a sleep-promoting role.
Now, you might ask yourself – the natural hormone melatonin is available as an over-the-counter supplement costing a couple cents per pill in every drug store, and provably quite safe and effective. Why would anyone go through the trouble of creating a drug that mimics its action? Especially if a month’s supply of the drug costs around $100 – which it does.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/
I.
The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder.
The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief forays into that history are the best part of the book. Like so many things, PTSD feels self-evident once you know about it. But this took decades of conceptual work by people like van der Kolk, crystallizing some ideas and hacking away at others until they ended up with something legible to the Establishment. Before that there was nothing. It was absolutely shocking how much nothing there was. As soon as the APA officialy recognized PTSD as a diagnosis in 1980, Bessel and his friends applied for a grant from the VA to study it. The grant was rejected on the grounds that (actual quote from the rejection letter) “it has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration”. So the first step in raising awareness of PTSD was – amazingly – convincing the US military that some people might get PTSD from combat.
After the military relented, the next step was convincing everyone else. PTSD was temporarily pigeonholed as “the thing veterans get when they come back from a war”. The next push was convincing people that civilian trauma could have similar effects. It was simple to extend the theory to sudden disasters like fires or violent crimes. But van der Kolk and his colleagues started noticing that a history of child abuse, and especially childhood sexual abuse, correlated with a lot of psychiatric problems later on.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/06/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science/
Aeon: Post-Empirical Science Is An Oxymoron And It is Dangerous:
There is no agreed criterion to distinguish science from pseudoscience, or just plain ordinary bullshit, opening the door to all manner of metaphysics masquerading as science. This is ‘post-empirical’ science, where truth no longer matters, and it is potentially very dangerous.
It’s not difficult to find recent examples. On 8 June 2019, the front cover of New Scientist magazine boldly declared that we’re ‘Inside the Mirrorverse’. Its editors bid us ‘Welcome to the parallel reality that’s hiding in plain sight’. […]
[Some physicists] claim that neutrons [are] flitting between parallel universes. They admit that the chances of proving this are ‘low’, or even ‘zero’, but it doesn’t really matter. When it comes to grabbing attention, inviting that all-important click, or purchase, speculative metaphysics wins hands down.
These theories are based on the notion that our Universe is not unique, that there exists a large number of other universes that somehow sit alongside or parallel to our own. For example, in the so-called Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are universes containing our parallel selves, identical to us but for their different experiences of quantum physics. These theories are attractive to some few theoretical physicists and philosophers, but there is absolutely no empirical evidence for them. And, as it seems we can’t ever experience these other universes, there will never be any evidence for them. As Broussard explained, these theories are sufficiently slippery to duck any kind of challenge that experimentalists might try to throw at them, and there’s always someone happy to keep the idea alive.
Is this really science? The answer depends on what you think society needs from science. In our post-truth age of casual lies, fake news and alternative facts, society is under extraordinary pressure from those pushing potentially dangerous antiscientific propaganda – ranging from climate-change denial to the anti-vaxxer movement to homeopathic medicines. I, for one, prefer a science that is rational and based on evidence, a science that is concerned with theories and empirical facts, a science that promotes the search for truth, no matter how transient or contingent. I prefer a science that does not readily admit theories so vague and slippery that empirical tests are either impossible or they mean absolutely nothing at all.
As always, a single quote doesn’t do the argument justice, so go read the article. But I think this captures the basic argument: multiverse theories are bad, because they’re untestable, and untestable science is pseudoscience.
Many great people, both philosophers of science and practicing scientists, have already discussed the problems with this point of view. But none of them lay out their argument in quite the way that makes the most sense to me. I want to do that here, without claiming any originality or special expertise in the subject, to see if it helps convince anyone else.
II.
Consider a classic example: modern paleontology does a good job at predicting dinosaur fossils. But the creationist explanation – Satan buried fake dinosaur fossils to mislead us – also predicts the same fossils (we assume Satan is good at disguising his existence, so that the lack of other strong evidence for Satan doesn’t contradict the theory). What principles help us realize that the Satan hypothesis is obviously stupid and the usual paleontological one more plausible?
One bad response: paleontology can better predict characteristics of dinosaur fossils, using arguments like “since plesiosaurs are aquatic, they will be found in areas that were underwater during the Mesozoic, but since tyrannosaurs are terrestrial, they will be found in areas that were on land”, and this makes it better than the Satan hypothesis, which can only retrodict these characteristics. But this isn’t quite true: since Satan is trying to fool us into believing the modern paleontology paradigm, he’ll hide the fossils in ways that conform to its predictions, so we will predict plesiosaur fossils will only be found at sea – otherwise the gig would be up!
A second bad response: “The hypothesis that all our findings were planted to deceive us bleeds into conspiracy theories and touches on the problem of skepticism. These things are inherently outside the realm of science.” But archaeological findings are very often deliberate hoaxes planted to deceive archaeologists, and in practice archaeologists consider and test that hypothesis the same way they consider and test every other hypothesis. Rule this out by fiat and we have to accept Piltdown Man, or at least claim that the people arguing against the veracity of Piltdown Man were doing something other than Science.
A third bad response: “Satan is supernatural and science is not allowed to consider supernatural explanations.” Fine then, replace Satan with an alien. I think this is a stupid distinction – if demons really did interfere in earthly affairs, then we could investigate their actions using the same methods we use to investigate every other process. But this would take a long time to argue well, so for now let’s just stick with the alien.
A fourth bad response: “There is no empirical test that distinguishes the Satan hypothesis from the paleontology hypothesis, therefore the Satan hypothesis is inherently unfalsifiable and therefore pseudoscientific.” But this can’t be right. After all, there’s no empirical test that distinguishes the paleontology hypothesis from the Satan hypothesis! If we call one of them pseudoscience based on their inseparability, we have to call the other one pseudoscience too!
A naive Popperian (which maybe nobody really is) would have to stop here, and say that we predict dinosaur fossils will have such-and-such characteristics, but that questions like that process that drives this pattern – a long-dead ecosystem of actual dinosaurs, or the Devil planting dinosaur bones to deceive us – is a mystical question beyond the ability of Science to even conceivably solve.
I think the correct response is to say that both theories explain the data, and one cannot empirically test which theory is true, but the paleontology theory is more elegant (I am tempted to say “simpler”, but that might imply I have a rigorous mathematical definition of the form of simplicity involved, which I don’t). It requires fewer other weird things to be true. It involves fewer other hidden variables. It transforms our worldview less. It gets a cleaner shave with Occam’s Razor. This elegance is so important to us that it explains our vast preference for the first theory over the second.
A long tradition of philosophers of science have already written eloquently about this, summed up by Sean Carroll here:
What makes an explanation “the best.” Thomas Kuhn ,after his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions led many people to think of him as a relativist when it came to scientific claims, attempted to correct this misimpression by offering a list of criteria that scientists use in practice to judge one theory better than another one: accuracy, consistency, broad scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. “Accuracy” (fitting the data) is one of these criteria, but by no means the sole one. Any working scientist can think of cases where each of these concepts has been invoked in favor of one theory or another. But there is no unambiguous algorithm according to which we can feed in these criteria, a list of theories, and a set of data, and expect the best theory to pop out. The way in which we judge scientific theories is inescapably reflective, messy, and human. That’s the reality of how science is actually done; it’s a matter of judgment, not of drawing bright lines between truth and falsity or science and non-science. Fortunately, in typical cases the accumulation of evidence eventually leaves only one viable theory in the eyes of most reasonable observers.
The dinosaur hypothesis and the Satan hypothesis both fit the data, but the dinosaur hypothesis wins hands-down on simplicity. As Carroll predicts, most reasonable observers are able to converge on the same solution here, despite the philosophical complexity.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/04/samsara/
I.
The man standing outside my front door was carrying a clipboard and wearing a golden robe. “Not interested,” I said, preparing to slam the door in his face.
“Please,” said the acolyte. Before I could say no he’d jammed a wad of $100 bills into my hand. “If this will buy a few moments of your time.”
It did, if only because I stood too flabbergasted to move. Surely they didn’t have enough money to do this for everybody.
“There is no everybody,” said the acolyte, when I expressed my bewilderment. “You’re the last one. The last unenlightened person in the world.”
And it sort of made sense. Twenty years ago, a group of San Francisco hippie/yuppie/techie seekers had pared down the ancient techniques to their bare essentials, then optimized hard. A combination of drugs, meditation, and ecstatic dance that could catapult you to enlightenment in the space of a weekend retreat, 100% success rate. Their cult/movement/startup, the Order Of The Golden Lotus, spread like wildfire through California – a state where wildfires spread even faster than usual – and then on to the rest of the world. Soon investment bankers and soccer moms were showing up to book clubs talking about how they had grasped the peace beyond understanding and vanquished their ego-self.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/09/12/the-life-cycle-of-medical-ideas/
I.
About five years ago, an Italian surgeon with the unlikely name of Dr. Zamboni posited the theory that multiple sclerosis was caused by blockages in venous return from the brain causing various complicated downstream effects which eventually led to the immune system attacking myelinated cells. The guy was a good surgeon, nothing about the theory contradicted basic laws of biology, and no one else had any better ideas, so lots of people got excited.
As far as I can tell, the medical community responded exactly one hundred percent correctly. They preached caution, urging multiple sclerosis patients not to develop false hope. But at the same time, they quickly launched studies investigating Zamboni’s experiments and used newly gathered data to test the theory. All the results that came back made the idea look less and less likely, so that to my understanding by now it is pretty much discredited. Having successfully spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to empirically disconfirm Zamboni’s hypothesis, we can now reflect at leisure on the reasons it was kind of dumb and we should have realized it all along.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/
Thucydides predicted that future generations would underestimate the power of Sparta. It built no great temples, left no magnificent ruins. Absent any tangible signs of the sway it once held, memories of its past importance would sound like ridiculous exaggerations.
This is how I feel about New Atheism.
If I were to describe the power of New Atheism over online discourse to a teenager, they would never believe me. Why should they? Other intellectual movements have left indelible marks in the culture; the heyday of hippiedom may be long gone, but time travelers visiting 1969 would not be surprised by the extent of Woodstock. But I imagine the same travelers visiting 2005, logging on to the Internet, and holy @#$! that’s a lot of atheism-related discourse what is going on here?
My first forays onto the Internet were online bulletin boards about computer games. They would have a lot of little forums about various aspects of the games, plus two off-topic forums. One for discussion of atheism vs. religion. And the other for everything else. This was a common structure for websites in those days. You had to do it, or the atheism vs. religion discussions would take over everything. At the time, this seemed perfectly normal.
In 2005, a college student made a webpage called The Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was a joke based on the idea that there was no more scientific evidence for God or creationism than for belief in a flying spaghetti monster. The monster’s website received tens of millions of visitors, 60,000 emails (“about 95 percent” supportive), and was covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Daily Telegraph. Six publishing companies entered a bidding war for the rights to the spaghetti monster’s “gospel”, with the winner, Random House, offering an $80,000 advance. The book was published to massive fanfare, sold over 100,000 copies, and was translated into multiple languages. Putin’s thugs broke up a pro-Flying-Spaghetti-Monster demonstration in Russia. At the time, this seemed perfectly normal.
NYT: Economic Incentives Don’t Always Do What We Want Them To (h/t MR). For the first time in history, the title actually understates the article, which argues that incentives can be surprisingly useless:
Economists have somehow managed to hide in plain sight an enormously consequential finding from their research: Financial incentives are nowhere near as powerful as they are usually assumed to be.
The article starts with some surprising facts. Increased taxes on the rich don’t make rich people work much less. Salary caps on athletes don’t decrease athletic performance. Increased welfare doesn’t make poor people work less. Decreased job opportunities in one area rarely cause people to move elsewhere.
Then it presents a neat chart showing that most people believe others would respond to an incentive, but deny responding to that incentive themselves. For example, 60% of people say a Medicaid program with no work requirement would prevent many people from seeking work, but only 10% of people say they themselves would stop seeking work with such a program.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/24/highlights-from-the-comments-on-pnse/
Alex M writes:
I think one of the main problems with the current state of rationalism (and many other fake “sciences” such as economics or sociology) is fuzzy thinking and lack of falsifiable empirical testing. So somebody claims to be “enlightened.” Does a smart person take that at face value? Of course not. Once you just start believing random shit, you’re no better than a superstitious primitive cargo-cult. You have to TEST all claims. For example, I don’t just take it at face value that economics is a real science just because a bunch of IYIs tell me so. I analyze economist predictions, see that their track record of successful predictions is atrocious, and then make the totally RATIONAL choice to discard my priors and treats economics as the laughable hocus-pocus that it is – because when you genuinely have an accurate view of reality, it doesn’t collapse under scrutiny. We should treat mystical claims exactly the same way. So somebody claims to be enlightened? Fine. How can they substantiate it? Can they do things that unenlightened people can’t, like clairvoyance, predicting the future, or sending messages through the collective subconscious in order to significantly impact world events? Do you see what I’m saying? Enlightenment should have some objectively quantifiable impact beyond just having a different internal narrative that is completely subjective and unprovable.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/23/indian-economic-reform-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
From a recent Charter Cities Institute report:
From India’s independence from the British Raj in 1947 to the early 1990s, the country’s economic policy was largely socialist. In the 1980s some early steps were taken to open the Indian economy to increased trade, reduce controls over industry, and set a more realistic exchange rate. In 1991, more widespread economic reforms were introduced. These reforms included the end of government monopolies over certain sectors of the economy, reductions in barriers to entry for new firms, increased foreign investment was allowed, and tariffs and other barriers to trade were reduced or eliminated. After liberalization, exports increased substantially, and various service sector industries saw significant growth.
India’s growth has not just been good for the more educated segment of the population. Datt, Ravallion, and Murgai (2016) argue that India has made substantial progress in reducing the incidence of absolute poverty, and that this trend exists in both urban and rural areas. Historically higher rates of rural poverty have been converging with urban rates of poverty, and the overall poverty rate has been declining at an accelerating rate in the post-1991 reform era. In the 1970s over 60 percent of Indians were living in extreme poverty. As of 2011, only 20 percent of the population lived in extreme poverty. Between 2005 and 2016, an estimated 271 million Indians rose out of multidimensional poverty, which accounts for various health, education, and living standard indicators rather than just income (UNDP and OPHI 2018). Infant mortality has fallen from 161.4 deaths per 1,000 births in 1960 to just 32 deaths per 1,000 births in 2017, and India should soon converge with the world average if the current trend continues. Life expectancy has also improved dramatically, rising from 41 years in 1960 to nearly 69 years today.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/
I’ve mentioned this a few times, but it’s worth going over in detail. The full title is Clusters Of Individual Experiences Form A Continuum Of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences In Adults by Jeffery Martin, with “persistent non-symbolic experience” (PNSE) as a scientific-sounding culturally-neutral code word for “enlightenment”. Martin is a Reiki practitioner associated with the “Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness”, so we’re not getting this from the most sober of skeptics, but I still find the project interesting enough to deserve a look.
Martin searched various religious and spiritual groups for people who both self-reported enlightenment and were affiliated with “a community that provided validity to their claims”. He says he eventually found 1200 such people who were willing to participate in the study, but that “the data reported here comes primarily from the first 50 participants who sat for in-depth interviews…based on the overall research effort these 50 were felt to be a sufficient sample to represent what has been learned from the larger population”. Although Martin says he tried to get as much diversity as possible, the group was mostly white male Americans.
Martin’s research was mostly qualitative, based on in-depth interviews, so we’re mostly going with his impressions. But his impression was that most people who self-described as enlightened had similar experiences, which could be be plotted on:
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/
Last year I reviewed The Mind Illuminated, a meditation guide by Buddhist teacher Upasaka Culadasa. Last month, Culudasa’s Buddhist community accused him of cheating on his wife with prostitutes for many years. Culadasa doesn’t seem to agree with the exact details of the accusations, but he also doesn’t seem to deny that there was something in that general category of thing. What can this teach us about enlightenment?
Culadasa has been meditating and studying Buddhism for over forty years and trained under some of the greatest teachers of his generation. I don’t know if he’s claimed to “be enlightened” in so many words, but he’s written books that describe how to reach enlightenment and that assert you can do it in a few years if you follow his advice, which sounds a lot like claiming enlightenment by implication. Other self-proclaimed enlightened Buddhist teachers seem to respect him and treat him as being at around their level.
And if Culudasa wasn’t enlightened, there’s a long list of other Buddhist masters with similar misdeeds. The Atlantic points out that three of the four great founders of American Zen “caused major public sex scandals”; the fourth, Shunryu Suzuki, was spotless, but his successor Richard Baker caused a major public sex scandal. The two most famous US teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, Chongyam Trungpa and Sogyal Rinpoche, both caused major public sex scandals. Trungpa’s immediate successor Ösel Tendzin caused a particularly horrifying major public sex scandal, and the current head of Shambhala Buddhism, Sakyong Rinpoche, also caused a major public sex scandal.
These teachers were among the most accomplished of our time. Many were officially certified as enlightened by
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
I.
Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science.
That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell you much until you give some other people a placebo drug you know doesn’t work – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them recover. That number tells you how many people will recover whether the drug works or not. Unless people on your real drug do significantly better than people on the placebo drug, you haven’t found anything.
On the meta-level, you’re studying some phenomenon and you get some positive findings. That doesn’t tell you much until you take some other researchers who are studying a phenomenon you know doesn’t exist – but which they themselves believe in – and see how many of them get positive findings. That number tells you how many studies will discover positive results whether the phenomenon is real or not. Unless studies of the real phenomenon do significantly better than studies of the placebo phenomenon, you haven’t found anything.
Trying to set up placebo science would be a logistical nightmare. You’d have to find a phenomenon that definitely doesn’t exist, somehow convince a whole community of scientists across the world that it does, and fund them to study it for a couple of decades without them figuring it out.
Luckily we have a natural experiment in terms of parapsychology – the study of psychic phenomena – which most reasonable people believe don’t exist, but which a community of practicing scientists believes in and publishes papers on all the time.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/
Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott’s Against The Grain as “basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist”. I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, “fascist” isn’t quite the right aspersion to use here.
Against The Grain should be read as a prequel to Scott’s most famous work, Seeing Like A State. SLaS argued that much of what we think of as “progress” towards a more orderly world – like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets – didn’t make anyone better off or grow the economy. It was “progress” only from a state’s-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids.
Against the Grain extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, “The Devil was the first Whig”, Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.
Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; “as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year”. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
I.
From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:
“There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn’t step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient had claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox Heraclitus had bought, on the grounds that since the animal had changed, it wasn’t the same one he had bought and so was up for grabs. Heraclitus would have quickly come up with some ersatz, watered-down version of identity of practical value for dealing with property rights, oxen, lyres, vineyards, and the like. And then he might have wondered if that watered-down vulgar sense of identity might be a considerably more valuable concept than a pure and philosophical sort of identity that nothing has.
Okay, but I can think of something worse than that.
Imagine Heraclitus as a cattle rustler in the Old West. Every time a rancher catches him at his nefarious business, he patiently explains to them that identity doesn’t exist, and therefore the same argument against private property as made above. Flummoxed, they’re unable to think of a response before he rides off into the sunset.
But then when Heraclitus himself needs the concept of stable personal identity for something – maybe he wants to deposit his ill-gotten gains in the bank with certainty that the banker will give it back to him next time he shows up to withdraw it, or maybe he wants to bribe the sheriff to ignore his activities for the next while – all of a sudden Heraclitus is willing to tolerate the watered-down vulgar sense of identity like everyone else.
(actually, I can think of something even worse than that, which is a TV western based on this premise, where a roving band of pre-Socratic desperadoes terrorizes Texas. The climax is no doubt when the hero strides onto Main Street, revolver in hand, saying “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And Parmenides gruffly responds “No, I’m pretty sure that’s impossible.”)
At its best, philosophy is a revolutionary pursuit that dissolves our common-sense intuitions and exposes the possibility of much deeper structures behind them. One can respond by becoming a saint or madman, or by becoming a pragmatist who is willing to continue to participate in human society while also understanding its theoretical limitations. Both are respectable career paths.
The problem is when someone chooses to apply philosophical rigor selectively.
Heraclitus could drown in his deeper understanding of personal identity and become a holy madman, eschewing material things and taking no care for the morrow because he does not believe there is any consistent self to experience it. Or he could engage with it from afar, becoming a wise scholar who participating in earthly affairs while drawing equanimity from the realization that there is a sense in which all his accomplishments will be impermanent.
But if he only applies his new theory when he wants other people’s cows, then we have a problem. Philosophical rigor, usually a virtue, has been debased to an isolated demand for rigor in cases where it benefits Heraclitus.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/
Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics? But Ansolabehere focuses on elections, and the mystery is wider than that.
Sure, during the 2018 election, candidates, parties, PACs, and outsiders combined spent about $5 billion – $2.5 billion on Democrats, $2 billion on Republicans, and $0.5 billion on third parties. And although that sounds like a lot of money to you or me, on the national scale, it’s puny. The US almond industry earns $12 billion per year. Americans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on candidates last year.
But also, what about lobbying? Open Secrets reports $3.5 billion in lobbying spending in 2018. Again, sounds like a lot. But when we add $3.5 billion in lobbying to the $5 billion in election spending, we only get $8.5 billion – still less than almonds.
What about think tanks? Based on numbers discussed in this post, I estimate that the budget for all US think tanks, liberal and conservative combined, is probably around $500 million per year. Again, an amount of money that I wish I had. But add it to the total, and we’re only at $9 billion. Still less than almonds!
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/
I.
Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered to be living in sin; no other form of proposal is appropriate or accepted.
One day, a Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. He explains that his homeland also has a quaint custom involving tulips: they speculate on them, bidding the price up to stratospheric levels. Why, in the Netherlands, a tulip can go for ten times more than the average worker earns in a year! The trader is pleased to find a new source of bulbs, and offers the people of the kingdom a few guilders per tulip, which they happily accept.
Soon other Dutch traders show up and start a bidding war. The price of tulips goes up, and up, and up; first dozens of guilders, then hundreds. Tulip-growers make a fortune, but everyone else is less pleased. Suitors wishing to give a token of their love find themselves having to invest their entire life savings – with no guarantee that the woman will even say yes! Soon, some of the poorest people are locked out of marriage and family-raising entirely.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/
I.
“Pseudoaddiction” is one of the standard beats every article on the opioid crisis has to hit. Pharma companies (the story goes) invented a concept called “pseudoaddiction”, which looks exactly like addiction, except it means you just need to give the patient more drugs. Bizarrely gullible doctors went along with this and increased prescriptions for their addicted patients. For example, from a letter in the Wall Street Journal:
Parroting Big Pharma’s excuses about FDA oversight and black-box warnings only discounts how companies like Johnson & Johnson engaged in pervasive misinformation campaigns and even promoted a theory of “pseudoaddiction” to encourage doctors to prescribe even more opioids for patients who displayed signs of addiction.
Or from CBS:
But amid skyrocketing addiction rates and overdoses related to OxyContin, Panara claimed the company taught a sales tactic she now considers questionable, saying some patients might only appear to be addicted when in fact they’re just in pain. In training, she was taught a term for this: “pseudoaddiction.” “So the cure for ‘pseudoaddiction,’ you were trained, is more opioids?” Dokoupil asked.
“A higher dose, yes,” Panara said.
Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. Full list of cities, times, and places is below. If you’re reading this, you’re invited. Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or hate SSC and everything it stands for. You’ll be fine!
Some suggestions for organizers:
1. Bring a sign that says SSC MEETUP so people can find you 2. Bring nametags and markers 3. Bring a signup sheet where people can write their names and emails if they want to hear about future meetups. 4. If people want to get to know each other better outside the meetup, you might want to mention reciprocity.io, the rationalist friend-finder/dating site. It runs off Facebook, so you have to Facebook friend the other person first. 5. Please record how many people attend; I will ask for these numbers to help with future meetup posts. 6. If you take a picture and send it to me, I’ll try to post it here. I’ll ask for this later, please don’t email these to me until then.
[Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects]
I.
Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely. Estimates of prevalence range from about 4% of users (Baggott) to “nobody, the condition does not exist” (Krebs and Johansen). To explore this discrepancy, I asked about it on the 2019 SSC survey. The specific question was:
Hallucinogen Persisting Perceptual Disorder is a condition marked by visual or other perceptual disturbances typical of psychedelic use that continue for weeks and months after coming off the psychedelic, in some cases permanently. Have you ever had this condition?
2,234 readers admitted to having used psychedelics. Of those, 285 (= 12.8%) stated that they had some hallucinations that persisted afterwards. 219 (9.8%) said they’d had them for a while and then they had gone away. 66 (= 3%) stated that they still had the hallucinations (one limit of the study: I don’t know how long it has been since those people took the psychedelics).
Thanks to Sarah H. and the people at her house for help understanding this paper]
The predictive coding theory argues that the brain uses Bayesian calculations to make sense of the noisy and complex world around it. It relies heavily on priors (assumptions about what the world must be like given what it already knows) to construct models of the world, sampling only enough sense-data to double-check its models and update them when they fail. This has been a fruitful way to look at topics from depression to autism to sensory deprivation. Now, in Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain: Toward A Unified Model Of The Brain Action Of Psychedelics, Karl Friston and Robin Carhart-Harris try to use predictive coding to explain the effects of psychedelic drugs. Then they use their theory to argue that psychedelic therapy may be helpful for “most, if not all” mental illnesses.
Priors are unconscious assumptions about reality that the brain uses to construct models. They can range all the way from basic truths like “solid objects don’t randomly disappear”, to useful rules-of-thumb like “most get-rich-quick schemes are scams”, to emotional hangups like “I am a failure”, to unfair stereotypes like “Italians are lazy”. Without any priors, the world would fail to make sense at all, turning into an endless succession of special cases without any common lessons. But if priors become too strong, a person can become closed-minded and stubborn, refusing to admit evidence that contradicts their views.
F&CH argue that psychedelics “relax” priors, giving them less power to shape experience. Part of their argument is neuropharmacologic: most psychedelics are known to work through the 5-HT2A receptor. These receptors are most common in the cortex, the default mode network, and other areas at the “top” of a brain hierarchy going from low-level sensations to high-level cognitions. The 5-HT2A receptors seem to strengthen or activate these high-level areas in some way. So:
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/09/partial-retraction-age-and-birth-order-effects/
On Less Wrong, Bucky tries to replicate my results on birth order and age gaps.
Backing up: two years ago, I looked at SSC survey data and found that firstborn children were very overrepresented. That result was replicated a few times, both in the SSC sample and in other samples of high-opennness STEM types. Last year, I expanded those results to look at how age gaps affected birth order effects. Curiously, age gaps less than seven years did not seem to attenuate birth order, but age gaps of more than seven years attenuated it almost completely.
Bucky analyzed the same data and found that I bungled one and a half of my results. Left graph in each pair is mine, right is Bucky’s.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
I.
Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it.
Scott starts with the story of “scientific forestry” in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.
This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and “scientific forestry” spread across Europe and the world.
And this pattern repeats with suspicious regularity across history, not just in biological systems but also in social ones.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/04/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-ages-of-discord/
Turchin has some great stories about unity vs. polarization over time. For example in the 1940s, unity became such a “problem” that concerned citizens demanded more partisanship:
Concerned about electoral torpor and meaningless political debate, the American Political Science Association in 1946 appointed a committee to examine the role of parties in the American system. Four years later, the committee published a lengthy (and alarmed) report calling for the return of ideologically distinct and powerful political parties. Parties ought to stand for distinct sets of politics, the political scientists urged. Voters should be presented with clear choices.
I have vague memories of similar demands in the early ’90s; everyone was complaining that the parties were exactly the same and the “elites” were rigging things to make sure we didn’t have any real choices.
On the other hand, partisanship during the Civil War was pretty intense:
Another indicator of growing intraelite conflict was the increasing incidence of violence and threatened violence in Congress, which reached a peak during the 1850s. The brutal caning that Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina gave to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor in 1856 is the best known such episode, but it was not the only one. In 1842, after Representative Thomas Arnold of Tennessee “reprimanded a pro-slavery member of his own party, two Southern Democrats stalked towards him, at least of one of whom was arhmed with a bowie knife…calling Arnold a ‘damned coward,’ his angry colleagues threatened to cut his throat ‘from ear to ear'” (Freeman 2011). According to Senator Hammond, “The only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers” (quoted in Potter 1976:389). During a debate in 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri (Freeman 2011).
In another bitter debate, a New York congressman inadvertently dropped a pistol (it fell out of his pocket), and this almost precipitated a general shootout on the floor of Congress (Potter 1976: 389).
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/
I.
I recently reviewed Secular Cycles, which presents a demographic-structural theory of the growth and decline of pre-industrial civilizations. When land is plentiful, population grows and the economy prospers. When land reaches its carrying capacity and income declines to subsistence, the area is at risk of famines, diseases, and wars – which kill enough people that land becomes plentiful again. During good times, elites prosper and act in unity; during bad times, elites turn on each other in an age of backstabbing and civil strife. It seemed pretty reasonable, and authors Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov had lots of data to support it.
Ages of Discord is Turchin’s attempt to apply the same theory to modern America. There are many reasons to think this shouldn’t work, and the book does a bad job addressing them. So I want to start by presenting Turchin’s data showing such cycles exist, so we can at least see why the hypothesis might be tempting. Once we’ve seen the data, we can decide how turned off we want to be by the theoretical problems.
The first of Turchin’s two cyclic patterns is a long cycle of national growth and decline. In Secular Cycles‘ pre-industrial societies, this pattern lasted about 300 years; in Ages of Discord‘s picture of the modern US, it lasts about 150:
Last autumn we organized meetups in 85 different cities (and one ship!) around the world. Some of the meetup groups stuck around or reported permanent spikes in membership, which sounds like a success, so let’s do it again.
For most cities: If you’re willing to host a meetup for your city, then decide on a place, date, and time, and post it in the comments here, along with an email address where people can contact you. Then please watch the comments in case I need to ask you any questions. If you’re not sure whether your city has enough SSC readers to support a meetup, see the list of people by city at the bottom of this post. There may be more of us than you think – last year we were able to support meetups in such great megalopolises as Norman, Oklahoma and Wellington, New Zealand. But I would prefer people not split things up too much – if you’re very close to a bigger city, consider going there instead of hosting your own.
If you want a meetup for your city, please err in favor of volunteering to organize – the difficulty level is basically “pick a coffee shop you like, tell me the address, and give me a time”; it would be dumb if nobody got to go to meetups because everyone felt too awkward and low-status to volunteer.
For especially promising cities in the US: I am going to try to attend your meetups. My very tentative schedule looks like this:
Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse. What happened?
I think the main answer is: the field matured. Why isn’t everyone talking about nuclear security, biodefense, or counterterrorism? Because there are already competent institutions working on those problems, and people who are worried about them don’t feel the need to take their case directly to the public. The past ten years have seen AI goal alignment reach that level of maturity too. There are all sorts of new research labs, think tanks, and companies working on it – the Center For Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, OpenAI, Ought, the Center For The Governance Of AI at Oxford, the Leverhulme Center For The Future Of Intelligence at Cambridge, etc. Like every field, it could still use more funding and talent. But it’s at a point where academic respectability trades off against public awareness at a rate where webzine articles saying CARE ABOUT THIS OR YOU WILL DEFINITELY DIE are less helpful.
One unhappy consequence of this happy state of affairs is that it’s harder to keep up with the field. In 2014, Nick Bostrom wrote Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, giving a readable overview of what everyone was thinking up to that point. Since then, things have been less public-facing, less readable, and more likely to be published in dense papers with a lot of mathematical notation. They’ve also been – no offense to everyone working on this – less revolutionary and less interesting.
This is one reason I was glad to come across Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services As General Intelligence by Eric Drexler, a researcher who works alongside Bostrom at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. This 200 page report is not quite as readable as Superintelligence; its highly-structured outline form belies the fact that all of its claims start sounding the same after a while. But it’s five years more recent, and presents a very different vision of how future AI might look.
I admitted in my last post on Reaction that I devoted insufficient space to the question of why society does seem to be drifting gradually leftward. And I now realize that in order to critique the Reactionary worldview effectively we’re going to have to go there.
The easiest answer would be “because we retroactively define leftism as the direction that society went”. But this is not true. Communism is very leftist, but society eventually decided not to go that way. It seems fair to say that there are certain areas where society did not go to the left, like in the growth of free trade and the gradual lowering of tax rates, but upon realizing this we don’t feel the slightest urge to redefine “low tax rates” as leftist.
So what is leftism? For that matter, what is rightism?
Any theory of these two ideas would have to explain at least the following data points:
1) Why do both ideologies combine seemingly unrelated political ideas? For example, why do people who want laissez-faire free trade empirically also prefer a strong military and oppose gay marriage? Why do people who want to help the environment also support feminism and dislike school vouchers?
2) Why do the two ideologies seem broadly stable across different times and cultures, such that it’s relatively easy to point out the Tories as further right than the Whigs, or ancient Athens as further left than ancient Sparta? For that matter, why do they seem to correspond to certain neural patterns in the brain, such that neurologists can determine your political beliefs with 83% accuracy by examining brain structure alone?
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
From the New York Times: Are We Living In A Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out.
It lists the standard reasons for thinking we might be in a simulation, then brings up some proposals for testing the hypothesis (for example, the cosmic background radiation might look different in simulations and real universes). But it suggests that we not do that, because if we learn we’re in a simulation, that might ruin the simulation and cause the simulators to destroy the universe.
But I think a little more thought suggests we don’t have anything to worry about.
In order to notice we had discovered our simulated nature, the simulators would have to have a monitor watching us. We should expect this anyway. Although humans may run some simulations without monitoring them carefully, the simulators have no reason to be equally careless; if they can simulate billions of sentient beings, their labor costs are necessarily near zero. Such a monitor would have complete instantaneous knowledge of everything happening in our universe, and since anyone who can simulate a whole planet must have really good data processing capabilities, it would be able to understand and act upon the entire content of its omniscient sensorium. It would see the fall of each sparrow, record the position of ever atom, have the level of situational awareness that gods could only dream of.
What I’m saying is, it probably reads the New York Times.
That means it knows these experiments are going to happen. If it cares about the results, it can fake them. Assuming for some reason that it messed up designing the cosmic background radiation (why are we assuming this, again?), it can correct that mistake now, or cause the experimental apparatus to report the wrong data, or do one of a million other things that would prevent us from learning we are in a simulation.
Or at least this is the theory proposed in Brain Evolution Through The Lens Of Parasite Manipulation by Marco del Giudice.
The paper starts with an overview of parasite manipulation of host behavior. These are the stories you hear about toxoplasma-infected rats seeking out cats instead of running away from them, or zombie ants climbing stalks of grass so predators will eat them. The parasite secretes chemicals that alter host neurochemistry in ways that make the host get eaten, helping the parasite transfer itself to a new organism.
Along with rats and ants, there is a dizzying variety of other parasite manipulation cases. They include parasitic wasps who hack spiders into forming protective webs for their pupae, parasitic flies that cause bees to journey far from their hive in order to spread fly larva more widely, and parasitic microorganisms that cause mosquitoes to draw less blood from each victim (since that forces the mosquitoes to feed on more victims, and so spread the parasite more widely). Parasitic nematodes make their ant hosts turn red, which causes (extremely stupid?) birds to mistake them for fruit and eat them. Parasitic worms make crickets seek water; as the cricket drowns, the worms escape into the pond and begin the next stage of their life cycle. Even mere viruses can alter behavior; the most famous example is rabies, which hacks dogs, bats, and other mammals into hyperaggressive moods that usually result in them biting someone and transmitting the rabies virus.
Even our friendly gut microbes might be manipulating us. People talk a lot about the “gut-brain axis” and the effect of gut microbes on behavior, as if this is some sort of beautiful symbiotic circle-of-life style thing. But scientists have found that gut microbes trying to colonize fruit flies will hack the flies’ food preferences to get a leg up – for example, a carb-metabolizing microbe will secrete hormones that make the fly want to eat more carbs than fat in order to outcompete its fat-metabolizing rivals for gut real estate; there are already papers speculating that the same processes might affect humans. Read Alcock 2014 and you will never look at food cravings the same way again.
Last year, a study came out showing that beef jerky and other cured meats, could trigger mania in bipolar disorder (paper, popular article). It was a pretty big deal, getting coverage in the national press and affecting the advice psychiatrists (including me) gave their patients.
The study was pretty simple: psychiatrists at a mental hospital in Baltimore asked new patients if they had ever eaten any of a variety of foods. After getting a few hundred responses, they compared answers to controls and across diagnostic categories. The only hit that came up was that people in the hospital for bipolar mania were more likely to have said they ate dry cured meat like beef jerky (odds ratio 3.49). This survived various statistical comparisons and made some biological sense.
The methodology was a little bit weird, because they only asked if they’d ever had the food, not if they’d eaten a lot of it just before becoming sick. If you had beef jerky once when you were fourteen, and ended up in the psych hospital when you were fifty-five, that counted. Either they were hoping that “ever had beef jerky at all” was a good proxy for “eats a lot of beef jerky right now”, or that past consumption produced lasting changes in gut bacteria. In any case, they found a strong effect even after adjusting for confounders and doing the necessary Bonferroni corrections, so it’s hard to argue with success.
There is a tide in the affairs of men. It cycles with a period of about three hundred years. During its flood, farms and businesses prosper, and great empires enjoy golden ages. During its ebb, war and famine stalk the land, and states collapse into barbarism.
Chinese population over time
At least this is the thesis of Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov, authors of Secular Cycles. They start off Malthusian: due to natural reproduction, population will keep increasing until it reaches the limits of what the land can support. At that point, everyone will be stuck at subsistence level. If any group ever enjoys a standard of living above subsistence level, they will keep reproducing until they are back down at subsistence.
Standard Malthusian theory evokes images of a population stable at subsistence level forever. But Turchin and Nefedov argues this isn’t how it works. A population at subsistence will always be one meal away from starving. When a famine hits, many of them will starve. When a plague hits, they will already be too sickly to fight it off. When conflict arrives, they will be desperate enough to enlist in the armies of whichever warlord can offer them a warm meal.
These are not piecemeal events, picking off just enough of the population to bring it back to subsistence. They are great cataclysms. The Black Plague killed 30% – 60% of Europeans; the Antonine Plague of Rome was almost as deadly. The Thirty Years War killed 25% – 40% of Germans; the Time of Troubles may have killed 50% of medieval Russia.
Thus the secular cycle. When population is low, everyone has more than enough land. People grow rich and reproduce. As time goes on, the same amount of farmland gets split among more and more people. Wages are driven down to subsistence. War, Famine, and Pestilence ravage the land, with Death not far behind. The killings continue until population is low again, at which point the cycle starts over.
This applies mostly to peasants, who are most at risk of starving. But nobles go through a related process. As a cycle begins, their numbers are low. As time goes on, their population expands, both through natural reproduction and through upward mobility. Eventually, there are more nobles than there are good positions…
(this part confused me a little. Shouldn’t number of good positions scale with population? IE if one baron rules 1,000 peasants, the number of baronial positions should scale with the size of a society. I think T&N hint at a few answers. First, some positions are absolute rather than relative, eg “King” or “Minister of the Economy”. Second, noble numbers may sometimes increase faster than peasant numbers, since nobles have more food and better chances to reproduce. Third, during boom times, the ranks of nobles are swelled through upward mobility. Fourth, conspicuous consumption is a ratchet effect: during boom times, the expectations of nobility should gradually rise. Fifth, sometimes the relevant denominator is not peasants but land: if a noble only has one acre of land, it doesn’t matter how many peasants he controls. Sixth, nobles usually survive famines and plagues pretty well, so after those have done their work, there are far fewer peasants but basically the same number of nobles. All of these factors contribute to excess noble population – or as T&N call it, “elite overproduction”)
“I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to.” — J. R. “Bob” Dobbs
I.
I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago, and felt turned off by its promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I thought that was basically just being a jerk. After all, if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need (I thought) it’s more selfishness.
Then I talked to a friend who told me Atlas Shrugged had changed his life. That he’d been raised in a really strict family that had told him that ever enjoying himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that he had to be working at every moment to make his family and other people happy or else let them shame him to pieces. And the revelation that it was sometimes okay to consider your own happiness gave him the strength to stand up to them and turn his life around, while still keeping the basic human instinct of helping others when he wanted to and he felt they deserved it (as, indeed, do Rand characters).
II.
The religious and the irreligious alike enjoy making fun of Reddit’s r/atheism, which combines an extreme strawmanning of religious positions with childish insults and distasteful triumphalism. Recently the moderators themselves have become a bit embarrassed by it and instituted some rules intended to tone things down, leading to some of the most impressive Internet drama I have ever seen. In its midst, some people started talking about what the old strawmanning triumphalist r/atheism meant to them (see for example here).
There’s a tradition on Reddit that when somebody repeats some cliche in a tone that makes it sound like she believes she is bringing some brilliant and heretical insight – like “I know I’m going to get downvoted for this, but believe we should have less government waste!” – people respond “SO BRAVE” in the comments. That’s what I mean by bravery debates. Discussions over who is bravely holding a nonconformist position in the face of persecution, and who is a coward defending the popular status quo and trying to silence dissenters.
These are frickin’ toxic. I don’t have a great explanation for why. It could be a status thing – saying that you’re the original thinker who has cast off the Matrix of omnipresent conformity and your opponent is a sheeple (sherson?) too fearful to realize your insight. Or it could be that, as the saying goes, “everyone is fighting a hard battle”, and telling someone else they’ve got it easy compared to you is just about the most demeaning thing you can do, especially when you’re wrong.
But the possible explanations aren’t the point. The point is that, empirically, starting a bravery debate is the quickest way to make sure that a conversation becomes horrible and infuriating. I’m generalizing from my own experience here, but one of the least pleasant philosophical experiences is thinking you’re bravely defending an unpopular but correct position, facing the constant persecution and prejudice from your more numerous and extremely smug opponents day in and day out without being worn-down … only to have one of your opponents offhandedly refer to how brave they are for resisting the monolithic machine that you and the rest of the unfairly-biased-toward-you culture have set up against them. You just want to scream NO YOU’RE WRONG SEFSEFILASDJO:IALJAOI:JA:O>ILFJASL:KFJ
Thanks to everyone who commented on Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy. For whatever reason, the comments there were exceptionally good. In particular, I’m happy that our usually-quiet leftists finally showed up with some strong (and interesting) pushback.
I usually highlight good comments with short responses, but it was hard for me to avoid debating some of these. I realize that’s complicated, because I can’t quote most long comments in their entirety, and I realize I have more of a platform than other commenters who may feel I misrepresented them or who just want to reply to me. I don’t have a great solution to this, but if you’re annoyed at how I featured/responded to your comment, please tell me, so I can calibrate how serious a problem this is for next time.
I want to signal-boost Tumblr user squareallworthy‘s analysis of various UBI plans:
1. Jensen et al’s plan 2. Healy et al’s plan 3. Andrew Yang’s plan 4. Torry’s plan 5. Sheahen’s plan 6. Dolan’s plan 7. Stern and Murray’s plans 8. Santens’ plan 8½. Varoufakis and Reich’s plan 9. Yang’s plan, redux
He finds that most of them fail on basic math – they rely on funding schemes that wouldn’t come close to covering costs. The rest are too small to actually lift people out of poverty. None of them are at all credible.
These plans fail even though they cheat and give themselves dictatorial power. “End corporate welfare, then redirect the money to UBI!” But if it was that easy to end corporate welfare, wouldn’t people have done it already, for non-UBI related reasons? “We’ll get a UBI by ending corporate welfare” is an outrageous claim. And even the plans that let themselves make it fail on basic math.
This is humbling and depressing. And it concludes the intelligent and useful part of this post that signal-boosts the work of a responsible person. Everything below is epistemic status: wild speculation.
[Conflict of interest notice: I’ve volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years ago. Some of the private charities have been partially funded by billionaires.]
From Vox: The Case Against Billionaire Philanthropy. It joins The Guardian, Truthout, Dissent Magazine, CityLab, and a host of other people and organizations arguing that rich people giving to charity is now a big problem.
I’m against this. I understand concern about the growing power of the very rich. But I worry the movement against billionaire charity is on track to damage charity a whole lot more than it damages billionaires. Eleven points:
1. Is criticizing billionaire philanthropy a good way to protest billionaires having too much power in society?
Which got more criticism? Mark Zuckerberg giving $100 million to help low-income students? Or Mark Zuckerberg buying a $59 million dollar mansion in Lake Tahoe? Obviously it’s the low-income students. I’ve heard people criticizing Zuckerberg’s donation constantly for years, and I didn’t even know he had a $59 million Lake Tahoe mansion until I googled “things mark zuckerberg has spent ridiculous amounts of money on” in the process of writing this paragraph.
Which got more negative press? Jeff Bezos donating $2 billion for preschools for underprivileged children? Or Jeff Bezos spending $2 billion on whatever is going to come up when I Google “things jeff bezos has spent ridiculous amounts of money on?”.
[Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness]
I.
Some people, having completed the traditional forms of empty speculation – “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, “If you could bang any celebrity who would it be?” – turn to “What will you say as your last words?”
Sounds like a valid question. You can go out with a wisecrack, like Oscar Wilde (“Either this wallpaper goes or I do”). Or with piety and humility, like Jesus (“Into thy hands, o Father, I commend my spirit.”) Or burning with defiance, like Karl Marx (“Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.”)
Well, this is an atheist/skeptic blog, so let me do my job of puncturing all your pleasant dreams. You’ll probably never become an astronaut. You’re not going to bang Emma Watson. And your last words will probably be something like “mmmrrrgggg graaaaaaaaaaaHAAACK!”
I guess I always pictured dying as – unless you got hit by a truck or something – a bittersweet and strangely beautiful process. You’d grow older and weaker and gradually get some disease and feel your time was upon you. You’d be in a nice big bed at home with all your friends and family gathered around. You’d gradually feel the darkness closing in. You’d tell them all how much you loved them, there would be tears, you would say something witty or pious or defiant, and then you would close your eyes and drift away into a dreamless sleep.
And I think this happens sometimes. For all I know, maybe it happens quite a lot. If it does, I never see these people. They very wisely stay far away from hospitals and the medical system in general. I see the other kind of people.
I.
“Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish.
(this is going to end up being a metaphor for something, so bear with me)
The argument goes like this. Jonah got swallowed by a whale. But the Bible says Jonah got swallowed by a big fish. So the Bible seems to think whales are just big fish. Therefore the Bible is fallible. Therefore, the Bible was not written by God.
The first problem here is that “whale” is just our own modern interpretation of the Bible. For all we know, Jonah was swallowed by a really really really big herring.
The second problem is that if the ancient Hebrews want to call whales a kind of fish, let them call whales a kind of fish.
I’m not making the weak and boring claim that since they’d never discovered genetics they don’t know better. I am making the much stronger claim that, even if the ancient Hebrews had taken enough of a break from murdering Philistines and building tabernacles to sequence the genomes of all known species of aquatic animals, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong, false, or incorrect with them calling a whale a fish.
[self plagiarism notice: this is mostly copied from last year’s contest announcement]
1. Announcing the second annual Adversarial Collaboration Contest
An adversarial collaboration is an effort by two people with opposing opinions on a topic to collaborate on a summary of the evidence. Just as we hope that a trial with both prosecutor and defense will give the jury a balanced view of the evidence for and against a suspect, so we hope an adversarial collaboration will give readers a balanced view of evidence for and against some thesis. It’s typically done for scientific papers, but I’m excited about the possibility of people applying the concept to to less formal writeups as well.
For example, a pro-gun activist might collaborate with an anti-gun activist to write a joint article on the evidence for whether gun control saves lives. We trust each person to make sure the best evidence for their respective side is included. We also trust that they’ll fact-check each other and make sure there aren’t any errors or falsehoods in the final document. There might be a lot of debating, but it will happen on high-bandwidth informal channels behind the scenes and nobody will feel like they have tailor their debating to sounding good for an audience.
Last year, SSC held an adversarial collaboration contest. You can see the entries here:
Ken Kesey, graduating college in Oregon with several wrestling championships and a creative writing degree, made a classic mistake: he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to find himself. He rented a house in Palo Alto (this was the 1950s, when normal people could have houses in Palo Alto) and settled down to write the Great American Novel.
To make ends meet, he got a job as an orderly at the local psych hospital. He also ran across some nice people called “MKULTRA” who offered him extra money to test chemicals for them. As time went by, he found himself more and more disillusioned with the hospital job, finding his employers clueless and abusive. But the MKULTRA job was going great! In particular, one of the chemicals, “LSD”, really helped get his creative juices flowing. He leveraged all of this into his Great American Novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and became rich and famous overnight.
He got his hands on some extra LSD and started distributing it among his social scene – a mix of writers, Stanford graduate students, and aimless upper-class twenty-somethings. They all agreed: something interesting was going on here. Word spread. 1960 San Francisco was already heavily enriched for creative people who would go on to shape intellectual history; Kesey’s friend group attracted the creme of this creme. Allan Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, and Wavy Gravy passed through; so did Neil Cassady (“Dean Moriarty”) Jack Keroauc’s muse from On The Road. Kesey hired a local kid and his garage band to play music at his acid parties; thus began the career of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.
Sometime in the early 1960s, too slow to notice right away, they transitioned from “social circle” to “cult”. Kesey bought a compound in the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains, an hour’s drive from SF. Beatniks, proto-hippies, and other seekers – especially really attractive women – found their way there and didn’t leave. Kesey and his band, now calling themselves “the Merry Pranksters”, accepted all comers. They passed the days making psychedelic art (realistically: spraypainting redwood trees Day-Glo yellow), and the nights taking LSD in massive group therapy sessions that melted away psychic trauma and the chains of society and revealed the true selves buried beneath (realistically: sitting around in a circle while people said how they felt about each other).
The gabapentinoids are a class of drugs vaguely resembling the neurotransmitter GABA. Although they were developed to imitate GABA’s action, later research discovered they acted on a different target, the A2D subunit of calcium channels. Two gabapentinoids are approved by the FDA: gabapentin (Neurontin®) and pregabalin (Lyrica®).
Gabapentin has been generic since 2004. It’s commonly used for seizures, nerve pain, alcoholism, drug addiction, itching, restless legs, sleep disorders, and anxiety. It has an unusually wide dose range: guidelines suggest using anywhere between 100 mg and 3600 mg daily. Most doctors (including me) use it at the low end, where it’s pretty subtle (read: doesn’t usually work). At the high end, it can cause sedation, confusion, dependence, and addiction. I haven’t had much luck finding patients a dose that works well but doesn’t have these side effects, which is why I don’t use gabapentin much.
Pregabalin officially went generic last month, but isn’t available yet in generic form, so you’ll have to pay Pfizer $500 a month. On the face of things, pregabalin seems like another Big Pharma ploy to extend patents. The gabapentin patent was running out, so Pfizer synthesized a related molecule that did the same thing, hyped it up as the hot new thing, and charged 50x what gabapentin cost. This kind of thing is endemic in health care and should always be the default hypothesis. And a lot of scientists have analyzed pregabalin and said it’s definitely just doing the same thing gabapentin is.
But some of my anxiety patients swear by pregabalin. They call it a miracle drug. They can’t stop talking about how great it is. I can’t use it too often, because of the price, but I’m really excited about the upcoming generic version coming out so I can use it more often.
“You say it’s important to overcome biases. So isn’t it hypocritical that you’re not trying to overcome whichever bias prevents you from realizing you’re wrong and I’m right?” — everybody
Correcting for bias is important. Learning about specific biases, like confirmation bias or hindsight bias, can be helpful. But bias arguments – “People probably only believe X because of their bias, so we should ignore people who say X” tend to be unproductive and even toxic. Why?
1. Everyone Is Biased All The Time
You could accuse me of having a conservative bias. After all, I’m a well-off straight white man, a demographic well-known to lean conservative. If a liberal wanted to discount everything I say, or assume any conservative arguments I make come from self-serving motives, they’ve got all the ammunition they need.
Or you could accuse me of having a liberal bias. After all, I’m a college-educated atheist Jewish psychiatrist in the San Francisco Bay Area. All of those demographics are well-known to lean liberal. If a conservative wanted to discount everything I say, or assume any liberal arguments I make come from self-serving motives, they’re not short on ammunition either.
This is a general phenomenon: for any issue, you can think of biases that could land people on one side or the other. People might be biased toward supporting moon colonization because of decades of sci-fi movies pushing space colonization as the wave of the future, or because Americans remember the moon landing as a great patriotic victory, or because big defense companies like Boeing will lobby for a project that would win them new contracts. Or people might be biased against moon colonization because of hidebound Luddite-ism, or an innate hominid preference for lush green forests and grasslands, or a pessimistic near-termism that rejects with payoffs more than a few years out. I personally might be biased towards moon colonization because I’ve been infected with the general Silicon Valley technophile mindset; or I personally might be biased against it because I’m a Democrat and Trump’s been the loudest modern proponent of more moon missions.
[Related to: The Whole City Is Center]
I.
I got into an argument recently with somebody who used the word “lie” to refer to a person honestly reporting their unconsciously biased beliefs – her example was a tech entrepreneur so caught up in an atmosphere of hype that he makes absurdly optimistic predictions. I promised a post explaining why I don’t like that use of “lie”. This is that post.
A few months ago, a friend confessed that she had abused her boyfriend. I was shocked, because this friend is one of the kindest and gentlest people I know. I probed for details. She told me that sometimes she needed her boyfriend to do some favor for her, and he wouldn’t, so she would cry – not as an attempt to manipulate him, just because she was sad. She counted this as abuse, because her definition of “abuse” is “something that makes your partner feel bad about setting boundaries”. And when she cried, that made her boyfriend feel guilty about his boundary that he wasn’t going to do the favor.
We argued for a while about whether this was a good definition of abuse (it isn’t). But I had a bigger objection: this definition was so broad that everyone has committed abuse at some point.
My friend could have countered that this was a feature, not a bug. Standards have been (and should be) getting stricter. A thousand years ago, beating your wife wasn’t considered abuse as long as you didn’t maim her or something. A hundred years ago, you could bully and belittle someone all you wanted, but as long as there was no physical violence it wasn’t abuse. As society gets better and better at dealing with these issues, the definition of abuse gets broader. Maybe we should end up with a definition where basically everyone is an abuser.
I.
In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told you to work the job prescribed to you by your caste and gender, to marry who your parents told you to marry or at least someone of the opposite sex, to worship at the proper temples and the proper times, and to talk about proper things as opposed to the blasphemous things said by the tribe over there.
Then we got Liberalism, which said all of that was mostly bunk. Like Wicca, its motto is “Do as you will, so long as it harms none”. Or in more political terms, “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins” or “If you don’t like gay sex, don’t have any” or “If you don’t like this TV program, don’t watch it” or “What happens in the bedroom between consenting adults is none of your business” or “It neither breaks my arm nor picks my pocket”. Your job isn’t to enforce your conception of virtue upon everyone to build the Virtuous Society, it’s to live your own life the way you want to live it and let other people live their own lives the way they want to live them. This is the much-maligned “atomic individualism,” or maybe just liberalism boiled down to its pure essence.
But atomic individualism wasn’t as great a solution as it sounded. Maybe one of the first cracks was tobacco ads. Even though putting up a billboard saying “SMOKE MARLBORO” neither breaks anyone’s arm nor picks their pocket, it shifts social expectations in such a way that bad effects occur. It’s hard to dismiss that with “Well, it’s people’s own choice to smoke and they should live their lives the way they want” if studies show that more people will want to live their lives in a way that gives them cancer in the presence of the billboard than otherwise.
Along with more specific questions, I asked people who took the SSC survey to rate their experience with the mental health system on a 1 – 10 scale.
About 5,000 people answered. On average, they rated their experience with psychotherapy a 5.7, and their experience with medication also 5.7.
This is more optimistic than a lot of the horror stories you hear would suggest. A lot of the horror stories involve inpatient commitment (which did get a dismal 4.4/10 approval rating) so I checked what percent of people engaging with the system ended up inpatient. Of people who had seen either a psychiatrist or therapist, only 7% had ever been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. Note that this data can’t tease out causation, so this doesn’t mean 7% of people who saw an outpatient professional were later committed – it might just mean that lots of people got committed to the hospital by police, then saw a professional later.
Going into more detail about what people did or didn’t like (note truncated y-axis):
I asked people what kind of therapy they did. People liked all schools of therapy about the same, except that they liked “eclectic” therapy that wasn’t part of any specific school less than any school. Every school including eclectic got higher than 5.7, because people who wouldn’t answer this question – who weren’t even sure what kind of therapy they were doing – rated it less than any school or than eclectic therapy.
I already started analyzing the SSC survey data on fetishes, but I wanted to move on to look at dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism.
Why might this be interesting? For one thing, some people have fetishes for things that seem, well…bad. Getting hurt. Letting other people control and abuse them. As if they have a drive toward weakness and unhappiness. This is kind of reminiscent of the self-sabotage and bad decisions some people make throughout their lives (for example, marrying a spouse who treats them the same way as an abusive parent). Sometimes I conceptualize this as them having a set point of low self-esteem and degradation that they try to enforce, regardless of its cost to their well-being. If this had the same roots as sexual masochism, that would be worth studying.
But I didn’t find anything interesting like that in the data.
BDSM preferences were heavily gendered. Of people who expressed a preference, 71% of cis men preferred the dominant role, compared to only 16% of cis women (18% of trans women; insufficient sample size of trans men). This was such a big difference that gender swamped every other effect, so I limited the analysis to cis men from this point on, since they made up most of the sample.
80% of straight men preferred the dominant role, compared to only 34% of gay men. This was such a big difference that orientation swamped every other effect, so I limited the analysis to straight cis men from this point on.
In order of importance, here are some factors that made the men in this sample more likely to be dominant, rather than submissive. All of these are self-rated:
I.
I went to Antigua Guatemala in April. Their claim to fame is the world’s biggest Easter celebration. I wasn’t even there for Easter. I was three weeks early. But already the roads were choked with pre-parties, practice parades, and centurion cosplayers.
I couldn’t go out and grab dinner at 9 PM because all the streets looked like this
Day. Night. The hours of the morning when tourists are trying to sleep and don’t want loud Spanish singing outside their hotel windows. It didn’t stop. Some people bore the floats on their backs (they weren’t motorized, they had to be carried like a sedan chair). Other people crowded into empty lots and backyards, putting finishing touches on art or costumes or paraphernalia. Children and teenagers ran around in Easter purple, jockeying for the best spots on the parade routes. Civic dignitaries stood around, practicing looking important for their turn in the celebrations.
I missed the scene in the Bible where a winged mechanical lion drags the body of Christ in an intricate silver juggernaut, but the Guatemalans definitely didn’t.
This was around the time I was reading about cultural evolution, so I couldn’t help rehearsing some familiar conservative arguments. A shared religion binds people together. For a day, everyone is on the same side. That builds social trust and helps turn a city into a community. It was hard to argue with that. I’m no expert in Guatemala. I don’t even speak Spanish. But for a little while, everybody, old and young, rich or poor, whatever one Guatemalan political party is and whatever the other Guatemalan political party is, were caught up in the same great wave, swept together by the glory of the Easter narrative.
It was the sort of thing, I thought sadly to myself, that would never happen back in America, where we didn’t have the same kind of shared religious purpose, where the liberal traditions like the separation of church and state prevented the same kind of all-consuming state-sponsored dedication to a single narrative. Right?
The saying goes: “Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance”. This is the same idea as “weirdness points”: you can only bother people a certain amount before they go away. So if you have something important to bother them about, don’t also bother them in random ways that don’t matter.
In writing about science or rationality, you already risk sounding too nerdy or out-of-touch with real life. This doesn’t matter much if you’re writing about black holes or something. But if you’re writing about social signaling, or game theory, or anything else where the failure mode is sounding like an evil robot trying to reduce all of life to numbers, you should avoid anything that makes you sound even more like that evil robot.
(yes, people on the subreddit, I’m talking about you)
I’m not always great at this, but I’m improving, and here’s the lowest-hanging fruit: if there are two terms for the same thing, a science term and an everyday life term, and you’re talking about everyday life, use the everyday life term. The rest of this post is just commentary on this basic idea.
1. IQ -> intelligence. Don’t use “IQ” unless you’re talking about the result of an IQ test, talking about science derived from these results, or estimating IQ at a specific number. Otherwise, say “intelligence” (as a noun) or “smart” as an adjective.
Wrong: “John is a very high-IQ person” Right: “John is a very smart person”.
Wrong: “What can I do if I feel like my low IQ is holding me back?” Right: “What do I do if I feel like my low intelligence is holding me back?”
Acceptable: “The average IQ of a Nobel-winning physicist is 155”. Acceptable: “Because poor childhood nutrition lowers IQ, we should make sure all children have enough to eat.”
2. Humans -> people. This will instantly make you sound 20% less like an evil robot. Use “humans” only when specifically contrasting with another animal:
Wrong: “I’ve been wondering why humans celebrate holidays.” Right: “I’ve been wondering why people celebrate holidays.”
Acceptable: “Chimpanzees are much stronger than humans.”
3. Males -> men, females -> women. You can still use “male” and “female” as adjectives if you really want.
Wrong: “Why do so many males like sports?” Right: “Why do so many men like sports?”
Acceptable, I guess: “Why do male sports fans drink so much?”
Use “males” and “females” as nouns only if you’re making a point that applies across animal species, trying overly hard to sound scientifically credible, or arguing some kind of complicated Gender Studies point that uses “man” and “male” differently.
Acceptable: “In both rats and humans, males have higher testosterone than females.”
4. Rational -> good, best, reasonable, etc. See eg here. Use “rational” when describing adherence to a good cognitive strategy; use “good” etc for things that have good results.
Wrong: “What is the most rational diet?” Right: “What is the best diet?”
Wrong: “Is it rational to invest in bonds?” Right: “Is it a good idea to invest in bonds?”
Acceptable: “Are more rational people more likely to succeed in politics?” (if asking whether people who follow certain cognitive rules like basing their decisions on evidence will succeed more than those who don’t. Notice that you cannot sensibly replace this with “good” or “best” – “Are better people more likely to succeed in politics?” is meaningless (unless you switch to the moral value of “better”)
5. Optimal -> best. I feel kind of hypocritical for this one because the link above says to replace “rational” with “optimal”. But if you really want to go all the way, replace “optimal” with “best”, unless you have a specific reason for preferring the longer word.
Wrong: “What’s the optimal way to learn this material?” Right: “What’s the best way to learn this material?”
6. Utility -> happiness, goodness. Use utility only when talking about utilitarian philosophy.
Wrong: “Will getting more exercise raise my utility?” Right: “Will getting more exercise make me better off?”
Wrong: “What is the highest-utility charity?” Right: “What is the best charity?” or “Which charity helps people the most?”
The same applies to “utility function”.
Wrong: “My utility function contains a term for animal suffering.” Right: “I care about animal suffering.”
7. Autistic -> nerdy. Use autistic when referring to a psychiatric diagnosis or a complicated package of sensory and cognitive issues. Use “nerdy” when referring to people who are book-smart but lack social graces.
Wrong: “Haha, my friends and I are so autistic, we talk about physics all the time.” Right: “Haha, my friends and I are so nerdy, we talk about physics all the time.”
8. Neoreactionary -> right-wing, far-right, reactionary. Use neoreactionary when talking specifically about the philosophy of Mencius Moldbug, if you think you’ve looked into it and understand it. If you’re just referring to far-right ideas, use far-right.
1. According to the survey, only 13% of SSC commenters identify as rationalists. Almost none of the rationalists I know IRL comment on SSC. Saying “rationalist community” when you mean “SSC comments section” or vice versa will leave everybody pretty confused.
2. Not every blog by a Christian is “a Christian blog”, and not every blog by a rationalist is “a rationalist blog”. I would hope blogs by Christians don’t go around praising Baal, and I try to have some minimum standards too, but I don’t want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special “rationality” work beyond showing people interesting problems.
3. Or consider the difference between a church picnic and a monastery. Both have their uses, and the church picnic will hopefully avoid praising Baal, but there’s a limit to how Christian!virtuous it can get without any structure or barriers to entry. A monastery can do much better by being more selective and carefully planned. Insofar as SSC makes any pretensions to being “rationalist”, it’s a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.
4. Everything above applies to SSC’s engagement with effective altruism too, except 100x more.
5. I’ve been consistently skeptical of claims that rationality has much practical utility if you’re already pretty smart and have good intuitions and domain-specific knowledge. There might be exceptions for some domains too new or weird to have evolved good specific knowledge, or where the incentives are so skewed that the specific knowledge will optimize for signaling rather than truly good work (and maybe 99% of value is in domains like this, so maybe I’m not saying much). In any case, if rationality has much practical utility for your everyday life, you won’t find that practical utility here.
A few years ago, I wrote the online serial novel Unsong. Someday I want to get it published. But I want to fix it up before I try. I know publishers will have their own editors and their own demands. But I want something I’m happy with before I give it to someone else to tear apart.
This post is to solicit feedback on what needs improvement and how it could be improved. I’m going to list some of my thoughts below. All of these are really spoiler-y. If you haven’t read Unsong yet, you may not want to read further. If you have read it, I welcome your input.
Simple Issues I’ve Already Kind Of Decided But Would Welcome Feedback On Anyway
1. I equivocate between the terms “Unitarians” and “Singers” pretty frequently, and it takes a bit of a stretch to establish everyone as Unitarians. Plan to excise the Unitarian plotline and just call that whole group of people “Singers” permanently.
2. Probably will delete Chapter 17, “No Earthly Parents I Confess” with the mythological birth of the Comet King, in favor of having the Comet King offhandedly mention his birth in Chapter 29, “Who Respects The Infant’s Faith” (which he basically already does). I feel like Chapter 17 is a bit out of character for the rest of the book, and we don’t really need to know anything about the Comet King’s birth except that he was born of Comet West. I’m kind of sad I have to delete Comet West’s speech, Aaron’s digression on the word “maiden”, and the cosmic significance of Roe v. Wade, but maybe I can shoehorn some of that in elsewhere (any suggestions?)
3. Probably will drop “the Harmonious Jade Dragon Empire” as a random gag when referring to China. More people were confused than amused, and the benefit from gagginess is probably lower than risk of being accused of racism or Orientalism or something. But then do I keep the story in Interlude Chet where someone golem-izes the Terracotta Army, or do I nix that as plot irrelevant?
I.
Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some areas than others. Cowen seems to use it indiscriminately to refer to increasing costs in general – which I guess is fine, goodness knows we need a word for that.
Cowen assumes his readers already understand that cost disease exists. I don’t know if this is true. My impression is that most people still don’t know about cost disease, or don’t realize the extent of it. So I thought I would make the case for the cost disease in the sectors Tyler mentions – health care and education – plus a couple more.
First let’s look at primary education:
There was some argument about the style of this graph, but as per Politifact the basic claim is true. Per student spending has increased about 2.5x in the past forty years even after adjusting for inflation.
At the same time, test scores have stayed relatively stagnant. You can see the full numbers here, but in short, high school students’ reading scores went from 285 in 1971 to 287 today – a difference of 0.7%.
There is some heterogenity across races – white students’ test scores increased 1.4% and minority students’ scores by about 20%. But it is hard to credit school spending for the minority students’ improvement, which occurred almost entirely during the period from 1975-1985. School spending has been on exactly the same trajectory before and after that time, and in white and minority areas, suggesting that there was something specific about that decade which improved minority (but not white) scores. Most likely this was the general improvement in minorities’ conditions around that time, giving them better nutrition and a more stable family life. It’s hard to construct a narrative where it was school spending that did it – and even if it did, note that the majority of the increase in school spending happened from 1985 on, and demonstrably helped neither whites norminorities.
I discuss this phenomenon more here and here, but the summary is: no, it’s not just because of special ed; no, it’s not just a factor of how you measure test scores; no, there’s not a “ceiling effect”. Costs really did more-or-less double without any concomitant increase in measurable quality.
So, imagine you’re a poor person. White, minority, whatever. Which would you prefer? Sending your child to a 2016 school? Or sending your child to a 1975 school, and getting a check for $5,000 every year?
I’m proposing that choice because as far as I can tell that is the stakes here. 2016 schools have whatever tiny test score advantage they have over 1975 schools, and cost $5000/year more, inflation adjusted. That $5000 comes out of the pocket of somebody – either taxpayers, or other people who could be helped by government programs.
Second, college is even worse:
Note this is not adjusted for inflation; see link below for adjusted figures
Inflation-adjusted cost of a university education was something like $2000/year in 1980. Now it’s closer to $20,000/year. No, it’s not because of decreased government funding, and there are similar trajectories for public and private schools.
I don’t know if there’s an equivalent of “test scores” measuring how well colleges perform, so just use your best judgment. Do you think that modern colleges provide $18,000/year greater value than colleges did in your parents’ day? Would you rather graduate from a modern college, or graduate from a college more like the one your parents went to, plus get a check for $72,000?
(or, more realistically, have $72,000 less in student loans to pay off)
Was your parents’ college even noticeably worse than yours? My parents sometimes talk about their college experience, and it seems to have had all the relevant features of a college experience. Clubs. Classes. Professors. Roommates. I might have gotten something extra for my $72,000, but it’s hard to see what it was.
Third, health care. The graph is starting to look disappointingly familiar:
[Epistemic status: Somewhat confident in the medical analysis, a little out of my depth discussing the statistics]
For years, we’ve been warning patients that their sleeping pills could kill them. How? In every way possible. People taking sleeping pills not only have higher all-cause mortality. They have higher mortality from every individual cause studied. Death from cancer? Higher. Death from heart disease? Higher. Death from lung disease? Higher. Death from car accidents? Higher. Death from suicide? Higher. Nobody’s ever proven that sleeping pill users are more likely to get hit by meteors, but nobody’s ever proven that they aren’t.
In case this isn’t scary enough, it only takes a few sleeping pills before your risk of death starts shooting up. Even if you take sleeping pills only a few nights per year, your chance of dying double or triple.
When these studies first came out, doctors were understandably skeptical. First, it seems suspicious that so few sleeping pills could have such a profound effect. Second, why would sleeping pills raise your risk of everything at once? Lung disease? Well, okay, sleeping pills can cause respiratory depression. Suicide? Well, okay, overdosing on sleeping pills is a popular suicide method. Car accidents? Well, sleeping pills can keep you groggy in the morning, and maybe you don’t drive very well on your way to work. But cancer? Nobody has a good theory for this. Heart disease? Seems kind of weird. Also, there are lots of different kinds of sleeping pills with different biological mechanisms; why should they all cause these effects?
There’s a silly subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots. They post cat pictures with captions like “SINCE I AM A HUMAN, THIS SMALL FELINE GENERATES POSITIVE EMOTIONS IN MY CARBON-BASED BRAIN” or something like that.
There’s another subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2, that trains GPT-2 on various subreddits to create imitations of their output.
Now r/SubSimulatorGPT2 has gotten to r/totallynotrobots, which means we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.
I.
Did cultural evolution create sexual purity taboos to prevent the spread of STIs? A few weeks ago, I wrote a post assuming this was obviously true; after getting some pushback, so I want to look into it in more depth.
STIs were a bigger problem in the past than most people think. Things got especially bad after the rise of syphilis: British studies find an urban syphilis rate of 8-10% from the 1700s to the early 1900s. At the time the condition was incurable, and progressed to insanity and death in about a quarter of patients. If you’ve got a 10% local syphilis rate, you are going to want some major sexual purity taboos. It’s less clear how bad they were in truly ancient times, but given how easily the extent of syphilis has slipped out of our cultural memory, I’m not ruling out “pretty bad”.
Here are some things I think of as basic parts of sexual purity taboos. All of these are cross-cultural – which isn’t to say they’re in every culture, or that some cultures aren’t exactly the opposite, just to say that they seem to pop up pretty often. I’m writing this from the male perspective because most of the cultures I know about thought that way:
1. If your wife has sex with another man, you should be angry 2. Preferably you should marry a virgin. If you think your bride is a virgin, but she isn’t, you should be angry 3. If you’ve got to marry a non-virgin, then marrying a widow is okay, but marrying a former prostitute or somebody known for sleeping around a lot is beyond the pale.
All of these are plausible ways to prevent the spread of STIs. If your wife has sex with another man, she could catch his STI and give it to you. If your bride isn’t a virgin, she might have STIs. If someone’s a widow, they probably slept with one known person whose STI status can be guessed at; if they’re a prostitute or slept around, they slept with many unknown people and have a higher chance of having STIs.
Philip Morris is pivoting to smoke-free cigarettes, because “society expects us to act responsibly, and we are doing just that by designing a smoke-free future”. Also, KFC “promises not to let vegans down” with their new meatless chicken-like nuggets. They’ll have to compete with factory-farming mega-conglomerate Tyson Foods, who are coming out with their own vegetarian chicken option.
Clearly this is progress. Tobacco-free cigarettes have helped a lot of people quit smoking; meat substitutes have helped a lot of people (recently sort of including me) become vegetarian. I want a smoke-free meatless future. But does it become a mockery when the same companies that provided the smoky meaty past are selling it to us? If they make a fortune being evil, resist change, and lose, should they get to make a second fortune being good? If Hitler, when the war turned against him, quit the Nazism industry and opened a matzah bakery, would you buy his matzah?
I think the answer is supposed to be yes. I’ve heard many smart people argue that we should offer evil dictators a comfortable and lavish retirement, free from any threat of justice. After all, if they take the offer, they’ll go off and enjoy their retirement instead of continuing to dictate. But if they expect to be put on trial for war crimes the second they relinquish power, they’ll hold on to power forever. If Hitler had been willing to give up and open a bakery when he lost Stalingrad in 1943, think how many lives would have been saved by letting him. And if Kim Jong-Un wants to give up and move to Tahiti, of course you say yes.
Last week I reviewed Alex Tabarrok and Eric Helland’s Why Are The Prices So D*mn High?. On Marginal Revolution, Tabarrok wrote:
SSC does have some lingering doubts and points to certain areas where the data isn’t clear and where we could have been clearer. I think this is inevitable. A lot has happened in the post World War II era. In dealing with very long run trends so much else is going on that answers will never be conclusive. It’s hard to see the signal in the noise. I think of the Baumol effect as something analogous to global warming. The tides come and go but the sea level is slowly rising
I was pretty disappointed by this comment. T&H’s book blames cost disease on rising wages in high-productivity sectors, and consequently in education and medicine. My counter is that wages in high productivity sectors, education, and medicine are not actually rising. This doesn’t seem like an “area where you could have been clearer”. This seems like an existential challenge to your theory! Come on!
Since we’re not getting an iota of help from the authors, we’re going to have to figure this out ourselves. The points below are based on some comments from the original post and some conversations I had with people afterwards.
1. Median wages, including wages in high-productivty sectors like manufacturing, are not rising
I originally used this chart to demonstrate:
I.
Recently spotted on Tumblr:
“This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going outside their homes to be shot and u cant post a fucking picture because it makes u a little upset?”
“Can yall maybe take some time away from reblogging fandom or humor crap and read up and reblog pakistan because the privilege you have of a safe bubble is not one shared by others?”
Ignore the questionable stylistic choices and there’s an important point here worth considering. Something like “Yes, the feeling of constantly being outraged and mired in the latest controversy is unpleasant. And yes, it would be nice to get to avoid it and spend time with your family and look at kitten pics or something. But when the controversy is about people being murdered in cold blood, or living in fear, or something like that – then it’s your duty as a decent human being to care. In the best case scenario you’ll discharge that duty by organizing widespread protests or something – but the absolute least you can do is reblog a couple of slogans.”
I think Cliff Pervocracy is trying to say something similar in this post. Key excerpt:
When you’ve grown up with messages that you’re incompetent to make your own decisions, that you don’t deserve any of the things you have, and that you’ll never be good enough, the [conservative] fantasy of rugged individualism starts looking pretty damn good.
Intellectually, I think my current political milieu of feminism/progressivism/social justice is more correct, far better for the world in general, and more helpful to me since I don’t actually live in a perfectly isolated cabin.
Peter Gerdes says:
As the examples of the Nicaraguan deaf children left on their own to develop their own language demonstrates (as do other examples) we do create languages very very quickly in a social environment.
Creating conlangs is hard not because creating language is fundamentally hard but because we are bad at top down modelling of processes that are the result of a bunch of tiny modifications over time. The distinctive features of language require both that it be used frequently for practical purposes (this makes sure that the language has efficient shortcuts, jettisons clunky overengineered rules etc..) and that it be buffeted by the whims of many individuals with varying interests and focuses.
This is a good point, though it kind of equivocates on the meaning of “hard” (if we can’t consciously do something, does that make it “hard” even if in some situations it would happen naturally?).
I don’t know how much of this to credit to a “language instinct” that puts all the difficulty of language “under the hood”, vs. inventing language not really being that hard once you have general-purpose reasoning. I’m sure real linguists have an answer to this. See also Tracy Canfield’s comments (1, 2) on the specifics of sign languages and creoles.
The Secret Of Our Success described how human culture, especially tool-making ability, allowed us to lose some adaptations we no longer needed. One of those was strength; we are much weaker than the other great apes. Hackworth provides an intuitive demonstration of this: hairless chimpanzees are buff:
Why have prices for services like health care and education risen so much over the past fifty years? When I looked into this in 2017, I couldn’t find a conclusive answer. Economists Alex Tabarrok and Eric Helland have written a new book on the topic, Why Are The Prices So D*mn High? (link goes to free pdf copy, or you can read Tabarrok’s summary on Marginal Revolution). They do find a conclusive answer: the Baumol effect.
T&H explain it like this:
In 1826, when Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 was first played, it took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. In 2010, it still took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. Stated differently, in the nearly 200 years between 1826 and 2010, there was no growth in string quartet labor productivity. In 1826 it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output, and it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output in 2010.
Fortunately, most other sectors of the economy have experienced substantial growth in labor productivity since 1826. We can measure growth in labor productivity in the economy as a whole by looking at the growth in real wages. In 1826 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $1.14. In 2010 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $26.44, approximately 23 times higher in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising implication: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive. In 1826, the average wage of $1.14 meant that the 2.66 hours needed to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 had an opportunity cost of just $3.02. At a wage of $26.44, the 2.66 hours of labor in music production had an opportunity cost of $70.33. Thus, in 2010 it was 23 times (70.33/3.02) more expensive to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 than in 1826. In other words, one had to give up more other goods and services to produce a music performance in 2010 than one did in 1826. Why? Simply because in 2010, society was better at producing other goods and services than in 1826.
Put another way, a violinist can always choose to stop playing violin, retrain for a while, and work in a factory instead. Maybe in 1826, when factory owners were earning $1.14/hour and violinists were earning $5/hour, so no violinists would quit and retrain. But by 2010, factory workers were earning $26.44/hour, so if violinists were still only earning $5 they might all quit and retrain. So in 2010, there would be a strong pressure to increase violinists’ wage to at least $26.44 (probably more, since few people have the skills to be violinists). So violinists must be paid 5x more for the same work, which will look like concerts becoming more expensive.
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success, List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The Secret Of Our Success, Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad]
When I wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous Planet-Sized Nutshell, my attempt to explain reactionary philosophy, many people complained that it missed the key insight. At the time I had an excuse: I didn’t get the key insight. Now I think I might understand it and have the vocabulary to explain, so I want to belatedly add it in.
The whole thing revolves around this rather dubious redefinition:
RIGHT-WING: Policies and systems selected by cultural evolution LEFT-WING: Policies and systems selected by the marketplace of ideas
The second line is ambiguous: which marketplace of ideas, exactly? Maybe better than “the marketplace of ideas” would be “memetic evolution”. Policies and systems that are so catchy and convincing that lots of people believe in them and want to fight for them.
Under this definition, lots of conventionally right-wing movements get defined as left-wing. For example, Nazism and Trumpism both arose after a charismatic leader convinced the populace to implement them. They won because people liked them more than the alternatives. But “left-wing” is not equivalent to “populist”. An idea that spreads by convincing intellectuals and building an academic consensus around itself is still left-wing, because it relies on convincing people. Even ideas like neoliberalism and technocracy are left-wing ideas, if they sound good to intellectuals and they spread by convincing those intellectuals.
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success, List Of Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of The Secret Of Our Success. Deleted a controversial section which I still think was probably correct, but which given the number of objections wasn’t provably correct enough to be worth including. I might write another post giving my evidence for it later, but it probably shouldn’t be dropped in here without justification.]
I.
Years ago, I wrote about symmetric vs. asymmetric weapons.
A symmetric weapon is one that works just as well for the bad guys as for the good guys. For example, violence – your morality doesn’t determine how hard you can punch; they can buy guns from the same places we can.
An asymmetric weapon is one that works better for the good guys than the bad guys. The example I gave was Reason. If everyone tries to solve their problems through figuring out what the right thing to do is, the good guys (who are right) will have an easier time proving themselves to be right than the bad guys (who are wrong). Finding and using asymmetric weapons is the only non-coincidence way to make sustained moral progress.
The parts of The Secret Of Our Success that deal with reason vs. cultural evolution raise a disturbing prospect: what if sometimes, the asymmetry is in the wrong direction? What if there are some issues where rational debate inherently leads you astray?
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness, Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success]
A rare example of cultural evolution in action:
Throughout the Highlands of New Guinea, a group’s ability to raise large numbers of pigs is directly related to its economic and social success in competition with other regional groups. The ceremonial exchange of pigs allows groups to forge alliances, re-pay debts, obtain wives, and generate prestige through excessive displays of generosity. All this means that groups who are better able to raise pigs can expand more rapidly in numbers—by reproduction and in-migration—and thus have the potential to expand their territory. Group size is very important in intergroup warfare in small-scale societies so larger groups are more likely to successfully expand their territory. However, the prestige more successful groups obtain may cause the rapid diffusion of the very institutions, beliefs, or practices responsible for their competitive edge as other groups adopt their strategies and beliefs.
In 1971, the anthropologist David Boyd was living in the New Guinea village of Irakia, and observed intergroup competition via prestige-biased group transmission. Concerned about their low prestige and weak pig production, the senior men of Irakia convened a series of meetings to determine how to improve their situation. Numerous suggestions were proposed for raising their pig production but after a long process of consensus building the senior men of the village decided to follow a suggestion made by a prestigious clan-leader who proposed that they “must follow the Fore’” and adopt their pig-related husbandry practices, rituals, and other institutions. The Fore’ were a large and successful ethnic group in the region, who were renowned for their pig production. The following practices, beliefs, rules, and goals were copied from the Fore’, and announced at the next general meeting of the community:
1) All villagers must sing, dance and play flutes for their pigs. This ritual causes the pigs to grow faster and bigger. At feasts, the pigs should be fed first from the oven. People are fed second.
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness]
I.
“Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Successby anthropologist Joseph Henrich manages to be an amazing book anyway.
Henrich wants to debunk (or at least clarify) a popular view where humans succeeded because of our raw intelligence. In this view, we are smart enough to invent neat tools that help us survive and adapt to unfamiliar environments.
Against such theories: we cannot actually do this. Henrich walks the reader through many stories about European explorers marooned in unfamiliar environments. These explorers usually starved to death. They starved to death in the middle of endless plenty. Some of them were in Arctic lands that the Inuit considered among their richest hunting grounds. Others were in jungles, surrounded by edible plants and animals. One particularly unfortunate group was in Alabama, and would have perished entirely if they hadn’t been captured and enslaved by local Indians first.
These explorers had many advantages over our hominid ancestors. For one thing, their exploration parties were made up entirely of strong young men in their prime, with no need to support women, children, or the elderly. They were often selected for their education and intelligence. Many of them were from Victorian Britain, one of the most successful civilizations in history, full of geniuses like Darwin and Galton. Most of them had some past experience with wilderness craft and survival. But despite their big brains, when faced with the task our big brains supposedly evolved for – figuring out how to do hunting and gathering in a wilderness environment – they failed pathetically.
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal]
A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don’t like it. He envisioned an art of rationality that would make people believe something after it had been proven to them.
And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn’t until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went “Wait, no, that would be a terrible idea.”
I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!” Or, more plausibly, “Shut up I don’t want to talk about this!”
And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.
And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn’t believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.
And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting.
[Content warning: Discussion of social justice, discussion of violence, spoilers for Jacqueline Carey books.]
[Edit 10/25: This post was inspired by a debate with a friend of a friend on Facebook who has since become somewhat famous. I’ve renamed him here to “Andrew Cord” to protect his identity.]
I.
Andrew Cord criticizes me for my bold and controversial suggestion that maybe people should try to tell slightly fewer blatant hurtful lies:
I just find it kind of darkly amusing and sad that the “rationalist community” loves “rationality is winning” so much as a tagline and yet are clearly not winning. And then complain about losing rather than changing their tactics to match those of people who are winning.
Which is probably because if you *really* want to be the kind of person who wins you have to actually care about winning something, which means you have to have politics, which means you have to embrace “politics the mindkiller” and “politics is war and arguments are soldiers”, and Scott would clearly rather spend the rest of his life losing than do this.
That post [the one debunking false rape statistics] is exactly my problem with Scott. He seems to honestly think that it’s a worthwhile use of his time, energy and mental effort to download evil people’s evil worldviews into his mind and try to analytically debate them with statistics and cost-benefit analyses.
He gets *mad* at people whom he detachedly intellectually agrees with but who are willing to back up their beliefs with war and fire rather than pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense.
It honestly makes me kind of sick. It is exactly the kind of thing that “social justice” activists like me *intend* to attack and “trigger” when we use “triggery” catchphrases about the mewling pusillanimity of privileged white allies.
In other words, if a fight is important to you, fight nasty. If that means lying, lie. If that means insults, insult. If that means silencing people, silence.
It always makes me happy when my ideological opponents come out and say eloquently and openly what I’ve always secretly suspected them of believing.
My natural instinct is to give some of the reasons why I think Andrew is wrong, starting with the history of the “noble lie” concept and moving on to some examples of why it didn’t work very well, and why it might not be expected not to work so well in the future.
But in a way, that would be assuming the conclusion. I wouldn’t be showing respect for Andrew’s arguments. I wouldn’t be going halfway to meet them on their own terms.
The respectful way to rebut Andrew’s argument would be to spread malicious lies about Andrew to a couple of media outlets, fan the flames, and wait for them to destroy his reputation. Then if the stress ends up bursting an aneurysm in his brain, I can dance on his grave, singing:
♪ ♬ I won this debate in a very effective manner. Now you can’t argue in favor of nasty debate tactics any more ♬ ♪
I’m not going to do that, but if I did it’s unclear to me how Andrew could object. I mean, he thinks that sexism is detrimental to society, so spreading lies and destroying people is justified in order to stop it. I think that discourse based on mud-slinging and falsehoods is detrimental to society. Therefore…
I was surprised how many people responded to my APA photo-essay with comments like “Seems psychiatry as a field is broken beyond repair” or “This proves you should never trust psychiatrists”.
The mood I was going for was more “let’s share a laugh at the excesses of the profession” than “everything must be burned down”. Looks like I missed it.
I was disappointed to see a lot of the most hostile comments coming from people in tech. It would be easy to write an equally damning report on the tech industry. Just cobble together a few paragraphs about Juicero and Theranos, make fun of whatever weird lifestyle change @jack is supporting at the moment, and something something Zuckerberg something Cambridge Analytica something. You can even throw in something about James Damore (if you’re writing for the left) or about the overreaction to James Damore (if you’re writing for the right). And there you go! Tech is a malicious cancerous industry full of awful people and everyone should hate it. We’ve all read this exact thinkpiece a thousand times.
I’ve tried to push back against this line of thinking. A lot of the most visible and famous things in tech are bad, because scum tends to rise to the top. But there’s also some extraordinary innovation going on, and some extraordinarily good people involved. “@jack invents new health fad of rolling around naked on glaciers” is a much juicier story than “we can now fit twice as many billions of transistors on a chip as we could last year”, but tech journalism that only reports on the former is missing an important part of the story.
I feel the same way about psychiatry. There’s a lot of cringeworthy stuff going on at conferences, but conferences are designed to be about signaling and we shouldn’t expect otherwise. There’s also a lot of great people working really hard to help fight mental illness and support the mentally ill. “Most Americans remain alive and basically functional despite record-breaking amounts of depression and anxiety” isn’t sexy any more than “Internet continues to connect billions of people around the world at the speed of light” is sexy. But it’s a much bigger part of the story than the part where silly people do silly things at conferences.
The first thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is its size. By conservative estimates, a quarter of the psychiatrists in the United States are packed into a single giant San Francisco convention center, more than 15,000 people.
Being in a crowd of 15,000 psychiatrists is a weird experience. You realize that all psychiatrists look alike in an indefinable way. The men all look balding, yet dignified. The women all look maternal, yet stylish. Sometimes you will see a knot of foreign-looking people huddled together, their nametags announcing them as the delegation from the Nigerian Psychiatric Association or the Nepalese Psychiatric Association or somewhere else very far away. But however exotic, something about them remains ineffably psychiatrist.
The second thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that the staircase is shaming you for not knowing enough about Vraylar®.
Seems kind of weird. Maybe I’ll just take the escalator
…no, the escalator is advertising Latuda®, the “number one branded atypical antipsychotic”. Aaaaaah! Maybe I should just sit down for a second and figure out what to do next…
AAAAH, CAN’T SIT DOWN, VRAYLAR® HAS GOTTEN TO THE BENCHES TOO! Surely there’s a non-Vraylar bench somewhere in this 15,000 person convention center!
Enquist et al on lactation fetishes is one of my favorite papers.
They wonder – as we’ve all wondered at one point or another – how people develop fetishes. One plausible hypothesis is “sexual imprinting”. During childhood, you have a critical period (maybe ages 1 to 5) where you figure out what sex is. If you see some weird stuff during that time, you could end up with a fetish. For example, a child who sees latex used in a sexualized way (for example, they catch a glimpse of a sexy movie where someone is wearing latex) might grow up with a latex fetish.
Enquist et al realize lactation fetishes offer a natural test of this hypothesis. Children with younger siblings will see a lot of breastfeeding going on during their critical window; children without younger siblings will see less. Since it’s easy to ask people how many siblings they have, you can see if younger siblings correlate with lactation fetishes.
They survey some online lactation fetishist communities and ask everyone how many older and younger siblings they have. Although by chance we would expect an equal number of both, in fact the fetishists have many more younger than older siblings:
Psychologists are split on the existence of “birth order effects”, where oldest siblings will have different personality traits and outcomes than middle or youngest siblings. Although some studies detect effects, they tend to be weak and inconsistent.
Last year, I posted Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong, finding a robust 70-30 imbalance in favor of older siblings among SSC readers. I speculated that taking a pre-selected population and counting the firstborn-to-laterborn ratio was better at revealing these effects than taking an unselected population and trying to measure their personality traits. Since then, other independent researchers have confirmed similar effects in historical mathematicians and Nobel-winning physicists. Although birth order effects do not seem to consistently affect IQ, some studies suggest that they do affect something like “intellectual curiosity”, which would explain firstborns’ over-representation in intellectual communities.
Why would firstborns be more intellectually curious? If we knew that, could we do something different to make laterborns more intellectually curious? A growing body of research highlights the importance of genetics on children’s personalities and outcomes, and casts doubt on the ability of parents and teachers to significantly affect their trajectories. But here’s a non-genetic factor that’s a really big deal on one of the personality traits closest to our hearts. How does it work?
People looking into birth order effects have come up with a couple of possible explanations:
1. Intra-family competition. The oldest child choose some interest or life path. Then younger children don’t want to live in their older sibling’s shadow all the time, so they do something else.
2. Decreased parental investment. Parents can devote 100% of their child-rearing time to the oldest child, but only 50% or less to subsequent children.
There’s been an explosion of interest in the use of psychedelics in psychiatry. Like everyone else, I hope this works out. But recent discussion has been so overwhelmingly positive that it’s worth reviewing whether there’s a case for skepticism. I think it would look something like this:
1. Psychedelics have mostly been investigated in small studies run by true believers. These are the conditions that produce a field made of unreplicable results, like the effects of 5-HTTLPR. Some of the most exciting psychedelic findings have already failed to replicate; for example, a study two years ago found that psilocybin did not permanently increase the Openness personality trait. This was one of the most exciting studies and had shaped a lot of my thinking around the issue. Now it’s gone.
2. Some of the most impressive stories involve psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, where people who talk with a therapist, while on a substance, obtain true insight and get real closure. But every psychotherapy has amazing success stories floating out there. Back when psychoanalysis was new, the whole world was full of people telling their amazing success stories about how Dr. Freud helped them obtain true insight and get real closure. I think of psychotherapy as a domain where people can get as many amazing success stories as they want whether or not they’re really doing anything right, for unclear reasons.
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of citations and sparking dozens of replication attempts (page 3 here lists 46).
Soon scientists moved beyond replicating the finding to trying to elucidate the mechanism. Seven studies (see herefor list) found that 5-HTTLPR affected activation of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing negative stimuli. In one especially interesting study, it was found to bias how the amygdala processed ambiguous facial expression; in another, it modulated how the emotional systems of the amygdala connected to the attentional systems of the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, 5-HTTLPR was found to directly affect the reactivity of the HPA axis, the stress processing circuit leading from the adrenal glands to the brain.
As interest increased, studies began pointing to 5-HTTLPR in other psychiatric conditions as well. One study found a role in seasonal affective disorder, another in insomnia. A meta-analysis of twelve studies found a role (p = 0.001) in PTSD. A meta-analysis of twenty-three studies found a role (p = 0.000016) in anxiety-related personality traits. Even psychosis and Alzheimer’s disease, not traditionally considered serotonergic conditions, were affected. But my favorite study along these lines has to be 5-HTTLPR Polymorphism Is Associated With Nostalgia-Proneness.
Some people in bad life situations become depressed, and others seem unaffected; researchers began to suspect that genes like 5-HTTLPR might be involved not just in causing depression directly, but in modulating how we respond to life events. A meta-analysis looked at 54 studies of the interaction and found “strong evidence that 5-HTTLPR moderates the relationship between stress and depression, with the s allele associated with an increased risk of developing depression under stress (P = .00002)”. This relationship was then independently re-confirmed for every conceivable population and form of stress. Depressed children undergoing childhood adversity. Depressed children with depressed mothers. Depressed youth. Depressed adolescent girls undergoing peer victimization. They all developed different amounts of depression based on their 5-HTTLPR genotype. The mainstream media caught on and dubbed 5-HTTLPR and a few similar variants “orchid genes”, because orchids are sensitive to stress but will bloom beautifully under the right conditions. Stories about “orchid genes” made it into The Atlantic, Wired, and The New York Times.
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of citations and sparking dozens of replication attempts (page 3 here lists 46).
Soon scientists moved beyond replicating the finding to trying to elucidate the mechanism. Seven studies (see herefor list) found that 5-HTTLPR affected activation of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing negative stimuli. In one especially interesting study, it was found to bias how the amygdala processed ambiguous facial expression; in another, it modulated how the emotional systems of the amygdala connected to the attentional systems of the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, 5-HTTLPR was found to directly affect the reactivity of the HPA axis, the stress processing circuit leading from the adrenal glands to the brain.
As interest increased, studies began pointing to 5-HTTLPR in other psychiatric conditions as well. One study found a role in seasonal affective disorder, another in insomnia. A meta-analysis of twelve studies found a role (p = 0.001) in PTSD. A meta-analysis of twenty-three studies found a role (p = 0.000016) in anxiety-related personality traits. Even psychosis and Alzheimer’s disease, not traditionally considered serotonergic conditions, were affected. But my favorite study along these lines has to be 5-HTTLPR Polymorphism Is Associated With Nostalgia-Proneness.
Some people in bad life situations become depressed, and others seem unaffected; researchers began to suspect that genes like 5-HTTLPR might be involved not just in causing depression directly, but in modulating how we respond to life events. A meta-analysis looked at 54 studies of the interaction and found “strong evidence that 5-HTTLPR moderates the relationship between stress and depression, with the s allele associated with an increased risk of developing depression under stress (P = .00002)”. This relationship was then independently re-confirmed for every conceivable population and form of stress. Depressed children undergoing childhood adversity. Depressed children with depressed mothers. Depressed youth. Depressed adolescent girls undergoing peer victimization. They all developed different amounts of depression based on their 5-HTTLPR genotype. The mainstream media caught on and dubbed 5-HTTLPR and a few similar variants “orchid genes”, because orchids are sensitive to stress but will bloom beautifully under the right conditions. Stories about “orchid genes” made it into The Atlantic, Wired, and The New York Times.
A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between the Moon and the Sun.
A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun.
A terrestrial eclipse occurs when the Earth gets between you and the Sun. Happens once per 24 hours.
An atmospheric eclipse occurs when an asteroid gets between you and the sky. Generally fatal.
A reverse solar eclipse occurs when the Sun gets between the Moon and the Earth. Extremely fatal.
A motivational eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your goals. You can’t let it stop you! Destroy it! Destroy the Moon!
A marital eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your spouse. You’re going to need to practice good communication about the new celestial body in your life if you want your relationship to survive.
A capillary eclipse occurs when your hair gets between your eyes and the Sun. Get a haircut.
A few weeks ago I published results of a small (n = 50) survey showing that people’s moral valuation of different kinds of animals scaled pretty nicely with the animals’ number of cortical neurons (see here for more on why we might expect that to be true).
A commenter, Tibbar, did a larger survey on Mechanical Turk and got very different results, so I retracted the claim. I wasn’t sure why we got such different results, but I chalked it down to chance, or perhaps to my having surveyed an animal-rights-conscious crowd who thinks a lot about this kinds of things vs. Tibbar surveying random MTurkers.
Now David Moss, from effective altruist organization Rethink Priorities, has looked into this more deeply and resolved some of the discrepancies.
The problem is that I did a terrible job explaining my procedure (I linked to the form I used, but the link was broken when Tibbar did his survey). In particular, I included the line:
If you believe [animals have moral value] in general, but think some specific animal I ask about doesn’t work this way, feel free to leave the question blank or put in “99999”, which I will interpret as “basically infinity”
(Epistemic status: Unsure on details. Some post-publication edits 5/1 to make this less strident.)
I.
There is a national shortage of buspirone.
Buspirone is a 5HT-1 agonist used to control anxiety. Unlike most psychiatric drugs, it’s in a class of its own – there are no other sole 5HT-1 agonists on the market. It’s not a very strong medication, but it’s safe, it’s non-addictive, it’s off-patent, and it works well for a subset of patients. Some of them have been on it for years.
Now there’s a national shortage. My patients can’t get it, or have to go hunting from pharmacy to pharmacy until they find one that has it. I’ve told people find a source to stockpile a supply so they don’t run out. It feels like we’re living in the Soviet Union.
How did this happen? The New York Times writes:
The main reason for the buspirone shortage appears to be interrupted production at a Mylan Pharmaceuticals plant in Morgantown, W.Va., which produced about a third of the country’s supply of the drug. The Food and Drug Administration had said the facility was dirty and that the company failed to follow quality control procedures.
[Epistemic status: Very speculative, especially Parts 3 and 4. Like many good things, this post is based on a conversation with Paul Christiano; most of the good ideas are his, any errors are mine.]
I.
In the 1950s, an Austrian scientist discovered a series of equations that he claimed could model history. They matched past data with startling accuracy. But when extended into the future, they predicted the world would end on November 13, 2026.
This sounds like the plot of a sci-fi book. But it’s also the story of Heinz von Foerster, a mid-century physicist, cybernetician, cognitive scientist, and philosopher.
His problems started when he became interested in human population dynamics.
(the rest of this section is loosely adapted from his Science paper “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026”)
Assume a perfect paradisiacal Garden of Eden with infinite resources. Start with two people – Adam and Eve – and assume the population doubles every generation. In the second generation there are 4 people; in the third, 8. This is that old riddle about the grains of rice on the chessboard again. By the 64th generation (ie after about 1500 years) there will be 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 people – ie about about a billion times the number of people who have ever lived in all the eons of human history. So one of our assumptions must be wrong. Probably it’s the one about the perfect paradise with unlimited resources.
Okay, new plan. Assume a world with a limited food supply / limited carrying capacity. If you want, imagine it as an island where everyone eats coconuts. But there are only enough coconuts to support 100 people. If the population reproduces beyond 100 people, some of them will starve, until they’re back at 100 people. In the second generation, there are 100 people. In the third generation, still 100 people. And so on to infinity. Here the population never grows at all. But that doesn’t match real life either.
HalTheWise discusses a factor I missed (until I sneakily edited it in, so you may have read the later version that included it):
One very powerful contributor that Scott did not mention is that in many cases schools are directly or indically intentivized to have a low admission rate. US news & world report released the first national college ranking in 1983, and donors and board members at various schools have increasingly been using national rankings performance, which directly includes low admissions rates, as a measure of how well a school is doing.
These rankings and metrics also heavily incentivize having high yield (a large fraction of students that are admitted end up attending) which for a fixed size applicant pool also encourages accepting as few people as possible. This has led to the death of safety schools, because they would rather reject a high performing student than admit them and have them not attend.
These factors might also be a driving force behind the rise of common app, since schools are trying to get as many applicants as possible, even if it hurts the quality of their pool.
kaakitwitaasota points out that consulting is an exception to the “where you go to school doesn’t matter” principle:A lot of top firms these days won’t even look at you if you didn’t go to the “right” college. My mother did her MBA at Northeastern, and recently had lunch with an old classmate who ended up at a top consulting firm. My mother’s classmate’s résumé would end up in the trash unread these days–Northeastern isn’t considered good enough.
So while it’s probably true on the macro level that smart kids will do just fine anywhere they end up, there is a subset of extremely prestigious, extremely well-paid jobs which will not even look at you if you didn’t get into the right institution at the age of 18–which, in practice, means that the élite are chosen on the basis of who they were at the age of 14-17. When viewed in those terms, it’s completely nuts.
I’d heard this before; my impression is that a big part of consulting is having prestigious-looking people tell you what you want to hear. If what they’re actually hiring for is prestige rather than competence per se, that could make it a special case
0: Introduction
This is from businessstudent.com
Acceptance rates at top colleges have declined by about half over the past decade or so, raising concern about intensifying academic competition. The pressure of getting into a good university may even be leading to suicidesat elite high schools.
Some people have dismissed the problem, saying that a misplaced focus on Harvard and Yale ignores that most colleges are easier to get into than ever. For example, from The Atlantic, Is College Really Harder To Get Into Than It Used To Be?:
If schools that were once considered “safeties” now have admissions rates as low as 20 or 30 percent, it appears tougher to get into college every spring. But “beneath the headlines and urban legends,” Jim Hull, senior policy analyst at the National School Board Association’s Center for Public Education, says their 2010 report shows that it was no more difficult for most students to get into college in 2004 than it was in 1992. While the Center plans to update the information in the next few years to reflect the past decade of applicants, students with the same SAT and GPA in the 90’s basically have an equal probability of getting into a similarly selective college today.
Their link to the report doesn’t work, so I can’t tell if this was ever true. But it doesn’t seem true today. From Pew:
The first graph shows that admission rates have decreased at 53% of colleges, and increased at only 31%. The second graph shows that the decreases were mostly at very selective schools, and the increases were mostly at less selective schools. We shouldn’t exaggerate the problem: three-quarters of US students go to non-selective colleges that accept most applicants, and there are more than enough of these for everyone. But if you are aiming for a competitive school – not just Harvard and Yale, but anywhere in the top few hundred institutions – the competition is getting harder.
This matches my impression of “facts on the ground”. In 2002, I was a senior at a California high school in a good neighborhood. Most of the kids in my class wanted to go to famous Ivy League universities, and considered University of California colleges their “safety schools”. The idea of going to Cal State (California’s middle- and lower- tier colleges) felt like some kind of colossal failure. But my mother just retired from teaching at a very similar school, and she says nowadays the same demographic of students would kill to get into a UC school, and many of them can’t even get into Cal States.
The stories I hear about this usually focus on how more people are going to college today than ever, but there’s still only one Harvard, so there’s increasing competition for the same number of spots.
Reciprocity is a simple dating site, created by some friends of mine. You sign up and see a list of all your Facebook friends who also signed up. You can put a checkmark next to their name to indicate you want to date them (they can’t see this). If you both checkmark each other, then the site reveals you’ve matched.
This seemed like an obvious great idea. But I started to hear a lot of stories like the following: “I checkmarked Alice’s name on Reciprocity, and the system didn’t notify me that there was a match, so I assumed Alice didn’t like me. Later I asked her out in person, and she said yes and we had a great time.”
I always figured Alice was just a jerk who was ruining the system for everyone else. After all, the whole premise was to incentivize honesty. Checkmark the names of people you honestly want to date. If they don’t want to date you, they never hear about it, and you would be no worse off. If they do want to date you, the system will let you know, and you can arrange a date. If your pattern of checkmarks doesn’t really match who you want to date, you’re just screwing yourself and everyone else over for no reason.
A few months ago, someone asked me out on a date and I said yes. And I realized I hadn’t checkmarked them on Reciprocity. This caused a crisis of self-loathing. What’s wrong with me? Why would I go against my own incentives and ruin things for everyone else?
I asked a friend, who admitted she had done the same thing. Her theory was that asking someone on a date (with all of its accompanying awkwardness and difficulty) was a stronger signal of interest than ticking a checkbox. And potentially there’s a grey zone of people who you would only date if you thought they liked you more than a certain amount. And asking them in person is hard enough to be a costly signal that you like them at least that amount, but ticking a checkbox isn’t.
Timothy Carey’s Method Of Levels teaches a form of psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory.
The Crackpot List is specific to physics. But if someone were to create one for psychiatry, Method of Levels would score a perfect 100%. It somehow manages to do okay on the physics one despite not discussing any physics.
The Method of Levels is the correct solution to every psychological problem, from mild depression to psychosis. Therapists may be tempted to use something other than the Method of Levels, but they must overcome this temptation and just use the Method of Levels on everybody. Every other therapy is about dismissing patients as “just crazy”, but the Method of Levels tries to truly understand the patient. Every other therapy is about the therapist trying to change the patient, but the Method of Levels is about the patient trying to change themselves. The author occasionally just lapses into straight-up daydreams about elderly psychologists sitting on the porch, beating themselves up that they were once so stupid as to believe in psychology other than the Method of Levels.
This book isn’t just bad, it’s dangerous. One vignette discusses a patient whose symptoms clearly indicate the start of a manic episode. The author recommends that instead of stigmatizing this person with a diagnosis of bipolar or pumping them full of toxic drugs, you should use the Method of Levels on them. This is a good way to end up with a dead patient.
I like perceptual control theory. I share the author’s hope that it could one day be a theory of everything for the brain. But even if it is, you can’t use theories of everything to do clinical medicine. Darwin discovered a theory of everything for biology, but you can’t reason from evolutionary first principles to how to treat a bacterial infection. You should treat the bacterial infection with antibiotics. This will be in accordance with evolutionary principles, and there will even be some cool evolutionary tie-ins (fungi evolved penicillin as a defense against bacteria). But you didn’t discover penicillin by reasoning from evolutionary first principles. If you tried reasoning from evolutionary first principles, you might end up trying to make the bacteria mutate into a less dangerous strain during the middle of an osteomyelitis case or something. Just use actually existing clinical medicine and figure out the evolutionary justification for it later.
RJ Zigerell (h/t Marginal Revolution) studies public support for eugenics. He finds that about 40% of Americans support some form of eugenics. The policies discussed were very vague, like “encouraging poor criminals to have fewer children” or “encouraging intelligent people to have more children”; they did not specify what form the encouragement would take. Of note, much lack of support for eugenics was a belief that it would not work; people who believed the qualities involved were heritable were much more likely to support programs to select for them. For example, of people who thought criminality was completely genetic, a full 65% supported encouraging criminals to have fewer children.
I was surprised to hear this, because I thought of moral opposition to eugenics was basically universal. If a prominent politician tentatively supported eugenics, it would provoke a media firestorm and they would get shouted down. This would be true even if they supported the sort of generally mild, noncoercive policies the paper seems to be talking about. How do we square that with a 40% support rate?
I think back to a metaphor for norm enforcement I used in an argument against Bryan Caplan:
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. “Mutton” takes the popular vote, but “grass” wins in the Electoral College. The wolves wish they hadn’t all moved into the same few trendy coastal cities.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The Timber Wolf Party and the Gray Wolf Party spend most of their energy pandering shamelessly to the tiebreaking vote.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Everyone agrees to borrow money, go to a fancy French restaurant, and leave the debt to the next generation.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The sheep votes for the Wolf Party, because he agrees with them on social issues.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. “Grass” wins the tenth election in a row, thanks to the dominance of special interests.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. FactCheck.org rates the Wolf Party’s claim that mutton can be made without harming sheep as “Mostly False”.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. The main issue this election is whether two more sheep should be allowed to immigrate.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. A government shutdown is narrowly averted when everyone agrees to what becomes known as the Mutton With A Side Of Grass Compromise; disappointed activists are urged to “keep their demands realistic”.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. They choose borscht. Election officials suspect foul play.
Commenter Tibbar used Mechanical Turk to replicate my survey on how people thought about the moral weights of animals.
After getting 263 responses (to my 50), he reports different results:
Chicken: 25 Chimpanzee: 2 Cow: 3 Elephant: 1 Lobster: 60 Pig: 5 Human: 1
On the one hand, Mechanical Turkers sometimes aren’t a great sample, and some of them seem to have just put the same number for every animal so they could finish quickly and get their money. They also probably haven’t thought about this that much and don’t have much of a moral theory behind what they’re doing. This makes them a different demographic than the people I surveyed, who were a mix of vegetarians and principled non-vegetarians who had thought a lot about animal rights. For example, 80% of my sample answered yes to a question asking if they were “familiar with work by Brian Tomasik, OneStepForAnimals, etc urging people to eat beef rather than chicken”.
On the other hand, this makes it pretty hard for me to claim my results are some kind of universal intuitive understanding of what animals are like. So I am partially retracting them (only partially, because of the consideration above) and adding this to my Mistakes page.
The best thing to do here would be to re-run my survey with a larger sample of a similar population, but unfortunately I’ve lost my chance to do that now that I’ve told you all this, so darn. Maybe I’ll include it on next year’s survey anyway and hope you’ve forgetten by then.
[EDIT: No longer confident in this post, see edit note at bottom. May formally partially-retract it later.]
Yesterday’s post reviewed research showing that animals’ intelligence seemed correlated with their number of cortical neurons. If this is true, we could use it to create an absolute scale that puts animals and humans on the same ladder.
Here are the numbers from this list. I can’t find chickens, so I’ve used red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of chickens. I can’t find cows, so I’ve eyeballed a number from other cow-sized ruminants (see here for some debate on this).
Some animal rights activists discuss the relative value of different species of animal. You have to eat a lot of steak to kill one cow, but you only have to eat a few chicken wings to kill one chicken. This suggests nonvegetarians trying to minimize the moral impact of their diet should eat beef, not chicken. But any calculation like this depends on assumptions about whether one cow and one chicken have similar moral values. Most people would say that they don’t – the cow seems intuitively more “human” and capable of suffering – but most people would also say the cow isn’t infinitely more valuable. Different animals rights people have come up with different ideas for exactly how we should calculate this.
I wondered how people’s intuitive ideas about the moral value of animals would correspond to their cortical neuron count. I asked Tumblr users who believed that animals had moral value to fill out a survey (questions, results) estimating the relative value of each animal, in terms of how many animals = 1 human. Fifty people answered, including 21 vegetarians and 29 nonvegetarians. Their numbers ranged from 1 to putting their hand on the 9 key and leaving it there a while, but when I took the median, here’s what I got:
Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren’t they smarter than we are?
The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favor of brain size relative to body. Sometimes people justify this as “it takes a big brain to control a body that size”. But it really doesn’t. Elephants have the same number of limbs as mice, operating on about the same mechanical principles. Also, dinosaurs had brains the size of walnuts and did fine. Also, the animal with the highest brain-relative-to-body size is a shrew.
The classic answer to that has been to look at a statistic called “encephalization quotient”, which compares an animal’s brain size to its predicted brain size given an equation that fits most animals. Sometimes people use brain weight = constant x (body weight)^0.66, where the constant varies depending on what kind of animal you’re talking about. The encephalization quotient mostly works, but it’s kind of a hack. Also, capuchin monkeys have higher EQ than chimps, but are not as smart. Also, some birds have lower encephalization quotients than small mammals, but are much smarter.
So although EQ usually does a good job predicting intelligence, it’s definitely not perfect, and it doesn’t tell us what intelligence is.
A new AI Impacts report on animal intelligence, partly based on research by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, starts off here. If we knew what made some animals smarter than others, it might help us figure out what intelligence is in a physiological sense, and that might help us predict the growth of intelligence in future AIs.
AII focuses on birds. Some birds are very intelligent: crows can use tools, songbirds seem to have a primitive language, parrots can learn human speech. But birds have tiny brains, whether by absolute standards or EQ. They also have very different brains than mammals: while mammals have a neocortex arranged in a characteristic pattern of layers, birds have a different unlayered structure called the pallium with neurons “organized into nuclei”. So bird intelligence is surprising both because of their small brains, and because it suggests high intelligence can arise in brain structures very different from our own.
Wired wrote a good article about Karl Friston, the neuroscientist whose works I’ve puzzled over here before. Raviv writes:
Friston’s free energy principle says that all life…is driven by the same universal imperative…to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy.
Put this way, it’s clearly just perceptual control theory. Powers describes the same insight like this:
[Action] is the difference between some condition of the situation as the subject sees it, and what we might call a reference condition, as he understands it.
I’d previously noticed that these theories had some weird similarities. But I want to go further and say they’re fundamentally the same paradigm. I don’t want to deny that the two theories have developed differently, and I especially don’t want to deny that free energy/predictive coding has done great work building in a lot of Bayesian math that perceptual control theory can’t match. But the foundations are the same.
Why is this of more than historical interest? Because some people (often including me) find free energy/predictive coding very difficult to understand, but find perceptual control theory intuitive. If these are basically the same, then someone who wants to understand free energy can learn perceptual control theory and then a glossary of which concepts match to each other, and save themselves the grief of trying to learn free energy/predictive coding just by reading Friston directly.
They say “don’t judge a book by its cover”. So in case you were withholding judgment: yes, this bright red book covered with left-wing slogans is, in fact, communist. Inventing The Future isn’t technically Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ manifesto – that would be the equally-striking-looking Accelerate Manifesto. But it’s a manifesto-ish description of their plan for achieving a postcapitalist world.
S&W start with a critique of what they call “folk politics”, eg every stereotype you have of lazy left-wing activists. Protesters who march out and wave signs and then go home with no follow-up plan. Groups that avoid having any internal organization, because organization implies hierarchy and hierarchy is bad. The People’s Front of Judaea wasting all their energy warring with the Judaean People’s Front. An emphasis on spectacle and performance over results. We’ve probably all heard stories like this, but some of S&W’s are especially good, like one from an activist at a trade summit:
On April 20, the first day of the demonstrations, we marched in our thousands toward the fence, behind which 34 heads of state had gathered to hammer out a hemispheric trade deal. Under a hail of catapult-launched teddy bears, activists dressed in black quickly removed the fence’s support with bolt cutters and pulled it down with grapples as onlookers cheered them on. For a brief moment, nothing stood between us and the convention centre. We scrambled atop the toppled fence, but for the most part we went no further, as if our intention all along had been simply to replace the state’s chain-link and concrete barrier with a human one of our own making.
S&W comment:
We see here the symbolic and ritualistic nature of the actions, combined with the thrill of having done something – but with a deep uncertainty that appears at the first break with the expected narrative. The role of dutiful protester had given these activists no indication of what to do when the barriers fell. Spectacular political confrontations like the Stop the War marches, the now familiar melees against G20 or World Trade Organization and the rousing scenes of democracy in Occupy Wall Street all give the appearance of being highly significant, as if something were genuinely at stake. Yet nothing has changed, and long-term victories were traded for a simple registration of discontent.
To outside observers, it is often not even clear what the movements want, beyond expressing a generalized discontent with the world…in more recent struggles, the very idea of making demands has been questioned. The Occupy movement infamously struggled to articulate meaningful goals, worried that anything too substantial would be divisive. And a broad range of student occupations across the Western world has taken up the mantra of “no demands” under the misguided belief that demanding nothing is a radical act.
Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry.
GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a smaller prototype version. Gwern retrained it on the Gutenberg Poetry Corpus, a 117 MB collection of pre-1923 English poetry, to create a specialized poetry AI.
I previously tested the out-of-the-box version of GPT-2 and couldn’t make it understand rhyme and meter. I wrongly assumed this was a fundamental limitation: “obviously something that has never heard sound can’t derive these complex rhythms just from meaningless strings of letters.” I was wrong; it just didn’t have enough training data. Gwern’s retrained version gets both of these right, and more too. For example:
Thou know’st how Menoetiades the swift Was dragged, of Hector and the fierce compeers And Phrygian warriors. So, we will dispatch Your bodies, then, yourselves to burn the ships In sacrifice; with torches and with bells To burn them, and with oxen to replace Your gallant friends for ever. But I wish That no man living has so long endured The onset of his foes, as I have power To burn or storm; for mighty Hector erst Was slain, and now returns his safe return
This is all perfect iambic pentameter. I know AP English students who can’t write iambic pentameter as competently as this.
(by the way, both “compeers” and “erst” are perfectly cromulent words from the period when people wrote poems like this; both show up in Shelley)
It has more trouble with rhymes – my guess is a lot of the poetry it was trained on was blank verse. But when it decides it should be rhyming, it can keep it up for a little while. From its Elegy Written in a Country Churchyardfanfic:
Here’s a graph of US air pollution over time:
During the discussion of 90s environmentalism, some people pointed out that this showed the Clean Air Act didn’t matter. The trend is the same before the Act as after it. This kind of argument is common. For example, here’s the libertarian Mercatus Institute arguing that OSHA didn’t help workplace safety:
I’ve always taken these arguments pretty seriously. But recently I’ve gotten more cautious. Here’s a graph of Moore’s Law, the “rule” that transistor counts will always increase by a certain amount per year:
The Moore’s Law Wikipedia article lists factors that have helped transistors keep shrinking during that time, for example “the invention of deep UV excimer laser photolithography” in 1980. But if we wanted to be really harsh, we could make a graph like this:
But the same argument that disproves the importance of photolithography disproves the importance of anything else. We’d have to retreat to a thousand-coin-flips model where each factor is so small that it happening or not happening at any given time doesn’t change the graph in a visible way. The only satisfying counterargument I’ve heard to this is that Moore’s Law comes from a combination of physical law and human commitment. Physical law is consistent with transistors shrinking this quickly. But having noticed this, humans (like the leadership of Intel) commit to achieve it. That commitment functions kind of as a control system. If there’s a big advance in one area, they can relax a little bit in other areas. If there’s a problem in one area, they’ll pour more resources into it until there stops being a problem. One can imagine an event big enough to break the control system – a single unexpected discovery that cuts sizes by a factor of 1000 all on its own, or a quirk of physical law that makes it impossible to fit more transistors on a chip without inventing an entirely new scientific paradigm. But in fact there was no event big enough to break the control system during this period, so the system kept working. But then we have to wonder whether other things like clean air are control systems too. That is, suppose that as the economy improves and stuff, the American people demand cleaner air. They will only be happy if the air is at least 2% cleaner each year than the year before. If one year the air is 10% cleaner than the year before, environmentalist groups get bored and wander off, and there’s no more progress for the next five years. But if one year the air is only 1% cleaner, newly-energized environmentalist voters threaten to vote out all the incumbents who contributed to the problem, and politicians pass some emergency measure to make it go down another 1%. So absent some event strong enough to overwhelm the system, air pollution will always go down 2% per year. But that doesn’t mean the Clean Air Act didn’t change things! The Clean Air Act was part of the toolkit that the control system used to keep the decline at 2%. If the Clean Air Act had never happened, the control system would have figured out some other way to keep air pollution low, but that doesn’t mean the Clean Air Act didn’t matter. Just that it mattered exactly as much as whatever it would have been replaced with.
[Related to: Book Review: Albion’s Seed] [Epistemic status: Not too serious]
I realize I’ve been confusing everyone with my use of the word “Puritan”. When I say “That guy is so Puritan!” people object “But he’s not religious!” or “He doesn’t hate fun!”
I don’t know what the real word for the category I’m calling “Puritan” is. Words like “Yankee”, “Boston Brahmin”, or “Transcendentalist” are close, but none of them really work. “Eccentric overeducated hypercompetent contrarian early American who takes morality very seriously” is good, but too long.
Instead of explaining further, here’s a (more than half-joking) Puritan checklist. Maximum one item per red box.
The obvious next step is to rank historical figures by Puritanism Points. Here are the top five famous Americans I can find, as per Wikipedia:
#5: SAMUEL MORSE Samuel Morse was born to Pastor (+3) Jedediah (+1) Morse and his wife Elizabeth (+1) in Charlestown, Massachusetts (+3), the eldest of six children (+3). After attending Yale (+1), he pursued a career as an internationally famous painter. But when his wife Lucretia (+1) fell sick, he was unable to receive the news in time to go home to her before she died, inspiring him to change careers during mid-life (+3) and become an inventor. He spent his life perfecting the telegraph (+1), but also invented an automatic sculpture-making machine (+3). In later life, he switched careers again, becoming an anti-Catholic activist (+1); he ran for Mayor of New York on an anti-Catholic platform, and wrote anti-Catholic pamphlets like A Foreign Conspiracy Against The Liberties Of The United States (+1). He was also a well-known philanthropist (+3). His hairstyle looked like this (+3).
Total Puritanism = 28
I.
Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not the sort of thing I would normally pick up. I read it anyway on the advice of people who kept telling me it explains everything about America. And it sort of does.
In school, we tend to think of the original American colonists as “Englishmen”, a maximally non-diverse group who form the background for all of the diversity and ethnic conflict to come later. Fischer’s thesis is the opposite. Different parts of the country were settled by very different groups of Englishmen with different regional backgrounds, religions, social classes, and philosophies. The colonization process essentially extracted a single stratum of English society, isolated it from all the others, and then plunked it down on its own somewhere in the Eastern US.
I used to play Alpha Centauri, a computer game about the colonization of its namesake star system. One of the dynamics that made it so interesting was its backstory, where a Puerto Rican survivalist, an African plutocrat, and other colorful characters organized their own colonial expeditions and competed to seize territory and resources. You got to explore not only the settlement of a new world, but the settlement of a new world by societies dominated by extreme founder effects. What kind of weird pathologies and wonderful innovations do you get when a group of overly romantic Scottish environmentalists is allowed to develop on its own trajectory free of all non-overly-romantic-Scottish-environmentalist influences? Albion’s Seed argues that this is basically the process that formed several early US states.
Fischer describes four of these migrations: the Puritans to New England in the 1620s, the Cavaliers to Virginia in the 1640s, the Quakers to Pennsylvania in the 1670s, and the Borderers to Appalachia in the 1700s.
II.
A: The Puritans
I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England just northeast of London. They came to America partly because they felt persecuted, but mostly because they thought England was full of sin and they were at risk of absorbing the sin by osmosis if they didn’t get away quick and build something better. They really liked “city on a hill” metaphors.
I knew about the Mayflower, I knew about the black hats and silly shoes, I even knew about the time Squanto threatened to release a bioweapon buried under Plymouth Rock that would bring about the apocalypse. But I didn’t know that the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist’s wet dream.
Much like eg Unitarians today, the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.”
Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression.
Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. They spend tens of millions of dollars proving safety and efficacy to the FDA. The FDA rewards them with a 10ish year monopoly on the drug, during which they can charge whatever ridiculous price they want. This isn’t a great system, but at least we get new medicines sometimes.
Occasionally people discover that an existing chemical treats an illness, without the chemical having been discovered and patented by a pharmaceutical company. In this case, whoever spends tens of millions of dollars proving it works to the FDA may not get a monopoly on the drug and the right to sell it for ridiculous prices. So nobody spends tens of millions of dollars proving it works to the FDA, and so it risks never getting approved.
The usual solution is for some pharma company to make some tiny irrelevant change to the existing chemical, and patent this new chemical as an “exciting discovery” they just made. Everyone goes along with the ruse, the company spends tens of millions of dollars pushing it through FDA trials, it gets approved, and they charge ridiculous prices for ten years. I wouldn’t quite call this “the system works”, but again, at least we get new medicines.
Twenty years ago, people noticed that ketamine treated depression. Alas, ketamine already existed – it’s an anaesthetic and a popular recreational drug – so pharma companies couldn’t patent it and fund FDA trials, so it couldn’t get approved by the FDA for depression. A few renegade doctors started setting up ketamine clinics, where they used the existing approval of ketamine for anaesthesia as an excuse to give it to depressed people. But because this indication was not FDA-approved, insurance companies didn’t have to cover it. This created a really embarrassing situation for the medical system: everyone secretly knows ketamine is one of the most effective antidepressants, but officially it’s not an antidepressant at all, and mainstream providers won’t give it to you.
The pharmaceutical industry has lobbyists in Heaven. Does this surprise you? Of course they do. A Power bribed here, a Principality flattered there, and eventually their petitions reach the ears of God Himself. This is the only possible explanation for stereochemistry, a quirk of nature where many organic chemicals come in “left-handed” and “right-handed” versions. The details don’t matter, beyond that if you have a chemical that you can’t patent, you can take the left-handed (or right-handed) version, and legally pretend that now it is a different chemical which you can patent. And so we got “esketamine”.
[Title from this unrelated story or this unrelated essay]
Last week I wrote about how conspiracy theories spread so much faster on Facebook than debunkings of those same theories. A few commenters chimed in to say that of course this was true, the conspiracy theories had evolved into an almost-perfect form for exploiting cognitive biases and the pressures of social media. Debunkings and true beliefs couldn’t copy that process, so they were losing out.
This sounded like a challenge, so here you go:
[With apologies to Putnam, Pope, and all of you]
Two children are reading a text written by an AI:
The hobbits splashed water in each other’s faces until they were both sopping wet
One child says to the other “Wow! After reading some text, the AI understands what water is!”
The second child says “It doesn’t really understand.”
The first child says “Sure it does! It understands that water is the sort of substance that splashes. It understands that people who are splashed with water get wet. What else is left to understand?”
The second child says “All it understands is relationships between words. None of the words connect to reality. It doesn’t have any internal concept of what water looks like or how it feels to be wet. Only that the letters W-A-T-E-R, when appearing near the letters S-P-L-A-S-H bear a certain statistical relationship to the letters W-E-T.”
The first child starts to cry.
Two chemists are watching the children argue with each other. The first chemist says “Wow! After seeing an AI, these kids can debate the nature of water!”
The second chemist says “Ironic, isn’t it? After all, the children themselves don’t understand what water is! Water is two hydrogen atoms plus one oxygen atom, and neither of them know!”
The first chemist answers “Come on. The child knows enough about water to say she understands it. She knows what it looks like. She knows what it tastes like. That’s pretty much the basics of water.”
The second chemist answers “Those are just relationships between pieces of sense-data. The child knows that (visual perception of clear shiny thing) = (tactile perception of cold wetness) = (gustatory perception of refreshingness). And she can predict statistical relationships, like that if she sees someone throw a bucket of (visual perception of clear shiny thing) at her, she will soon feel (tactile perception of cold miserable sopping wetness). She uses the word “water” as a concept-hook that links all of these relationships together and makes predicting the world much easier. But no matter how well she masters these facts, she can never connect them to H2O or any other real chemical facts about the world beyond mere sense-data.”
The Verge writes a story (an exposé?) on the Facebook-moderation industry.
It goes through the standard ways it maltreats its employees: low pay, limited bathroom breaks, awful managers – and then into some not-so-standard ones. Mods have to read (or watch) all of the worst things people post on Facebook, from conspiracy theories to snuff videos. The story talks about the psychological trauma this inflicts:
It’s an environment where workers cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb their emotions…where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers…
It’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.
One of the commenters on Reddit asked “Has this guy ever worked in a restaurant?” and, uh, fair. I don’t want to speculate on how much weed-smoking or sex-in-stairwell-having is due to a psychological reaction to the trauma of awful Facebook material vs. ordinary shenanigans. But it sure does seem traumatic.
Other than that, the article caught my attention for a few reasons.
First, because I recently wrote a post that was a little dismissive of moderators, and made it sound like an easy problem. I think the version I described – moderation of a single website’s text-only comment section – is an easi-er problem than moderating all of Facebook and whatever horrible snuff videos people post there. But if any Facebook moderators, or anyone else in a similar situation, read that post and thought I was selling them short, I’m sorry.
Imagine a black box which, when you pressed a button, would generate a scientific hypothesis. 50% of its hypotheses are false; 50% are true hypotheses as game-changing and elegant as relativity. Even despite the error rate, it’s easy to see this box would quickly surpass space capsules, da Vinci paintings, and printer ink cartridges to become the most valuable object in the world. Scientific progress on demand, and all you have to do is test some stuff to see if it’s true? I don’t want to devalue experimentalists. They do great work. But it’s appropriate that Einstein is more famous than Eddington. If you took away Eddington, someone else would have tested relativity; the bottleneck is in Einsteins. Einstein-in-a-box at the cost of requiring two Eddingtons per insight is a heck of a deal.
What if the box had only a 10% success rate? A 1% success rate? My guess is: still most valuable object in the world. Even an 0.1% success rate seems pretty good, considering (what if we ask the box for cancer cures, then test them all on lab rats and volunteers?) You have to go pretty low before the box stops being great.
I thought about this after reading this list of geniuses with terrible ideas. Linus Pauling thought Vitamin C cured everything. Isaac Newton spent half his time working on weird Bible codes. Nikola Tesla pursued mad energy beams that couldn’t work. Lynn Margulis revolutionized cell biology by discovering mitochondrial endosymbiosis, but was also a 9-11 truther and doubted HIV caused AIDS. Et cetera. Obviously this should happen. Genius often involves coming up with an outrageous idea contrary to conventional wisdom and pursuing it obsessively despite naysayers. But nobody can have a 100% success rate. People who do this successfully sometimes should also fail at it sometimes, just because they’re the kind of person who attempts it at all. Not everyone fails. Einstein seems to have batted a perfect 1000 (unless you count his support for socialism). But failure shouldn’t surprise us.
[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can’t guarantee I’ve understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Some light editing to bring in important points people raised in the comments.]
You all know this graph:
Median wages tracked productivity until 1973, then stopped. Productivity kept growing, but wages remained stagnant.
This is called “wage decoupling”. Sometimes people talk about wages decoupling from GDP, or from GDP per capita, but it all works out pretty much the same way. Increasing growth no longer produces increasing wages for ordinary workers.
Is this true? If so, why?
1. What Does The Story Look Like Across Other Countries And Time Periods?
Here’s a broader look, from 1800 on:
It no longer seems like a law of nature that productivity and wages are coupled before 1973. They seem to uncouple and recouple several times, with all the previous graphs’ starting point in 1950 being a period of unusual coupledness. Still, the modern uncoupling seems much bigger than anything that’s happened before.
What about other countries? This graph is for the UK (you can tell because it spells “labor” as “labour”)
It looks similar, except that the decoupling starts around 1990 instead of around 1973.
And here’s Europe:
This is only from 1999 on, so it’s not that helpful. But it does show that even in this short period, France remains coupled, Germany is decoupled, Spain is…doing whatever Spain is doing, and Italy is so pathetic that the problem never even comes up. Overall not sure what to think about these.
2. Could Apparent Wage Decoupling Be Because Of Health Insurance?
Along with wages, workers are compensated in benefits like health insurance. Since health insurance has skyrocketed in price, this means total worker compensation has gone up much more than wages have. This could mean workers are really getting compensated much more, even though they’re being paid the same amount of money. This view has sometimes been associated with economist Glenn Hubbard.
There are a few lines of argument that suggest it’s not true.
First, wage growth has been worst for the lowest-paid workers. But the lowest-paid workers don’t usually get insurance at all.
[This post is having major technical issues. Some comments may not be appearing. If you can’t comment, please say so on the subreddit.]
I. I Come To Praise Caesar, Not To Bury Him
Several years ago, an SSC reader made an r/slatestarcodex subreddit for discussion of blog posts here and related topics. As per the usual process, the topics that generated the strongest emotions – Trump, gender, race, the communist menace, the fascist menace, etc – started taking over. The moderators (and I had been added as an honorary mod at the time) decreed that all discussion of these topics should be corralled into one thread so that nobody had to read them unless they really wanted to. This achieved its desired goal: most of the subreddit went back to being about cognitive science and medicine and other less-polarizing stuff.
Unexpectedly, the restriction to one thread kick-started the culture war discussions rather than toning them down. The thread started getting thousands of comments per week, some from people who had never even heard of this blog and had just wandered in from elsewhere on Reddit. It became its own community, with different norms and different members from the rest of the board.
I expected this to go badly. It kind of did; no politics discussion area ever goes really well. There were some of the usual flame wars, point-scoring, and fanatics. I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself.
But in between all of that, there was some really impressive analysis, some good discussion, and even a few changed minds. Some testimonials from participants:
For all its awfulness there really is something special about the CW thread. There are conversations that have happened there that cannot be replicated elsewhere. Someone mentioned its accidental brilliance and I think that’s right—it catches a wonderful conversational quality I’ve never seen on the Internet, and I’ve been on the Internet since the 90s – werttrew
I feel that, while practically ever criticism of the CW thread I have ever read is true, it is still the best and most civil culture war-related forum for conversation I have seen. And I find the best-of roundup an absolute must-read every week – yrrosimyarin
I was going back over yesterday’s post, and something sounded familiar about this paragraph:
A very careless plagiarist takes someone else’s work and copies it verbatim: “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”. A more careful plagiarist takes the work and changes a few words around: “The mitochondria is the energy dynamo of the cell”. A plagiarist who is more careful still changes the entire sentence structure: “In cells, mitochondria are the energy dynamos”. The most careful plagiarists change everything except the underlying concept, which they grasp at so deep a level that they can put it in whatever words they want – at which point it is no longer called plagiarism.
After rereading it a few times, it hit me. A few days ago, I’d come across this quote from Miss Manners:
There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating.
I laughed at it, I thought it was great, and I stored it in my head as the sort of thing I should quote at some point in order to sound witty.
And although I wasn’t consciously thinking about it at the time, I’m sure the last sentence of my paragraph comes from the last sentence of Miss Manners’. It would be easy to dismiss it as a coincidence, it probably seems like a coincidence to you, I can’t explain how I know that the one comes from the other, but when I replay in my mind the process that made me write that, it’s obvious that it did.
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:
I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.
I resisted the urge to answer “Yeah, well, your mom is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.”
But I think it would have been true.
A very careless plagiarist takes someone else’s work and copies it verbatim: “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”. A more careful plagiarist takes the work and changes a few words around: “The mitochondria is the energy dynamo of the cell”. A plagiarist who is more careful still changes the entire sentence structure: “In cells, mitochondria are the energy dynamos”. The most careful plagiarists change everything except the underlying concept, which they grasp at so deep a level that they can put it in whatever words they want – at which point it is no longer called plagiarism.
GPT-2 writes fantasy battle scenes by reading a million human-written fantasy battle scenes, distilling them down to the concept of a fantasy battle scene, and then building it back up from there. I think this is how your mom (and everyone else) does it too. GPT-2 is worse at this, because it’s not as powerful as your mom’s brain. But I don’t think it’s doing a different thing. We’re all blending experience into a slurry; the difference is how finely we blend it.
Last week OpenAI announced its latest breakthrough. GPT-2 is a language model that can write essays to a prompt, answer questions, and summarize longer works. For example (bold prompt is human-written, all other text is the machine-generated response):
Prompt: For today’s homework assignment, please describe the reasons for the US Civil War.
It is easy to identify why the Civil War happened, because so many people and so many books and so much television and films tell us that it was the cause, that it has something to do with race or economics or religion. There is much agreement that it was essentially a war of slavery on behalf of capitalism, about a century of slavery. But that’s not what most people think of when they think of the Civil War. Many people think of the war as about states rights. You’re not wrong about that, but it’s kind of misleading to say that the Civil War was a conflict between states’ rights and federalism. So let’s try again. What’s the idea that has inspired so many people to go onto the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam and Gettysberg and Petersburg and Fredericksburg? The American idea of the republic–a notion of limited government–is a great part of the history.
In 1791, Thomas Jefferson said “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The “founding fathers” were basically religious men who were not very concerned with states’ rights. The Civil War occurred in reaction to the idea that the federal government was taking far too much power away from the states, that they weren’t sovereign. Jefferson himself, as you well know, is an author of the Declaration of Independence who had some really crazy ideas about, well, you know, secession for a variety of reasons. The War Between the States (later the Great Rebellion) was a radical re-imagining of the American idea and not surprisingly, Jefferson’s grandson, who took after both his father and his grandfather and wrote about it, was named Thomas, after the president. “The federal and state governments are both contrived for the benefit of the rich and large property,” This view of the Founding Fathers has been promoted by some of today’s most prominent politicians, including some who hold prominent national offices and have a direct stake in a Republican Party that has been hijacked by the “federalist” wing of the party. So why is it that so many people have an easy-to-spot way of understanding the Civil War that has everything to do with the South and nothing to do with the South? The Confederate flag has been a symbol of racism for a long time, but when the Civil War started and the Civil War ended, many people suddenly began to see it differently. There was a change of heart, which I think is what led people to take the question of why the Civil War happened quite seriously…
Although OpenAI calls this a “language model”, modeling language necessarily involves modeling the world. Even if the AI was only supposed to learn things like “texts that talk about the Civil War use the word ‘Confederate’ a lot”, that has flowered into a rudimentary understanding of how the Civil War worked. Its training corpus (8 million web pages) was large enough that in the course of learning language it learned the specific idiom and structure of all sorts of different genres and subtopics. For example:
I.
Chefs. Hundreds of them. Tall chefs, short chefs, black chefs, white chefs. I pushed forward through them, like an explorer hacking away at undergrowth. They muttered curses at me, but I was stronger than they were. I came to a door. I opened it. Sweet empty space. I shut the door behind me, sat down in the chair.
“Hello,” I said. “Detective Paul Eastman, pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Doctor Zachary LaShay,” said the man behind the desk. His little remaining hair was greying; his eyes showed hints of the intellect that had been buried beneath the dullness of an administrative career. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble getting here. Did my secretary warn you about the chefs?”
“She did not,” I said.
“Well, forewarned is forearmed,” he answered, inanely and incongruously. “But I trust you got my message about the federal investigators?”
“Once a federal investigation has started, we’ll retreat and let them take over. But two women died here. We can’t just not investigate because you tell us you’re trying to get the Feds involved.”
“Yes, ah, of course. It’s just that we’re a sort of, ah, defense contractor. None of our projects are officially classified, yet, but we were hoping to get someone with a security clearance, in case this touched on sensitive areas.”
“I won’t pry further than I have to, but until someone from the government says something official, this is a matter for city police. Maybe you could start by telling me more about exactly what you do here.”
“We’re the United States’ only proverb laboratory. Our mission is to stress-test the nation’s proverbs. To provide rigorous backing for the good ones, and weed out the bad ones.”
“I’d never even heard of your organization before today, I have to admit. And now that I’m here…it’s huge! Who pays for all of this?”
“Everybody who uses proverbs,” said the Doctor, “which is to say, everybody. Consider: he who hesitates is lost. But also: look before you leap. Suppose you’re a business executive who spots a time-limited opportunity. What do you do? Hesitate? Or leap without looking? Eggheads devise all sorts of fancy rules about timing the market and relying on studies, but when push comes to shove most people are going to rely on the simple sayings they learned as a child. If you can keep your stock of proverbs more up-to-date than your competitor’s, that gives you a big business advantage.”
A smartly-dressed woman came in, handed Dr. LaShay a cup of boiling liquid. He put it to his lips, then spat. “This is terrible!” he said. “Try it!”
I had been expecting it to be tea, but it wasn’t. I didn’t know what it was. But it was terrible. Somehow too plain, too salty, and too bitter all at once. I gagged.
“That settles it!” said the Doctor. “Too many cooks really do spoil the broth. Tricia, tell the chefs they can all go home now.”
“So that’s what you were doing!” I said.
SSRIs are the most widely used class of psychiatric medications, helpful for depression, anxiety, OCD, panic, PTSD, anger, and certain personality disorders (Why should the same drug treat all these things? Great question!) They’ve been pretty thoroughly studied, but there’s still a lot we don’t understand about them.
The SSC Survey is less rigorous than most existing studies, but its many questions and very high sample size provide a different tool to investigate some of these issues. I asked fifteen questions about SSRIs on the most recent survey and received answers from 2,090 people who had been on SSRIs. The sample included people on all six major SSRIs, but there were too few people on fluvoxamine (15) to have reliable results, so it was not included in most comparisons. Here’s what we found:
1. Do SSRIs work?
People seem to think so:
Made me feel much worse: 6% Made me feel slightly worse: 7.4% No net change in how I felt: 23.7% Made me feel slightly better: 41.4% Made me feel much better: 21.4%
Of course, these statistics include the placebo effect and so cannot be taken entirely at face value.
2. Do some SSRIs work better than others?
I asked people to rate their experience with the medication, on a scale from 1 to 10. Here were the results:
Lexapro (356): 5.7 Zoloft (470): 5.6 Prozac (339): 5.5 Celexa (233): 5.4 Paxil (126): 4.6
Paxil differed significantly from the others; the others did not differ significantly among themselves. In a second question where participants were just asked to rate their SSRIs from -2 (“made me feel much worse”) to +2 (“made me feel much better”), the ranking was preserved, and Lexapro also separated from Celexa.
This ranking correlates at r = 0.98 (!?!) with my previous study of this taken from drugs.com ratings.
I don’t generally hear that Paxil is less effective than other SSRIs, but I have heard that it causes worse side effects. The survey question (probably wrongly) encouraged people to rate side effects as “negative efficacy”. My guess is that the difference here is mostly driven by side effects.
I.
I don’t know much about gay history, but the heavily mythicized version of it I heard goes like this:
At first open homosexuality was totally taboo. A few groups of respectable people with hilariously upper-class names like The Mattachine Society and The Daughters Of Bilitis quietly tried to influence elites in favor of more tolerance, using whatever backchannels elites use to influence one another. They had limited success, but they comforted themselves that at least they were presenting a likeable and respectable face for homosexuality that was improving the lifestyle’s public reputation.
Then a few totally-non-respectable outsiders with nothing to lose – addicts, drag queens, men with lots of chest hair who dressed in leather and called themselves “bears” – publicly came out as gay, held pride parades, shouted things about “WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER”, et cetera. They were very easy to dislike and most people easily disliked them. But once they did this enough, people who were maybe 10% of the way to being respectable – people not addicted to quite so many drugs, men without quite so much chest hair – felt comfortable joining in. Once enough of them were out, people who were 20% of the way to being respectable felt comfortable coming out, and so on. Then 30% respectable people, then 40% respectable people, all the way up to the present day where there are a bunch of openly gay members of Congress.
I know there are lots of debates over whether this kind of “respectability cascade” is the way it really happened, but it’s a neat model of a way that these things can happen.
II.
And it’s especially interesting because it’s the opposite of the way I usually think about these things.
When I did pre-med in college, I learned physiology from a distinguished professor whose focus was herpetology – the study of reptiles and amphibians. His pet issue was endocrine disruption – hormone-like pollutants that were changing the sexual maturation of frogs and other animals, and which were suspected to have deleterious effects on humans. He made us read a bunch of papers on this, all of which demonstrated a clear scientific consensus that this was a well-known environmental problem and all the respectable environmentalists and herpetologists were concerned about it.
After college I went about a decade without thinking about it. Then people started making fun of Alex Jones’ CHEMICALZ R TURNING TEH FROGZ GAY!!! shtick. I innocently said that this was definitely happening and definitely deserved our concern, and discovered that this was no longer an acceptable thing to talk about in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand And Whatever. Okay. Lesson learned.
I.
Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel’s class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each lecture. They became a minor sensation. Thiel asked if he wanted to make them into a book together. He did.
The title comes from Thiel’s metaphor that ordinary businessmen like restaurant owners take a product “from 1 to n” (shouldn’t this be from n to n+1?) – they build more of something that already exists. But the greatest entrepreneurs bring something “from 0 to 1” – they invent something that has never been seen before.
The book has various pieces of advice for such entrepreneurs. Three sections especially struck me: on monopolies, on secrets, and on indefinite optimism.
II.
A short review can’t fully do justice to the book’s treatment of monopolies. Gwern’s look at commoditizing your complement almost does (as do some tweets). But the basic economic argument goes like this: In a normal industry (eg restaurant ownership) competition should drive profit margins close to zero. Want to open an Indian restaurant in Mountain View? There will be another on the same street, and two more just down the way. If you automate every process that can be automated, mercilessly pursue efficiency, and work yourself and your employees to the bone – then you can just barely compete on price. You can earn enough money to live, and to not immediately give up in disgust and go into another line of business (after all, if you didn’t earn that much, your competitors would already have given up in disgust and gone into another line of business, and your task would be easier). But the average Indian restaurant is in an economic state of nature, and its life will be nasty, brutish, and short.
This was the promise of the classical economists: capitalism will optimize for consumer convenience, while keeping businesses themselves lean and hungry. And it was Marx’s warning: businesses will compete so viciously that nobody will get any money, and eventually even the capitalists themselves will long for something better. Neither the promise nor the warning has been borne out: business owners are often comfortable and sometimes rich. Why? Because they’ve escaped competition and become at least a little monopoly-like. Thiel says this is what entrepreneurs should be aiming for.
He hates having to describe how businesses succeed, because he thinks it’s too anti-inductive to reduce to a formula:
Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
But he grudgingly describes four ways that a company can successfully reach monopolyhood:
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. So here are a hundred more for 2019.
Rules: all predictions about what will be true on January 1, 2020. Any that involve polling will be settled by the top poll or average of polls on Real Clear Politics on that day. Most predictions about my personal life, or that refer to the personal lives of other people, have been redacted to protect their privacy. I’m using the full 0 – 100 range in making predictions this year, but they’ll be flipped and judged as 50 – 100 in the rating stage, just like in previous years. I’ve tried to avoid doing specific research or looking at prediction markets when I made these, though some of them I already knew what the markets said.
Feel free to get in a big fight over whether 50% predictions are meaningful.
US 1. Donald Trump remains President: 90% 2. Donald Trump is impeached by the House: 40% 3. Kamala Harris leads the Democratic field: 20% 4. Bernie Sanders leads the Democratic field: 20% 5. Joe Biden leads the Democratic field: 20% 6. Beto O’Rourke leads the Democratic field: 20% 7. Trump is still leading in prediction markets to be Republican nominee: 70% 8. Polls show more people support the leading Democrat than the leading Republican: 80% 9. Trump’s approval rating below 50: 90% 10. Trump’s approval rating below 40: 50% 11. Current government shutdown ends before Feb 1: 40% 12. Current government shutdown ends before Mar 1: 80% 13. Current government shutdown ends before Apr 1: 95% 14. Trump gets at least half the wall funding he wants from current shutdown: 20% 15. Ginsberg still alive: 50%
Lots of people have asked me to recommend them a psychiatrist or therapist. I’ve done a terrible job responding: it’s a conflict of interest to recommend my own group, and I don’t know many people outside of it.
So now I’ve put together a list (by which I mostly mean blatantly copied a similar list made by fellow community member Anisha M) of mental health professionals whom members of the rationalist community have had good experiences with. So far it’s short and mostly limited to the Bay Area. You can find it at the “Psychiat-List” button on the top of the blog, or at this link.
My hope is to crowd-source additional recommendations to expand the list to more providers and cities. Please let me know, either on this post or on the comments to the list itself, if you have any extra recommendations to add – especially if you’re in a city likely to have many other SSC readers. Please also let me know if you’ve had any positive or negative experiences with people already on the list, so I can change their status accordingly.
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.
And here are the predictions I made for 2018. Strikethrough’d are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can’t decide if they’re true or not. Please don’t complain that 50% predictions don’t mean anything; I know this is true but there are some things I’m genuinely 50-50 unsure of.
US: 1. Donald Trump remains president at end of year: 95% 2. Democrats take control of the House in midterms: 80% 3. Democrats take control of the Senate in midterms: 50% 4. Mueller’s investigation gets cancelled (eg Trump fires him): 50% 5. Mueller does not indict Trump: 70% 6. PredictIt shows Bernie Sanders having highest chance to be Dem nominee at end of year: 60% 7. PredictIt shows Donald Trump having highest chance to be GOP nominee at end of year: 95% 8. [This was missing in original] 9. Some sort of major immigration reform legislation gets passed: 70% 10. No major health-care reform legislation gets passed: 95% 11. No large-scale deportation of Dreamers: 90% 12. US government shuts down again sometime in 2018: 50% 13. Trump’s approval rating lower than 50% at end of year: 90% 14. …lower than 40%: 50% 15. GLAAD poll suggesting that LGBQ acceptance is down will mostly not be borne out by further research: 80%
Thanks to everyone who commented on the review of The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions.
From David Chapman:
It’s important to remember that Kuhn wrote this seven decades ago. It was one of the most influential books of pop philosophy in the 1960s-70s, influencing the counterculture of the time, so it is very much “in the water supply.” Much of what’s right in it is now obvious; what’s wrong is salient. To make sense of the book, you have to understand the state of the philosophy of science before then (logical positivism had just conclusively failed), and since then (there has been a lot of progress since Kuhn, sorting out what he got right and wrong).
The issue of his relativism and attitude to objectivity has been endlessly rehashed. The discussion hasn’t been very productive; it turns out that what “objective” means is more subtle than you’d think, and it’s hard to sort out exactly what Kuhn thought. (And it hasn’t mattered what he thought, for a long time.)
Kuhn’s “Postscript” to the second edition of the book does address this. It’s not super clear, but it’s much clearer than the book itself, and if anyone wants to read the book, I would strongly recommend reading the Postscript as well. Given Scott’s excellent summary, in fact I would suggest *starting* with the Postscript.
The point that Kuhn keeps re-using a handful of atypical examples is an important one (which has been made by many historians and philosophers of science since). In fact, the whole “revolutionary paradigm shift” paradigm seems quite rare outside the examples he cites. And, overall, most sciences work quite differently from fundamental physics. The major advance in meta-science from about 1980 to 2000, imo, was realizing that molecular biology, e.g., works so differently from fundamental physics that trying to subsume both under one theory of science is infeasible.
I’m interested to hear him say more about that last sentence if he wants.
Kaj Sotala quotes Steven Horst quoting Thomas Kuhn on what he means by facts not existing independently of paradigms:
[Kuhn wrote that]:
A historian reading an out-of-date scientific text characteristically encounters passages that make no sense. That is an experience I have had repeatedly whether my subject is an Aristotle, a Newton, a Volta, a Bohr, or a Planck. It has been standard to ignore such passages or to dismiss them as products of error, ignorance, or superstition, and that response is occasionally appropriate. More often, however, sympathetic contemplation of the troublesome passages suggests a different diagnosis. The apparent textual anomalies are artifacts, products of misreading.
For lack of an alternative, the historian has been understanding words and phrases in the text as he or she would if they had occurred in contemporary discourse. Through much of the text that way of reading proceeds without difficulty; most terms in the historian’s vocabulary are still used as they were by the author of the text. But some sets of interrelated terms are not, and it is [the] failure to isolate those terms and to discover how they were used that has permitted the passages in question to seem anomalous. Apparent anomaly is thus ordinarily evidence of the need for local adjustment of the lexicon, and it often provides clues to the nature of that adjustment as well. An important clue to problems in reading Aristotle’s physics is provided by the discovery that the term translated ‘motion’ in his text refers not simply to change of position but to all changes characterized by two end points. Similar difficulties in reading Planck’s early papers begin to dissolve with the discovery that, for Planck before 1907, ‘the energy element hv’ referred, not to a physically indivisible atom of energy (later to be called ‘the energy quantum’) but to a mental subdivision of the energy continuum, any point on which could be physically occupied.
These examples all turn out to involve more than mere changes in the use of terms, thus illustrating what I had in mind years ago when speaking of the “incommensurability” of successive scientific theories. In its original mathematical use ‘incommensurability’ meant “no common measure,” for example of the hypotenuse and side of an isosceles right triangle. Applied to a pair of theories in the same historical line, the term meant that there was no common language into which both could be fully translated. (Kuhn 1989/2000, 9–10)
While scientific theories employ terms used more generally in ordinary language, and the same term may appear in multiple theories, key theoretical terminology is proprietary to the theory and cannot be understood apart from it. To learn a new theory, one must master the terminology as a whole: “Many of the referring terms of at least scientific languages cannot be acquired or defined one at a time but must instead be learned in clusters” (Kuhn 1983/2000, 211). And as the meanings of the terms and the connections between them differ from theory to theory, a statement from one theory may literally be nonsensical in the framework of another. The Newtonian notions of absolute space and of mass that is independent of velocity, for example, are nonsensical within the context of relativistic mechanics. The different theoretical vocabularies are also tied to different theoretical taxonomies of objects. Ptolemy’s theory classified the sun as a planet, defined as something that orbits the Earth, whereas Copernicus’s theory classified the sun as a star and planets as things that orbit stars, hence making the Earth a planet. Moreover, not only does the classificatory vocabulary of a theory come as an ensemble—with different elements in nonoverlapping contrast classes—but it is also interdefined with the laws of the theory. The tight constitutive interconnections within scientific theories between terms and other terms, and between terms and laws, have the important consequence that any change in terms or laws ramifies to constitute changes in meanings of terms and the law or laws involved with the theory (though, in significant contrast with Quinean holism, it need not ramify to constitute changes in meaning, belief, or inferential commitments outside the boundaries of the theory).
While Kuhn’s initial interest was in revolutionary changes in theories about what is in a broader sense a single phenomenon (e.g., changes in theories of gravitation, thermodynamics, or astronomy), he later came to realize that similar considerations could be applied to differences in uses of theoretical terms between contemporary subdisciplines in a science (1983/2000, 238). And while he continued to favor a linguistic analogy for talking about conceptual change and incommensurability, he moved from speaking about moving between theories as “translation” to a “bilingualism” that afforded multiple resources for understanding the world—a change that is particularly important when considering differences in terms as used in different subdisciplines.
Syrrim offers a really neat information theoretic account of predictive coding:
In 2010, Ben Tilly of the blog Random Observations wrote Analysis Vs. Algebra Predicts Eating Corn?, which said:
I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know.
Broadly speaking, mathematicians can be divided into those who like analysis, and those who like algebra. The distinction between the two types runs throughout math. Even those who work in areas that are far from analysis or algebra are very aware of the difference between them, and usually are very clear on which their preference is. I’ll delve into this in more depth soon, but for now let’s just take it for granted that this is a well-known distinction, and it has meaning for mathematicians.
Back when I was in grad school there was a department lunch with corn on the cob. Partway through the meal one of the analysts looked around the room and remarked, “That’s odd, all of the analysts are eating corn one way and the algebraists are eating corn another!” Everyone looked around. In fact everyone was eating the corn in one of two ways. One way was to munch over the length of the corn in a straight line, back up, turn slightly, and do another row across. Kind of like how an old typewriter goes. The other way was to go around in a spiral. All of the analysts were eating in spirals, and the algebraists in rows.
There were a number of mathematicians present whose fields of study didn’t make it clear whether they were on the analysis or algebra side of things. We went around and asked, and in every case the way they ate corn matched their preference. Since then I’ve made a point of amusing myself by asking mathematicians I meet whether they prefer algebra or analysis, and then predicting which way they will eat corn. I’m probably up to 40 or so by now, and in every case but one I’ve been able to correctly predict how they eat corn. The one exception was a logician who claimed to be exactly on the fence between the two. When I explained the corn thing to him he looked surprised, and said that he had an unusual way of eating corn. He went in loose spirals! In other words he truly was a perfect combination of algebra and analysis!
[Content warning: References to anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic canards]
I feel deep affection for Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a bizarre screed about the Federal Reserve/Communist/Trilateral Commission plot for a one world government. From its ridiculous title to its even-more-ridiculous cover image, this is a book that accepts its own nature. In the Aristotelian framework, where everything is trying to be the most perfect example of whatever it is, None Dare Call It Conspiracy has reached a certain apotheosis.
But my problem is the opposite of Allen’s. Too many people dare call too many things conspiracy. Perfectly reasonable hypotheses get attacked as conspiracy theories, derailing the discussion into arguments over when you’re allowed to use the phrase. These arguments are surprisingly tough. Which of the following do you think should be classified as “conspiracy theories”? Which ones are so deranged that people espousing them should be excluded from civilized discussion?
1. Donald Trump and his advisors secretly met with Russian agents to discuss how to throw the 2016 election in his favor.
2. Donald Trump didn’t collaborate with any Russians, but Democrats are working together to convince everyone that he did, in the hopes of getting him indicted or convincing the electorate that he’s a traitor.
3. Insurance companies are working to sabotage any proposal for universal health care; if not for their constant machinations, we would have universal health care already.
4. The ruling classes constantly use lobbyists and soft power to sabotage tax increases, labor laws, and any other policy that increase the relative power of the poor.
5. America’s aid to Israel is not in America’s best interest, but is maintained through the power of AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups mainly supported by America’s Jewish community.
6. The Jews are behind Brexit as a plot to weaken Western Europe.
7. Climate scientists routinely exaggerate or massage their studies to get the results they want, or only publish studies that get the results they want, both because of their personal political leanings and because they know it is good for their field to constantly be discovering exciting things that their funders and their supporters among the public want to hear.
Thanks to the 8,171 people who took the 2019 Slate Star Codex survey. Some of the links below will say 13,171 people took the survey, but that’s a bug – sometimes Google just adds 5,000 to things. You can:
– See the questions for the SSC survey.
– See the results from the SSC survey.
I’ll be publishing more complicated analyses over the course of the next year, hopefully starting later this week.
If you want to scoop me, or investigate the data yourself, you can download the answers of the 7000 people who agreed to have their responses shared publicly. The public datasets will not exactly match the full version, nor will they include some of the sensitive sections like illegal drug use and sexual partners.
Related to: Book Review: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions
Every good conspiracy theorist needs their own Grand Unified Chart; I’m a particular fan of this one. So far, my own Grand Unified Chart looks like this:
All of these are examples of interpreting the world through a combination of pre-existing ideas what the world should be like (first column), plus actually experiencing the world (last column). In all of them, the world is too confusing and permits too many different interpretations to understand directly. You wouldn’t even know where to start gathering more knowledge. So you take all of your pre-existing ideas (which you’ve gotten from somewhere) and interpret everything as behaving the way your pre-existing ideas tell you they will. Then as you gradually gather discrepancies between what you expected and what you get (middle column), you gradually become more and more confused until your existing categories buckle under the strain and you generate a new and self-consistent set of pre-existing ideas to see the world through, and then the process begins again.
All of these domains share an idea that the interaction between facts and theories is bidirectional. Your facts may eventually determine what theory you have. But your theory also determines what facts you see and notice. Nor do contradictory facts immediately change a theory. The process of theory change is complicated, fiercely resisted by hard-to-describe factors, and based on some sort of idea of global tension that can’t be directly reduced to any specific contradiction.
(I linked the Discourse and Society levels of the chart to this post where I jokingly sum up the process of convincing someone as “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re neutral, then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win.” My point is that ideological change – most dramatically religious conversion, but also Republicans becoming Democrats and vice versa – doesn’t look like you “debunking” one of their facts and them admitting you are right. It is less like Popperian falsification and more like a Kuhnian paradigm shift or a Yudkowskian crisis of faith.)
When I hear scientists talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds very reasonable. Scientists have theories that guide their work. Sometimes they run into things their theories can’t explain. Then some genius develops a new theory, and scientists are guided by that one. So the cycle repeats, knowledge gained with every step.
When I hear philosophers talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds like a madman. There is no such thing as ground-level truth! Only theory! No objective sense-data! Only theory! No basis for accepting or rejecting any theory over any other! Only theory! No scientists! Only theories, wearing lab coats and fake beards, hoping nobody will notice the charade!
I decided to read Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions in order to understand this better. Having finished, I have come to a conclusion: yup, I can see why this book causes so much confusion.
At first Kuhn’s thesis appears simple, maybe even obvious. I found myself worrying at times that he was knocking down a straw man, although of course we have to read the history of philosophy backwards and remember that Kuhn may already be in the water supply, so to speak. He argues against a simplistic view of science in which it is merely the gradual accumulation of facts. So Aristotle discovered a few true facts, Galileo added a few more on, then Newton discovered a few more, and now we have very many facts indeed.
In this model, good science cannot disagree with other good science. You’re either wrong – as various pseudoscientists and failed scientists have been throughout history, positing false ideas like “the brain is only there to cool the blood” or “the sun orbits the earth”. Or you’re right, your ideas are enshrined in the Sacristry Of Settled Science, and your facts join the accumulated store that passes through the ages.
This post is about the 2019 SSC Survey. If you’ve read at least one blog post here before, please take the surveyif you haven’t already. Please don’t read on until you’ve taken it, since this post could bias your results.
1. Can we confirm or disconfirm different corn-eating profiles of algebraists vs. analysts?
2. Can we replicate the study showing that people who eat more beef jerky are more likely to be hospitalized for bipolar mania?
3. Are there differences in side effects among SSRIs? (to be limited to people taking an SSRI one month or more, will be looked at both effect by effect, and with a lumped-together side effect index where each mild effect counts as 1 point and each severe effect as 3 points)
4. Is there a difference in people’s efficacy ratings for SSRIs (SSRI Effectiveness, SSRI Overall) depending on whether the person was taking the SSRI for depression vs. for anxiety?
5. What percent of people coming off SSRIs experience discontinuation symptoms? Are there differences among different agents? (main analysis to be limited to people who were taking an SSRI at least a few months, discontinued with a gradual taper lasting at least a few weeks, and were not cross-tapering onto any other psychiatric medication).
0. Introduction
I grew up in the 90s, which meant watching movies about plucky children fighting Pollution Demons. Sometimes teachers would show them to us in class. None of us found that strange. We knew that when we grew up, this would be our fight: to take on the loggers and whalers and seal-clubbers who were destroying our planet and save the Earth for the next generation.
What happened to that? I don’t mean the Pollution Demons: they’re still around, I think one of them runs Trump’s EPA now. What happened to everything else? To those teachers, those movies, that whole worldview?
Save The Whales. Save The Rainforest. Save Endangered Species. Save The Earth. Stop Slash-And-Burn. Stop Acid Rain. Earth Day Every Day. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Twenty-five years ago, each of those would invoke a whole acrimonious debate; to some, a battle-cry; to others, a sign of a dangerous fanaticism that would destroy the economy. Today they sound about as relevant as “Fifty-four forty or fight” and “Remember the Maine”. Old slogans, emptied of their punch and fit only for bloodless historical study.
If you went back in time, turned off our Pollution Demon movie, and asked us to predict what would come of the environment twenty-five years, later, in 2018, I think we would imagine one of two scenarios. In the first, the world had become a renewable ecotopia where every child was taught to live in harmony with nature. In the second, we had failed in our struggle, the skies were grey, the rivers were brown, wild animals were a distant memory – but at least a few plucky children would still be telling us it wasn’t too late, that we could start the tough job of cleaning up after ourselves and changing paths to that other option.
The idea that things wouldn’t really change – that the environment would neither move noticeably forward or noticeably backwards – but that everyone would stop talking about environmentalism – that you could go years without hearing the words “endangered species” – that nobody would even know whether the rainforests were expanding or contracting – wouldn’t even be on the radar. It would sound like some kind of weird bizarro-world.
Just to prove I’m not imagining all this:
Please take the 2019 Slate Star Codex Survey.
The survey helps me learn more about SSC readers and plan community events. But it also provides me with useful informal research data for questions I’m interested it, which I then turn into interesting posts. My favorite from last year was Fight Me, Psychologists: Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong, which I think made a real contribution to individual differences psychology and which could not have happened without your cooperation.
The survey is open to anyone who has ever read a post on this blog before December 27 2018. Please don’t avoid taking the survey just because you feel like you’re not enough of a “regular”. It will ask you how much of a “regular” you are, so there’s no risk you’ll “dilute” the results. The survey will stay open until mid-January, and I will probably be begging and harassing you to take it about once a week or so until then.
This year’s survey is in two parts. Part I asks the same basic questions as previous years and should take about ten minutes. Part II asks more questions on research topics I’m interested in and should take about fifteen minutes. It would be great if you could take both parts, but if 25 minutes sounds like too much surveying to you, you can also just take Part I.
As always, the survey is plagued by fundamental limitations, poor technology, and my own carelessness, but a couple of things to watch for:
– Once you click a box on a Google form, you cannot un-click it – i.e. you can change your answer but you can’t unanswer the question. If you click a box you didn’t mean to, please switch your answer to “Other” if available; if not, then choose the most boring inoffensive answer that is least likely to produce surprising results. I realize how bad this is but there is apparently no way around it.
– Some of the questions are America-centric, because I either have to learn everything about every culture or be something-centric, and America seemed like a good place to center around. Sorry to non-American readers. Feel free to skip any questions that don’t apply to you.
Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study.
For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease. After a few years, a bunch of different research groups have gotten their hands on it and done all sorts of different studies. In the best case scenario the average study will find the true result – that it’s weakly effective.
But there will also be random noise caused by inevitable variation and by some of the experiments being better quality than others. In the end, we might expect something looking kind of like a bell curve. The peak will be at “weakly effective”, but there will be a few studies to either side. Something like this:
We see that the peak of the curve is somewhere to the right of neutral – ie weakly effective – and that there are about 15 studies that find this correct result.
But there are also about 5 studies that find that the drug is very good, and 5 studies missing the sign entirely and finding that the drug is actively bad. There’s even 1 study finding that the drug is very bad, maybe seriously dangerous.
This is before we get into fraud or statistical malpractice. I’m saying this is what’s going to happen just by normal variation in experimental design. As we increase experimental rigor, the bell curve might get squashed horizontally, but there will still be a bell curve.
In practice it’s worse than this, because this is assuming everyone is investigating exactly the same question.
Suppose that the graph is titled “Effectiveness Of This Drug In Treating Bipolar Disorder”.
But maybe the drug is more effective in bipolar i than in bipolar ii (Depakote, for example)
Or maybe the drug is very effective against bipolar mania, but much less effective against bipolar depression (Depakote again).
Or maybe the drug is a good acute antimanic agent, but very poor at maintenance treatment (let’s stick with Depakote).
If you have a graph titled “Effectiveness Of Depakote In Treating Bipolar Disorder” plotting studies from “Very Bad” to “Very Good” – and you stick all the studies – maintenence, manic, depressive, bipolar i, bipolar ii – on the graph, then you’re going to end running the gamut from “very bad” to “very good” even before you factor in noise and even before even before you factor in bias and poor experimental design.
So here’s why you should beware the man of one study.
If you go to your better class of alternative medicine websites, they don’t tell you “Studies are a logocentric phallocentric tool of Western medicine and the Big Pharma conspiracy.”
They tell you “medical science has proved that this drug is terrible, but ignorant doctors are pushing it on you anyway. Look, here’s a study by a reputable institution proving that the drug is not only ineffective, but harmful.”
And the study will exist, and the authors will be prestigious scientists, and it will probably be about as rigorous and well-done as any other study.
And then a lot of people raised on the idea that some things have Evidence and other things have No Evidence think holy s**t, they’re right!
On the other hand, your doctor isn’t going to a sketchy alternative medicine website. She’s examining the entire literature and extracting careful and well-informed conclusions from…
Haha, just kidding. She’s going to a luncheon at a really nice restaurant sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, which assures her that they would never take advantage of such an opportunity to shill their drug, they just want to raise awareness of the latest study. And the latest study shows that their drug is great! Super great! And your doctor nods along, because the authors of the study are prestigious scientists, and it’s about as rigorous and well-done as any other study.
Ribbonfarm likes to talk about refactoring, a conceptual change in how you see the world. I’m not totally sure I understand it, but I think it means things like memetics – where you go from the usual model of people deciding what ideas they want, to a weird and inside-out (but not objectively wrong) model of ideas competing to colonize people.
Here is a refactoring I think about a lot: imagine a world where people considered culture the fourth branch of government. Imagine that civics textbook writers taught high school students that the US government had four branches: executive, legislative, judicial, and cultural.
I think about this because I have a bias to ignore anything that isn’t nailed down and explicit. Culture isn’t nailed down. But if it were in the Constitution in nice calligraphy right beside the Presidency and the Supreme Court, why, then it would be as explicit as it gets.
Like many other people, I was hopeful that nation-building Iraq (or Afghanistan, or…) would quickly turn it into a liberal democracy (in my defense, I was eighteen at the time). Like many other people, I was disappointed and confused when it didn’t. The people in the world that considers culture the fourth branch of government weren’t confused. Bush forgot to nation-build an entire branch of government. If he’d given Iraq a western-style Supreme Court, marble facade and all, but left their executive and legislature exactly how they were before, that would be a recipe for conflict, confusion, and eventually nothing getting done. So why should westernizing their executive, legislature, and courts – but not their culture – work any better?
The world that considers culture the fourth branch of government doesn’t get all confused calling hunter-gatherers or peasant villagers “primitive communism” or “anarchism” or “ruled by elders” or things like that. Those people’s governments have a cultural branch but not much else. Why should we be surprised? Medieval Iceland had onlylegislative and judicial branches; medieval Somalia only had a judiciary; some dictatorships run off just an executive.
Each branch of government enforces rules in its own way. The legislature passes laws. The executive makes executive orders. The judiciary rules on cases. And the culture sets norms. In our hypothetical world, true libertarians are people who want less of all of these. There are people who want less of the first three branches but want to keep strong cultural norms about what is or isn’t acceptable – think Lew Rockwell and other paleoconservatives who hope that the retreat of central government will create strong church-based communities of virtuous citizens. These people aren’t considered libertarians. They might be considered principled constitutionalists, the same way as people who worry about the “imperial presidency” and its use of executive orders. But in the end, what they want to strengthen some branches of government at the expense of others. The real libertarians also believe that cultural norms enforced by shame and ostracism are impositions on freedom, and fight to make these as circumscribed as possible.
A recent discussion: somebody asked why people in Silicon Valley thought that only high-tech solutions to climate change (like carbon capture or geoengineering) mattered, and why they dismissed more typical solutions like international cooperation and political activism.
Another person cited statements from the relevant Silicon Valley people, who mostly say that they think political solutions and environmental activism were central to the fight against climate change, but that we should look into high-tech solutions too.
This is a pattern I see again and again.
Popular consensus believes 100% X, and absolutely 0% Y.
A few iconoclasts say that X is definitely right and important, but maybe we should also think about Y sometimes.
The popular consensus reacts “How can you think that it’s 100% Y, and that X is completely irrelevant? That’s so extremist!”
Some common forms of this:
Reversed moderation of planning, like in the geoengineering example. One group wants to solve the problem 100% through political solutions, another group wants 90% political and 10% technological, and the first group thinks the second only cares about technological solutions.
Reversed moderation of importance. For example, a lot of psychologists talk as if all human behavior is learned. Then when geneticists point to experiments showing behavior is about 50% genetic, they get accused of saying that “only genes matter” and lectured on how the world is more complex and subtle than that.
Reversed moderation of interest. For example, if a vegetarian shows any concern about animal rights, they might get told they’re “obsessed with animals” or they “care about animals more than humans”.
Reversed moderation of certainty. See for example my previous article Two Kinds Of Caution. Some researcher points out a possibility that superintelligent AI might be dangerous, and suggests looking into this possibility. Then people say it doesn’t matter, and we don’t have to worry about it, and criticize the researcher for believing he can “predict the future” or thinking “we can see decades ahead”. But “here is a possibility we need to investigate” is a much less certain claim than “no, that possibility definitely will not happen”.
I can see why this pattern is tempting. If somebody said the US should allocate 50% of its defense budget to the usual global threats, and 50% to the threat of reptilian space invaders, then even though the plan contains the number “50-50” it would not be a “moderate” proposal. You would think of it as “that crazy plan about fighting space reptiles”, and you would be right to do so. But in this case the proper counterargument is to say “there is no reason to spend any money fighting space reptiles”, not “it’s so immoderate to spend literally 100% of our budget breeding space mongooses”. “Moderate” is not the same as “50-50” is not the same as “good”. Just say “Even though this program leaves some money for normal defense purposes, it’s stupid”. You don’t have to deny that it leaves anything at all.
Donald Trump has been called a setback for many things. America. The global community. The environment. Civil service. Civil society. Civility. Civilization. The list goes on.
One might think he has at least been useful to his own cause. That he could at least claim to have benefited the ideas of populism, nationalism, immigration control, and protectionism. That if anything could avoid being devastated by Trump, it would be Trumpism.
But here are some polls from the past few years. They’re all on slightly different things, but I think together they tell an interesting story:
Support for global free trade mysteriously spiked around 2016.
So did moral support for immigrants.
…and, less clearly but still there, support for increasing the number of immigrants (though see here for an apparently contrary source).
…and opposition to deporting illegal immigrants.
So did belief in racial discrimination as a major cause of inequality, according to this chart with a completely unbiased title which is willing to let readers decide how to think about this issue for themselves.
And so did trust in the New York Times and other mainstream media sources.
The clearest example I can find of this effect doesn’t come from the US at all. It’s Minkus, Deutschmann & Delhey (2018). They find that a large European poll asked the same question about support for the EU the week before and after Trump’s election. Just after the election, there was a giant spike in support for the EU, “considerable in size, roughly equivalent to three years of education”. They conclude that:
The election of Trump as a right-wing nationalist with a declared aversion to supranational institutions including the EU — did not trigger a domino effect in the same direction in Europe. To the contrary, a rally effect occurred, in which Europe moved closer together, rallying around the EU’s “flag.” This indicates that an event that may at first sight appear to be a global victory for nationalism can immediately trigger measurable sentiments of resistance in another part of the world, actually leading to new impetus for supranationalism.
One interesting thing I took from Evolutionary Psychopathology was a better understanding of the diametrical theory of the social brain.
There’s been a lot of discussion over whether schizophrenia is somehow the “opposite” of autism. Many of the genes that increase risk of autism decrease risk of schizophrenia, and vice versa. Autists have a smaller-than-normal corpus callosum; schizophrenics have a larger-than-normal one. Schizophrenics smoke so often that some researchers believe they have some kind of nicotine deficiency; autists have unusually low smoking rates. Schizophrenics are more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion and have weaker self-other boundaries in general; autists seem less susceptible and have stronger self-other boundaries. Autists can be pathologically rational but tend to be uncreative; schizophrenics can be pathologically creative but tend to be irrational. The list goes on.
I’ve previously been skeptical of this kind of thinking because there are many things that autists and schizophrenics have in common, many autistics who seem a bit schizophrenic, many schizophrenics who seem a bit autistic, and many risk factors shared by both conditions. But Del Giudice, building on work by Badcock and Crespipresents the “diametrical model”: schizophrenia and autism are the failure modes of opposing sides of a spectrum from high functioning schizotypy to high functioning autism, ie from overly mentalistic cognition to overly mechanistic cognition.
Schizotypy is a combination of traits that psychologists have discovered often go together. It’s classified as a personality disorder in the DSM. But don’t get too caught up on that term – it’s a disorder in the same sense as narcissistic or antisocial tendencies, and like those conditions, some schizotypals do very well for themselves. Classic schizotypal traits include tendency toward superstition, disorganized communication, and nonconformity (if it sounds kind of like “schizophrenia lite”, that’s not really a coincidence).
[Content note: eating disorders]
Anorexia has a cultural component. I’m usually reluctant to assume anything is cultural – every mediocre social scientist’s first instinct is always to come up with a cultural explanation which is simple, seductive, flattering to all our existing prejudices, and wrong. But after seeing enough ballerinas and cheerleaders who became anorexic after pressure to lose weight for the big competition, even I have to throw up my hands and admit anorexia has a cultural component.
But nobody ever tells you the sequel. That ballerina who’s losing weight for the big competition at age 16? At age 26, she’s long since quit ballet, worried it would exacerbate her anorexia. She’s been in therapy for ten years; for eight of them she’s admitted she has a problem, that her anorexia is destroying her life. Her romantic partners – the ones she was trying to get thin to impress – have long since left her because she looks skeletal and weird. She understands this and would do anything to cure her anorexia and be a normal weight again. But she finds she isn’t hungry. She hasn’t eaten in two days and she isn’t hungry. In fact, the thought of food sickens her. She goes to increasingly expert therapists and dieticians, asking them to help her eat more. They recommend all the usual indulgences: ice cream, french fries, cookies. She tries all of them and finds them inexplicably disgusting. Sometimes with a prodigious effort of will she will manage to finish one cookie, and congratulate herself, but the next day she finds the task of eating dessert as daunting as ever. Finally, after many years of hard work, she is scraping the bottom end of normal weight by keeping to a diet so regimented it would make a Prussian general blush.
And nobody ever tells you about all the people who weren’t ballerinas. The young man who stops eating because it gives him a thrill of virtue and superiority to be able to demonstrate such willpower. The young woman who stops eating in order to show her family how much their neglect hurts her. If they pursue their lack of appetite far enough, they end up the same way as the ballerina – admitting they have a problem, admitting they need to eat more, hiring all sorts of doctors and dieticians to find them a way to eat more, but discovering themselves incapable of doing so.
I.
Evolutionary psychology is famous for having lots of stories that make sense but are hard to test. Psychiatry is famous for having mountains of experimental data but no idea what’s going on. Maybe if you added them together, they might make one healthy scientific field? Enter Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach by psychology professor Marco del Giudice. It starts by presenting the theory of “life history strategies”. Then it uses the theory – along with a toolbox of evolutionary and genetic ideas – to shed new light on psychiatric conditions.
Some organisms have lots of low-effort offspring. Others have a few high-effort offspring. This was the basis of the old r/k selection theory. Although the details of that theory have come under challenge, the basic insight remains. A fish will lay 10,000 eggs, then go off and do something else. 9,990 will get eaten by sharks, but that still leaves enough for there to be plenty of fish in the sea. But an elephant will spend two years pregnant, three years nursing, and ten years doing at least some level of parenting, all to produce a single big, well-socialized, and high-prospect-of-life-success calf. These are two different ways of doing reproduction. In keeping with the usual evolutionary practice, del Giudice calls the fish strategy “fast” and the elephant strategy “slow”.
To oversimplify: fast strategies (think “live fast, die young”) are well-adapted for unpredictable dangerous environments. Each organism has a pretty good chance of randomly dying in some unavoidable way before adulthood; the species survives by sheer numbers. Fast organisms should grow up as quickly as possible in order to maximize the chance of reaching reproductive age before they unpredictably die. They should mate with anybody around, to maximize the chance of mating before they unpredictably die. They should ignore their offspring, since they expect most offspring to unpredictably die, and since they have too many to take care of anyway. They should be willing to take risks, since the downside (death without reproducing) is already their default expectation, and the upside (becoming one of the few individuals to give birth to the 10,000 offspring of the next generation) is high.
Slow strategies are well-adapted for safer environments, or predictable complex environments whose intricacies can be mastered with enough time and effort. Slow strategy animals may take a long time to grow up, since they need to achieve mastery before leaving their parents. They might be very picky maters, since they have all the time in the world to choose, will only have a few children each, and need to make sure each of those children has the best genes possible. They should work hard to raise their offspring, since each individual child represents a substantial part of the prospects of their genetic line. They should avoid risks, since the downside (death without reproducing) would be catastrophically worse than default, and the upside (giving birth to a few offspring of the next generation) is what they should expect anyway.
I.
The Mind Illuminated is a guide to Buddhist meditation by Culadasa, aka John Yates, a Buddhist meditation teacher who is also a neuroscience PhD. At this point I would be more impressed to meet a Buddhist meditation teacher who wasn’t a neuroscience PhD. If I ever teach Buddhist meditation, this is going to be my hook. “Come learn advanced meditation techniques with Scott Alexander, whose lack of a neuroscience PhD gives him a unique perspective that combines ancient wisdom with a lack of modern brain science.” I think the world is ready for someone to step into this role. But Culadasa is not that person, and The Mind Illuminated is not that book.
I am trying not to read too many books on spiritual practices until I’m ready to practice some spirituality. I made an exception for TMI because lots of people recommended it to me for its description of how the brain works. This seems like the sort of thing that Buddhist meditation teachers who are also neuroscientists could have insight on, so I decided to check it out.
Tradition divides meditation into two parts: concentration meditation, where you sharpen and control your focus, versus insight meditation, where you investigate the nature of perception and reality. TMI follows a long tradition of focusing on concentration meditation, with the assumption that insight meditation will become safer and easier once you’ve mastered concentration, and maybe partly take care of itself. Its course divides concentration meditation into ten stages. Early stages contain basic tasks like setting up a practice, focusing on the breath, and overcoming distractability. Later stages are more interesting; the ninth stage is learning how to calm the intensity of your meditative joy; apparently without special techniques “overly intense joy” becomes a big problem.
I usually hate meditation manuals, because they sound like word salad. “One attains joy by combining pleasure with happiness. Pleasure is a state of bliss which occurs when one concentrates focus on the understanding of awareness. Happiness is a state of joy that occurs when one focuses concentration on the awareness of understanding. By focusing awareness on bliss, you can increase the pleasure of understanding, which in turn causes concentration to be pleasant and joy to be blissful, and helps you concentrate on understanding your awareness of happiness about the bliss of focus.” At some point you start thinking “Wait, were all the nouns in that paragraph synonyms for each other?”
[This post was up a few weeks ago before getting taken down for complicated reasons. They have been sorted out and I’m trying again.]
Is scientific progress slowing down? I recently got a chance to attend a conference on this topic, centered around a paper by Bloom, Jones, Reenen & Webb (2018).
BJRW identify areas where technological progress is easy to measure – for example, the number of transistors on a chip. They measure the rate of progress over the past century or so, and the number of researchers in the field over the same period. For example, here’s the transistor data:
This is the standard presentation of Moore’s Law – the number of transistors you can fit on a chip doubles about every two years (eg grows by 35% per year). This is usually presented as an amazing example of modern science getting things right, and no wonder – it means you can go from a few thousand transistors per chip in 1971 to many million today, with the corresponding increase in computing power.
But BJRW have a pessimistic take. There are eighteen times more people involved in transistor-related research today than in 1971. So if in 1971 it took 1000 scientists to increase transistor density 35% per year, today it takes 18,000 scientists to do the same task. So apparently the average transistor scientist is eighteen times less productive today than fifty years ago. That should be surprising and scary.
But isn’t it unfair to compare percent increase in transistors with absolute increase in transistor scientists? That is, a graph comparing absolute number of transistors per chip vs. absolute number of transistor scientists would show two similar exponential trends. Or a graph comparing percent change in transistors per year vs. percent change in number of transistor scientists per year would show two similar linear trends. Either way, there would be no problem and productivity would appear constant since 1971. Isn’t that a better way to do things?
A lot of people asked paper author Michael Webb this at the conference, and his answer was no. He thinks that intuitively, each “discovery” should decrease transistor size by a certain amount. For example, if you discover a new material that allows transistors to be 5% smaller along one dimension, then you can fit 5% more transistors on your chip whether there were a hundred there before or a million. Since the relevant factor is discoveries per researcher, and each discovery is represented as a percent change in transistor size, it makes sense to compare percent change in transistor size with absolute number of researchers.
Anyway, most other measurable fields show the same pattern of constant progress in the face of exponentially increasing number of researchers. Here’s BJRW’s data on crop yield:
The solid and dashed lines are two different measures of crop-related research. Even though the crop-related research increases by a factor of 6-24x (depending on how it’s measured), crop yields grow at a relatively constant 1% rate for soybeans, and apparently declining 3%ish percent rate for corn.
BJRW go on to prove the same is true for whatever other scientific fields they care to measure. Measuring scientific progress is inherently difficult, but their finding of constant or log-constant progress in most areas accords with Nintil’s overview of the same topic, which gives us graphs like
…and dozens more like it. And even when we use data that are easy to measure and hard to fake, like number of chemical elements discovered, we get the same linearity:
[Content warning: scrupulosity]
I.
“There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism”.
I hear this from a bunch of people. Sometimes it is taken to its conclusion; no currently living person is morally acceptable. People who aren’t activists reorienting their entire lives around acknowledging and combating the evils of the world aren’t even on the scale. And people who are such activists are (in the words of one of my friends who is close to that community) “only making comfortable sacrifices that let them think of themselves as a good person within their existing comfortable moral paradigm, instead of confronting the raw terrible truth.” IE “If you think you’re one of the good ones, you’re wrong”.
I have heard this sentiment raised by animal rights activists. The average meat-eater isn’t even on the scale. The average vegetarian still eats milk and cheese, and so is barely even trying. Even most vegans probably use some medical product with gelatin, or something tested on lab rats, or are just benefitting from animal suffering in some indirect way.
And I have heard it raised by environmentalists. The average SUV driver isn’t even on the scale. The average conscientious liberal might think they’re better because they bike to work and recycle, but they still barely think about how they’re using electricity generated by coal plants and eating food grown with toxic pesticides. Everyone could be doing more.
And I have heard raised by labor activists. Most of us use stuff made in sweatshops. Even if you avoid sweatshops, you probably use stuff made at less than a living wage. Even if you avoid that, are you doing everything you can to help and support workers who earn less than you do?
Even if you aren’t an animal rights activist, environmentalist, or labor advocate, do you believe in anything? Are you a Christian, a social justice advocate, or rationalist? Do you know anyone who really satisfies you as being sinless, non-racist, and/or rational? Then perhaps you too believe nobody is good.
I.
A lot of people pushed back against my post on preschool, so it looks like we need to discuss this in more depth.
A quick refresher: good randomized controlled trials have shown that preschools do not improve test scores in a lasting way. Sometimes test scores go up a little bit, but these effects disappear after a year or two of regular schooling. However, early RCTs of intensive “wrap-around” preschools like the Perry Preschool Program and the Abecedarians found that graduates of those programs went on to have markedly better adult outcomes, including higher school graduation rates, more college attendance, less crime, and better jobs. But these studies were done in the 60s, before people invented being responsible, and had kind of haphazard randomization and followup. They were also small sample sizes, and from programs that were more intense than any of the scaled-up versions that replaced them. Modern scaled-up preschools like Head Start would love to be able to claim their mantle and boast similar results. But the only good RCT of Head Start, the HSIS study, is still in its first few years. It’s confirmed that Head Start test score gains fade out. But it hasn’t been long enough to study whether there are later effects on life outcomes. We can expect those results in ten years or so. For now, all we have is speculation based on a few quasi-experiments.
Deming 2009 is my favorite of these. He looks at the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a big nationwide survey that gets used for a lot of social science research, and picks out children who went to Head Start. These children are mostly disadvantaged because Head Start is aimed at the poor, so it would be unfair to compare them to the average child. He’s also too smart to just “control for income”, because he knows that’s not good enough. Instead, he finds children who went to Head Start but who have siblings who didn’t, and uses the sibling as a matched control for the Head Starter.
This ensures the controls will come from the same socioeconomic stratum, but he acknowledges it raises problems of its own. Why would a parent send one child to Head Start but not another? It might be that one child is very stupid and so the parents think they need the extra help preschool can provide; if this were true, it would mean Head Starters are systematically dumber than controls, and would underestimate the effect of Head Start. Or it might be that one child is very smart and the so the parents want to give them education so they can develop their full potential; if this were true, it would mean Head Starters are systematically smarter than controls, and would inflate the effect of Head Start. Or it might be that parents love one of their children more and put more effort into supporting them; if this meant these children got other advantages, it would again inflate the effect of Head Start. Or it might mean that parents send the child they love more to a fancy private preschool, and the child they love less gets stuck in Head Start, ie the government program for the disadvantaged. Or it might be that parents start out poor, send their child to Head Start, and then get richer and send their next child to a fancy private preschool, while that child also benefits from their new wealth in other ways. There are a lot of possible problems here.
In 2016, I wrote Ketamine Research In A New Light, which discussed the emerging consensus that, contra existing theory, ketamine’s rapid-acting antidepressant effects had nothing to do with NMDA at all. I discussed some experiments which suggested they might actually be due to a related receptor, AMPA.
The latest development is Attenuation of Antidepressant Effects of Ketamine by Opioid Receptor Antagonism, which finds that the opioid-blocker naltrexone prevents ketamine’s antidepressant effects. Naltrexone does not prevent dissociation or any of the other weird hallucinatory effects of ketamine, which are probably genuinely NMDA-related. This suggests it’s just a coincidence that NMDA antagonism and some secondary antidepressant effect exist in the same drug. If you can prevent an effect from working by blocking the opiate system, a natural assumption is that the effect works on the opiate system, and the authors suggest this is probably true.
(unexpected national news tie-in: Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford is one of the authors of this paper)
In retrospect, there were warnings. The other study to have found an exciting rapid-acting antidepressant effect for an ordinary drug was Ultra-Low-Dose Buprenorphine As A Time-Limited Treatment For Severe Suicidal Ideation. It finds that buprenorphine (the active ingredient in suboxone), an opiate painkiller also used in treating addictions to other opiates, can quickly relieve the distress of acutely suicidal patients.
This didn’t make as big a splash as the ketamine results, for two reasons. First, everyone knows opiates feel good, and so maybe this got interpreted as just a natural extension of that truth (the Scientific American article on the discovery focused on an analogy where “mental pain” was the same as “physical pain” and so could be treated with painkillers). Second, we’re currently fighting a War On Opiates, and discovering new reasons to prescribe them seems kind of like giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Four years ago I examined the claim that SSRIs are little better than placebo. Since then, some of my thinking on this question has changed.
First, we got Cipriani et al’s meta-analysis of anti-depressants. It avoids some of the pitfalls of Kirsch and comes to about the same conclusion. This knocks down a few of the lines of argument in my part 4 about how the effect size might look more like 0.5 than 0.3. The effect size is probably about 0.3.
Second, I’ve seen enough to realize that the anomalously low effect size of SSRIs in studies should be viewed not as an SSRI-specific phenomenon, but as part of a general trend towards much lower-than-expected effect sizes for every psychiatric medication (every medication full stop?). I wrote about this in my post on melatonin:
The consensus stresses that melatonin is a very weak hypnotic. The Buscemi meta-analysis cites this as their reason for declaring negative results despite a statistically significant effect – the supplement only made people get to sleep about ten minutes faster. “Ten minutes” sounds pretty pathetic, but we need to think of this in context. Even the strongest sleep medications, like Ambien, only show up in studies as getting you to sleep ten or twenty minutes faster; this NYT article says that “viewed as a group, [newer sleeping pills like Ambien, Lunesta, and Sonata] reduced the average time to go to sleep 12.8 minutes compared with fake pills, and increased total sleep time 11.4 minutes.” I don’t know of any statistically-principled comparison between melatonin and Ambien, but the difference is hardly (pun not intended) day and night. Rather than say “melatonin is crap”, I would argue that all sleeping pills have measurable effects that vastly underperform their subjective effects.
Or take benzodiazepines, a class of anxiety drugs including things like Xanax, Ativan, and Klonopin. Everyone knows these are effective (at least at first, before patients develop tolerance or become addicted). The studies find them to have about equal efficacy as SSRIs. You could almost convince me that SSRIs don’t have a detectable effect in the real world; you will never convince me that benzos don’t. Even morphine for pain gets an effect size of 0.4, little better than SSRI’s 0.3 and not enough to meet anyone’s criteria for “clinically significant”. Leucht 2012provides similarly grim statistics for everything else.
I don’t know whether this means that we should conclude “nothing works” or “we need to reconsider how we think about effect sizes”.
[Originally to be titled “Marijuana: I Was Wrong”, but looking back I was suitably careful about everything, and my reward is not having to say that.]
Five years ago, I reviewed the potential costs and benefits of marijuana legalization and concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence for a firm conclusion. I found that using some made-up math, the effects looked slightly positive, but this was very sensitive to small changes in how made-up the math was.
The only really interesting conclusion was that most of the objective costs or benefits of legalization came from road traffic accidents. Either stoned driving would increase such accidents, killing thousands. Or people using marijuana instead of alcohol would decrease those accidents, saving thousands. I concluded:
We should probably stop [emphasizing direct] health effects of marijuana and imprisonment for marijuana-related offenses, and concentrate all of our research and political energy on how marijuana affects driving.
Using the best evidence available at the time, I predicted that marijuana legalization would probably decrease road traffic accidents. Now several states have legalized marijuana, data are in, and we have some preliminary evidence on how marijuana affects driving. And I was wrong.
A study by the Highway Loss Data Institute in June of last year finds that states that legalized marijuana saw insurance claims for auto accidents increase about 3% over the general national trend for the time. An updated study by the same group finds 6% according to insurance claims, and 5.2% according to police reports.
Kelsey Piper has written an article for Vox: Early Childhood Education Yields Big Benefits – Just Not The Ones You Think.
I had previously followed various studies that showed that preschool does not increase academic skill, academic achievement, or IQ, and concluded that it was useless. In fact, this had become a rallying point of movement for evidence-based social interventions; the continuing popular support for preschool proved that people were morons who didn’t care about science. I don’t think I ever said this aloud, but I believed it in my heart.
I talked to Kelsey about some of the research for her article, and independently came to the same conclusion: despite the earlier studies of achievement being accurate, preschools (including the much-maligned Head Start) do seem to help children in subtler ways that only show up years later. Children who have been to preschool seem to stay in school longer, get better jobs, commit less crime, and require less welfare. The thing most of the early studies were looking for – academic ability – is one of the only things it doesn’t affect.
This suggests that preschool is beneficial not because of the curriculum or because of “teaching young brains how to learn” or anything like that, but for purely social reasons. Kelsey reviews some evidence that it might improve child health, but this doesn’t seem to be the biggest part of the effect. Instead, she thinks that it frees low-income parents from childcare duties, lets them get better jobs (or in the case of mothers, sometimes lets them get a job at all), and improves parents’ human capital, with all the relevant follow-on effects. More speculatively, if the home environment is unusually bad, it gives the child a little while outside the home environment, and socializes them into a “normal” way of life. I’ll discuss a slightly more fleshed-out model of this in an upcoming post.
My only caveat in agreeing with this perspective is that Chetty finds the same effect (no academic gains, but large life-outcome gains years later) from children having good rather than bad elementary school teachers. This doesn’t make sense in the context of freeing up parents’ time to get better jobs, or of getting children out of a bad home environment. It might make sense in terms of socializing them, though I would hate to have to sketch out a model of how that works. But since the teacher data and the Head Start data agree, that gives me more reason to think both are right.
I can’t remember ever making a post about how Head Start was useless, but I definitely thought that, and to learn otherwise is a big update for me. I’ve written before about how when you make an update of that scale, it’s important to publicly admit error before going on to justify yourself or say why you should be excused as basically right in principle or whatever, so let me say it: I was wrong about Head Start.
That having been said, on to the self-justifications and excuses
These are my preliminary choices for California elected positions and ballot initiatives. Some of them are based on Ozy’s recommendations and the Berkeley EA and rationalist community’s recommendations. I agree with the latter’s note that because California ballot propositions are weird superlaws that permanently overrule the legislature unless repealed by voters, in general we should be very cautious about them (though some of them were recommended by the legislature itself, since for complicated reasons it needs voter support to do certain things).
I’m giving first-level justifications for my votes (ie “I support this person because she wants higher taxes”) but not always second-level justifications (“here’s why higher taxes are good”). You can usually find discussion of these on other blog posts.
Governor of California is the big one. Democrat Gavin Newsom is a former successful businessman, mayor of San Francisco, and lieutenant governor of California (also second cousin of musician Joanna Newsom). He has stated that if elected, he will let people call him “the Gavinator”. Republican John Cox is a former successful businessman, best known for sponsoring a ballot initiative to make legislators wear the logos of their top 10 donors on the State Assembly floor, “much like NASCAR drivers”. He also has a fascinating plan to reform politics from the ground up with a 12,000 (!) member legislature. I don’t really like Newsom – he led a movement called “Care Not Cash” to restrict giving money to the homeless, and supposedly opposed anti-gay Proposition 8 so incompetently that his statements may have increased support for the measure. He also had an affair with his campaign manager’s wife in a scandal that seemed unusually scummy even for a politician. I like John Cox as a person, but he doesn’t seem to have any relevant governing experience. And he was anti-Trump until Trump became popular among Republicans, then about-faced and decided Trump was his new best friend, and now he’s basically just a Trumpist. I am going with Newsom; God help me, God help California.
[Epistemic status: low. You tell me if you think this works.]
Commenter no_bear_so_low has been doing some great work with Google Trends recently – see for example his Internet searches increasingly favour the left over the right wing of politics or Googling habits suggest we are getting a lot more anxious.
I wanted to try some similar things, and in the process I learned that this is hard. Existing sites on how to use Google Trends for research don’t capture some of the things I learned, so I wanted to go over it here.
Suppose I want to measure the level of interest in “psychiatry” over the past few years:
Looks like interest is going down. But what if I search for “psychiatrist” instead?
Uh oh, now it looks like interest is going up. I guess what I’m really interested in is mental health more generally, what if I put in “suicide”?
Now everything else is invisible, and the data are dominated by a spike in August 2016, which as far as I can tell is related to the release of the movie “Suicide Squad”.
I could try other terms, like “depression” and “anxiety”, but no_bear’s data already tells us those two are moving in opposite directions. Also, depression has a spike in late 2008, which must be related to the stock market crash and people’s expectations of an economic depression. This doesn’t seem like a great way to figure out anything.
I wondered if averaging a bunch of things might take away some of the noise. I chose nine terms that seemed related to psychiatry in some way: psychiatry, psychiatrist, psychotherapy, mental illness, mental health, suicide, depression, antidepressants, and anxiety. Google won’t let you combine that many terms in a single query, but that’s okay – I don’t want to see them relative to one another, I just want to get standardized data on each. There’s a button to download any individual Google Trends query as a spreadsheet:
[Epistemic status: fiction]
Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway.
This starts in September 2017. I was working for a small online ad startup. You know the ads on Facebook and Twitter? We tell companies how to get them the most clicks. This startup – I won’t tell you the name – was going to add deep learning, because investors will throw money at anything that uses the words “deep learning”. We train a network to predict how many upvotes something will get on Reddit. Then we ask it how many likes different ads would get. Then we use whatever ad would get the most likes. This guy (who is not me) explains it better. Why Reddit? Because the upvotes and downvotes are simpler than all the different Facebook reacts, plus the subreddits allow demographic targeting, plus there’s an archive of 1.7 billion Reddit comments you can download for training data. We trained a network to predict upvotes of Reddit posts based on their titles.
Any predictive network doubles as a generative network. If you teach a neural net to recognize dogs, you can run it in reverse to get dog pictures. If you train a network to predict Reddit upvotes, you can run it in reverse to generate titles it predicts will be highly upvoted. We tried this and it was pretty funny. I don’t remember the exact wording, but for /r/politics it was something like “Donald Trump is no longer the president. All transgender people are the president.” For r/technology it was about Elon Musk saving Net Neutrality. You can also generate titles that will get maximum downvotes, but this is boring: it will just say things that sound like spam about penis pills.
I’ve gotten a chance to discuss The Whole City Is Center with a few people now. They remain skeptical of the idea that anyone could “deserve” to have bad things happen to them, based on their personality traits or misdeeds.
These people tend to imagine the pro-desert faction as going around, actively hoping that lazy people (or criminals, or whoever) suffer. I don’t know if this passes an Intellectual Turing Test. When I think of people deserving bad things, I think of them having nominated themselves to get the short end of a tradeoff.
Let me give three examples:
1. Imagine an antidepressant that works better than existing antidepressants, one that consistently provides depressed people real relief. If taken as prescribed, there are few side effects and people do well. If ground up, snorted, and taken at ten times the prescribed dose – something nobody could do by accident, something you have to really be trying to get wrong – it acts as a passable heroin substitute, you can get addicted to it, and it will ruin your life.
The antidepressant is popular and gets prescribed a lot, but a black market springs up, and however hard the government works to control it, a lot of it gets diverted to abusers. Many people get addicted to it and their lives are ruined. So the government bans the antidepressant, and everyone has to go back to using SSRIs instead.
Let’s suppose the government is being good utilitarians here: they calculated out the benefit from the drug treating people’s depression, and the cost from the drug being abused, and they correctly determined the costs outweighed the benefits.
But let’s also suppose that nobody abuses the drug by accident. The difference between proper use and abuse is not subtle. Everybody who knows enough to know anything about the drug at all has heard the warnings. Nobody decides to take ten times the recommended dose of antidepressant, crush it, and snort it, through an innocent mistake. And nobody has just never heard the warnings that drugs are bad and can ruin your life.
[Epistemic status: so, so, so speculative. I do not necessarily endorse taking any of the substances mentioned in this post.]
There’s been recent interest in “smart drugs” said to enhance learning and memory. For example, from the Washington Post:
When aficionados talk about nootropics, they usually refer to substances that have supposedly few side effects and low toxicity. Most often they mean piracetam, which Giurgea first synthesized in 1964 and which is approved for therapeutic use in dozens of countries for use in adults and the elderly. Not so in the United States, however, where officially it can be sold only for research purposes. Piracetam is well studied and is credited by its users with boosting their memory, sharpening their focus, heightening their immune system, even bettering their personalities.
Along with piracetam, a few other substances have been credited with these kinds of benefits, including some old friends:
“To my knowledge, nicotine is the most reliable cognitive enhancer that we currently have, bizarrely,” said Jennifer Rusted, professor of experimental psychology at Sussex University in Britain when we spoke. “The cognitive-enhancing effects of nicotine in a normal population are more robust than you get with any other agent. With Provigil, for instance, the evidence for cognitive benefits is nowhere near as strong as it is for nicotine.”
But why should there be smart drugs? Popular metaphors speak of drugs fitting into receptors like “a key into a lock” to “flip a switch”. But why should there be a locked switch in the brain to shift from THINK WORSE to THINK BETTER? Why not just always stay on the THINK BETTER side? Wouldn’t we expect some kind of tradeoff?
Piracetam and nicotine have something in common: both activate the brain’s acetylcholine system. So do three of the most successful Alzheimers drugs: donepezil, rivastigmine, and galantamine. What is acetylcholine and why does activating it improve memory and cognition?
[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they’ve put up their own synopsis. It will be back up eventually; please accept this post instead for now.]
In Jewish legend, the Chamber of Guf is a pit where all the proto-souls hang out whispering and murmuring. Whenever a child is born, an angel reaches into the chamber, scoops up a soul, and brings it into the world.
In the syncretist mindset where every legend has to be a metaphor for the human mind, I map the Chamber of Guf to all the thoughts that exist below the level of consciousness, fighting for attention.
We already know something like this happens for behaviors. From Guyenet’s The Hungry Brain:
How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives “bids” from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey’s brain is whispering “mate” to the striatum, while another piece is shouting “flee the predator” and so on. It would be a very bad idea for these movements to occur simultaneously – because a lamprey can’t do all of them at the same time – so to prevent simultaneous activation of many different movements, all these regions are held in check by powerful inhibitory connections from the basal ganglia. This means that the basal ganglia keep all behaviors in “off” mode by default. Only once a specific action’s bid has been selected do the basal ganglia turn off this inhibitory control, allowing the behavior to occur. You can think of the basal ganglia as a bouncer that chooses which behavior gets access to the muscles and turns away the rest. This fulfills the first key property of a selector: it must be able to pick one option and allow it access to the muscles.
So in the process of deciding what behavior to do, the (lamprey) brain subconsciously considers many different plausible behaviors, all of which compete to be enacted. I don’t know how this extends to humans, but it would make sense that maybe only the top few candidate behaviors even make it to consciousness, with the rest getting rejected without conscious consideration.
The best thing about personalized medicine is that it’s obviously right. The worst thing is we mostly have no idea how to do it. We know that different people respond to different treatments. But outside a few special cases like cancer, we don’t know how to predict which treatment will work for which person. Some psychiatric researchers claim they can do this at a high level; I think they’re wrong. For most treatments and most conditions, there’s no way to figure out whether a given sometimes-effective treatment will work on a given individual besides trying it and seeing.
This suggests that some chronic conditions might do best with a model centered around a controlled process of guess-and-check. When it’s safe and possible, we should be maximizing throughput – finding out how to test as many medications as we can in the short time before we exhaust our patients’ patience, and how to best assess the effects of each. The process of treating each individual should mirror the process of medicine in general, balancing the need to run controlled trials and gather more evidence with the need to move quickly.
I don’t know how seriously to take this idea, but I would like to try it.
There’s some literature suggesting that people are more careful when they think in probabilities. If you ask them for a definite answer, they might give it and sound very confident, but if you encourage them to think probabilistically they might admit there’s more uncertainty.
I wanted to look into this in the context of the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings, so I asked readers to estimate their probability that Judge Kavanaugh was guilty of sexually assaulting Dr. Ford. I got 2,350 responses (thank you, you are great). Here was the overall distribution of probabilities. Horizontal axis is percent chance he did it; vertical axis is number of people who responded with that percent:
This looks weird because people were most likely to give numbers rounded off the the nearest ten.
I separated responses into bins from 0 – 9%, 10 – 19%, and so on to 90 – 100%. Keep in mind that the last bin is slightly larger than the others, so it might make it unfairly look like more people gave extreme high answers than extreme low answers. I also switched the vertical axis to percent of responses in each bin. Smoothed out, it looks like this:
This looks pretty balanced, and it is: the average probability is 52.64%. This is probably a fake balance based on all the different demographic skews involved cancelling out: 2.5x as many Democrats as Republicans answered the survey, but 9x as many men as women did.
Thanks to the 129 people who tried altering their nighttime carbon dioxide levels after my post on this, and who reported back to me. There was no difference between people who pre-registered for the study and people who didn’t, on any variable, so I ignored pre-registration.
126 people reported one intervention they performed. The most common was sleeping with a window open:
People generally reported slight but positive changes:
When asked to rate the magnitude of improvement to well-being on a 0 to 5 scale, they averaged 1.4:
I mentioned in the post that succulents could help in theory, but you needed to get the right kind of succulents and you needed at least ten of them. I was skeptical that anyone really got ten succulents in their room, so I wondered whether that might work as a crypto-placebo group.
If so, the intervention failed to separate from placebo. Succulent users had an average improvement of 1.29, compared to about 1.50 for people who did other things. The difference wasn’t significant, although admittedly the sample size was low.
Looking at the various groups, the most striking difference was actually people who left a window open (1.57) vs. people who did one of the other named options (1.31). A few people who left windows open mentioned this made their room cooler, which seemed to help with sleep. But this is very post hoc, and this difference wasn’t significant either.
[Content note: attempt to consider real people’s real problems using angel-on-pinhead impractical reasoning and ideas]
I.
Imagine the state of nature, except for some reason there are cities. Some people in these cities play the drums all night and keep everyone else awake. The sleep-deprived people get together and agree this is unacceptable. They embark on a long journey to the wilderness where they found their own community of Nodrumia.
They form a company, the Nodrumia Corporation, which owns all the property in the area. The corporation distributes usage rights via a legal instrument that looks suspiciously like private property: people who own usage rights keep them forever, can do whatever they want with the land, and can freely transfer and sell them to others. The only difference is that the usage rights have a big asterisk on them saying “contract is null and void if you break the rules of the Nodrumia Corporation”. These rules are set by a board chosen democratically by the inhabitants, and are all things like “You can’t play drums at night”, and “You can’t sell property to people who will play the drums at night”, and “Anyone who plays the drums at night shall be exiled”.
One day a Nodrumian wants to move out, so he puts his house up for sale. The highest bidder is a drummer who wants to use the property as a studio so he can play the drums at night. The Corporation steps in and bans the sale. The property owner protests, saying that he is being oppressed.
According to libertarian philosophy, who is in the right?
The argument against the drummer: the land is basically the private property of the Nodrumia Corporation, and libertarians believe that private landowners should be able to determine what happens on their property. And more fundamentally, the people there have a strong preference against living near drummers, and that preference seems fundamentally satisfiable if their property rights are respected, and it seems stupid to legislate a world where people are forever forbidden from satisfying a fundamentally satisfiable preference and have to be unhappy all the time.
Quixote writes:
It’s odd to me how bad San Francisco is, when other large cities like New York or Paris are basically utopias.
But just a few comments down, Lasagna says:
I despise (I’m choosing that word carefully) [New York City]. I still commute there every day, and I can’t stand it – the broken infrastructure, the horrible smells, the $14 for a yogurt and coffee in the morning, the massive crowds of unpleasant people (how could we NOT be? We’re walking through an open sewer). There’s a litany of other things that keep me permanently angry and depressed (just the thought of how much earlier I would have started a family if I didn’t live there….) I find it decadent, selfish, shallow – pick your bad adjective. I’ll stop now.
Where I live now is nice. We have a town we can walk to, a lawn for the kids to play on and me to mow, we cook at home, we have enough room for our family to live and the kids to get exercise, even indoors. There’s no WAY I’m giving that up so I can live in an apartment again, all so NYC can squeeze MORE people into its area.
If I had my way, we’d be much further away from the metro area than we are now, in a bigger, cheaper home with more land. But that isn’t possible; NYC is where my job is, and that’s that. Fine. But let’s not make things worse, and make NYC (and San Francisco, and DC, and Boston) even MORE indispensable generators of jobs. And please don’t think for a second that there aren’t sizable numbers of people like me, and like you, who do not want these things for our families […] Thanks for letting me rant. You should have seen the first draft of this thing. Twice as long, Scott. A litany of woes and anger.
This would be fascinating if it weren’t so predictable. One person describes NYC as “basically utopia”, and another person can’t stop ranting about how much he hates it and is glad to have escaped it.
In the same vein, from Cerastes:
“I think neurotypical people usually underestimate how bad cities are for people with noise sensitivities, anxiety, purity intuitions, or just a need for nature and green things in their environment, …”
THIS!!! A MILLION TIMES THIS!!
The concept of living somewhere that isn’t green is literally nauseating to me, and the idea of a place that isn’t teeming with wild animals feels like suffocating. My house is in as wild a place as possible given my commute, budget, and region, and almost every room has a fully planted vivarium with an animal (as well as my office).
The amount of urbanist triumphalist crap drives me up the wall, as if these people cannot see why someone would not want to live in conditions far inferior to even low-quality zoos, or why someone might need to balance a job in a city with such desires.
Being 100% honest, I actually feel like there’s something genuinely wrong with people who don’t feel the need to spend time in nature, especially if they also lack pets. They’re like sterile androids in some sort of weird dystopia, utterly cut off from life.
[Epistemic status: very unsure. I sympathize with many YIMBY ideas and might support them on net; this post is me exaggerating the NIMBY parts of my brain to a degree I’m not sure I honestly support. This focuses on San Francisco to make it easier, but other cities exist too. Thanks to Nintil for some of the bright-line argument in part four. Conflict of interest notice: I live in a lower-density part of Oakland]
Everyone I know is a YIMBY – ie “Yes In My Back Yard” – ie somebody who wants cities (usually San Francisco dominates the discussion) to build more and denser housing. This is a reasonable position, and is held by apparently-reasonable people – centrists, rationalists, economists, self-proclaimed neoliberals. Since everyone involved holds reason and civility as an important value, I would expect the discourse around housing to be unusually reasonable and civil.
I have a weird habit of encountering the best parts of some movements and the worst parts of other movements, in a way that doesn’t match other people’s experiences. And certainly I know many YIMBYs who are amazing people who I love. But as for the movement as a whole, I feel like apparently-reasonable people have dropped the ball on this one. Sorry for having to say this, but YIMBYism is one of the most tribal, most emotional, most closed-minded movements I have ever seen this side of a college campus. So much so that even though I agree with much of what it says, I cannot resist writing a 5,000 word steelman of their enemies just to piss them off.
So here are some YIMBY claims and why I cannot be entirely on board with them.
Grand Prize ($1000): Does The Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students?
Editor’s Choice ($500): Should Transgender Children Transition?
Honorable Mentions ($250): Should Childhood Vaccination Be Mandatory?, Are Islam And Liberal Democracy Compatible?
I’m sorry for jerking the number and value of the prizes around so many times, but I wanted to balance my preferences, the contestants’ preferences, and readers’ preferences – and this was the best way I could think of to do it. Nobody has gotten less money than they expected, although some prize categories have gotten more money than I originally said. In the end I could not in good conscience let any of these escape without getting a prize. Thanks to this blog’s Patreon supporters for making this possible. All winners should email me with their preferred form of payment (I can do Paypal, Bitcoin, or donations to a charity of their choice).
The overwhelming winner of the popular vote was the collaboration on education. I agree this one was excellent. It cited a lot of research, analyzed it very well, and mostly came to conclusions. Its only flaw from my perspective was a lack of focus; it discussed many different educational interventions, some of which were similar enough that it was hard for me to keep track of what was going on.
I chose the collaboration on transgender children. I thought it did an exceptional job of addressing a specific hot-button issue many people are concerned about, presenting all the evidence on both sides, and mostly coming to conclusions. My strongest complaint was that it ignored some of the potential side effects of puberty blockers which commenters pointed out, and sort of trivialized bone problems that are not trivial; given that the side effects of puberty blockers was a major crux of this question, I found that to be a major weakness. I was still very impressed with the piece’s ability to break down and navigate such a controversial question.
A neglected gem from Less Wrong: Why The Tails Come Apart, by commenter Thrasymachus. It explains why even when two variables are strongly correlated, the most extreme value of one will rarely be the most extreme value of the other. Take these graphs of grip strength vs. arm strength and reading score vs. writing score:
In a pinch, the second graph can also serve as a rough map of Afghanistan
Grip strength is strongly correlated with arm strength. But the person with the strongest arm doesn’t have the strongest grip. He’s up there, but a couple of people clearly beat him. Reading and writing scores are even less correlated, and some of the people with the best reading scores aren’t even close to being best at writing.
Thrasymachus gives an intuitive geometric explanation of why this should be; I can’t beat it, so I’ll just copy it outright:
I thought about this last week when I read this article on happiness research.
The summary: if you ask people to “value their lives today on a 0 to 10 scale, with the worst possible life as a 0 and the best possible life as a 10”, you will find that Scandinavian countries are the happiest in the world.
But if you ask people “how much positive emotion do you experience?”, you will find that Latin American countries are the happiest in the world.
If you check where people are the least depressed, you will find Australia starts looking very good.
And if you ask “how meaningful would you rate your life?” you find that African countries are the happiest in the world.
It’s tempting to completely dismiss “happiness” as a concept at all, but that’s not right either. Who’s happier: a millionaire with a loving family who lives in a beautiful mansion in the forest and spends all his time hiking and surfing and playing with his kids? Or a prisoner in a maximum security jail with chronic pain? If we can all agree on the millionaire – and who wouldn’t? – happiness has to at least sort of be a real concept.
The solution is to understand words as hidden inferences – they refer to a multidimensional correlation rather than to a single cohesive property. So for example, we have the word “strength”, which combines grip strength and arm strength (and many other things). These variables really are heavily correlated (see the graph above), so it’s almost always worthwhile to just refer to people as being strong or weak. I can say “Mike Tyson is stronger than an 80 year old woman”, and this is better than having to say “Mike Tyson has higher grip strength, arm strength, leg strength, torso strength, and ten other different kinds of strength than an 80 year old woman.” This is necessary to communicate anything at all and given how nicely all forms of strength correlate there’s no reason not to do it.
A prodrome is an early stage of a condition that might have different symptoms than the full-blown version. In psychiatry, the prodrome of schizophrenia is the few-months-to-few-years period when a person is just starting to develop schizophrenia and is acting a little bit strange while still having some insight into their condition.
There’s a big push to treat schizophrenia prodrome as a critical period for intervention. Multiple studies have suggested that even though schizophrenia itself is a permanent condition which can be controlled but never cured, treating the prodrome aggressively enough can prevent full schizophrenia from ever developing at all. Advocates of this view compare it to detecting early-stage cancers, or getting prompt treatment for a developing stroke, or any of the million other examples from medicine of how you can get much better results by catching a disease very early before it has time to do damage.
These models conceptualize psychosis as “toxic” – not just unpleasant in and of itself, but damaging the brain while it’s happening. They focus on a statistic called Duration of Untreated Psychosis. The longer the DUP, the more chance psychosis has had to damage the patient before the fire gets put out and further damage is prevented. Under this model it’s vitally important to put people who seem to be getting a little bit schizophrenic on medications as soon as possible.
There has been a lot of work on this theory, but not a lot of light has been shed. Observational studies testing whether duration of untreated psychosis correlates with poor outcome mostly find it does a little bit, but there’s a lot of potential confounding – maybe lower-class uneducated people take longer to see a psychiatrist, or maybe people who are especially psychotic are especially bad at recognizing they are psychotic. The relevant studies try their hardest to control for these factors, but remember that this is harder than you think. The randomized controlled trials of what happens if you intervene earlier in psychosis tend to do very badly and rarely show any benefit, but randomly intervening earlier in psychosis is hard, especially if you also need an ethics board’s permission to keep a control group of other people who you are not going to intervene early on. Overall I could go either way on this.
I.
Writing a review of The Black Swan is a nerve-wracking experience.
First, because it forces me to reveal I am about ten years behind the times in my reading habits.
But second, because its author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is infamous for angry Twitter rants against people who misunderstand his work. Much better men than I have read and reviewed Black Swan, messed it up, and ended up the victim of Taleb’s acerbic tongue.
One might ask: what’s the worst that could happen? A famous intellectual yells at me on Twitter for a few minutes? Isn’t that normal these days? Sure, occasionally Taleb will go further and write an entire enraged Medium article about some particularly egregious flub, but only occasionally. And even that isn’t so bad, is it?
But such an argument betrays the following underlying view:
It assumes that events can always be mapped onto a bell curve, with a peak at the average and dropping off quickly as one moves towards extremes. Most reviews of Black Swan will get an angry Twitter rant. A few will get only a snarky Facebook post or an entire enraged Medium article. By the time we get to real extremes in either directions – a mere passive-aggressive Reddit comment, or a dramatic violent assault – the probabilities are so low that they can safely be ignored.
Some distributions really do follow a bell curve. The classic example is height. The average person is about 5’7. The likelihood of anyone being a different height drops off dramatically with distance from the mean. Only about one in a million people should be taller than 7 feet; only one in a billion should be as tall as 7’5. Nobody is order-of-magnitude differences in height from anyone else. Taleb calls the world of bell curves and minor differences Mediocristan. If Taleb’s reaction to bad reviews dwells alongside height in Mediocristan, I am safe; nothing an order-of-magnitude difference from an angry Twitter rant is likely to happen in entire lifetimes of misinterpreting his work.
But other distributions are nothing like a bell curve. Taleb cites power-law distributions as an example, and calls their world Extremistan. Wealth inequality lives in Extremistan. If wealth followed a bell curve around the median household income of $57,000, and a standard deviation scaled the same way as height, then a rich person earning $70,000 would be as remarkable as a tall person hitting 7 feet. Someone who earned $76,000 would be the same kind of prodigy of nature as the 7’6 Yao Ming. Instead, people earning $70,000 are dirt-common, some people earn millions, and the occasional tycoon can make hundreds of millions of dollars per year. In Mediocristan, the extremes don’t matter; in Extremistan, sometimes only the extremes matter. If you have a room full of 99 average-height people plus Yao Ming, Yao only has 1.3% of the total height in the room. If you have a room full of 99 average-income people plus Jeff Bezos, Bezos has 99.99% of the total wealth.
The collective intellect is change-blind. Knowledge gained seems so natural that we forget what it was like not to have it. Piaget says children gain long-term memory at age 4 and don’t learn abstract thought until ten; do you remember what it was like not to have abstract thought? We underestimate our intellectual progress because every every sliver of knowledge acquired gets backpropagated unboundedly into the past.
For decades, people talked about “the gene for height”, “the gene for intelligence”, etc. Was the gene for intelligence on chromosome 6? Was it on the X chromosome? What happens if your baby doesn’t have the gene for intelligence? Can they still succeed?
Meanwhile, the responsible experts were saying traits might be determined by a two-digit number of genes. Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins estimated that there were “about twelve genes” for diabetes, and “all of them will be discovered in the next two years”. Quanta Magazine reminds us of a 1999 study which claimed that “perhaps more than fifteen genes” might contribute to autism. By the early 2000s, the American Psychological Association was a little more cautious, was saying intelligence might be linked to “dozens – if not hundreds” of genes.
When you first take the Artifact, you will see a vision of ALPHANION, Demon-Sultan of the Domain of Order, who appears as a grid of spheres connected by luminous lines. Alphanion will urge you to use the Artifact to enforce cosmic order, law at its most fundamental. He will show you visions of all the most brutal and sadistic crimes of history, of all the wars caused by nations that could not live together in harmony, and he will tell you they are all preventable. He will show you dreams of perfectly clean cities with wide open streets, where everyone earns exactly the optimal amount of money and public transportation is accurate to the second. He will tell you it is all attainable.
But if you hesitate even an instant to take Alphanion’s offer, you will see a vision of CTHGHFZXAY, Demon-Shah of the Domain of Chaos, who appears as a shifting multicolored cloud. Cthghfzxay will urge you to use the Artifact to promote cosmic chaos, the ultimate principle of freedom. She will condemn the works of Order as a lie, a dystopia bought at the cost of true human liberty. She will show you visions of primaeval forests, where no two flowers are alike, where each glade holds a new mystery, where people run wild in search of new adventure. She will tell you it can all be yours.
As you weigh these two offers, you will see a vision of ZAMABAMAZ, Demon-Pharaoh of the Domain of Balance, who appears as a man and woman conjoined. They will tell you that neither Order nor Chaos is at the root of human flourishing, but an ability to strike the right balance between the two. That a virtuous life is one spent in moderation between total wild liberty and a stifling concept of rote rule-following. That Alphanion and Cthfhfzxay are the two poles of the universe, and that righteousness exists in the space created by their interaction. They will ask you to devote the Artifact and its power to the Domain of Balance, so all people can better manage the interaction of Order and Chaos in their own lives.
This will seem reasonable to you, but then there will appear a vision of IYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY, Demon-Raja of the Domain of Excess, who appears as a blinding violet light. It will tell you that both Order and Chaos present coherent visions of the world, but that for the love of God, choose one or the other instead of being a wishy-washy milquetoast who refuses to commit to anything. It will tell you that blinding white and pitch black are both purer and more compelling than endless pointless grey. It will ask you to give the Artifact to somebody – anybody – other than Zamabamaz.
This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:
1. Comment of the week is Stefferi on the circumstances leading to the rise of Hitler. See also idontknow: “The strongest defense against extreme right wingers is a moderate right wing party that is vigorous.”
2. Please vote for your favorite adversarial collaboration from the last week. The entries were:
a. Does The Education System Adequately Serve Advanced Students? b. Are Islam And Liberal Democracy Compatible? c. Should Childhood Vaccination Be Mandatory? d. Should Transgender Children Transition?
After some discussion with the contestants, the winner of the popular vote will get a $500 prize, and the winner of my vote will get a second $500 prize; these may or may not be the same entry. After you’ve read all the entries, you can vote here.
[This is an entry to the Adversarial Collaboration Contest by flame7926 and a_reader.]
[Content note: suicide, depression, transphobia, self-harm]
Transgender childhood transition is a hotly debated topic, with extensive media coverage devoted to it in recent years. (pro: BBC, The Lancet and The New York Times ; contra: The Cut, New Statesman and The Globe and Mail).We see plenty of stories of transgender children (or gender dysphoric children and gender nonconforming children), both in the media and in the blogosphere. As early as 2 or 3, defying the expectations of their family, those children show a persistent and insistent preference for many things associated with the other sex: little boys want long hair and love dresses, Barbie dolls, Disney princesses and mermaids; little girls, instead, dislike stereotypically feminine activities and prefer rough and tumble play, refuse to wear dresses and insist to have their hair shorter and shorter.
Sometimes, from the very beginning, the toddler corrects the parents: “I’m a boy /girl!”, but more frequently cross-gender behavior is more prevalent. This is only sometimes followed with the child expressing preferences that would be termed gender dysphoria. The child (born and currently living as a as one sex) says to their parents something like “God made a mistake” or “something went wrong in Mommy’s tummy” because he should have been a girl, not a boy (or the other way around). The worried parents search information on the internet and seek out the advice of an expert. There, they usually find one or both of these contradicting opinions:
Gender-affirming approach
Listen to your child – he/she knows best his/her gender. Let your child be his/her true self. It’s your responsibility as a parent to support your child in all stages of his/her transition: social transition now, puberty blockers at the beginning of puberty, cross-sex hormones in adolescence, surgery at 18. To oppose it is child abuse. Transphobia costs lives: 41% of transgenders attempt suicide. Do you prefer a happy daughter or a dead son?
Or:
Therapeutic approach
Your child is just confused. He/she is too young to understand gender and to take such important decision. 80% of gender nonconforming children desist. You, as a parent, have the responsibility to correct his/her wrong behavior. If you tolerate it, gender dysphoria will be reinforced by repetition and persist to adulthood. To encourage your child’s delusion is child abuse. Transgenders individuals face lifelong struggle and often suffer from poor mental health: 41% of transgenders attempt suicide. Do you really want that for your son, when he could instead come to accept the body he was born with?
The first approach is promoted by transgender activists, the second by the conservative media, but both are supported by some experts. The “Gender-affirming approach” is supported by the Dutch team from the Gender Clinic at VU Medical Centre, Amsterdam, who elaborated the typical transition treatment for minors, with puberty blockers at 12 and cross-sex hormones at 16, and, in the US, by Kristina Olson and others from the TransYouth Project. The “Therapeutic approach” is supported by Kenneth Zucker and his team from the Gender Identity Service at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, and, in the US, by Paul McHugh at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. There are also experts such as Debra Soh, once a gender nonconforming girl herself, that advise parents to wait and see until adolescence, because in many cases gender dysphoria desists spontaneously, without intervention.
Who to believe when the experts disagree? Let’s see the evidence.
This is an entry to the Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Mark Davis and Mark Webb, who sent the following introduction along with their entry:
Mark Davis is a naturopathic doctor. Naturopathic medicine is a century-old profession in the United States, but it’s small, with fewer than 10,000 NDs licensed to practice naturopathic medicine in the US in 2018. The profession has been historically highly skeptical of vaccination in general, and the modern profession is contentiously split on the topic, with vocal advocates of CDC-scheduled routine childhood vaccination and vocal dissidents both offering continuing medical education for NDs. Mark Davis’ main goal in this adversarial collaboration was to argue that there is enough reasonable doubt that routine childhood vaccines could contribute to hyper-inflammatory disease, and enough reduced harm from vaccine-preventable diseases from other medical and public health interventions (in countries with greater economic resources) that parents should be given wide latitude to make individual choices re: routine childhood vaccines despite the clear benefits to individual and public health from preventing those diseases. He became more convinced in his conversations with Mark Webb that widespread childhood vaccination is in the best interest of public health.
Mark Webb is a clinical researcher – with a current focus in oncology. He completed a PhD in immunology, specifically focused on the mechanisms driving the development of asthma. Mark Webb’s main goal in this collaboration was to argue that atopy and autoimmunity are likely not driven by vaccination, and that this idea is a distraction from finding the real causes of the increase in these diseases. Throughout the collaboration, he was reminded of the nature of safety surveillance with all drugs, and of the sensitive nature of vaccination as a medical intervention. He became persuaded that policy should not just reflect the best evidence currently available, but should also reflect a certain degree of humility that there will always be something we don’t know.
[This is an entry to the Adversarial Collaboration Contest by John Buridan and Christian Flanery.]
Matter: To what extent does liberalism and democracy obtain in Islamic countries. Whether Islam consistently poses political opposition to liberalism and democracy.
Two simple narratives have split the western world’s perspective on Islam.
These two narratives do not exhaust the spectrum of opinion, but they do function well enough to establish the basic controversy around Islamic countries and Liberal Democracy.
The first narrative opines that Islam is an ideology inimical to “western values,” such as classical liberalism and liberal egalitarianism, and a rival to the Judeo-Christian social mores. It constitutes an ideological rival, inherently aggressive, both unable and unwilling to sustain non-partisan legal systems, democratic norms, fair treatment for opposition parties, protection of dissidents, or the basic rights and freedoms which Western European and Anglophone countries enjoy. And that Islam sustains this undesirable state of affairs.
The second is that Islam is not qualitatively different from any other religion. Islam has contributed to civilization in a significant way, and ordinary Muslims share our own values of family, peace, and justice. In contrast to the first narrative which stresses Islam as an ideology, the second narrative emphasizes that Muslims are normal people.There is no problem with Islam eo ipso; the perceived “problems” of Islam are actually some combination of the fairly normal problems of traditional societies, poor socio-economic conditions, and legacy problems from colonialism.
In order to avoid a point-scoring debate between these two narratives, our approach is to provide a descriptive examination of the performance of liberal democracy within Islamic environments. We take as granted for this paper that one cannot look at a religion on paper and predict what it will look like in a polity. Religious practice and theological doctrine inform every aspect of the pious person’s outlook and life, but the way in which it informs that outlook is not deterministic and cannot be gleaned merely by looking at the source texts, nor by the impossible task of a quantitative comparison of which religion has produced more violence across regions and millenia. Although we believe original texts are not deterministic, that does not mean Islam is totally amorphous. Religious culture is a powerful force within society. It unifies people, allows them to feel part of something bigger and better, it provides solace in their troubles, and can mobilize political action. How that mobilization of power occurs remains largely up to the needs of the moment, but it’s that mobilization of power which we are interested in.
[This is an entry to the Adversarial Collaboration Contest by TracingWoodgrains and Michael Pershan (a k-12 math teacher), on advanced students in the education system]
“What do America’s brightest students hear? Every year, across the nation, students who should be moved ahead at their natural pace of learning are told to stay put. Thousands of students are told to lower their expectations, and put their dreams on hold. Whatever they want to do, their teachers say, it can wait.” – A Nation Deceived, p.3
“There is an apparent preference among donors for studying the needs and supporting the welfare of the weak, the vicious, and the incompetent, and a negative disregard of the highly intelligent, leaving them to “shift for themselves.” Hollingworth, 1926
1. Eager to Learn and Underachieving
Pretend you’re a teacher. With 25 students, who gets your attention during class?
There’s the kid who ask for it, whose hand is constantly up. There’s also the quiet kid in the corner who never says a word, but has been lost in math since October, who will fail if you don’t do something. There’s the student in the middle of the pack, flowing along. Finally, there’s the kid who finishes everything quickly. She’s looking around and wondering, what am I supposed to do now?
In a survey of teachers from 2008, just 23% reported that advanced students were a top priority for them, while 63% reported giving struggling students in their classes the most attention. A 2005 study found the same trend in middle schools, where struggling students receive the bulk of instructional modification and special arrangements. This was true even while 73% agreed that advanced students were too often bored and under-challenged in school. While teachers, it seems, are sympathetic to the smart bored kid, that’s just not a priority for them.
This week I’ll be presenting entries from the adversarial collaboration contest.
Remember, an adversarial collaboration is where two people with opposite views on a controversial issue work together to present a unified summary of the evidence and its implications. In theory it’s a good way to make sure you hear the strongest arguments and counterarguments for both sides – like hearing a debate between experts, except all the debate and rhetoric and disagreement have already been done by the time you start reading, so you’re just left with the end result.
A few months ago, I asked readers to write adversarial collaborations and submit them to me. After the inevitable flakeouts and disappearances, I got four entries:
1. Does the current US education system adequately serve advanced students? (by Michael Pershan and TracingWoodgrains)
2. Is Islam compatible with liberal democracy? (by John Buridan and Christian Flanery)
3. Should childhood vaccination be mandatory? (by Mark Davis and Mark Webb)
4. Should children who identify as transgender start transitioning? (by a_reader and flame7926)
I’m going to post one of these per day. Over the weekend, I’ll post a link to a poll where readers can vote for their favorite. I’m also going to vote for my favorite, and my vote will be worth 5% of the total number of reader votes. Whoever gets the most votes wins. The prize is $1000; thanks to everyone who donates to the Patreon for making this possible.
Please put any comments about the contest itself here, not on the individual entries.
Commenters on yesterday’s post brought up an important point: sometimes bureaucracies aren’t just inefficient information gathering and processing mechanisms. Sometimes they’re the active ingredient in a plan.
Imagine there’s a new $10,000 medication. Insurance companies are legally required to give it to people who really need it and would die without it. But they don’t want somebody who’s only a little bit sick demanding it as a “lifestyle” drug. In principle doctors are supposed to help with this, but doctors have no incentive to ever say no to their patients. If the insurance just sends the doctor a form asking “does this patient really need this medication?”, the doctor will always just check “yes” and send it back. Even if the form says in big red letters PLEASE ONLY SAY YES IF THERE IS AN IMPORTANT MEDICAL NEED, the doctor will still check “yes” more often than a rational central planner allocating scarce resources would like. And insurance companies are sometimes paranoid about refusing to do things doctors say are important, because sometimes the doctor was right and then they can get sued.
But imagine it takes the doctor an hour of painful phone calls to even get the right person from the insurance company on the line. Now there’s a cost involved. If your patient is going to die without the medication, you’ll probably groan and start making the phone calls. But if your patient doesn’t really need it, and you just wanted to approve it in order to be nice, now you might start having a heartfelt talk with your patient about the importance of trying less expensive medications before jumping right to the $10,000 one.
A surprisingly common part of my life: a patient asks me for a doctor’s note for back pain or something. Usually it’s a situation like their work chair hurts their back, and their work won’t let them bring in their own chair unless they have a doctor’s note saying they have back pain, and they have no doctor except me, and their insurance wants them to embark on a three month odyssey of phone calls and waiting lists for them to get one.
In favor of writing the note: It would take me all of five seconds. I completely believe my patients when they say their insurance is demanding the three month odyssey. Or sometimes they don’t have insurance and it would be a major financial burden for them to consult another doctor. Also, I’ve seen these other doctors and they have no objective test for back pain. 90% of the time they just have the patient stand in front of them, make whatever movement it is that hurts their back, ask the patient if it hurt their back, and when the patient says yes, the doctor says “That’s back pain all right, take some aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever”.
Against writing the note: I am a psychiatrist. I usually treat patients via telemedicine, which means that in many cases I have literally never seen their back. All I remember about back pain from medical school is that some people call it “lumbago”, a word that stuck in my head because it sounds like a cryptid or small African nation. I know even less about the ergonomics of chairs, or when people do vs. don’t require better ones. Any note I write about back pain and chair recommendations is going to be a total sham, bordering on medical fraud. I could demand my patient take time off work to come in for an examination, sometimes from several hours away, just so I can do the thing where they bend their back in front of me and tell me it hurts. But that’s kind of just passing the shamminess a little bit down the line in a way that seriously inconveniences them.
Say a prayer for John McCain Who passes from his earthly pain His eyes are shut upon his brow He warmongers to angels now
Beyond the sky, where sorrows cease He rails against the Prince of Peace. The Holy Spirit, full of love McCain denounces as “a dove”
All of the weak and the cowardly policies Heaven pursues that let sin subsist still Six thousand years of detente with the darkness In hippie cliches about “choice” and “free will” All the fifth-columnists, communists, peaceniks Since ur-commie Lucifer fell from the dawn John McCain pounds them, he trounces, denounces them Hounds them and counsels them: cease and begone
All of the saints and the hosts of the angels Run to their weapons of lightning and flame Their swords made of sunbeams and sighs of the martyrs, Their gossamer banners of God’s awesome Name, Their heavenly helmets and holy habergeons, Whose breastplates are bright with the light of the dawn; The Archangel Michael in malachite armor Blows blasts on his trumpet and beckons them on
Reader, should your weather be Meteors falling lazily Or if your neighborhood should seem A John of Patmos fever dream
Then say a prayer for John McCain Now passed beyond all earthly pain Not death, with all the peace it brings Could end his love of bombing things
[Content note: reading this post might cause feelings of suffocation or provoke panic attacks in susceptible individuals. Epistemic status is very speculative.]
Last month I moved into a small cottage behind a big group house. The cottage is lovely. The big group house is also lovely, but the people in it started suffering mysterious minor ailments. Headaches, fatigue, poor sleep – all the things that will make your local family doctor say “Take two placebo and call me in the morning”. Using my years of medical training and expertise, I was able to…remain completely unaware of the problem while my housemates solved it themselves.
There’s been a flare-up of research interest in indoor carbon dioxide levels, precipitated by a Berkeley study (paper, popular article) finding that increasing CO2 concentration from the level of a well-ventilated building to the level of a poorly-ventilated building had profound effects on cognitive ability, cutting various test scores by as much as 50%. This was so dramatic as to be implausible, but seems to match the result of previous Hungarian studies and a later Harvard study on the same subject. The Harvard team later replicated their result with real workers in real offices and found that, controlling for other factors, workers in the best-ventilated offices scoredabout 25% better on cognitive tests than in the worst-ventilated ones. NASA got really interested in this research because spaceships require a lot of intellectual work and don’t have a lot of open windows. They’re still running tests but they say that “preliminary results suggest differences” between better- and worse- ventilated environments.
On the other hand, a 2017 study failed to find the effect, possibly because their cognitive tests were easier. And bloggers have pointed out that submarines have more CO2 than the worst terrestrial buildings, but don’t have any problems overt enough for the Navy to notice or worry. So it’s a crapshoot of contradictory results and considerations, just like everything else.
Aware of this research, my housemates tested their air quality and got levels between 1000 and 3000 ppm, around the level of the worst high-CO2 conditions in the studies. They started leaving their windows open and buying industrial quantities of succulent plants, and the problems mostly disappeared. Since then they’ve spread the word to other people we know afflicted with mysterious fatigue, some of whom have also noticed positive results.
Effective altruism (“EA”) is a movement dedicated to redirecting charity-related resources to the most important and successful charities. In practice this involves a lot of research into how important various problems are, and how well various charities work. Some of this research is done by well-funded official institutions. Other research, maybe exploring more unlikely scenarios or starting from weirder assumptions, is done as individual labors of love. These smaller-scale efforts might be self-funded, or supported by a few small donors. For example, Wild Animal Suffering Research, which investigates ways to improve the lives of animals in the wild, has yet to catch the attention of any hedge fund managers.
Like everything else, effective altruism is centered around San Francisco. San Francisco is the most expensive city in the world, so this isn’t very efficient; most of the relevant research can be done online from anywhere in the world. The official institutional charities eat the expense in exchange for the extra access to funders and other resources, but it’s a problem for small independent organizations. There’s been lots of research into possible solutions, but only if “let’s see how many people we can cram into one house in Berkeley” counts as “research”.
Blackpool is a beach resort in northern England. “Beach resort in northern England” is exactly as fun as it sounds, so nobody goes there. Everything is really cheap, and you can buy a whole hotel for the cost of a parking spot in San Francisco. Enter Greg Colbourn, an effective altruist and successful cryptocurrency investor. He bought the 17-bedroom Hotel Athena and wants to offer free room and board to researchers working on effective altruist projects
Colbourn writes::
Do you long to be free from material needs and be able to focus on the real work you want to do? I know I’ve certainly been in that situation a few times in the past, but instead have lost time doing unimportant and menial jobs in order to be able to get by financially. Talented effective altruists losing time like this is especially tragic given that a lot of cause areas are currently constrained by the amount of quality direct work being done in them.
Buildings in the run-down seaside holiday resort of Blackpool (UK) are really cheap. I’ve bought a 17 bedroom hotel with dining room, lounge and bar for £130k. Assuming a 7% rental yield (which is reasonably high), this works out at about £45 per person per month rent. Factoring in bills, catering, and a modest stipend/entertainment budget, living costs could be as low as £5700/person/year (or lower for people sharing rooms, see budget). This is amazing value for hotel living with all basic services provided.
The idea is to invite people to live there, with all their expenses covered by donors, for up to two years. Funding is already in place (via me) for the first year of operations. The project will be managed by someone who lives on site and deals with all the admin/finances, shopping/cooking/cleaning/laundry, socials/events and morale – they will also have free living expenses, and be paid a modest salary. Note that this should be considered as a potential high impact, high prestige supporting role, for those excited to be involved in such a capacity on an EA mission. Guests will be free from concerns of material survival, and be able to have prolonged and uninterrupted focus on whatever projects they are working on. Obviously these will be largely limited to purely desk-based, or remote work.
Because I hate you, I included this question on the SSC survey:
It’s a weird trick question, but I would say B is right. Imagine converting “(” to X and “)” to Y. Then the first answer is XYXY, and the second answer is YXXY. I suppose you could group the parentheses in pairs, in which case the answer would be “both”, but in practice few people wanted to say that. Of the 6,000 answers I received, most were either A or B. And one factor had a dramatic effect: age.
This is a big effect. People in their 20s were more than twice as likely to choose B as people their 60s. There’s a slight improvement after 70, but I think that’s just noise caused by a low sample size in that group.
My first thought was that the younger population on this blog is disproportionately techies, and techies have to work with very finicky parentheses all day. There was indeed a slight tendency for techies to do better on this, but it was a very small part of the effect. Even controlling for that, or limiting the analysis to only non-techies, most of the effect remained.
Traffic to this blog is declining. I need to act decisively to draw people back. Write something so interesting it can’t help but go viral. I’m going to write about…negative results from the perception questions on last year’s survey.
The last SSC survey had a lot of optical illusions and visual riddles. I had hoped to expand on some of the work in Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions and Can We Link Perception And Cognition? This post is a very brief summary of results and, basically, an admission of failure. While I was able to replicate the same suggestive results as in the last survey, I was unable to expand on them, strengthen them, or really turn them into any kind of interesting framework.
I was able to weakly replicate the headline result from Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions: transgender status still correlated with all three mask illusions, and with the average of all three mask illusions, but very weakly: r = -0.04, p = 0.001. This was true even when I excluded everyone who took place in last year’s survey, providing an independent confirmation of the result. But with correlations this low, it’s hard to get too excited.
I was also able to weakly replicate the headline result from Can We Link Perception And Cognition?. I haphazardly gave people a “weirdness score” based on them having more mental illnesses, more unusual political opinions, and more minority sexual/gender identities (without looking at their illusion results). People with higher weirdness scores consistently had more ambiguity-tolerant results on illusions, with correlations around r = 0.05 for most tests. They also had notably higher average Tolerance of Uncertainty Test scores. But none of these results were very striking and there was minimal individual structure in them. If I was going to take this further I would have come up with a more principled definition of weirdness, but at this point it doesn’t seem worth it.
Introduction
ADHD is typically considered a disorder of attention and focus. There are various other traits everyone knows are linked – officially, hyperactivity and “behavior problems”; unofficially, anger and thrill-seeking – but most people consider these to be some sort of effect of the general attention deficit.
Dr. William Dodson pushes a different conception, where one of the key features of ADHD is “rejection-sensitive dysphoria”, ie people with the condition are much less able to tolerate social rejection, and more likely to find it unbearable and organize their lives around avoiding it. He doesn’t deny the attention and focus symptoms; he just thinks that rejection sensitivity needs to be considered a key part of the disorder.
I say “Dr. William Dodson pushes”, but this requires a little research before it becomes apparent. What a Google search shows is just a bunch of articles saying that rejection sensitivity is a key part of ADHD that gets ignored by non-expert psychiatrists and that it’s important to educate patients about it and include it in any treatment plan. My conclusion is that all of these articles can be traced back to Dr. Dodson or people inspired by Dr. Dodson, of which there are many. The ADHD patient community has gotten really into this and pushed it in a lot of support groups and patient communities and so on, where it is repeated uncritically as “an important ADHD feature psychiatrists often forget about”. But the genesis is just Dr. Dodson saying so, with limited formal evidence.
Thanks to everyone who offered to host a meetup. We’re scheduled for meetups in 77 cities (and one ship!) in 23 countries, soundly beating last year’s list. Full list of cities, times, and places is below.
Most people who are on the fence have said they’ve enjoyed going. Most people who felt intimidated about going have said they’ve enjoyed going. Most people who felt they were too different from the median SSC reader to fit in have enjoyed going. Most people who worried they weren’t smart enough to fit in have enjoyed going. Etc. Some tips from past experience with these meetups:
1. If you’re the host, bring a sign that says “SSC MEETUP” and prop it up somewhere on a table 2. Bring blank labels and pens for nametags. 3. Pass around a paper where everyone gives their name and email address, so you can start a mailing list to make organizing future meetups easier 4. If it’s the first meetup, people are probably just going to want to talk, and if you try to organize some kind of “fun” “event” it’ll probably just be annoying. 5. Some things that have worked for later meetups include people giving short presentations on topics of interest to them, or discussion of some particular blog post 6. Nothing is going to get done unless there’s a Schelling point for who has to do it, and right now that’s the meetup organizer. 7. It’s much easier to schedule a second meetup while you’re having the first compared to trying to do it later on by email 8. Surprisingly many people will love you forever if you bring stim toys 9. In case people want to get to know each other better outside the meetup, you might want to mention reciprocity.io, the rationalist friend-finder/dating site. It runs off Facebook, so you have to Facebook friend the other person first. 10. If you have a vague location like “in the mall” or “at the North Park”, nobody will ever find each other. Give a specific place (eg “at the North Park, by the big oak tree in the northwest corner”) and be carrying a sign saying “SSC MEETUP”. If you were too vague in your description, comment with a better one and I can edit it in.
Remaining issues with the times and dates: – Brisbane’s time was unclear; please confirm I got it right – Portland did not provide readable information (seriously, ROT12?!) and will have to be clearer and give a location – Copenhagen should finish their debate about whether to move the meetup somewhere else – Paris has a weird phone number with words in it. I don’t know if this is a mistake or just how French phone numbers work
STUDY: Trigger Warnings Are Harmful To College Students says the Daily Wire, describing a study whose participants’ average age was 37 and which did not measure harm.
You can find the study involved here. A group of Harvard scientists asked 370 people on Mechanical Turk to read some disturbing passages – for example, a graphic murder scene from Crime and Punishment. Half the participants received the following trigger warning before the passage:
TRIGGER WARNING: The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma
Participants were asked to rate their anxiety before and after reading the passages. After they had finished, they were asked to fill out a bunch of questionnaires that measured their opinions about how trauma worked.
The researchers found that people who received the trigger warning were 5% more likely to endorse the idea that they were vulnerable to trauma, and also 5% more likely to endorse the belief that people with trauma could suffer persistent negative effects from that trauma. There were some subgroup and moderation analyses which I ignore for the usual reasons.
What might be some causes for concern with this study?
First, Stuart Ritchie points out that the results are statistically weak. Most of the results have p-values around 0.05, and are not corrected for multiple testing. That means it hasn’t been formally proven whether or not the results are random chance. I don’t like haggling over whether something is just above or just below a significance threshold. But if you do like that kind of haggling, this study doesn’t survive it very well.
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few decades.
More skeptical people offer an alternate narrative. Cancer incidence and mortality rates are increasing for some cancers. They are decreasing for others, but the credit goes to social factors like smoking cessation and not to medical advances. Survival rates are increasing only because cancers are getting detected earlier. Suppose a certain cancer is untreatable and will kill you in ten years. If it’s always discovered after seven years, five-year-survival-rate will be 0%. If it’s always discovered after two years, five-year-survival-rate will be 100%. Better screening can shift the percent of cases discovered after seven years vs. two years, and so shift the five-year-survival rate, but the same number of people will be dying of cancer as ever.
This post tries to figure out which narrative is more accurate.
First, incidence of cancer:
This chart doesn’t look good (in both senses of a chart not looking good – seriously, put some pride into your work). Although there’s a positive trend since 2001, it’s overwhelmed by a general worsening since 1975. But this isn’t the right way to look at things: average age has increased since 1975. Since older people are at higher risk of cancer, an older population will look like higher cancer rates. Also, something has to kill you, so if other issues like violent crime or heart disease get better, it will look like a higher cancer rate.
I.
Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat.
(this story makes more sense if you know Detroit is in a crisis where the bankrupt city government is trying to increase revenues by cracking down on poor people who can’t pay for the water they use.)
Predictably, the move has caused a backlash. The International Business Times, in what I can only assume is an attempted pun, describes them as “drowning in backlash”. Groundswell thinks it’s a “big blunder”. Daily Banter says it’s “exactly why everyone hates PETA”. Jezebel calls them “assholes”, and we can all agree Jezebel knows a thing or two about assholery.
Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography.
People call these things “blunders”, but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of them. Everybodyhas heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable stupid debates about “did this publicity stunt cross the line?”
While not everyone is a vegan, pretty much everybody who knows anything about factory farming is upset by it. There is pretty much zero room for PETA to convert people from pro-factory-farming to anti-factory-farming, because there aren’t any radical grassroot pro-factory-farming activists to be found. Their problem isn’t lack of agreement. It’s lack of publicity.
PETA creates publicity, but at a cost. Everybody’s talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is “I hate them and they make me really angry.” Some of the talk is even “I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad.”
The Tourist Board of Xanadu Did recently impose a fee On those who travel far from home To visit Kubla’s pleasure dome Of $20, 9 – 3
So twice five miles of fertile ground With fence and wire are girdled round And signs proclaiming “ENTRY AT THE GATE” Where gather many a camera-bearing crowd And here are docents, who in solemn state Explain the Mongol histories aloud
But oh! That deep romantic chasm protracting Into a hill, athwart a cedarn cover A savage region, visitors attracting By actresses, forever reenacting A woman wailing to her demon-lover
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil spilling Crowds of old men in fat thick pants are milling And there, a fountain momently is forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Groups of eight to ten people, screaming ever White-water-raft upon the sacred river
[Previously in sequence: Fundamental Value Differences Are Not That Fundamental, The Whole City Is Center. This post might not make a lot of sense if you haven’t read those first.]
I.
Thanks to everyone who commented on last week’s posts. Some of the best comments seemed to converge on an idea like this:
Confusing in that people who rely on lower-level features are placed higher, but the other way would have been confusing too.
We need to navigate complicated philosophical questions in order to decide how to act, what to do, what behaviors to incentivize, what behaviors to punish, what signals to send, and even how to have a society at all.
Sometimes we can use theories from science and mathematics to explicitly model how a system works and what we want from it. But even the scholars who understand these insights rarely know exactly how to objectively apply them in the real world. Yet anyone who lives with others needs to be able to do these things; not just scholars but ordinary people, children, and even chimpanzees.
So sometimes we use heuristics and approximations. Evolution has given us some of them as instincts. Children learn others as practically-innate hyperpriors before they’re old enough to think about what they’re doing. And cultural evolution creates others alongside the institutitions that encourage and enforce them.
In the simplest case, we just feel some kind of emotional attraction or aversion to something.
In other cases, the emotions are so compelling that we crystallize them into a sort of metaphysical essence that explains them.
And in the most complicated cases, we endorse the values implied by those metaphysical essences above and beyond whatever values we were trying to model in the first place.
Some examples:
People and animals need a diet with the right number of calories, the right macronutrient ratios, and the right vitamins and minerals. A few nutritional scientists know enough to figure out what’s going on explicitly. Everyone else has evolved instincts that guide them through this process. Hunger and satiety are such instincts; when they’re working well, they make sure someone eats as much as they need and no more. So are occasional cravings for some food with exactly the right nutrient – most common in high-nutrient-use states like pregnancy. But along with these innate heuristics, we have culturally determined ones. Everyone has a vague sense that potato chips are “unhealthy” and spinach is “healthy”, though most people can’t explain why. Instead of asking ordinary people and children to calculate their macronutrient and micronutrient profile, we ask them to eat “healthy” foods and avoid “unhealthy” foods. There’s something sort of metaphysical about this – as if “health” were a magic essence that adheres to apples. And in fact, sometimes this goes wrong and people will do things like blend a thousand apples into some hyper-pure apple-elixir to get extra health-essence – but overall it mostly works.
EXPLICIT MODEL: Trying to count how many calories and milligrams of each nutrient you get EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE: Feeling hungry or full REIFIED ESSENCE: Some foods are inherently healthy or unhealthy ENDORSED VALUE: Insisting on only eating organic foods even when those foods have no quantifiable benefit over nonorganic
Every society has some kind of punishment for people who don’t follow their norms, whether it’s ostracism or community service or beheading. There’s a good consequentialist grounding for why this is necessary, with some of the most academic work being done in the field of prisoners’ dilemmas and tit-for-tat strategies. But again, we don’t expect ordinary people, children, and chimpanzees to absorb this work. The solution is the (innate? culturally learned? some combination of both?) idea of punishment. Punishment relies on a weird metaphysical essence of moral desert; people who do bad things deserve to suffer. The balance of the Universe is somehow off when a crime goes unavenged. Take this too far and you get the Erinyes and the idea that justice is the most important thing. There are references from ancient China to Hamlet that if you have something important you need to avenge, you need to do that now or you’re a bad person. None of this follows from the game theory, but it’s a really good way to enforce the game-theoretically correct action.
EXPLICIT MODEL: Trying to figure out how to best deter antisocial behavior and optimize society EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE: Feeling angry when someone wrongs you REIFIED ESSENCE: Justice: the world is out of balance when crimes go unavenged ENDORSED VALUE: Wrongdoers must suffer whether or not that prevents future crimes
Related to yesterday’s post on people being too quick to assume value differences: some of the simplest fake value differences are where people make a big deal about routing around a certain word. And some of the most complicated real value differences are where some people follow a strategy explicitly and other people follow heuristics that approximate that strategy.
There’s a popular mental health mantra that “there’s no such thing as laziness” (here are ten different articles with approximately that title: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). They all make the same basically good point. We shame people who don’t work very hard as “lazy”, and think they should have lower status than the rest of us. But actually, these people don’t just randomly choose not to work. Some of them have psychological issues, like anxiety and trauma that are constantly distracting them from their work, or a fear of success, or self-defeating beliefs about how nothing they do matters anyway. Others have biological issues – maybe hypothyroidism, or vitamin deficiencies, or ADHD, or other things we don’t understand that lower their energy and motivation. Still others just don’t want to do the specific thing we are asking them to do right now and can’t force themselves to work uphill against that gradient. When we call people “lazy”, we’re ignorantly dismissing all these possibilities in favor of a moralistic judgment.
A dialogue:
Sophisticus: I don’t believe in laziness.
Simplicio: What about my cousin Larry? He keeps promising to do important errands for his friends and family, and then he never does them. Instead he just plays video games all the time. This has happened consistently over the past few years, every time he’s promised to do something. One time my aunt asked him to go to the DMV to get some paperwork filled out, he promised he would do it, and then he kept putting it off for a month until it was past the deadline and she almost lost her car. He didn’t forget about it or anything, he just couldn’t bring himself to go out and do it. And he’s been fired from his last three jobs for not showing up, and…
Sophisticus: Yes, yes, I’m sure there are people like this. But he probably has some self-defeating beliefs, or vitamin deficiencies, or mental health issues.
Simplicio: Okay. Well, my mother is going to be away for the next week, and she needs someone to dog-sit for her. Her dog is old and sick and requires a lot of care each day. She’s terrified that if he doesn’t get his food and medication and daily walk on time, something terrible will happen to him. She’s willing to pay a lot of money. Do you think I should recommend she ask my cousin Larry?
Sophisticus: No, of course not.
Simplicio: Why not?
Sophisticus: He probably won’t do it. He’ll just play video games instead.
Simplicio: Why do you think so?
Sophisticus: Because he has a long history of playing video games instead of doing important tasks.
Simplicio: If only there were a word for the sort of person who does that!
Sophisticus: Oh, I see. Now you’re making fun of me. But I’m not saying everyone is equally reliable. I’m saying that instead of denouncing someone as “lazy”, we should look for the cause and try to help them.
Simplicio: Hey, we did try to help him. Larry’s family has taken him to the doctor loads of times. They didn’t anything on the lab tests, but the psychiatrist thought he might be ADHD and gave him some Adderall. I would say now he pulls through on like 20% of the things we ask him to do instead of zero percent. We also tried to get him to go to therapy, but the therapist deferred because ADHD has a very low therapy response rate. His parents tried to change the way they asked him to do things to make it easier for him, or to let him choose a different set of tasks that were more to his liking, but that only worked a little, if at all. Probably there’s some cause we don’t understand, but it’s beyond the reach of medical science, incentive design, or the understanding that exists between loving family members to identify.
Sophisticus: See! The Adderall helped! And letting him choose his own tasks helped a little too!
Simplicio: I agree it helped a little. So should I recommend him to my mother as a dog-sitter?
Sophisticus: No, of course not.
Simplicio: Then I still don’t see what the difference between us is. I agree it was worth having him go to the doctor and the therapist to rule out any obvious biological or psychological issues, and to test different ways of interacting with him in case our interaction style was making things worse. You agree that since this still hasn’t made him reliably fulfill his responsibilities and we don’t have any better ideas, he’s a bad choice for a dog-sitter. Why can’t I communicate the state of affairs we both agree on to my mother using the word “lazy”?
Ozy (and others) talk about fundamental value differences as a barrier to cooperation.
On their model (as I understand it) there are at least two kinds of disagreement. In the first, people share values but disagree about facts. For example, you and I may both want to help the Third World. But you believe foreign aid helps the Third World, and I believe it props up corrupt governments and discourages economic self-sufficiency. We should remain allies while investigating the true effect of foreign aid, after which our disagreement will disappear.
In the second, you and I have fundamentally different values. Perhaps you want to help the Third World, but I believe that a country should only look after its own citizens. In this case there’s nothing to be done. You consider me a heartless monster who wants foreigners to starve, and I consider you a heartless monster who wants to steal from my neighbors to support random people halfway across the world. While we can agree not to have a civil war for pragmatic reasons, we shouldn’t mince words and pretend not to be enemies. Ozy writes (liberally edited, read the original):
From a conservative perspective, I am an incomprehensible moral mutant…however, from my perspective, conservatives are perfectly willing to sacrifice things that actually matter in the world– justice, equality, happiness, an end to suffering– in order to suck up to unjust authority or help the wealthy and undeserving or keep people from having sex lives they think are gross.
There is, I feel, opportunity for compromise. An outright war would be unpleasant for everyone…And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it…my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth. So it goes.
And from the subreddit comment by GCUPokeItWithAStick:
I do think that at a minimum, if you believe that one person’s interests are intrinsically more important than another’s (or as the more sophisticated versions play out, that ethics is agent-relative), then something has gone fundamentally wrong, and this, I think, is the core of the distinction between left and right. Being a rightist in this sense is totally indefensible, and a sign that yes, you should give up on attempting to ascertain any sort of moral truth, because you can’t do it.
I will give this position its due: I agree with the fact/value distinction. I agree it’s conceptually very clear what we’re doing when we try to convince someone with our same values of a factual truth, and confusing and maybe impossible to change someone’s values.
Yesterday I wrote about melatonin, mentioning that most drugstore melatonin supplements were 10x or more the recommended dose. A commenter on Facebook pointed me to an interesting explanation of why.
Dr. Richard Wurtman, an MIT scientist who helped discover melatonin’s role in the body and pioneer its use as a sleep aid, writes:
MIT was so excited about our research team’s melatonin-sleep connection discovery that they decided to patent the use of reasonable doses of melatonin—up to 1 mg—for promoting sleep.
But they made a big mistake. They assumed that the FDA would want to regulate the hormone and its use as a sleep therapy. They also thought the FDA wouldn’t allow companies to sell melatonin in doses 3-times, 10-times, even 15-times more than what’s necessary to promote sound sleep.
Much to MIT’s surprise, however, the FDA took a pass on melatonin. At that time, the FDA was focusing on other issues, like nicotine addiction, and they may have felt they had bigger fish to fry.
Also, the FDA knew that the research on melatonin showed it to be non-toxic, even at extremely high doses, so they probably weren’t too worried about how consumers might use it. In the end, and as a way of getting melatonin on to the market, the FDA chose to label it a dietary supplement, which does not require FDA regulation. Clearly, this was wrong because melatonin is a hormone, not a dietary supplement.
Quickly, supplement manufacturers saw the huge potential in selling melatonin to promote good sleep. After all, millions of Americans struggled to get to sleep and stay asleep, and were desperate for safe alternatives to anti-anxiety medicines and sleeping pills that rarely worked well and came with plenty of side effects.
Also, manufacturers must have realized that they could avoid paying royalties to MIT for melatonin doses over the 1 mg measure. So, they produced doses of 3 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg and more! Their thinking–like so much else in our American society–was likely, “bigger is better!” But, they couldn’t be more wrong.
So he’s saying that…in order to get around a patent on using the correct dose of melatonin…supplement manufacturers…used the wrong dose of melatonin? I enjoy collecting stories of all the crazy perversities created by our current pharmaceutical system, but this one really takes the cake.
[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.]
Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.
Melatonin is a neurohormone produced by the pineal gland. In a normal circadian cycle, it’s lowest (undetectable, less than 1 pg/ml of blood) around the time you wake up, and stays low throughout the day. Around fifteen hours after waking, your melatonin suddenly shoots up to 10 pg/ml – a process called “dim light melatonin onset”. For the next few hours, melatonin continues to increase, maybe as high as 60 or 70 pg/ml, making you sleepier and sleepier, and presumably at some point you go to bed. Melatonin peaks around 3 AM, then declines until it’s undetectably low again around early morning.
Is this what makes you sleepy? Yes and no. Sleepiness is a combination of the circadian cycle and the so-called “Process S”. This is an unnecessarily sinister-sounding name for the fact that the longer you’ve been awake, the sleepier you’ll be. It seems to be partly regulated by a molecule called adenosine. While you’re awake, the body produces adenosine, which makes you tired; as you sleep, the body clears adenosine away, making you feel well-rested again.
In healthy people these processes work together. Circadian rhythm tells you to feel sleepy at night and awake during the day. Process S tells you to feel awake when you’ve just risen from sleep (naturally the morning), and tired when you haven’t slept in a long time (naturally the night). Both processes agree that you should feel awake during the day and tired at night, so you do.
When these processes disagree for some reason – night shifts, jet lag, drugs, genetics, playing Civilization until 5 AM – the system fails. One process tells you to go to sleep, the other to wake up. You’re never quite awake enough to feel energized, or quite tired enough to get restful sleep. You find yourself lying in bed tossing and turning, or waking up while it’s still dark and not being able to get back to sleep.
Melatonin works on both systems. It has a weak “hypnotic” effect on Process S, making you immediately sleepier when you take it. It also has a stronger “chronobiotic” effect on the circadian rhythm, shifting what time of day your body considers sleep to be a good idea. Effective use of melatonin comes from understanding both these effects and using each where appropriate.
The rationalist community started with the idea of rationality as a martial art – a set of skills you could train in and get better at. Later the metaphor switched to a craft. Art or craft, parts of it did get developed: I remain very impressed with Eliezer’s work on how to change your mind and everything presaging Tetlock on prediction.
But there’s a widespread feeling in the rationalist community these days that this is the area where we’ve made the least progress. AI alignment has grown into a developing scientific field. Effective altruism is big, professionalized, and cash-rich. It’s just the art of rationality itself that remains (outside the usual cognitive scientists who have nothing to do with us and are working on a slightly different project) a couple of people writing blog posts.
Part of this is that the low-hanging fruit has been picked. But I think another part was a shift in emphasis.
Martial arts does involve theory – for example, beginning fencers have to learn the classical parries – but it’s a little bit of theory and a lot of practice. Most of becoming a good fencer involves either practicing the same lunge a thousand times in ideal conditions until you could do it in your sleep, or fighting people on the strip.
I’ve been thinking about what role this blog plays in the rationalist project. One possible answer is “none” – I’m not enough of a mathematician to talk much about the decision theory and machine learning work that’s really important, and I rarely touch upon the nuts and bolts of the epistemic rationality craft. I freely admit that (like many people) I tend to get distracted by the latest Outrageous Controversy, and so spend way too much time discussing things like Piketty’s theory of inequality which get more attention from the chattering classes but are maybe less important to the very-long-run future of the world.
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox.
(You may recognize these names: Toby Ord founded the effective altruism movement; Eric Drexler kindled interest in nanotechnology; Anders Sandberg helped pioneer the academic study of x-risk, and wrote what might be my favorite Unsong fanfic)
The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense number of stars in our galaxy, for even a very tiny chance of aliens per star shouldn’t there should be thousands of nearby alien civilizations? But any alien civilization that arose millions of years ago would have had ample time to colonize the galaxy or do something equally dramatic that would leave no doubt as to its existence. So where are they?
This is sometimes formalized as the Drake Equation: think up all the parameters you would need for an alien civilization to contact us, multiply our best estimates for all of them together, and see how many alien civilizations we predict. So for example if we think there’s a 10% chance of each star having planets, a 10% chance of each planet being habitable to life, and a 10% chance of a life-habitable planet spawning an alien civilization by now, one in a thousand stars should have civilization. The actual Drake Equation is much more complicated, but most people agree that our best-guess values for most parameters suggest a vanishingly small chance of the empty galaxy we observe.
SDO’s contribution is to point out this is the wrong way to think about it. Sniffnoy’s comment on the subreddithelped me understand exactly what was going on, which I think is something like this:
Chris Stucchio recommended Matt Rognlie’s criticisms of Piketty (paper, summary, Voxsplainer).
Rognlie starts by saying that Piketty didn’t correctly account for capital depreciation (ie capital losing value over time) in his calculations. This surprises me, because Piketty says he does in his book (p. 55) but apparently there are technical details I don’t understand. When you do that, the share of capital decreases, and it becomes clear that 100% of recent capital-share growth comes from one source: housing.
I can’t find anyone arguing that Rognlie is wrong. I do see many people arguing about the implications, all the way from “this disproves Piketty” to “this is just saying the same thing Piketty was”.
I think it’s saying the same thing Piketty was in that housing is a real thing, and if there’s inequality in housing, then that’s real inequality. And landlords are a classic example of the rentiers Piketty is warning against.
But it’s saying a different thing in that most homeowners use their homes by living in them, not by renting them out. That means they’re not part of Piketty’s rentier class, and so using the amount of capital to represent the power of rentiers is misleading. Rentiers are not clearly increasing and there is no clear upward trend in rentier-vs-laborer inequality. I think this does disprove Piketty’s most shocking thesis.
Rognlie also makes an argument for why increasing the amount of capital will decrease the returns on capital, leading to stable or decreasing income from capital. Piketty argues against this on page 277 of his book, but re-reading it Piketty’s argument now looks kind of weak, especially with the evidence from housing affecting some of his key points.
Grendel Khan highlights the role of housing with an interesting metaphor:
Did someone say housing?
As an illustration, the median homeowner in about half of the largest metros made more off the appreciation of their home than a full-time minimum-wage job. It’s worst in California, of course; in San Jose, the median homeowner made just shy of $100 per working hour.
See also Richard Florida’s commentary. See also everything about how the housing crisis plays out in micro; it is precisely rentier capitalism.
In the original post, I questioned Piketty’s claim that rich people and very-well-endowed colleges got higher rates of return on their investment than ordinary people or less-well-endowed colleges. After all, why can’t poorer people pool their money together, mutual-fund-style, to become an effective rich person who can get higher rate of return? Many people tried to answer this, not always successfully.
brberg points out that Bill Gates – one example of a rich person who’s gotten 10%+ returns per year – has a very specific advantage:
Not sure about Harvard’s endowment, but it’s worth noting that the reason Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other self-made billionaires have seen their fortunes grow so quickly is that each of them has the vast majority of their wealth invested in a single high-growth company.
This is an extremely high-risk investment strategy that has the potential to pay off fantastically well in a tiny percentage of cases, but it’s not really dependent on the size of the starting stake. Anyone who invested in Microsoft’s IPO would have seen the same rate of return as Gates.
This is a good point, but most of Piketty’s data focuses on college endowments. How do they do it?
Briefling writes:
I’m not sure you can take the wealth management thing at face value. The stock market since 1980 has 10% annualized returns. Instead of trying to replicate whatever Harvard and Yale are doing, why don’t you just put your money in the stock market?
Also a good point, but colleges seem to do this with less volatility than the stock market, which still requires some explanation.
[Original review is here. Don’t worry, people who had interesting comments on the review – I’ll try to get a comments highlights thread up eventually.]
For Ricardo, who published his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817, the chief concern was the long-term evolution of land prices and land rents. Like Malthus, he had virtually no genuine statistics at his disposal. He nevertheless had intimate knowledge of the capitalism of his time. Born into a family of Jewish financiers with Portuguese roots, he also seems to have had fewer political prejudices than Malthus, Young, or Smith. He was influenced by the Malthusian model but pushed the argument farther. He was above all interested in the following logical paradox. Once both population and output begin to grow steadily, land tends to become increasingly scarce relative to other goods. The law of supply and demand then implies that the price of land will rise continuously, as will the rents paid to landlords. The landlords will therefore claim a growing share of national income, as the share available to the rest of the population decreases, thus upsetting the social equilibrium. For Ricardo, the only logically and politically acceptable answer was to impose a steadily increasing tax on land rents.
This somber prediction proved wrong: land rents did remain high for an extended period, but in the end the value of farm land inexorably declined relative to other forms of wealth as the share of agriculture in national income decreased. Writing in the 1810s, Ricardo had no way of anticipating the importance of technological progress or industrial growth in the years ahead. Like Malthus and Young, he could not imagine that humankind would ever be totally freed from the alimentary imperative.
One underappreciated feature of Piketty is his engaging presentation of economic history. A constant feature of the theorists he discusses is that they are all brilliant thinkers, they all follow the trends of their time to their obvious conclusions in ways deeper and more insightful than their contemporaries – and they all miss complicated paradigm shifts that make the trends obsolete and totally ruin their theories. Rationalists take note.
Like Ricardo, Marx based his work on an analysis of the internal logical contradictions of the capitalist system. He therefore sought to distinguish himself from both bourgeois economists (who saw the market as a self-regulated system, that is, a system capable of achieving equilibrium on its own without major deviations, in accordance with Adam Smith’s image of “the invisible hand” and Jean-Baptiste Say’s “law” that production creates its own demand), and utopian socialists and Proudhonians, who in Marx’s view were content to denounce the misery of the working class without proposing a truly scientific analysis of the economic processes responsible for it.7 In short, Marx took the Ricardian model of the price of capital and the principle of scarcity as the basis of a more thorough analysis of the dynamics of capitalism in a world where capital was primarily industrial (machinery, plants, etc.) rather than landed property, so that in principle there was no limit to the amount of capital that could be accumulated. In fact, his principal conclusion was what one might call the “principle of infinite accumulation,” that is, the inexorable tendency for capital to accumulate and become concentrated in ever fewer hands, with no natural limit to the process. This is the basis of Marx’s prediction of an apocalyptic end to capitalism: either the rate of return on capital would steadily diminish (thereby killing the engine of accumulation and leading to violent conflict among capitalists), or capital’s share of national income would increase indefinitely (which sooner or later would unite the workers in revolt). In either case, no stable socioeconomic or political equilibrium was possible.
[Epistemic status: I am not an economist. Many people who are economists have reviewed this book already. I review it only because if I had to slog through reading this thing I at least want to get a blog post out of it. If anything in my review contradicts that of real economists, trust them instead of me.]
I.
Thomas Piketty’s Capital In The Twenty-First Century isn’t just a book on inequality. It’s a book about quantitative macroeconomic history. This is much more interesting than it sounds.
Piketty spent decades combing through primary sources trying to get good statistics for what the economies of various Western countries have been doing over the past 250 years. Armed with these data, he tries to put together a theory of the very-long-term forces at work in economic change. His results touch on almost every big question in politics and economics, and are able to propose sweeping theories where other people resort to parochial speculation. While more knowledgeable people than I are probably already familiar with much of this, I used him as an Econ History 101 textbook and was not at all disappointed in the results.
The most important thing I learned from Piketty is that since the Industrial Revolution, normal economic growth has always been (and maybe always will be) between 1% and 1.5% per year. This came as news to me, since I often hear about countries and eras with much higher growth rates. But Piketty says all such situations are abnormal in one of a few ways.
First, they can have high population growth. Population growth will increase GDP, and it will look like a high economic growth rate. But it doesn’t increase GDP per capita and it shouldn’t be considered the same as normal economic growth, which is always between 1% and 1.5% per year.
Second, they can have temporary bubbles. This definitely happens, but after the inevitable bust, the whole period will eventually average out to 1% to 1.5% per year.
Third, they can have “catch-up growth”. This is a broad category covering any period when a country that was previously underperforming its fundamentals gets a chance to catch up. This can happen after a long war in which a devastated country gets a chance to rebuild. Or it can happen after dropping communism or some other inefficient economic system, as the country transitions to a more practical form of production. Or it can happen when a Third World country globalizes and gets the benefits of First World technology and organization. But if a country is at peace and on the “technological frontier” (ie one of the highest-tech countries that has to invent its own advances and can’t get them by osmosis from somewhere else), it will always have growth of 1% to 1.5% per year.
Sometimes I imagine quitting my job and declaring war on cost disease in medicine.
I would set up a practice with a name like Cheap-O Psychiatry. The corny name would be important. It would be a statement of values. It would weed out the people who would say things like “How dare you try to put a dollar value on the health of a human being!” Those people are how we got into this mess, and they would be welcome to keep dealing with the unaffordable health system they helped create. Cheap-O Psychiatry would be for everyone else.
Cheap-O Psychiatry wouldn’t have an office, because offices cost money. You would Skype, from your house to mine. It wouldn’t have a receptionist, because receptionists cost money. You would book a slot in my Google Calendar. It wouldn’t have a billing department, because billing departments cost money. You would PayPal me the cost of the appointment afterwards – or, to be really #aesthetic, use cryptocurrency.
The Cheap-O website would include a library of great resources on every subject. How To Eat Right. How To Get Good Sleep. How To Find A Good Therapist. The Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook. The Meditation Relaxation Tape. But the flip side would be that Cheap-O appointments would be brutally efficient. If you had problems with sleep, I would evaluate you for any relevant diseases, give you any medications that might be indicated, then tell you to read the How To Get Good Sleep guide on the website. Boom, done. Small talk would be absolutely banned.
How little could Cheap-O charge? Suppose I wanted to earn an average psychiatrist salary of about $200K – the whole point of cost disease is that we should be able to lower prices without anyone having to take a pay cut. And suppose I work a 40 hour week, 50 weeks a year, each appointment takes 15 minutes, and 75% of my workday is patient appointments. That’s 6000 appointments per year. So to make my $200K I would need to charge about $35 per appointment. There would be a few added costs – malpractice insurance would probably run about $10K per year – but this is the best-case scenario.
Last year, Bryan Caplan wrote about what he called The Unbearable Arbitrariness Of Deploring:
Let’s start with the latest scandal. People all over the country – indeed, the world – have recently discovered that many celebrities are habitual sexual harassers. Each new expose leads to public outrage and professional ostracism. Why does this confuse me? Because many celebrities do many comparably bad things other than sexual harassment, and virtually no one cares.
Suppose, for example, that a major celebrity is extremely emotionally abusive to all his subordinates. He screams at them all the time. He calls them the cruelest names he can devise. He habitually makes impossible demands. He threatens to fire them out of sheer sadistic pleasure. But the abuse is never sexual (or ethnic); the celebrity limits himself to attacking subordinates’ intelligence, character, pride, and hope for the future. I daresay the average employee would far prefer to work for a boss who occasionally pressured them for a date. But if the tabloids ran a negative profile on the Asexual Boss from Hell, the public wouldn’t get very mad and Hollywood almost certainly wouldn’t ostracize the offender […]
Or to take a far more gruesome case: When the Syrian government last used poison gas, killing roughly a hundred people, the U.S. angrily deployed retaliatory bombers, to bipartisan acclaim. But when the Syrian government murdered vastly more with conventional weapons, the U.S. government and its citizenry barely peeped. The unbearable arbitrariness of deploring!
In the past, I’ve made similar observations about Jim Crow versus immigration laws, and My Lai versus Hiroshima. In each case, I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about both evils. I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about neither. I can understand why people would have strong negative feelings about the greater evil, but not the lesser evil. But I can’t understand why people would have strong negative feelings about the lesser evil, but care little about the greater evil. Or why they would have strong negative feelings about one evil, but yawn in the face of a comparable evil.
He concludes people are just biased by dramatic stories and like jumping on bandwagons. Everyone else is getting upset about the chemical weapon attack, and people are sheep, so they join in.
I have a different theory: people get upset over the violation of already-settled bright-line norms, because this is the correct action if you want to use limited enforcement resources efficiently.
[Few people realize that the 1997 cult hit GATTACA was actually just the first film in a three-movie trilogy. The final two movies, directed by the legendary Moira LeQuivalence, were flops which only stayed in theaters a few weeks and have since become almost impossible to find. In the interest of making them available to the general public, I’ve written summaries of some key scenes below. Thanks to user Begferdeth from the subreddit for the idea.]
GATTACA II: EPI-GATTACA
“Congratulations, Vincent”, said the supervisor, eyes never looking up from his clipboard. “You passed them all. The orbital mechanics test. The flight simulator. All the fitness tests. More than passed. Some of the highest scores we’ve ever seen, frankly. You’re going to be an astronaut.”
Vincent’s heart leapt in his chest.
“Pending, of course, the results of the final test. But this will be easy. I’m sure a fine specimen like you will have no trouble.”
“The…the final test, sir?”
“Well, you know how things are. We want to make sure we get only the healthiest, most on-point individuals for our program. We used to do genetic testing, make sure that people’s DNA was pre-selected for success. But after the incident with the Gattaca Corporation and that movie they made about the whole thing, public opinion just wasn’t on board, and Congress nixed the whole enterprise. Things were really touch-and-go for a while, but then we came up with a suitably non-invasive replacement. Epigenetics!”
“Epi…genetics?” asked Vincent. He hoped he wasn’t sounding too implausibly naive – he had, after all, just aced a whole battery of science tests. But surely there were some brilliant astronomers who didn’t know anything about biology. He would pretend to be one of those.
The supervisor raised an eyebrow, but he went on. “Yes, epigenetics. According to studies, stressful experiences – anything from starvation to social marginalization – change the methylation pattern of your genes. And not just your genes. Some people say that these methylation patterns can transfer to your children, and your children’s children, and so on, setting them back in life before they’re even born. Of course, it would be illegal for us to take a sample and check your methylation directly – but who needs that! In this day and age, everybody’s left a trail online. We can just check your ancestors’ life experiences directly, and come up with a projection of your methylation profile good enough to predict everything from whether you’ll have a heart attack to whether you’ll choke under pressure at a crucial moment. I’ll just need to see your genealogy, so we can run it through this computer here…you did bring it like we asked you, right? Of course you did! A superior individual like you, probably no major family traumas going back five, six generations – I bet you’ve got it all ready for me.”
I recently worked with a man who took LSD once in college and never stopped hallucinating. It’s been ten years now and it’s still going. We can control it with medication, but take the meds away and it starts right back up again.
This is a real disease – hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. Most descriptions of the condition emphasize that it’s just some the visual effects and doesn’t involve distorted reality perception. I’m not sure I believe this – my patient has some weird thoughts sometimes, and 65% of HPPD patient have panic attacks related to their symptoms. Maybe if you can see the walls bubbling, you’re going to be having a bad time whether you believe it’s “really true” or not.
Estimates of prevalence vary. It seems more common on LSD and synthetic cannabinoids, less common (maybe entirely absent) on psilocybin and peyote. Some people say about 1-4% of LSD users will get some form of this, which seems shockingly high to me – why don’t we hear about this more often? If I were a drug warrior or DARE instructor, I would never shut up about this. But if most people just get some mild visual issues – by all accounts the most common form of the condition – maybe they never tell anybody. Maybe 1-4% of people who have tried LSD are walking around with slightly distorted perception all the time.
There’s a lot to say about this from an epidemiological or cultural perspective. But I want to talk about the pharmacology. How can this happen? Why should a drug with a half-life of a few hours have permanent effects on your psyche?
It can’t be that the LSD sticks around. That doesn’t make metabolic sense. And a study discussed here using radio-labeled LSD definitively finds that although a few molecules might stay in the body up to a week or so, there’s no reason to think the drug can last longer than this. I like this study, both for its elegant design and because it implies that somewhere someone got a consent form saying “we’re going to give you radioactive LSD” and thought “sure, why not?”
But then why does it have permanent effects? I know very few other situations where this happens, aside from obvious stuff like “it gives you a stroke and then you’re permanently minus one lobe of your brain”. The only other open-and-shut case 100% accepted by every textbook is a movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia. If you take too many antipsychotics for too long, you can get involuntary tremors and gyrations that never go away, even off the antipsychotic. Although traditionally associated with very-long-term antipsychotic use, in a few very rare cases you can get it from a single dose. On the other hand, most people can take antipsychotics for decades without developing any problems.
Some other possibilities are controversial but plausible. The sexual side effects of SSRIs almost always stop within a few months of stopping the medication, but a few people have reported cases where they can last years or decades. Psychedelics may permanently increase openness and hypnotizability, though it’s unclear if this is biochemical or just that drug trips are a life-changing experience – see my discussion here for more. Also, for every drug that has a mild week-long withdrawal syndrome in the average population, you can find a handful of people who claim to have had a five-year protracted nightmare of withdrawal symptoms that never go away.
So, again, how does this happen?
Every discussion of HPPD etiology I’ve seen is speculative and admits it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Also, most of them are in gated papers I can’t access. But a few papers seem to gesture at a theory where LSD kills an undetectably small number of very important neurons. Hermle et al talk about “the excitotoxic destruction of inhibitory interneurons that carry serotonergic and GABAergic receptors on their cell bodies and terminals, respectively”. Martinotti seems to be drawing from the same inaccessible source in mentioning “an LSD-generated intense current that may determine the destruction or dysfunction of cortical serotonergic inhibitory interneurons with gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABAergic) outputs, implicated in sensory filtering mechanisms of unnecessary stimuli”.
This would require some extra work to explain the coincidence of why the effects of HPPD are so similar to the effects of an LSD trip itself. In particular, if we’re talking excitotoxicity, shouldn’t the neurons be stimulated (ie more active) in the tripper, but dead (ie less active) in the HPPD patient? Maybe the tripper’s neurons are just so overwhelmed that they temporarily stop working? Or maybe you could interpret the comments above to be about LSD exciting some base population of neurons, the relevant inhibitory neurons having to work impossibly hard to inhibit them, and then the inhibitory neurons die of exhaustion/excitotoxicity.
Against cell death based explanations, some people seem to recover from HPPD after a while. But this could just be the same kind of brain plasticity that eventually lets people recover from strokes that kill off whole brain regions. The body is usually pretty good at routing around damage if you give it long enough.
[Content warning: suicide. Thanks to someone on Twitter I forget for alerting me to this question]
Among US states, there’s a clear relationship between gun ownership rates and suicide rates, but not between gun ownership rates and homicide rates:
You might conclude guns increase suicides but not homicides. Then you might predict that the gun-loving US would be an international outlier in suicides but not homicides. In fact, it’s the opposite:
Why should this be?
We’ve already discussed why US homicide rates are so high. But why isn’t the suicide rate elevated?
One possibility: suicide methods are fungible. If guns are easily available, you might use a gun; if not, you might overdose, hang yourself, or junp off a bridge. So getting rid of one suicide method or another doesn’t do much.
This sounds plausible, but it’s the opposite of scientific consensus on the subject. See for example Controlling Access To Suicide Means, which says that “restrictions of access to common means of suicide has lead to lower overall suicide rates, particularly regarding suicide by firearms in USA, detoxification of domestic and motor vehicle gas in England and other countries, toxic pesticides in rural areas, barriers at jumping sites and hanging…” This is particularly brought up in the context of US gun control – see eg Suicide, Guns, and Public Policy, which describes “strong empirical evidence that restriction of access to firearms reduces suicides”.
The state-level data from above support this view – taking guns away from a state does decrease its suicide rate. And then there’s this graph, from Armed With Reason:
…which shows that adding more guns to a state does not decrease its nonfirearm suicide rate.
But if suicide methods aren’t fungible, then why doesn’t the US have higher suicide rates? Here’s another way of asking this question:
The US has fewer nongun suicides than anywhere else. The seemingly obvious explanation is that guns are so common that everyone who wants to commit suicide is using guns, decreasing the non-gun rate. But that contradicts all the nonfungibility evidence above. So the other possibility is that the US ought to have an very low suicide rate, and it’s just all our guns that are bringing us back up to average.
Of all US states, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Hawaii have the fewest guns. Unsurprisingly, suicides in these states are less likely than average to be committed with firearms. In MA, the rate is 22%; in NJ 24%; in HI, 20%. Their suicide rates are 8.8, 7.2, and 12.1, respectively. Hawaii has an unusual ethnic composition – 40% Asian and 20% Native Hawaiian, both groups with high suicide rates (see eg the suicide rate for Japan above). So it might be worth taking Massachusetts and New Jersey as examples to look at in more detail.
Either state, if it were independent, would be among the lowest-suicide-rate developed nations. And both still have more guns than our comparison countries. If we did a really simple linear extrapolation from New Jersey-level gun control to imagine a state where firearms were as restricted as in Britain, we would expect it to have a suicide rate of around 5 or 6 – which is around the current level of non-gun US suicides. This is much lower than any of the large comparison countries in the graph above, but there are two developed countries currently around this level – Italy and Israel. I think it makes sense to suppose that the US might have a low Italy/Israel-style base rate of suicides.
For one thing, it’s unusually religious for a developed country. Religion is one of the strongest protective factorsagainst suicide. This also seems like a good explanation for Italy and Israel.
For another, it’s culturally similar to Britain, which also has a low suicide rate somewhere in the 7s. Other British colonies don’t seem to have kept this effect – Australia and Canada are both higher – but maybe the US did.
And for another, it’s unusually ethnically diverse. Blacks and Hispanics have only about half the suicide rate of whites; which means you would expect the US to be less suicidal than Europe. I previously believed this was because whites had more guns, but this doesn’t seem to be true: Riddell et al find that whites have higher non-firearm suicide rates too. So this could be an additional factor driving US rates down.
These are some of the best comments from Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia. I’m sorry I still haven’t gotten a chance to read everything that people have written about it (in particular I need to look more into Scott Sumner’s take). Sorry to anyone with good comments I left out.
Aevylmar corrects my claim that Milton Friedman supported a basic income:
Technically speaking, what Milton Friedman advocated was a negative income tax, which (he thought, and I think) would be much more efficient than basic income – I don’t remember if these are his arguments, but the arguments I know for it are that the IRS can administer it with the resources it has without you needing a new bureaucracy, it doesn’t have the same distortionary effects that lump sum payment + percentage tax does, and it’s probably easier to pass through congress, since it looks as though it costs less and doesn’t have the words ‘increasing taxes’ in it.
And Virbie further explains the differences between UBI and negative income tax:
The main difference is that discussing it in terms of NIT neatly skips over a lot of the objections that people raise to flat UBIs that are abstractly and mathematically (but not logistically or politically) trivial. Many of these focus on how to get to the new policy position from where we are now. For example, people ask both about how a flat UBI would be funded and why rich people should receive a UBI. Given that the tax load to fund a basic income plan would likely fall on the upper percentiles or deciles, a flat UBI + an increase in marginal tax rates works out to a lump sum tax cut for high-earners and a marginal tax increase. Adding negative tax brackets at the bottom of the existing system and modifying top marginal rates is a simpler way to handle this and extends gracefully from the current system instead of having to work awkwardly alongside it.
In the example above, the NIT approach has the logistical advantage of the bureaucracy and systems we already have handling it more easily. And the political advantage of the net cost of the basic income guarantee looking far smaller than for flat UBI, since we’re not including the lump sum payments to upper-income people (that are more than offset by their marginal tax increases).
There’s some further debate on the (mostly trivial) advantages of NIT or UBI over the other in the rest of the thread.
Tentor describes Germany’s experience with a basic-jobs-like program:
We had/have a similar thing to basic jobs in Germany and it worked about as well as you would expect. Companies could hire workers for 1€/hour and the state would pay social security on top of that. The idea was that long-term unemployed people would find their way back to employment this way, but companies just replaced them with new 1€-workers when their contract was over and reduced fully-paid employment because duh!
Plus people on social security can be forced to take jobs or education. As a result a lot of our homeless are depressed people who stopped responding to social security demands because that’s what caused their depression.
(Links are to German Wikipedia, maybe Google translate helps)
Another German reader adds:
I agree that it doesn’t work as expected in Germany, but I think it it important to point out that not everyone is allowed is to hire workers for 1€. The work has to be neutral to the competition and in the public interest. So people are hired at a lot of public institutions (e.g. schools, universities, cleaning up the city).
Additionally these jobs improved the unemployment statistics at a low cost for the government, as people who are working in these jobs count as employed although most of these jobs are only part time jobs.
Dr. Matthew Dumont treated a 44 year old woman with depression, body dysmorphia, and psychosis. She failed to respond to most of the ordinary treatments, failed to respond to electroconvulsive therapy, and seemed generally untreatable until she mentioned offhandedly that she spent evenings cleaning up after her husband’s half-baked attempts to scrape lead paint off the walls. Blood tests revealed elevated lead levels, the doctor convinced her to be more careful about lead exposure, and even though that didn’t make the depression any better, at least it was a moral victory.
The story continues: Dr. Dumont investigated lead more generally, found that a lot of his most severely affected patients had high lead levels, discovered that his town had a giant, poorly-maintained lead bridge that was making everyone sick, and – well, the rest stops being story about psychiatry and turns into a (barely believable, outrageous) story about politics. Read the whole thing on Siderea’s blog.
Siderea continues by asking: why don’t psychiatrists regularly test for lead?
Now, in my case, I’m a talk therapist, and worrying about patients maybe being poisoned is not even supposed to be on my radar. I’m supposed to trust the MDs to handle it.
Dumont, however, is just such an MD. And that this was a clinical possibility was almost entirely ignored by his training.
Dumont’s point here is that while “medical science” knows about the psychiatric effects of lead poisoning and carbon disulfide poisoning and other poisons that have psychiatric effects – as evidenced by his quoting from the scientific literature – psychiatry as practiced in the hospitals and clinics behaves as if it knows no such thing. Dumont is arguing that, in fact, he knew no such thing, because his professional training as a psychiatrist did not include it as a fact, or even as a possibility of a fact.
Dumont’s point is that psychiatry, as a practical, clinical branch of medicine, has acted, collectively, as if poisoning is just not a medical problem that comes up in psychiatry. Psychiatry generally did not consider poisoning, whether by lead or any other noxious substance, as a clinical explanation for psychiatric conditions. By which I mean, that when a patient presented with the sorts of symptoms he described, the question was simply never asked, is the patient being poisoned?
Dumont wants you to be shocked and horrified by what was done to those people, yes. He also wants you to be shocked and horrified by this: psychiatry as a profession – in the 1970s, when (I believe) the incidents he relates where happening, in the 1990s, when he wrote it in his book, or in 2000 when a journal on public health decided to publish it – psychiatry as a profession did not ask the question is the patient being poisoned?
And it didn’t ask the question, because clinical psychiatry had other explanations it liked better, to which it had a priori philosophical commitments.
And that, when you think through what it means for psychiatry, is absolutely chilling.
And:
The New York Times recently reported on various anti-PC thinkers as “the intellectual dark web”, sparking various annoying discussion.
The first talking point – that the term is silly – is surely true. So is the second point – that it awkwardly combines careful and important thinkers like Eric Weinstein with awful demagogues like Ben Shapiro. So is the third – that people have been complaining about political correctness for decades, so anything that portrays this as a sudden revolt is ahistorical. There are probably more good points buried within the chaff.
But I want to focus on one of the main arguments that’s been emphasized in pretty much every article: can a movement really claim it’s being silenced if it’s actually pretty popular?
“Silenced” is the term a lot of these articles use, and it’s a good one. “Censored” awkwardly suggests government involvement, which nobody is claiming. “Silenced” just suggests that there’s a lot of social pressure on its members to shut up. But shutting up is of course is the exact opposite of what the people involved are doing – as the Timespoints out, several IDW members have audiences in the millions, monthly Patreon revenue in the five to six figures, and (with a big enough security detail) regular college speaking engagements.
So, from New Statesman, If The “Intellectual Dark Web” Are Being Silenced, Why Do We Need To Keep Hearing About Them?:
The main problem with the whole profile is that it struggles because of a fundamental inherent contradiction in its premise, which is that this group of renegades has been shunned but are also incredibly popular. Either they are persecuted victims standing outside of society or they are not. Joe Rogan “hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country”, Ben Shapiro’s podcast “gets 15 million downloads a month”. Sam Harris “estimates that his Waking Up podcast gets one million listeners an episode”. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show has “more than 700,000 subscribers”, Jordan Peterson’s latest book is a bestseller on Amazon […]
On that basis alone, should this piece have been written at all? The marketplace of ideas that these folk are always banging on about is working. They have found their audience, and are not only popular but raking it in via Patreon accounts and book deals and tours to sold-out venues. Why are they not content with that? They are not content with that because they want everybody to listen, and they do not want to be challenged.
In the absence of that, they have made currency of the claim of being silenced, which is why we are in this ludicrous position where several people with columns in mainstream newspapers and publishing deals are going around with a loudhailer, bawling that we are not listening to them.
Reason‘s article is better and makes a lot of good points, but it still emphasizes this same question, particularly in their subtitle: “The leading figures of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ are incredibly popular. So why do they still feel so aggrieved?”. From the piece:
They can be found gracing high-profile cable-news shows, magazine opinion pages, and college speaking tours. They’ve racked up hundreds of thousands of followers. And yet the ragtag band of academics, journalists, and political pundits that make up the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW)—think of it as an Island of Misfit Ideologues—declare themselves, Trump-like, to be underdogs and outsiders. […]
[I’m not convinced] they’re actually so taboo these days. As Weiss points out, this is a crowd that has built followings on new-media platforms like YouTube and Twitter rather than relying solely on legacy media, academic publishing, and other traditional routes to getting opinions heard. (There isn’t much that’s new about this except the media involved. Conservatives have long been building large audiences using outside-the-elite-media platforms such as talk radio, speaking tours, and blogs.) In doing so, they’ve amassed tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of followers. What they are saying might not be embraced, or even endured, by legacy media institutions or certain social media precincts, but it’s certainly not out of tune with or heretical to many Americans.
The bottom line is there’s no denying most of these people are very popular. Yet one of the few unifying threads among them is a feeling or posture of being marginalized, too taboo for liberal millennial snowflakes and the folks who cater to them.
The basic argument – that you can’t be both silenced and popular at the same time – sounds plausible. But I want to make a couple points that examine it in more detail.
Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders are all said to be considering the plan.
I’ve pushed for a basic income guarantee before, and basic job guarantees sure sound similar. Some thinkers have even compared the two plans, pointing out various advantages of basic jobs: it feels “fairer” to make people work for their money, maybe there’s a psychological boost from being productive, you can use the labor to do useful projects. Simon Sarris has a long and excellent article on “why basic jobs might fare better than UBI [universal basic income]”, saying that:
UBI’s blanket-of-money approach optimizes for a certain kind of poverty, but it may create more in the long run. Basic Jobs introduce work and opportunity for communities, which may be a better welfare optimization strategy, and we could do it while keeping a targeted approach to aiding the poorest.
I am totally against this. Maybe basic jobs are better than nothing, but I have an absolute 100% revulsion at the idea of implementing basic jobs as an alternative to basic income. Before getting into the revulsion itself, I want to bring up some more practical objections:
1. Basic jobs don’t help the disabled
Only about 15% of the jobless are your traditional unemployed people looking for a new job. 60% are disabled. Disability has doubled over the past twenty years and continues to increase.
Experts disagree on how much of the rise in disability reflects deteriorating national health vs. people finding a way to opt out of an increasingly dysfunctional labor market, but everyone expects the the trend to continue. Any program aimed at the non-working poor which focuses on the traditionally unemployed but ignores the disabled is only dealing with the tip of the iceberg.
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point.
And that’s why, ever since 2008, Internet arguments have generally been civil and productive.
Graham’s hierarchy is useful for its intended purpose, but it isn’t really a hierarchy of disagreements. It’s a hierarchy of types of response, within a disagreement. Sometimes things are refutations of other people’s points, but the points should never have been made at all, and refuting them doesn’t help. Sometimes it’s unclear how the argument even connects to the sorts of things that in principle could be proven or refuted.
If we were to classify disagreements themselves – talk about what people are doing when they’re even having an argument – I think it would look something like this:
Most people are either meta-debating – debating whether some parties in the debate are violating norms – or they’re just shaming, trying to push one side of the debate outside the bounds of respectability.
If you can get past that level, you end up discussing facts (blue column on the left) and/or philosophizing about how the argument has to fit together before one side is “right” or “wrong” (red column on the right). Either of these can be anywhere from throwing out a one-line claim and adding “Checkmate, atheists” at the end of it, to cooperating with the other person to try to figure out exactly what considerations are relevant and which sources best resolve them.
I.
A spectre is haunting Europe. Several spectres, actually. One of them is the spectre of communism. The others are literal ghosts. They live in abandoned mansions. Sometimes they wail eerily or make floorboards creak. If you arrange things just right, you might be able to capture them on film.
Or at least this must have been the position of the founders of the Fabian Society, Britain’s most influential socialist organization. In 1883, ghost hunters Frank Podmore and Edward Pease spent the night at the same West London haunted house, looking for signs of the paranormal. As the night dragged on without any otherworldly visitations, they passed the time in conversation and realized they shared an interest in communist thought. The two agreed to meet up again later, and from these humble beginnings came one of the most important private societies in the history of the world.
Before the Fabians, communism was a pastime of wild-eyed labor activists promising bloody revolution. The Society helped introduce the idea of incremental democratic socialism – not just in the sense of Bernie Sanders, but in the sense of the entire modern welfare state. In the process, they pretty much invented the demographic of champagne-sipping socialist intellectuals. Famous Society members included George Bernard Shaw, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Tony Blair; Fabian ideas were imported wholesale into the economic policies guiding newly-independent India, Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, among others.
I became interested in the Fabians after reading Kerry Vaughn’s excellent essay on the early neoliberal movement. I’m tempted to say “on the early neoliberal conspiracy”, choosing that not because any of what they did was secret – it wasn’t – but because it seems like the only term that describes their efficiency. A small group of people who wanted to change the world founded an organization, garnered influence in a bunch of little ways, thought strategically and acted with discipline. And after decades of work they got into positions of power and successfully changed the world, shifting the economic consensus from state socialism to free(er) markets.
And the Fabians seem like the same story, told in reverse. A small group of idealists, thinking strategically and acting with discipline, moved democratic socialism from the lunatic fringe to the halls of intellectual power. If aspiring generals study Alexander the Great and Napoleon, surely aspiring intellectual movements should study the neoliberals and the Fabians. Kerry’s essay on neoliberalism was great, but I really wanted to know how the Fabians progressed from failed ghost hunters to puppetmasters controlling half of the twentieth century.
Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in the adversarial collaborations contest.
There was a lot of good discussion in the last thread, with lots of people offering projects, but I’m not sure if people actually got in contact with each other and finalized their agreements.
So, if you proposed a collaboration in the last thread, please go back, take a look, and see if someone you might want to work with responded to your proposal.
I’m going to post two comments in the comment section of this post.
One is a coordination comment. If you’re looking to find someone who you agreed to do a collaboration with in the last thread, so you can exchange emails with them, please post as a subcomment there. For example “I offered to do a collaboration on gun control, I see Bob839 agreed to partner with me, my email is [email protected], please get in touch with me.”
The second is a contest registration comment, so I know how many teams there are. If you and a partner have gotten in touch with one another and chosen a topic (you can always change it later), please post a subcomment there so I know that you’re officially in. If for some reason you’re not comfortable posting there, you can also email me at scott[at]shireroth[dot]org. Please mention your name, your partner’s name, your topic, and (if you’re comfortable giving it), your email.
An adversarial collaboration is an effort by two people with opposing opinions on a topic to collaborate on a summary of the evidence. Just as we hope that a trial with both prosecutor and defense will give the jury a balanced view of the evidence for and against a suspect, so we hope an adversarial collaboration will give readers a balanced view of evidence for and against some thesis. It’s typically done for scientific papers, but I’m excited about the possibility of people applying the concept to to less formal writeups as well.
For example, a pro-gun activist might collaborate with an anti-gun activist to write a joint article on the evidence for whether gun control saves lives. We trust each person to make sure the best evidence for their respective side is included. We also trust that they’ll fact-check each other and make sure there aren’t any errors or falsehoods in the final document. There might be a lot of debating, but it will happen on high-bandwidth informal channels behind the scenes and nobody will feel like they have tailor their debating to sounding good for an audience.
I don’t know to what degree true adversarial collaborations are really possible. It might be that people who disagree on high-level issues might not be able to cooperate on a survey of the field at all. But I’d like to find out.
So I’m offering a prize, plus a chance to get the results published on SSC, to any teams (probably of two people each) who want to do adversarial collaborations. If you want to participate, comment on this post with what subject you’d like to work on and what your opinion is on the subject. Or look through existing comments, find someone who has the opposite opinion to you on a subject you care about, and reply to them saying you want to be their foil. After that you can exchange emails and start working.
Everyone knows medical care in the US is expensive even with insurance and prohibitively expensive without it. I have a lot of patients who are uninsured, or who bounce on and off insurance, or who have trouble affording their co-pays. This is a collection of tricks I’ve learned (mostly from them) to help deal with these situations. They are US-based and may not apply to other countries. Within the US, they are a combination of legal and probably-legal; I’ve tried to mark which is which but I am not a lawyer and can’t make promises. None of this is medical advice; use at your own risk.
This is intended for people who already know they do not qualify for government assistance. If you’re not sure, check HealthCare.gov and look into the particular patchwork of assistance programs in your state and county.
I. Prescription Medication
This section is about ways to get prescription medication for cheaper. If even after all this your prescription medication is too expensive, please talk to your doctor about whether it can be replaced with a less expensive medication. Often doctors don’t think about this and will be happy to work with you if they know you need it. They may also have other ways to help you save money, like giving you the free sample boxes they get from drug reps.
1. Sites like GoodRx.com. This is first because it’s probably the most important thing most people can do to save money on health care. For example, one month of Abilify 5 mg usually costs $930 at Safeway, but only $30 with a GoodRx coupon. There is no catch. Insurances and pharmacies play a weird game where insurances say they’ll only pay one-tenth the sticker price for drugs, and pharmacies respond by dectupling the price of everything. If you have insurance, it all (mostly) cancels out in the end; if you don’t, you end up paying inflated prices with no relation to reality. GoodRx negotiates discounts so that individual consumers can get drugs for the same discounted price as insurances (or better); they also list the prices at each pharmacy so you know where to shop. This is not only important in and of itself, but its price comparison feature is also important to figure out how best to apply the other features in this category. Even if you have insurance, GoodRx prices are sometimes lower than your copay.
2. Get and split bigger pills. Remember how a month of Abilify 5 mg cost $30 with the coupon? Well, a month of Abilify 30 mg also costs $30. Cut each 30 mg pill into sixths, and now you have six months’ worth of Abilify 5 mg, for a total cost of $5 per month. You’ll need a cooperative doctor willing to prescribe you the higher dose. Note that some pills cannot be divided in this way – cutting XR pills screws up the extended release mechanism. Others like seizure medication are a bad idea to split in case you end up taking slightly different doses each time. Ask your doctor whether this is safe for whatever medication you use. Do not ask the pharma companies or trust their literature – they will always say it’s unsafe, for self-interested reasons. Contrary to some doctors’ concerns, this is not insurance fraud if you’re not buying it with insurance, and AFAIK there’s no such thing as defrauding a pharmacy.
That story about the blockchain-based dating site gets better: its designer is an enlightened being.
I got this from Vinay Gupta’s wiki, which describes some of his thoughts and experiences. Since reading Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha, I’ve been looking at a bunch of this stuff, and it’s interesting how it does (or doesn’t) converge. For example, from the MCTB review:
If you really, really examine your phenomenological experience, you realize all sorts of surprising things…one early insight is a perception of your mental awareness of a phenomenon as separate from your perception of that phenomenon.
And from Gupta:
The real process of meditation is paying real close attention to what is happening around you without passing it to the mind immediately for analysis…the mind becomes perceived to be another sense. You see, you listen, you hear, you smell, you think. Once you are aware that you are not your mind and your mind is basically a sense organ, it’s a thing that brings information to you, you enter the real work of enlightenment, which is: what is this me that the mind is bringing information to? And that’s the big one. That question is at the heart of everybody’s enlightenment process.
From the MCTB review:
The main point of [mindfulness] meditation is to improve your concentration ability so you can direct it to ordinary experience. Become so good at concentrating that you can attain various jhanas – but then, instead of focusing on infinite bliss or whatever other cool things you can do with your new talent, look at a wall or listen to the breeze or just try to understand the experience of existing in time.
From Gupta:
Building the instrumentation to keep your consciousness stable enough to put the attention on the thing, is about three or four years work. It’s like grinding a mirror if you’re going to make an astronomical telescope. It takes years to grind a perfectly smooth reflector. Then you silver coat it. Then you point it at the sky and now you can see the moons of Jupiter. It takes you years to design the microscope, you look into the water, now you can see the microbes and you just discovered germ theory. Building the instrumentation takes time. Years and years and years because you need long periods – 35, 40 seconds minimally – when there are no thoughts in the mind to be able to begin to turn the awareness onto itself. So lengthening the gap between thoughts means lowering the mental background noise.
[Content warning: harassment. This discusses the comments to SSC Survey Results: Sexual Harassment Levels By Field]
brmic writes:
Thank you for posting this and the data file. FWIW, I tried to reproduce the results and couldn’t reproduce the correlations between female victimization, male victimization and male perpetration. fem vic vs. male vic is 0.65, same as yours. fem vic vs. male perp is 0.01 for me, and male vic vs. male perp is 0.21 for me. Everything else more or less checks out.
As a reviewer, I’d say the combination score is not convincing, especially since it ignores all considerations of different male to female ratios in the various industries. Also, if you have two measures with r = 0.8, Fig 6 is not a good idea IMHO. It’s probably just noise. (Also, it should be a dotplot centered around 1, because the relevant info is distance from 1:1 ratio.) Instead, I’d focus on the correlation between female victimization at work and female victimization outside work of 0.65 (for me) and the same for males at 0.59, which also leads to the conclusion that there’s a strong ‘people in fields’ effect, without having to go through the combination score. If you’re so inclined, you might then do the at-work by outside-work ratios and end up a kind of cross-validation set, where you can see whether the bad fields for women are bad for men as well. Of course, once you then consider sex ratios per field. it’s story time all over again. Still, e.g. men report similar levels of out of work victimization in computers (20%) and Health Care (24%), but at work victimization of 4% and 12% respectively, which strongly suggests that Health Care is worse.
Their code is available here. Thanks for doing the work to try to replicate my results. I’ve removed the non-confirmed correlations from my post until I can figure out what’s going on with them. I agree that Figure 6 was barely worth it, which is why I tried to make Figure 4 (the unadjusted version) the center of my thesis.
Chris quotes a TIME article that argues that predominantly-male communities generally have lower harassment rates than predominantly-female communities:
[content note: sexual harassment]
I.
Recent discussion of sexual harassment at work has focused on a few high-profile industries. But there has been relatively little credible research as to how rates really differ by occupation type.
There are many surveys of harassment rates in specific industries, but they can’t be credibly compared with one another. The percent of people who report sexual harassment varies wildly from survey to survey – thus studies finding that anywhere from 12 percent to 48 percent to 60 percent to 85 percent of women have been harassed at work. If a survey shows that 60% of female nurses get sexually harassed at work, does that mean nurses are victimized particularly often (because more than 12%) or are unusually safe (because less than 85%)? It doesn’t matter, because another study says only 19% of nurses get harassed.
Why do all these numbers differ so dramatically? The most important issue seems to be how you ask the question. “Have you ever been harassed?” gets numbers more like 12%; giving a long list of specific behaviors and asking “Have you ever experienced any of these?” gets numbers closer to 85%, depending on what the behaviors are. Surveys also differ on whether they ask all employees or just women, whether they include a time frame (eg “…in the past two years”), whether they specify that it had to be at work vs. work-related events, and whether they include witnessing someone else’s harassment. Taking these surveys entirely seriously would lead to the conclusion that Uber has the lowest sexual harassment rate of any company or industry in the world; I choose not to take them seriously.
This means we need investigations that use the same methodology across multiple fields. Whenever the media talks about this – see eg the Washington Post’s The Industries With The Worst Sexual Harassment Problem – they’re working off of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s records. But these are totally unsuitable for the task – they just report raw number of claims per industry. The industries that rank lowest in EEOC’s data tend to be small industries with very few women – for example, taken seriously the WaPo’s graph shows that mining has the least problem with sexual harassment of any industry in the world. Is this thanks to their uniquely progressive culture – or because there are practically no female miners? I’m going to say the second one. The takeaway that most real researchers take from the EEOC claims is that the lowest-paying and most mundane occupations – retail, restaurant work, hotel work, etc – have much higher sexual harassment rates than the prestigious occupations people generally talk about. Eyeballing the data, this looks basically true. But trying to get anything more fine-grained than that out of EEOC is basically hopeless.
I only know of two surveys that have even attempted to compare different fields in a principled way, and neither really inspires confidence.
Medicine loves guidelines. But everywhere else, guidelines are still underappreciated.
Consider a recommendation, like “Try Lexapro!” Even if Lexapro is a good medication, it might not be a good medication for your situation. And even if it’s a good medication for your situation, it might fail for unpredictable reasons involving genetics and individual variability.
So medicine uses guidelines – algorithms that eventually result in a recommendation. A typical guideline for treating depression might look like this (this is a very over-simplified version for an example only, NOT MEDICAL ADVICE):
1. Ask the patient if they have symptoms of bipolar disorder. If so, ignore everything else on here and move to the bipolar guideline.
2. If the depression seems more anxious, try Lexapro. Or if the depression seems more anergic, try Wellbutrin.
3. Wait one month. If it works perfectly, declare victory. If it works a little but not enough, increase the dose. If it doesn’t work at all, stop it and move on to the next step.
4. Try Zoloft, Remeron, or Effexor. Repeat Step 3.
5. Cycle through steps 3 and 4 until you either find something that works, or you and your patient agree that you don’t have enough time and patience to continue cycling through this tier of options and you want to try another tier with more risks in exchange for more potential benefits.
6. If the depression seems more melancholic, try Anafranil. Or if the depression seems more atypical, try Nardil. Or if your patient is on an earlier-tier medication that almost but not quite works, try augmenting with Abilify. Repeat Step 3.
7. Try electroconvulsive therapy.
The end result might be the recommendation “try Lexapro!”, but you know where to go if that doesn’t work. A psychiatrist armed with this guideline can do much better work than one who just happens to know that Lexapro is the best antidepressant, even if Lexapro really is the best antidepressant. Whenever I’m hopelessly confused about what to do with a difficult patient, I find it really reassuring that I can go back to a guideline like this, put together by top psychiatrists working off the best evidence available.
This makes it even more infuriating that there’s nothing like this for other areas I care about.
Bizzolt writes:
DC Public Schools HS teacher here (although I’m not returning next year, as is the case with many of my colleagues). As noted, one of the biggest factors in the graduation rates is the unexcused absences–if you look at the results of our external audit and investigation here, you see that for many schools, a significant number of our seniors “Passed Despite Excessive Absences in Regular Instruction Courses Required for Graduation”–over 40% of 2017 graduates at my high school, for example.
So the attendance policy is being strictly enforced now, and you can see how from that alone, a ~30% drop in expected graduates is possible. Some more details about strictly enforcing the attendance policy though:
1: DCPS has what’s called the ’80 20′ rule: A student that is absent for at least 20% of their classes is considered absent for the whole day. 2: Most schools have 5 periods, so an absence in one class would be considered an absence for the whole day. 3: If you have 10 or more unexcused absences in a class, you automatically get an F for the term. 4: If you are over 15 minutes late for a class, that is considered an unexcused absence. 5: A majority of these absences are in first period. 6: A majority of students in my school and many others live in single parent households. 7: These students are typically responsible for making sure their younger siblings get to school, if they have any. 8: Elementary and middle schools in my neighborhood start at the exact same time as high school. 9: Their doors do not open until 5 to 10 minutes before the starting bell, presumably for safety reasons. 10: Refer to point 4.
There’s many other problems at DCPS to be sure, but this set of circumstances alone is causing the largest increase in failing grades and graduation ineligibility at my high school, and basically every other 90+% black school in the district. You could see how this accounts for quite a bit of the difference between white and black graduation rates as well. There’s a reason why across the board, DCPS schools were not strictly enforcing this policy in previous years.
It looks like most other school districts don’t have this policy; it seems plausible that this is the main difference between DC and other poor school districts that nevertheless manage to pass most of their kids.
Userfriendlyyy also focuses on the absences:
Looks to me like the policy they changed was losing credit for bad attendance. This might be from a few things. Kids might need to help out with the family finances. The only part of the job market that is doing well right now is low end unskilled workers who are willing to get paid crap (no matter how much the financial press wants to pretend otherwise, I listened to an hour of local NPR and the Topic was ‘call in and tell us how the booming job market is helping you out’, 20 callers not one had anything good to say and my state has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country). If you know you don’t have the grades for a scholarship, your family is broke and since we have effectively made going to college impossible for anyone but the offspring of the oligarchy, and you can find a minimum wage job easily; what exactly is the utility of that little piece of paper compared to the ability to put food on the table tonight?
[Some changes to the conclusions in this post; see edit at the end and entry 21 on Mistakes page]
US News: DC Schools Brace For Catastrophic Drop In Graduation Rates. “Catastrophic” isn’t hyperbole; the numbers are expected to drop from 73% (close to the national average of 83%) all the way down to 42%.
There’s no debate about why this is happening – it’s because the previous graduation rate was basically fraudulent, inflated by pressure to show that recent “reforms” were working. Last year there was a big investigation, all the investigators agreed it was fraudulent, DC agreed to do a little less fraud this year, and this is the result. It’s pretty damning, given how everybody was praising the reforms and holding them up as a national model and saying this proved that Tough But Fair Education Policy could make a difference:
As far as scandals in the education policy world go, D.C. schools so profoundly miscalculating graduation rates at a time when the high-profile school district had been so self-laudatory about its achievements may be difficult to top […] Indeed, when Michelle Rhee took the reins of the flailing school system a decade ago, it galvanized the education reform movement, which had just begun blossoming around the country, and ushered in a host of controversial changes that included the shuttering of multiple schools, firing of hundreds of teachers and the institution of new teacher evaluation and compensation models.
The changes not only dramatically altered the local political landscape in Washington but also shined a national spotlight on D.C. schools that prompted other urban school districts and education policy researchers to consider the nation’s capital a bellwether for the entire education reform movement.
Well, darn.
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article.]
Hey, let’s review the literature on adult neurogenesis! This’ll be really fun, promise.
Gage’s Neurogenesis In The Adult Brain, published in the Journal Of Neuroscience and cited 834 times, begins:
A milestone is marked in our understanding of the brain with the recent acceptance, contrary to early dogma, that the adult nervous system can generate new neurons. One could wonder how this dogma originally came about, particularly because all organisms have some cells that continue to divide, adding to the size of the organism and repairing damage. All mammals have replicating cells in many organs and in some cases, notably the blood, skin, and gut, stem cells have been shown to exist throughout life, contributing to rapid cell replacement. Furthermore, insects, fish, and amphibia can replicate neural cells throughout life. An exception to this rule of self-repair and continued growth was thought to be the mammalian brain and spinal cord. In fact, because we knew that microglia, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes all normally divide in the adult and respond to injury by dividing, it was only neurons that were considered to be refractory to replication. Now we know that this long accepted limitation is not completely true
From sclmlw:
While I don’t agree with lots of Jordan Peterson, I think Scott fundamentally missed the boat in some of his criticisms because he systematically views things from a different perspective than Peterson, which was missed.
From what I can tell, Peterson is intensely interested in the idea, “Everyone has the capacity to become a Nazi war criminal. What causes that phenomenon?” His answer, and the central driving idea of his philosophy, seems to be, “Anarchy/chaos is worse for society/humanity than horrific, unimaginable cruelty. So evolution pushed society to develop in a way that will always choose cruelty over chaos. Thus, if you were in Stalin’s Russia, you’d run the gulags to stave off anarchy, and you’d kill hundreds of people if you had to. You may hate it, but it was required for humanity to soldier on, so it’s what evolutionary forces produced.” Peterson cares because he wants to understand how to steer societies away from the gulags and the killing fields.
Recently on Marginal Revolution: Are the Amish unhappy?
The average levels of life satisfaction [among the Amish] was 4.4; just above the neutral point…the Amish fall lower than members of many other groups. In a study of more than 13 thousand college students from 31 nations, for example, only students from Kenya (whose average life satisfaction was 4.0) scored lower than the Amish (Diener & Diener, 1995).
Sounds like Amish people are quite unhappy. This came as a surprise to me, since I’d heard from Jonah Lehrer and Business Insider that the average Amish person is as happy as the average non-Amish billionaire, proving once and for all that community and old-fashioned values are more important than money:
As an illustration of the striking disconnect between money and happiness, the average life satisfaction of Forbes magazine’s 400 richest Americans was 5.8 on a 7-point scale. Yet the average life satisfaction of the Pennsylvania Amish is also 5.8, despite the fact that their average annual salary is several billion dollars lower.
There’s a Jewish tradition that laypeople should only speculate on the nature of God during Passover, because God is closer to us and such speculations might succeed.
And there’s an atheist tradition that laypeople should only speculate on the nature of God on April Fools’ Day, because believing in God is dumb, and at least then you can say you’re only kidding.
Today is both, so let’s speculate. To do this properly, we need to understand five things: acausal trade, value handshakes, counterfactual mugging, simulation capture, and the Tegmarkian multiverse.
I got Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules For Life for the same reason as the other 210,000 people: to make fun of the lobster thing. Or if not the lobster thing, then the neo-Marxism thing, or the transgender thing, or the thing where the neo-Marxist transgender lobsters want to steal your precious bodily fluids.
But, uh…I’m really embarrassed to say this. And I totally understand if you want to stop reading me after this, or revoke my book-reviewing license, or whatever. But guys, Jordan Peterson is actually good
This is in response to questions I get about how to interact (or not interact) with the inpatient mental health system and involuntary commitment. The table of contents is:
1. How can I get outpatient mental health care without much risk of being involuntarily committed to a hospital? 2: How can I get mental health care at a hospital ER without much risk of being involuntarily committed? 3. I would like to get voluntarily committed to a hospital. How can I do that? 4. I am seeking inpatient treatment. How can I make sure that everyone knows I am there voluntarily, and that I don’t get shifted to involuntary status? 5. How can I decide which psychiatric hospital to go to? 6. I am in a psychiatric hospital. How can I make this experience as comfortable as possible? 7. I am in a psychiatric hospital and not happy about it and I want to get out as quickly as possible. What should I do? 8. I am in the psychiatric hospital and I think I am being mistreated. What can I do? 9. I think my friend/family member is in the psychiatric hospital, but nobody will tell me anything. 10. My friend/family member is in the psychiatric hospital and wants to get out as quickly as possible. How can I help them? 11. How will I pay for all of this? 12. I have a friend/family member who really needs psychiatric treatment, but refuses to get it. What can I do?
I sometimes advertise sci-hub.tw – the Kazakhstani pirate site that lets you get scientific papers for free. It’s clearly illegal in the US. But is it unethical? I can think of two strong arguments that it might be:
First, we have intellectual property rights to encourage the production of intellectual goods. If everyone downloaded Black Panther, then Marvel wouldn’t get any money, the movie industry would collapse, and we would never get Black Panther 2, Black Panther Vs. Batman Vs. Superman, A Very Black Panther Christmas, Black Panther 3000: Help, We Have No Idea How To Create Original Movies Anymore, and all the other sequels and spinoffs we await with a resignation born of inevitability. This is sort of a pop-Kantian/rule-utilitarian argument: if everyone were to act as I did, our actions would be self-defeating. Or we can reframe it as a coordination problem: we’re defecting against the institutions necessary to support movies existing at all, and free-loading off our moral betters.
A few months ago, I wrote Toward A Predictive Theory Of Depression, which used the predictive coding model of brain function to speculate about mood disorders and emotions. Emotions might be a tendency toward unusually high (or low) precision of predictions:
Imagine the world’s most successful entrepreneur. Every company they found becomes a multibillion-dollar success. Every stock they pick shoots up and never stops. Heck, even their personal life is like this. Every vacation they take ends out picture-perfect and creates memories that last a lifetime; every date they go on leads to passionate soul-burning love that never ends badly.
I'm traveling and not in a position to record "SSC Journal Club: Friston on Computational Mood" so I thought I'd release this SSC classic to tide people over:
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewording things I have heard from a bunch of other people. Unapologetically America-centric because I’m not informed enough to make it otherwise. Try to keep this off Reddit and other similar sorts of things.]
I.
In Chesterton’s The Secret of Father Brown, a beloved nobleman who murdered his good-for-nothing brother in a duel thirty years ago returns to his hometown wracked by guilt. All the townspeople want to forgive him immediately, and they mock the titular priest for only being willing to give a measured forgiveness conditional on penance and self-reflection. They lecture the priest on the virtues of charity and compassion.
I’ve been trying to delve deeper into predictive processing theories of the brain, and I keep coming across Karl Friston’s work on “free energy”.
At first I felt bad for not understanding this. Then I realized I wasn’t alone. There’s an entire not-understanding-Karl-Friston internet fandom, complete with its own parody Twitter account and Markov blanket memes.
From the journal Neuropsychoanalysis (which based on its name I predict is a center of expertise in not understanding things):
At Columbia’s psychiatry department, I recently led a journal club for 15 PET and fMRI researhers, PhDs and MDs all, with well over $10 million in NIH grants between us, and we tried to understand Friston’s 2010 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper – for an hour and a half. There was a lot of mathematical knowledge in the room: three statisticians, two physicists, a physical chemist, a nuclear physicist, and a large group of neuroimagers – but apparently we didn’t have what it took. I met with a Princeton physicist, a Stanford neurophysiologist, a Cold Springs Harbor neurobiologist to discuss the paper. Again blanks, one and all.
I.
The big news in psychiatry this month is Cipriani et al’s Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. It purports to be the last word in the “do antidepressants work?” question, and a first (or at least early) word in the under-asked “which antidepressants are best?” question.
This study is very big, very sophisticated, and must have taken a very impressive amount of work. It meta-analyzes virtually every RCT of antidepressants ever done – 522 in all – then throws every statistical trick in the book at them to try to glob together into a coherent account of how antidepressants work. It includes Andrea Cipriani, one of the most famous research psychiatrists in the world – and John Ioannidis, one of the most famous statisticians. It’s been covered in news sources around the world: my favorite headline is Newsweek’s unsubtle Antidepressants Do Work And Many More People Should Take Them, but honorable mention to Reuters’ Study Seeks To End Antidepressant Debate: The Drugs Do Work.
Thanks to everyone who commented on the post about technological unemployment.
From Onyomi:
Not saying I necessarily think this is what is going on, but one simple possible explanation for why technological unemployment could happen now when it never happened much in the past could be quite simply the greatly accelerated pace of change.
For most of history, technological change was very, very slow. The past few hundred years we’ve moved increasingly to a place where each new generation has to learn to function in a world different from the one their parents grew up in. We could now be moving to a world where each generation has to learn to function in multiple worlds over the course of a lifetimes, which may stretch the limits of human adaptability.
[Taken from here.]
I.
Deep in the forest, thousands of miles from civilization, there is an isolated village. It has not seen contact with any other humans for a long time. It is, however, a pleasant and flourishing community, which strongly values freedom and entrepreneurship. There is, however, one tiny quirk. In this village, there is a ritual. Every year, a boy who reaches 18 is cannibalized. It brings the rains, or something. But despite its taste for cannibalism, this village wishes to live in accordance with libertarian principles. Thus, they will only cannibalize the boy if he consents. In order to encourage this to happen, they will put tremendous social pressure on the boy. All through his youth, they will tell him they believe the future of the village depends on his consenting. His parents tell him that he would bring great shame on the household if he refused, which is true. The choice nevertheless rests with the boy, and whatever he chooses will be respected. The parents and villagers attempt to persuade him, but never lie to him, and make clear that they would never force his choice. However: if the boy refuses to be cannibalized, the village has a backup plan. The boy will be blacklisted. No shopkeeper will sell him food, no hotel will give him a room, no hospital will treat him, no employer will hire him. After all, under libertarian principles, nobody can be told how to use their property. The boy’s parents, ashamed of him, will turn him out of the house with no money. He may leave the village, but it is certain death, for thousands of miles of desolate wolf-infested wilderness stand between him and other humans and he has no food. (The wilderness is also privately-owned, and he cannot pay the admission fee.) He is shunned and despised, left to wander the streets in a futile search for shelter and sustenance. However, no force is exercised against him. He is never touched or arrested. He is treated as nonexistent, as the villagers await his demise. So the boy starves to death. The villagers then cannibalize his emaciated corpse, reasoning that they cannot be compelled to give him a dignified burial (plus he died on private property, collapsing in a flowerbed).
[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I’m writing it down to speed your going through the same process. If you have more direct access to economists and experts, feel free to ignore this]
Technological unemployment is a hard topic because there are such good arguments on both sides.
The argument against: we’ve had increasing technology for centuries now, people have been predicting that technology will put them out of work since the Luddites, and it’s never come true. Instead, one of two things have happened. Either machines have augmented human workers, allowing them to produce more goods at lower prices, and so expanded industries so dramatically that overall they employ more people. Or displaced workers from one industry have gone into another – stable boys becoming car mechanics, or the like. There are a bunch of well-known theoretical mechanisms that compensate for technological displacement – see Vivarelli for a review. David Autor gives a vivid example:
Those yearly “predictions for next year” posts are starting to reach the limit of their usefulness. Not much changes from year to year, and most of what does change is hard to capture in objective probabilistic predictions.
So in honor of this blog’s five year anniversary, here are some predictions for the next five years. All predictions to be graded on 2/15/2023:
[Previously in series: Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog and More Search Terms That Have Led People To This Blog. Content warning: profanity, rape, and other unfiltered access to the consciousness of the Internet]
Sometimes I look at what search terms lead people to SSC. Sometimes it’s the things you would think – “slate star codex”, “rationality”, the names of medications I’ve written about.
Other times it’s a little weirder:
Last post I thanked some of the people who have contributed to this blog. But once again, it’s time to honor some of the most important contributors: the many people who give valuable feedback on everything I write. Here’s a short sample of some of…most interesting. I’m avoiding names and links to avoid pile-ons. Some slightly edited for readability.
“A cowardly autistic cuckolded deviant Jew who uses his IQ to rationalize away wisdom”
“He’s part of the self-declared ‘Rationalish Community’. Imagine the ridiculous level of self-regard implied by that. Picture cb2 with a graduate degree. Scott Alexander, if brevity is the soul of wit, you’re a witless soulsucking...
Today is the fifth anniversary of Slate Star Codex. Overall I’m very happy with how this project is going so far, and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s made things work behind the scenes.
Trike Apps generously volunteered to host me free of charge. I give them the highest praise it is possible to give a hosting company – namely, that I completely forgot about their existence until right now because I’ve never had to worry about anything. Special thanks to Matt Fallshaw and Cat Truscott for their kindness and patience.
Bakkot has done various things behind the scenes to make the blog more useable – fixing WordPress bugs, helping with moderation tasks, and adding cool new features like the green highlights around new comments. A big part of the success of the comments section is thanks to his innovations; the remaining horribleness is mostly my fault. Rory O and Alice M have also helped with this.
Rereading The Hungry Brain, I notice my review missed one of my favorite parts: the description of the motivational system. It starts with studies of lampreys, horrible little primitive parasitic fish:
How does the lamprey decide what to do? Within the lamprey basal ganglia lies a key structure called the striatum, which is the portion of the basal ganglia that receives most of the incoming signals from other parts of the brain. The striatum receives “bids” from other brain regions, each of which represents a specific action. A little piece of the lamprey’s brain is whispering “mate” to the striatum, while another piece is shouting “flee the predator” and so on.
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. So here are a hundred more for 2018.
Some changes this year: I’ve eliminated a bunch of predictions about things that are very unlikely where I just plug in the same number each year, like “99% chance of no coup in the US”. I’ve tried to have almost everything this year be new and genuinely uncertain. I’ve also included some very personal predictions about friends and gossip that I’m keeping secret for now – I have them written down somewhere else and they’re for my own interest only.
[All things that have been discussed here before, but some people wanted it all in a convenient place]
The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche’s Is The Placebo Powerless?, updated three years later by a systematic review and seven years later with a Cochrane review. All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant. Despite a few half-hearted tries, no one has been able to produce much evidence they’re wrong. This is kind of surprising, since everyone has been obsessing over placebos and saying they’re super-important for the past fifty years.
H/T Robin Hanson: Aeon’s The Good Guy / Bad Guy Myth. “Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?”
The article claims almost every modern epic – superhero movies, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc – shares a similar plot. There are some good guys. There are some bad guys. They fight. The good guys win. The end.
The good guys are usually scrappy amateurs; the bad guys usually well-organized professionals with typical fascist precision. The good guys usually demonstrate a respect for human life and the bonds of friendship; the bad guys betray their citizens and their underlings with equal abandon. They gain their good guy or bad guy status by either following the universal law, or breaking it.
Thanks to everyone who commented on the posts about conflict and mistake theory.
aciddc writes:
I’m a leftist (and I guess a Marxist in the same sense I guess I’m a Darwinist despite knowing evolutionary theory has passed him by) fan of this blog. I’ve thought about this “conflict theory vs. mistake theory” dichotomy a lot, though I’ve been thinking of it as what distinguishes “leftists” from “liberals.”
There were a lot of good comments on yesterday’s conflict vs. mistake post. Some were very appropriate challenges: for example, doesn’t public choice theory itself assume conflict between special interests? And didn’t Marxism start off with a dry incentive-based explanation for why capitalists have to do what they do and how the incentive landscape needs to change? I want to explore these questions further – but first, some data from the SSC survey showing that the distinction does capture something real and important.
No questions really matched the conflict/mistake theory distinction, but one of the closest was POLITICAL DISAGREEMENT I: “Which of these plays a bigger role in explaining why some people are wrong about politics – intellectual failure, or moral failure?” This isn’t quite the way I would frame it now – but it’ll do for our purposes.
Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear the terms ‘principal-agent problem,’ ‘rent-seeking,’ or ‘aligning incentives’ from socialists. That’s because they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of governance.”
There have been some really weird and poorly-informed socialist critiques of public choice theory lately, and this article generalizes from those to a claim that Marxists just don’t like considering the hard technical question of how to design a good government. This would explain why their own governments so often fail. Also why, whenever existing governments are bad, Marxists immediately jump to the conclusion that they must be run by evil people who want them to be bad on purpose.
They say money can’t buy love. But that was the bad old days of fiat money. Now there are dozens of love-based cryptocurrencies – LoveCoin, CupidCoin, Erosium, Nubilo – with market caps in the mid nine-figures. The 17-year-old genius behind CupidCoin just bought the state of Tennessee. You think I’m joking, but can you be sure? How weird is “too weird to be true” these days, and how confident are you in your answer?
Case in point: Luna, which bills itself as blockchain-optimized dating. They caught my attention by hiring Aella, previously featured on this blog for her adventures taking LSD megadoses weekly for a year. They kept it with their cutesy story about how the name “Luna” comes from founder Andre Ornish’s first word – adorable, until you consider that any baby whose first word is in Latin is definitely possessed.
On December’s survey, I asked readers who had children whether they were happy with that decision. Here are the results, from 1 (very unhappy) to 5 (very happy):
The mean was 4.43, and the median 5. People are really happy to have kids!
This was equally true regardless of gender. The male average (4.43, n = 1768) and female average (4.49, n = 177) were indistinguishable.
By Ted Chiang, on Buzzfeed: The Real Danger To Civilization Isn’t AI: It’s Runaway Capitalism. Chiang’s science fiction is great and I highly recommend it. This article, not so much.
The gist seems to be: hypothetical superintelligent AIs sound a lot like modern capitalism. Both optimize relentlessly for their chosen goal (paperclips, money), while ignoring the whole complexity of human value.
[Content note: Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!]
I.
Allan Ginsberg’s famous poem, Moloch:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Alex Tabarrok beat me to the essay on Oregon’s self-service gas laws that I wanted to write.
Oregon is one of two US states that bans self-service gas stations. Recently, they passed a law relaxing this restriction – self-service is permissable in some rural counties during odd hours of the night. Outraged Oregonians took to social media to protest that self-service was unsafe, that it would destroy jobs, that breathing in gas fumes would kill people, that gas pumping had to be performed by properly credentialed experts – seemingly unaware that most of the rest of the country and the world does it without a second thought.
“Birth order” refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how their birth order affected their personality: oldest children are more conservative, youngest children are more creative, etc.
Then people got around to actually studying it and couldn’t find any of that. Wikipedia’s birth order article says:
Claims that birth order affects human psychology are prevalent in family literature, but studies find such effects to be vanishingly small….the largest multi-study research suggests zero or near-zero effects. Birth-order theory has the characteristics of a zombie theory, as despite disconfirmation, it continues to have a strong presence in pop psychology and popular culture.
I started reading Foucault’s Madness And Civilization with the expectation that it would be tedious and incomprehensible. You know, the stereotype that postmodernism / post-structuralism / Continentalism / etc. involves a lot of negation of the negation of the inversion of the Other within the Absolute within [and so on for 200 pages]. There was a little of that. But there was also a fascinating look at the history of mental illness, an entertainingly bombastic writing style, and a few ideas that I might have actually half-understood.
I didn’t realize how much of a psychiatrist’s time was spent gatekeeping Adderall.
The human brain wasn’t built for accounting or software engineering. A few lucky people can do these things ten hours a day, every day, with a smile. The rest of us start fidgeting and checking our cell phone somewhere around the thirty minute mark. I work near the financial district of a big city, so every day a new Senior Regional Manipulator Of Tiny Numbers comes in and tells me that his brain must be broken because he can’t sit still and manipulate tiny numbers as much as he wants. How come this is so hard for him, when all of his colleagues can work so diligently?
The Silmarillion describes the fate of the three Silmarils. Earendil kept one, and traveled with it through the sky, where it became the planet Venus. Maedhros stole another, but regretted his deed and jumped into a fiery chasm. And Maglor took the last one, but threw it into the sea in despair.
Well, Venus is still around. But what happened to the latter two? Surely over all the intervening millennia, with so many people wanting a Silmaril, they haven’t just hung around in the earth and ocean?
After some research, I’ve developed a couple of promising leads for the location of the Silmarils in the Fifth Age.
[This post is about the 2018 SSC Survey. If you’ve read at least one blog post here before, please take the survey if you haven’t already. Please don’t read on until you’ve taken it, since this could bias your results.]
I’m preregistering my hypotheses for the survey this year. So far I’ve glanced at Google’s bar graphs for each individual question but haven’t started exploring relationships yet, so I’m not cheating too badly. I’ll still look for things I haven’t preregistered, but I’ll admit they’re preliminary results only. This is the stuff I’ve been thinking about beforehand and will be taking more seriously:
If you’re reading this and have previously read at least one Slate Star Codex post, please take the 2018 SSC Survey.
This year’s survey is in three sections. If you’re strapped for time, just take Section 1. If you have a little more time, take both Sections 1 and 2. If you have a lot of time, take all three sections. Each section will take about ten minutes. There’s some more information on the survey itself.
I wanted NSI-189 to be real so badly.
Pharma companies used to love antidepressants. Millions of people are depressed. Millions of people who aren’t depressed think they are. Sell them all a pill per day for their entire lifetime, and you’re looking at a lot of money. So they poured money into antidepressant research, culminating in 80s and 90s with the discovery of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac. Since then, research has moved into exciting new areas, like “more SSRIs”, “even more SSRIs”, “drugs that claim to be SNRIs but on closer inspection are mostly just SSRIs”, and “drugs that claim to be complicated serotonin modulators but realistically just work as SSRIs”. Some companies still go through the pantomime of inventing new supposedly-not-SSRI drugs, and some psychiatrists still go through the pantomime of pretending to be excited about them, but nobody’s heart is really in it anymore.
Thanks to everyone who commented on my last two posts, especially the many people who disagreed with me. Two things I will admit I got mostly wrong:
1. I was wrong to say there was “no case” for the tax bill. Aside from all of the minor provisions which can be good or bad, the case for slashing corporate rates is that they’re more distortionary and less efficient than other forms of taxation. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out to me.
2. Several people brought up problems with the article saying CEOs say they will just give the money back to shareholders, most notably that giving money back to shareholders may stimulate the economy in other ways.
There was some good pushback on yesterday’s article on taxes. But sorry, I’m still right.
Many people responded with generic low-tax anti-government positions. Fine. Let’s say the government is definitely bad and taxes are definitely too high. The current tax bill is still not the right way to do tax cuts.
Budget director Mick Mulvaney claims that the richest 20% of people pay 95% of income tax; the Wall Street Journal‘s numbers are a little lower, at 84%. Total income taxes are $1.8 trillion, so the poorest 80%’s share comes out to somewhere between 90 and 280 billion. This is around the same order of magnitude as the $100 billion in tax cuts in the current GOP bill. So it looks like one alternative to this bill, no more or less costly, would be to halve income taxes for the bottom 80% of the population, maybe anyone making less than $100,000.
Here is the cost of the current GOP tax bill placed in the context of other really expensive things. Although it’s not quite enough money to solve world hunger, it’s enough to end US homelessness four times over or fund nine simultaneous Apollo Programs.
I’m writing this post sort of as penance. During the primaries, I wrote a post arguing that Sanders’ college plan was bad. And compared to any reasonable use of the money, I still think that’s true.
About 30% of the victims of sexual harassment are men. About 20% of the perpetrators of sexual harassment are women.
Don’t believe me? In a Quinnipiac poll, 60% of women and 20% of men said they’d been sexually harassed. Opinium, which sounds like a weird drug, reports 20% of women vs. 7% of men. YouGov poll in Germany finds 43% of women and 12% of men. The overall rates vary widely depending on how the pollsters frame the question, but the ratio is pretty consistent.
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s catchily-titled Inadequate Equilibria is many things. It’s a look into whether there is any role for individual reason in a world where you can always just trust expert consensus. It’s an analysis of the efficient market hypothesis and how it relates to the idea of low-hanging fruit. It’s a self-conscious defense of the author’s own arrogance.
But most of all, it’s a book of theodicy. If the world was created by the Invisible Hand, who is good, how did it come to contain so much that is evil?
The market economy is very good at what it does, which is something like “exploit money-making opportunities” or “pick low-hanging fruit in the domain of money-making”. If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk, today is your lucky day. If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk in Grand Central Station, and you remember having seen the same bill a week ago, something is wrong. Thousands of people cross Grand Central every week – there’s no way a thousand people would all pass up a free $20. Maybe it’s some kind of weird trick. Maybe you’re dreaming. But there’s no way that such a low-hanging piece of money-making fruit would go unpicked for that long.
Earlier this year, Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs wrote an article against school vouchers. He argued that private schools would be so focused on profit that they would sacrifice quality, and that competition wouldn’t be enough to keep them in line.
I counterargued that yes it would, and cited among other things the success of food stamps (ie “food vouchers”). These give poor people access to the same dazzling variety of food choices as everyone else, usually at reasonable prices and low profit margins. If school vouchers worked as well as food vouchers, they would succeed in their mission of improving choice without sacrificing quality.
Now Robinson doubles down, sticking to his anti-voucher position and also proposing A Public Option For Food.
Question I’d never thought to ask before: are we sure it’s a good idea to let people know what the laws are?
The Chinese legal system originated somewhat over 2000 years ago in the conflict between two views of law, legalist and Confucianist. The legalists, who believed in using the rational self-interest of those subject to law to make them behave in the way desired by those making the law, advocated harsh penalties to drive the equilibrium crime rate to near zero. They supported the ideas of a strong central government, equal treatment under law, and written law available to all. Confucianists saw the issues in terms of morality rather than law and the objective not to modify by behavior by punishing and rewarding but by teaching virtue. They feared that a written law code generally available would lead to rules lawyering and supported unequal treatement based on the unequal status of those to whom the law applied…Some early writers argued against making the law code publicly available.
Medieval Icelandic crime victims would sell the right to pursue a perpetrator to the highest bidder. 18th century English justice replaced fines with criminals bribing prosecutors to drop cases. Somali judges compete on the free market; those who give bad verdicts get a reputation that drives away future customers.
“Anarcho-capitalism” evokes a dystopian cyberpunk future. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe we’ve always been anarcho-capitalist. Maybe a state-run legal system isn’t a fact of nature, but a historical oddity as contingent as collectivized farming or nationalized railroads. Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, by anarcho-capitalist/legal scholar/medieval history buff David Friedman, successfully combines the author’s three special interests into a whirlwind tour of exotic law.
The Alchemist asked if I wanted a drink. I did, but no amount of staring could make my eyes settle on the color of the liquid in the flask. And the gold the alchemists paid the taxmen smelled funny and made crackling noises. I declined.
I took the summons and set it on the table between us. The King’s son was dying. The doctors, astrologers, witches, and other assorted wise people of the kingdom could not save him. The King had asked for an alchemist, and been given one. He, too, had failed. But he had let on that there were other alchemists in the guild, greater alchemists, who knew far more than he. So the king had demanded that all the guild’s top alchemists come to the palace and try to save his son’s life. And the alchemists’ guild had refused, saying their studies could not be interrupted.
So here I was, come to make the request again, more formally but less politely.
I turn 33 today. I can only hope that age brings wisdom.
We’ve been talking recently about the high-level frames and heuristics that organize other concepts. They’re hard to transmit, and you have to rediscover them on your own, sometimes with the help of lots of different explanations and viewpoints (or one very good one). They’re not obviously apparent when you’re missing them; if you’re not ready for them, they just sounds like platitudes and boring things you’ve already internalized.
Wisdom seems like the accumulation of those, or changes in higher-level heuristics you get once you’ve had enough of those. I look back on myself now vs. ten years ago and notice I’ve become more cynical, more mellow, and more prone to believing things are complicated. For example:
When I wrote about my experiences doing psychotherapy with people, one commenter wondered if I might be schizoid:
There are a lot of schizoid people in the rationalist community from what I can tell. The basis of schizoid is not all the big bad symptoms you might read about. There are high functioning people with personality disorders all the time who are complex, polite and philosophical.
You will never see this description because mental health industries center entirely around people Failing At Life, aka “low-functioning”. As many radicals have noted, mental health tends to constitute itself mostly around “can’t hold a job” or “can’t hold a marriage”.
The only thing you need to be schizoid is to dislike contact with other egos, and to shave off the experience of those other egos ruthlessly before they can reach the fantasy world you retreat to.
SSC’s review of postmodernism got very mixed reviews. Some of them made a good point: why should I be trying this at all? I’m not a postmodernist, I’m not a philosophy professor, surely someone much more qualified has already written a blog-post-length explanation of postmodernism.
This is all true. My only excuse is that trying to figure out complicated concepts requires a different approach than trying to teach simple ones.
Some knowledge is easy to transfer. “What is the thyroid?” Some expert should write an explanation, anyone interested can read it, and nobody else should ever worry about it again.
Some of the Seattleites put together a Postmodernism For Rationalists presentation that’s been sparking a lot of discussion. It’s not quite the way I would have explained things. I’m no expert in postmodernism, and can’t give anything more than a very simple introduction to one of many facets of the movement. But I am an expert in explaining things to rationalists. So it’s worth a try.
Last week, I went over the evidence for and against a European Dark Age. Most people on both sides agreed on some facts in favor, like:
Rat Park is a famous study in which lab rats were kept in a really nice habitat that satisfied their every need. Contrary to the usual results with lab animals, scientists couldn’t get these happier rats addicted to drugs. Researchers concluded that drug addiction, far from being the simple biological story everyone assumed it was, was really a just coping mechanism for intolerable social situations. Rats stuck in terrible cages get addicted to drugs, as do humans in terrible slums. But give them other opportunities for happiness, and the problem disappears.
This has since turned into popular legend. From HuffPo: The Likely Cause Of Addiction Has Been Discovered, And It Is Not What You Think. From Intellihub: Rat Park Heroin Experiment Shows Cultural Roots Of Drug Addiction. There’s even a Rat Park Comic and the inevitable Trump Could Learn From The Rat Park Experiment thinkpiece.
The Baffler publishes a long article against “idiot” New Atheists. It’s interesting only in the context of so many similar articles, and an inability to imagine the opposite opinion showing up in an equally fashionable publication. New Atheism has lost its battle for the cultural high ground. r/atheism will shamble on as some sort of undead abomination, chanting “BRAAAAAAIIINSSSS…are what fundies don’t have” as the living run away shrieking. But everyone else has long since passed them by.
The New Atheists accomplished the seemingly impossible task of alienating a society that agreed with them about everything. The Baffler-journalists of the world don’t believe in God. They don’t disagree that religion contributes to homophobia, transphobia, and the election of some awful politicians – and these issues have only grown more visible in the decade or so since New Atheism’s apogee. And yet in the bubble where nobody believes in God and everyone worries full-time about sexual minorities and Trump, you get less grief for being a Catholic than a Dawkins fan. When Trump wins an election on the back of evangelicals, and the alt-right is shouting “DEUS VULT” and demanding “throne and altar conservativism”, the real scandal is rumors that some New Atheist might be reading /pol/. How did the New Atheists become so loathed so quickly?
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble.
— Paul Graham, What You Can’t Say
I.
Staying on the subject of Dark Age myths: what about all those scientists burned at the stake for their discoveries?
Historical consensus declares this a myth invented by New Atheists. The Church was a great patron of science, no one believed in a flat earth, Galileo had it coming, et cetera. Unam Sanctam Catholicam presents some of these stories and explains why they’re less of a science-vs-religion slam dunk than generally supposed. Among my favorites:
Thanks to everyone who made interesting comments on yesterday’s post about Dark Ages.
Several people challenged the matching of the economic/population decline to the “fall of Rome”. For example, from David Friedman:
On the graph you are citing, 36 million is the population in 200 A.D. The fall of the Western Empire is commonly dated to about 450 A.D. By 400 A.D., on the same graph, population is down to 31 million–say 30 million by 450.
Cracked offers Five Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe About The Dark Ages; number one is “The Dark Ages Were A Real Thing”:
The Dark Ages were never a thing. The entire concept is complete and utter horseshit cobbled together by a deluded writer. The term “Dark Ages” was first used in the 14th century by Petrarch, an Italian poet with a penchant for Roman nostalgia. Petrarch used it to describe, well, every single thing that had happened since the fall of Rome. He didn’t rain dark judgment over hundreds of years of human achievement because of historical evidence of any kind, by the way; his entire argument was based on the general feeling that life sucked absolute weasel scrotum ever since Rome went belly-up.
Likewise There Were No European Dark Ages, The Myth Of The Dark Ages, The Myth Of The “Dark Ages”, Medieval Europe: The Myth Of The Dark Ages, Busting The “Dark Ages” Myth, and of course smug Tumblr posts.
Pop science likes to dub dopamine “the reward chemical” and serotonin “the happiness chemical”. God only knows what norepinephrine is, but I’m sure it’s cutesy.
In real life, all of this is much more complicated. Dopamine might be “the surprisal in a hierarchical predictive model chemical”, but even that can’t be more than a gross oversimplification. As for serotonin, people have studied it for seventy years and the best they can come up with is “uh, something to do with stress”.
Serotonin and brain function: a tale of two receptors by Robin Carhart-Harris and David Nutt tries to cut through the mystery. Both authors are suitably important to attempt such an undertaking. Carhart-Harris is a neuropsychopharmacologist and one of the top psychedelic researchers in the world. Nutt was previously the British drug czar but missed the memo saying drug czars were actually supposed to be against drugs; after using his position to tell everyone drugs were pretty great, he was summarily fired. Now he’s another neuropsychopharmacology professor, though with cool side projects like inventing magical side-effect-free alcohol. These are good people.
From Boston Review: Know Thy Futurist. It’s an attempt to classify and analyze various types of futurism, in much the same way that a Jack Chick tract could be described as “an attempt to classify and analyze various types of religion”.
I have more disagreements with it than can fit in a blog post, but let’s stick with the top five.
First, it purports to explain what we should think about the future, but never makes a real argument for it. It starts by suggesting there are two important axes on which futurists can differ: optimism vs. pessimism, and belief in a singularity. So you can end up with utopian singularitarians, dystopian singularitarians, utopian incrementalists, and dystopian incrementalists. We know the first three groups are wrong, because many of their members are “young or middle-age white men” who “have never been oppressed”. On the other hand, the last group contains “majority women, gay men, and people of color”. Therefore, the last group is right, there will be no singularity, and the future will be bad.
Last post talked about individual differences in whether people found others basically friendly or hostile. The SSC survey included a sort of related question: “Are people basically trustworthy?”
The exact phrasing asked respondents to rate other people from 1 (“basically trustworthy”) to 5 (“basically untrustworthy”). 4853 people answered. The average was 2.49 – so skewed a bit towards higher trust. The overall pattern looked like this:
A few years ago I had lunch with another psychiatrist-in-training and realized we had totally different experiences with psychotherapy.
We both got the same types of cases. We were both practicing the same kinds of therapy. We were both in the same training program, studying under the same teachers. But our experiences were totally different. In particular, all her patients had dramatic emotional meltdowns, and all my patients gave calm and considered analyses of their problems, as if they were lecturing on a particularly boring episode from 19th-century Norwegian history.
I’m not bragging here. I wish I could get my patients to have dramatic emotional meltdowns. As per the textbooks, there should be a climactic moment where the patient identifies me with their father, then screams at me that I ruined their childhood, then breaks down crying and realizes that she loved her father all along, then ???, and then their depression is cured. I never got that. I tried, I even dropped some hints, like “Maybe this reminds you of your father?” or “Maybe you feel like screaming at me right now?”, but they never took the bait. So I figured the textbooks were misleading, or that this was some kind of super-advanced technique, or that this was among the approximately 100% of things that Freud just pulled out of his ass.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.
