Slate Star Codex Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jeremiah Prophet
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
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.
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).
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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-everything-starts-looking-like-a-dance/
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.
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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
I.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/10/coronalinks-4-10-second-derivative/
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours-because-i-just-made-them-up/
[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 t
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 a
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.
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,
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:w
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,
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.
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
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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
“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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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With a few exceptions, Scott fairly and accurately explains my original (and current) position.
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Scott correctly
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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,
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.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/25/acc-how-much-significance-should-we-ascribe-to-spiritual-experiences/
[This is an entry to the 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest by Jeremiah Gruenberg and Seth Schoen]
- 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.
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.
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.”
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.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/19/acc-when-during-fetal-development-does-abortion-become-morally-wrong/
[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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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 expert
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.
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,
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.
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
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:
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.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescription/
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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.
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
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
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.
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.”
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
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.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/
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:
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/24/highlights-from-the-comments-on-pnse/
(original post)
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,
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.
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
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
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 n
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.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
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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
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,
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/
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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:
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/
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“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 Str
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:
- Bring a sign that says SSC MEETUP so people can find you
- Bring nametags and markers
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-around-with-mild-hallucinations-all-the-time/
[Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects]
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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 th
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/10/ssc-journal-club-relaxed-beliefs-under-psychedelics-and-the-anarchic-brain/
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,
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,
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
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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
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.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/
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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.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/28/meetups-everywhere-2019/
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.
Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/27/book-review-reframing-superintelligence/
Ten years ago, everyone was talking about superintelligence, the singularity, the robot apocalypse.
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.
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”.
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
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
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
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
“I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to.” — J. R. “Bob” Dobbs
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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.
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
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,
I want to signal-boost Tumblr user squareallworthy‘s analysis of various UBI plans:
- Jensen et al’s plan
- Healy et al’s plan
- Andrew Yang’s plan
- Torry’s plan
- Sheahen’s plan
- Dolan’s plan
- Stern and Murray’s plans
- Santens’ plan 8½. Varoufakis and Reich’s plan
- 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 ou
[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.
[Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness]
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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.
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“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.
[self plagiarism notice: this is mostly copied from last year’s contest announcement]
- 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,
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 tes
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.
“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?
[Related to: The Whole City Is Center]
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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.
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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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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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,
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.
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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.
[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?
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
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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,
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 h
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.
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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?”
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.
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
[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:
[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.]
[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
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness]
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“Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by 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.
[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
[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
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.
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.
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
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
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:
- 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
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 here for list) found that 5-HTTLPR affected activation of the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing negative
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 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
(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
[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.
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
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,
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[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
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
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:
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 ha
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.
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.
[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 h
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”,
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.
[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.
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:
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?
[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 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
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 pla
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.
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
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.”
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.
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,
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?)
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
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
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
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
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
[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
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
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
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!
This post is about the 2019 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 post could bias your results.
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Can we confirm or disconfirm different corn-eating profiles of algebraists vs. analysts?
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Can we replicate the study showing that people who eat more beef jerky are more likely to be hospitalized for bipolar mania?
- 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?
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.
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
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 writer
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-te
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.
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 k
[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 compon
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
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
[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
[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
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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;
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
[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,
[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”.
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,
[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
[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.
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.
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.
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:
[Content note: attempt to consider real people’s real problems using angel-on-pinhead impractical reasoning and ideas]
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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.
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?
[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]
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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:
[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
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.
[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
[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.
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,
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.
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.
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”
[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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
“Nobody makes an IRC channel for no reason. Who are we doing this versus?” — topic of #slatestarcodex 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.)
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
[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.]
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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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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)
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.
[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.
[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.]
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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.
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!”
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.
[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.]
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.
[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?
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:
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.
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 ahisto
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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;
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,
[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.
[content note: sexual harassment]
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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 -
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.
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 fo
[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.
[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:
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.
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).
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.
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. But guys, Jordan Peterson is actually go
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:
- 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?
- I would like to get voluntarily committed to a hospital. How can I do that?
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...
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.
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:
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...
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.
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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.
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.
[Taken from here.]
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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.
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
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”
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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?
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.”
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?
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!]
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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.
“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:
I.
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...
At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them. Here are 2014, 2015, and 2016.
And here are the predictions I made for 2017. Strikethrough’d are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can’t decide if they’re true or not.
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...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.
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?
[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...
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.
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:
- 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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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....
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”.
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.
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.